Moore is a wizardly prose stylist whose sentences flow in a Joycean stream ... If you’re looking for a writer to ensorcell you in a saga of hard-boiled crime and surrealist horror, here is your magus.
A book with a keen sense of the uncanny, has a pleasant lightness ... Paced like the kind of adventure story at which Moore so excelled in his comics scripts, and written in an urbane voice rich with jokes and memorable names and turns of phrase. It’s a sort of reversal of Waugh or Wodehouse — the witty narration is retained but instead of a realistic novel about the marriageable upper classes, we have a monster-filled fantasy about a virginal working-class sad sack.
Both gothic and baroque ... There’s a delirious and generous campness to The Great When. Freed from the tyranny of the speech bubble, you sense Moore is really, really having fun.
