The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 15: The Great Kitchen

Say what you will about Bentley Little's fiction (as I have done), but the man seems to have very good taste. Of the ten novels chosen by Little for his submission to the 2008 book The Book of Lists: Horror, called "Bentley Little's Ten Horror One-Hit Wonders That Everyone Should Read", I've read seven, I've liked six, and of those I think four are flat-out brilliant. Two of them I'd never heard of until reading Little's list, the first being Joan Samson's The Auctioneer which I wrote about last year, and the second is Harry Kressing's The Cook, a novel I finished reading earlier today.

The books on Little's list were written either by writers who only wrote one horror novel either because it was a fluke in their career, otherwise made up of other kinds of novels, or because, for one reason or another, they only wrote one novel. Joan Samson died shortly after The Auctioneer was published, for example. In the case of Harry Kressing, many other novels may well have been written by the same person, and many of them may have even been horror, but it's possible we'll never know. The last page of my 1984 edition of this 1965 novel, and no doubt all other editions, says only this:

Harry Kressing is a pseudonym.

Well, what more is there to say, but at the same time, those five words surrounded by blankness comes off as sort of sinister, especially coming immediately after the book it's attached to. According to Little:

"The rumor in the early 1960s was that this was John Fowles writing under a pseudonym...and Fowles blurbed the book, which was thought at the time to be a clever bit of self-referential post-modernism. It turned out that Kressing wasn't Fowles..."

How do we know that? From what I've seen, Kressing's real identity has never been revealed, so what's the proof that he wasn't Fowles? Did Fowles say "Nope, not me"? My own instinct tells me it isn't Fowles, only because I read The Collector, and The Cook is loads, loads better.

So what is this book, exactly? Well, it's a brief novel, 244 pages in paperback and made up mostly of very short chapters. It has the air of a story being related to you, almost like either a fairy tale or a parable, though what the moral would be I couldn't tell you. The Cook tells the story of Conrad, a cook, who applies for a job as personal cook for the Hill family. The Hill family shares a status as the richest and most respected family in the town of Cobb with the Vales, with whom they have a long history of feuding, though by the time the novel begins this has cooled considerably. What feud remains manifests itself as a competition between the two clans over who has the better cook, and in fact the families, who were once intertwined, would like to be joined again, through the marriage of the Hill heir, Harold, and Vale daughter Daphne. Once this happens, both families will be able to leave their respective mansions and move as one into the massive castle which the families once shared, known as the Prominence. When we first meet Conrad, before he has been seen by a single soul in the town of Cobb, let alone anyone from either family, he is walking around the base of the hugely steep hill atop which the Prominence sits:

After circling the most several times he sat down and looked at the castle. It was essentially Gothic, constructed of blue-gray stone, rising in hexagonal design some four stories from the ground. It was very big, about two hundred rooms. It was also in an excellent state of upkeep.

The grounds were also beautifully kept.

"Why then," he asked himself, "do I have a feeling no one lives up here? And if no one lives up here, why is it all kept up so?"

Several miles in the distance a small town, spired and pastel-shaded, nestled in a wooded valley.

"That must be Cobb," Conrad thought.

He would ask someone in Cobb about the castle.

That passage, which is on page two, should give you a good idea of the prose style. It is very plain, although, as that sounds negative, perhaps "clean" conveys what I mean better. Kressing is somehow able to build an atmosphere of dread throughout the book by apparently never doing anything. The simplest phrases take on a foreboding vibe purely through context. Nothing is forced, the manipulation completely invisible. I mean, I guess it's invisible, because it has to be there, because The Cook is a fictional construction and therefore by definition manipulative. But I don't know that I could point to an example anywhere in the novel.

What that passage might give you the wrong idea about is how Kressing treats the inner lives of his characters. Now, Conrad gets the job as the Hills cook, of course, and Conrad also must count as our point of view character -- he's barely ever off-stage. But his thoughts, his motivations, and, for the most part, his emotions come across only, again, through what is happening. In some ways, Conrad is very much a surface, not character, but person. If Kressing writes that he's smiling, you can assume he's smiling sincerely. Conrad, the cook, unlike The Cook, the novel, is deeply manipulative, but if he ever lies, like bald-faced lies, then he does so very, very rarely, and I can't think of a single instance of it in any case.

