Dylan Dog 157, Il sonno della ragione

Some people are just magnets for trouble and Dylan Dog is definitely one of them, thankfully I suppose, as otherwise there wouldn't be an adventure for us every month. It wouldn't be entirely correct then to say that what happens in Il sonno della ragione (The Dream of Reason) is the strangest thing to happen to him (you need only look back at Dylan Dog 153 - La strada verso il nulla for example), but with the Edvard Munch inspired cover (why not Goya?) you have to consider that there is something in Il sonno della ragione that pushes him to the limit this time.

It all starts when Dylan discovers an extremely thin entirely naked woman lying in an alley close to his home. It looks like a case of a drug overdose, but something strange passes through Dylan when he lifts her up to take her to the hospital. Even stranger is what Dr Oldbright discovers when the woman is put through a CT scan. The entire left hemisphere of her brain has been removed, and not recently either. As well as the lobotomy she appears to have been tortured or used for an experiment by some maniac, but one clearly with medical skills. Shocked, Dylan has only reaction - Giuda ballerino! - but he promises to find out who did this.

But even in her unresponsive state ‘Dorothy’, as he names the unknown woman, still exerts a strange influence over people. Two nurses who come into contact with the patient appear to commit suicide, but Dr Leblanc, after failing to put Dylan off looking any further into the woman's history, proposes that they were actually victims of N’ Dejizij, the Demon of Conscience, passed on by Dorothy. He claims that it is a tropical disease that has origins in central Africa, one that sucks the mind dry before seeking another host.

There is only one way of combatting the virus that is in danger of infecting them all and that's with another drug that removes one's mind from reality, causing hallucinations and combatting the virus by preventing logical linear thought. Yeah, that’s all Dylan Dog needs in a world that already often seems surreal and make little sense. It all gets very science-fiction later on as explanations begin to come through and the ending of Il sonno della ragione is appropriately strange and ambiguous, but there is plenty in Paola Barbaro's development of the story to keep you interested. There is nothing showy about Angelo Stano's artwork. It's clearly laid out, working to mood and pacing, saving those effects for the right explosive moments.


Reading notes: Dylan Dog 157 - Il sonno della ragione, June 2004 (Seconda ristampa), 98 pages. Story and script by Paola Barbaro, Artwork by Angelo Stano.

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