Night Raven: White Hopes, Red Nightmares, Part 1

How to read Night Raven

You can read Alan Moore's Night Raven stories by buying the print or digital collection here.

If you're less respecting of copyright or you just want to try it out before deciding to buy, you can follow along here.

White Hopes, Red Nightmares, Part 1

You can check out my read through of The Cure starting here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.

For my money, "White Hopes, Red Nightmares" is the best of Moore's Night Raven stories.

This second story starts with a big time shift, as we're now in 1957. This allows Moore to deal with the idea of Red Menace (a timely topic in the early Reagan '80s, when he was writing this) and suggests the transformation Night Raven has gone through, left for dead at the bottom of the sea at the end of The Cure.

We meet Howard Bates, who happens to find the Night Raven mask that was left on the wharf in a junk shop and buys it. The white, bone-like thing means something special to Howard:

"He would have been quite prepared to pay five dollars, ten dollars, a hundred. He knew that the pitted, skeletal mask with it's empty, sightless eyes was a genuine sliver of legend, a yellowed shard hewn from the rock of fables itself. It was the splinter of a dream, and it was priceless. Priceless."

Bates is a right-wing nutjob who hates what he sees happening to America: "There was the constant scent of foreign cooking where there should have been the warm and motherly perfume of apple pie or corned beef hash. There was distant, muffled cacophony of Negro Jazz where there should have been the uplifting, confident strains of a Glenn Miller, the pure and noble voice of Kate Smith. It wasn't right. It wasn't good. It wasn't American. It made him feel like an alien in his own home."

In his apartment building lives Minie Sapirstein, the free-thinking communist dancer, who has become Bates' obsession. His other obsession is Night Raven:

"Howard had been ten years old when he first learned of the shadowy figure that was wreaking havoc in the seedy boweries and decadent penthouses of New York's criminal class. An adventurer, resplendent in white trenchcoat and slouch hat, a creature of incredible physical and mental prowess who was repaying the tithe of misery that the Crime Barons had had so long visited upon the poor and the helpless. A character who might have stepped out of the pages of Street & Smith's Detective Story Monthly, a worthy companion to The Shadow, The Spider, to G-B And His Battle Aces, to all the wonderful fictional heroes that had helped the young Howard through many a long night, reading beneath the bed-clothes in the amber beam of a cheap dimestore torch.

"But Nightraven was real. Really really real. To the ten year old boy it had been like discovering that Santa Claus was genuine after all."

We find out that Bates supports Joe McCarthy, John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, the defenders of Bates' America.

When Bates slips on the mask, it all falls into place for him. What he must do. He orders a new trenchcoat and fedora. And nylon fishing line:

"All that remained to be done was deciding. Deciding who he was going to kill first."

Moore then switches characters. He has given up his first-person point-of-view from The Cure to this omniscient narrator point-of-view, allowing him to explore the minds of all of his characters. And so we go from the obsessive Howard Bates to Manfred the Maniac, the commie photographer, who  thinks about the happening that broke up.

Manfred discovers his friend, Mike Lawler, being strangled by the Bates Night Raven and takes his picture. As Lawler dies, he has time to think about what is happening.

"His limbs kicked and jerked feebly, made leaden by the horrifying shock of what was happening to him. He began to sink to the glistening sidewalk, tiny black suns exploding before his eyes. His lungs screamed for breath. His brain clamoured frantically for oxygen. A barely audible rasp issued from his gaping lips, small and brittle and dry as the scrabbling of a cockroach. It was not recognizable as a human sound.

"The miniscule black suns multiplied, filling his field of vision with a whole galaxy of arid, airless blackness. Swimming on the middle of that final, crushing darkness was something white. He tried to make out what it was.

"It was something like a bird, something like a Praying Mantis. Something like the skull of a steer that had bleached in the Death Valley sunshine. Set into it’s awful blank whiteness were two dark slits.

"They were eyes. And they were without mercy."

Manfred's picture of this new Night Raven ran in all the city's newspapers where everyone saw it. Including a shape living in an attic.

We'll find out how all this plays out in part two. See you then.