Philip Gelatt has worked in film, TV, comics, and video games. His work as writer and director includes the award-winning thriller They Remain, and the rotoscope-animated fantasy epic The Spine of Night. He was the writer of the 2013 sci-fi film Europa Report, and is the lead writer on the adult-animated Netflix series Love Death + Robots.
In video games, he received a WGA award for his work on Rise of the Tomb Raider and has been working with Frictional Games on their follow-up to Soma.
Gelatt lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife and son.
Tyler Crook is a comic book artist and illustrator. For over two decades, he has worked as a comics creator, artist, and 3D modeler in the video game industry. Released in 2011, Petrograd was Tyler's first published comic and earned Tyler the Russ Manning Promising Newcomer Award. Since then, he has worked on dozens of comics titles including B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth, Witchfinder, Bad Blood, and The Sixth Gun. In 2016, Harrow County, the horror comic he created with Cullen Bunn, was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best New Series, and his Comixology Original book, Stone King, was nominated for Best Digital Comic in 2019. Tyler lives in rural Oregon with his wonderful spouse and many terrible pets
BOOKLIST-There aren't many murders with more intrigue attached to
them than the 1916 assassination of Grigori Rasputin--poisoned,
stabbed, shot, and drowned in short order. Gelatt turns this
still-unresolved event into a tight, dialogue-heavy spy thriller
built on evidence that the plot to kill the mad monk was stirred up
by the British SIS, intent on keeping Russia at war with Germany.
The hero of sorts is British spy Cleary, who uses his connections
in the aristocracy to hatch the plot and his romantic dalliances
with a young Bolshevik to help turn the revolution. Even with the
inevitability of the outcome, the drama stays propulsive, shifting
the focus to how Cleary can escape the tightening noose once he's
left out to dry by his country and his Russian allies. Talented
newcomer Crook, newly enlisted for Mike Mignola's B.P.R.D., drapes
the period settings in moody shadows and grim orange hues, while
the smart layouts and craggy-featured faces grind out tension by
the pound. A sharply executed graphic novel, good for more than
just historical espionage fans.--Ian Chipman
LIBRARY JOURNAL-It took conniving Russian aristocrats numerous
attempts with poison, knife, gun, fists, and icy water to murder
mad monk Grigori Rasputin. But the lethal bullet was English, per
recent findings. Gelatt fictionalizes the alleged shooter as
Cleary, a young British intelligence agent who must supervise this
assassination but finds himself an unwilling collaborator. While
history presents a nasty-enough thriller to work with, Gelatt's
command of character makes this attempt particularly successful.
From hapless Cleary to the perverse yet likable nobles, the
swaggering chief of the tsar's police, and Cleary's prickly
Bolshevik crush, the characters seem to wear their dialog, not just
speak it. Their grimy romanticism conjures an unsavory history when
nobody had clean hands. VERDICT Gelatt never lets us forget that
real people create history, and he asks, What if those people were
us? Crook's semirealistic, sepia-washed art lends just the right
aura of a dangerous time that we may want to glimpse but certainly
not relive. Recommended for history buffs and thriller lovers, as
well as a curative for those who think history is boring. With
violence and some sexual situations.
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