And what is Conrad's manipulations in aid of? And if he doesn't really lie, how does he do it? To answer the second part first, he uses food, and insinuation, and self confidence. The food thing is interesting, because The Cook is actually not really a food book -- what Conrad makes is described as magnificent, better than anything anyone has eaten before, but Kressing only says that he's making roasts, or soups, or sauces, or biscuits. What it is is less important than what it does, and what it does, apparently, is addict those who eat it so that any other food disgusts them, and it effects their weight. Both ways. If you're too skinny, it will make you gain weight. If you're fat, it will make you lose weight. No matter how much you eat, by the way -- you can gorge yourself on Conrad's food, as poor, heavy Daphne Vale does, and still shed pounds like mad.

Again, though: why?

"I've sent Betsy [the maid] to bed," Conrad went on after a moment. "She'd be at it all night, and then be of absolutely no use tomorrow. Harold was too tired to help. He worked very hard this evening."

Mrs. Hill pursed her lips: she had made a decision.

"Well I'm not too tired." She started toward the pantry. "Are the aprons still kept in here?"

"Only Harold's."

Mrs. Hill found Harold's apron, wrapped it around her, tucked it in and made it very neat. "There!" she said. "It will do just fine. Now, I'll be back in a minute."

Mrs. Hill, remember, is the mistress of the house. Harold is her son, who has been taking rigorous cooking lessons from Conrad. Mr. Hill, the patriarch and Conrad's boss, finds himself happily pitching in as well. And Conrad wonders if maybe Betsy shouldn't be fired. Or Maxfield, the butler. Or...

The Cook would probably be embraced and easily read as a black comic satire of class issues, although boy, do I think that's an oversimplification. Not one member of the Hills or the Vales is ever depicted as rooking or oppressing or being cruel to anyone, for one thing, and then there's where the novel ends up, a grotesque and chillingly bizarre place so far away from whatever hazy upstairs/downstairs dynamic you might be tempted to root out in the beginning. So as a class satire, I wonder what The Cook could have in mind, and therefore must doubt that has a hell of a lot to do with Kressing's ambitions. Of course, it's quite possible that the current low state of satire is causing me to badly underestimate the breadth of Kressing's own definition of the word. This is borne out by my belief that the artist's work The Cook most closely resembles are, in fact, the class satires of Luis Bunuel, The Exterminating Angel more than anything else, but few people would be content to talk about that film as simply a class critique -- it would be like saying The Milky Way is a satire on religion and act as though this somehow told the whole story (and what the whole story actually is with that one is something I'm still working on).

Conrad, we will learn, is probably not of a class lower than the Hills, and may in fact come from some higher societal realm. And the laborers are dispensed with by him with as little care as the most mustache-twirling union buster. But who suffers more, the Hills, the Vales, or the Maxfields and Betsys? Well, I know the answer, actually, and in any case I resist the urge to reduce The Cook to something easy. It's wonderfully suspenseful, though, and thrillingly original, and finally, in its quiet, casual way, even shocking. Not to mention out of print and largely forgotten. So it goes.



Quick note: The Cook was adapted into a film in 1970 under the title Something for Everybody. Directed by Harold Prince, screenplay by Hugh Wheeler (who apparently had a habit of writing under pseudonyms, so hmmm....) and starring Michael York and Angela Lansbury, and featuring not one character who bears the name of any corresponding character from the novel, Something for Everybody was released on VHS, but never on DVD. Anybody out there seen it? I can't imagine it follows the novel very closely, at least not by the end.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 18: Gonads Small and Large!

The first novel I read by Bentley Little was called The Revelation. Had I been given the book in manuscript form, free from the knowledge that it had been published, and told that it was written by a teenage boy with a thing for gore films, I would have thought, "Yeah, that sounds about right." And, being naturally generous of spirit, I would have also given the plucky teen credit for seeing his book through to the end.

But The Revelation was not written by a teenager. It was published in 1990, when Little was thirty years old, and it won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel. Maybe now you can understand my occasional frustration with this genre. You might also conclude that I have no one to blame but myself when I tell you that I continued to read Little after that experience. I think the next thing I read was a short story called "The Washingtonians", which centers around the revelation that George Washington was a child murderer and cannibal. That's sacrilege, I agree, but it's so bonkers a premise that had Little pulled it off, I would have had no choice but to tip my cap to him. Unfortunately, Little chose the least interesting approach to the material, by telling his story from the point of view of a contemporary man making the historic discovery, and then being set upon by rabid Washington cults, bent on keeping the truth hidden. Yawn. Tell that story from the point of view of George Washington himself, and maybe then you'd have something. Instead, Little cut his own idea off at the knees.

