YA)īlack is back with another dark tale of Faerie, this one set in Faerie and launching a new trilogy. Don’t confuse this hefty, respectful adaptation with some of the other recent ones this one holds nothing back and is proudly, grittily realistic rather than cheerfully cartoonish. The artist’s use of color is especially striking: His battle scenes are ample, bloodily scarlet affairs, and Polyphemus’s cave is a stifling orange he depicts the underworld as a colorless, mirthless void, domestic spaces in warm tans, the all-encircling sea in a light Mediterranean blue and some of the far-away islands in almost tangibly growing greens. Lush watercolors move with fluid lines throughout this reimagining. Gods mingle with the mortals, and not heeding their warnings could lead to quick danger being mere men, Odysseus and his crew often make hasty errors in judgment and must face challenging consequences. Following Odysseus’s journey to return home to his beloved wife, Penelope, readers are transported into a world that easily combines the realistic and the fantastic. Hinds adds another magnificent adaptation to his oeuvre ( King Lear, 2009, etc.) with this stunning graphic retelling of Homer’s epic.

Less a straightforward horrorfest than a tasty adventure for any reader with an appetite for the…peculiar. Though less of a novelty here than in the opener, these still add distinctly creepy notes (even when the subject is supposedly comical) to a tale already well-stocked with soul eaters and tentacled monsters. As before, the author spins his tale in part around a crop of enigmatic vintage trick or portrait photographs, including two men (corpses?) sharing a bed with skeletons, a pipe-smoking dog and a staring girl with a huge hole through her midsection. After a brisk round of chases, captures, escapes and bombings-capped by a devastating reversal-the two end up separated from most of their allies but with a new talent that just might save “peculiardom” from its seemingly all-powerful enemies. The growing attachment between Jacob and kindhearted fire-conjurer Emma turns out to play a crucial role in the plot. With evil wights and murderous hollowgasts in hot pursuit-and only days to save their beloved Miss Peregrine from permanently becoming a bird-Jacob and his nine young (in body, if not age) companions fling themselves through time loops to Blitz-torn London. Along with picking up the action where it left off in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011), Riggs fills in background detail while adding both talking animals and more children with magical powers to the cast.

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