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While Book Three of Saga of the Swamp Thing doesn't include my favourite Swamp Thing moment (that has to be Abby and the Swamp Thing's consummation in Book Two) nor my favourite Swamp Thing arc (that is still the Floronic Man Green vs. Red arc from Book One), it is, perhaps, the most consistently excellent of the Moore years so far -- and it does contain my favourite single issue: "The Curse."

It begins with the creepy "The Nukeface Papers," wherein Swamp Thing begins to understand the breadth of his powers. It is a tale where the horror of 80s environmental concerns take the shape of a nuclear waste drinking bum, who inadvertently "kills" Swamp Thing. The eco-criticism at the heart of this arc -- which includes newspaper clippings from an imagined coal mining disaster juxtaposed with real world 3-Mile island articles -- is particularly chilling considering how little those dangers have changed since 1985.

It continues into a creepy Vampire arc, where a clan of Vampires and their horrifying Vampire Queen -- a morbidly obese, bloated carrier of countless fishlike Vampire eggs -- live beneath the still waters of a manmade lake, a lake that sprang up over an old town because of a dam project. Again, ecological concerns are firmly in place, but the macabre kookiness is in the frightening progeny of the Vampires and the bizarre way Swamp Thing deals with their presence.

Next up is "The Curse" -- a werewolf story with an extended menstruation metaphor that is a shockingly prescient scream of patriarchal ubiquity.

Then the book wraps up with a zombie tale, wherein the roots of racism have sunk themselves into the earth surrounding a Louisiana plantation, and then those roots reveal the ease with which others can find themselves engaging in racism despite their belief that they have moved beyond such things.

Add to all of this brilliance the dirty, nicotine stained fingers of John Constantine (looking as he did for so many of his early years as Dune-era Sting), and Book Three of Saga of the Swamp Thing is a high point for the Moore-Bissette-Totleben collaboration.