Then I went and I read another Little novel, this one called Dispatch. It's a horror novel based around letter writing (his second, it would seem, involving the postal service, as he wrote another novel called The Mailman, which I haven't read), and it, too, is pretty nuts. I also thought that one was largely successful, until an utterly ridiculous and bone-headed ending. But hey, I'd never read that novel before, at least. Credit where it's due, and everything. Little, it would seem, will write about whatever crazy thing enters his head, and I think this, more than anything else, accounts for his wide popularity in the horror community. You may not have heard of him yourself, but in certain quarters he's considered one of the big guns. Stephen King, for example, is extremely high on him, but that might just be because Little sometimes has his characters say things like "Eat my dick with brussels sprouts!", which is very much like something the Stephen King I don't like would write.

Most of Little's output has been novels -- and he's very prolific, with nineteen novels in as many years -- but he does have one collection of short fiction called, simply, The Collection (a title that is in keeping with most of his novel titles, like The Store, The Academy, The Policy, and so forth), and it is from whence I drew for today's readings. Ahem.

The first story is called "The Man in the Passenger Seat", and it's about a guy named Brian who, on his way to work one morning, pulls up to an ATM in order to make a quick deposit to cover some outstanding checks, but before he has a chance to do that, he sees a very fat man approach his car, open the door, and climb into the passenger seat. Brian tells him to get out, but the man only berates him with the aforementioned brussels sprouts zinger and tells him to drive. Even though the man appears to have no weapon, Brian does what he's told.

"The Man in the Passenger Seat" tries to be a kind of Patty Hearst/ambiguously anti-corporate America satire, but it doesn't have any kind of narrative drive, or electricity to the prose, to achieve much of anything. Brian waffles between being terrified of the man, and wanting to escape, to wondering what, really, there is for him to escape to. Here's some of that ambiguity in action:

The would have to stop for gas soon -- at the next town, if they weren't pulled over first -- and he knew that he would be able to escape at that time. He would be able to either run away or kick the shit out of the obese bastard.

But though he wanted desperately to kick the crap out of the crazy fucker, he wasn't sure he really wanted to escape.

I wonder if Little considered, and then rejected, variations like "He really wanted to kick the poop out of the fat crazy person" and "He sure wanted to kick the stool out of that portly loony toon" before picking the two versions you see above. Also, Brian wants to escape...or does he??

No, he, he doesn't. In the end, although the tubby person with a severe mental disorder does some pretty creepy things in the course of their time together, Brian decides that he's never felt more alive, however wrong or dangerous his newly chosen path might be. Because, you see, he believes that his co-workers have probably not even noticed that he's gone missing:

They'd be temporarily inconvenienced by his absence, would curse him for not being there to perform his regular duties, but they would not miss him.

They would not care enough to call and see if he was all right.

Yeah, because apparently you're a sociopathic loner! They're probably relieved you didn't show up with a gun!

The next story is called "The Show", and it's about a teenager whose parents are always fighting and drinking, and he just can't take it anymore, so when his friend invites him to come with him to this weird club where you can pay to witness a live murder, he says okay. Later on, though, he feels bad about it, and then something else bad happens.

That's your story, folks, and I wish I was kidding. Now, I'll admit, viewed as an outline, something good could easily come from that idea, but Little is content to simply go through the motions. I'm not quite sure what his first mistake is, but I think it might be the revelation that both our narrator and his friend witnessed a grotesque traffic accident when they were young, and each has been drawn towards violence ever since. As psychological insight, this is so rinky-dink that the story would have been better off without it -- at least then there would have been a hint of mystery. Little's biggest mistake, however, can be found in his attempts to depict the narrator's feelings about having paid to witness a murder. Here's what we get:

I felt filthy, unclean, covered with blood although none of the flying blood had touched me.

Merely seeing [Jimmy] again made me feel unclean...and my stomach started churning.

I could not imagine anyone wanting to sit through that butchery more than once.

I wondered how he slept at night. I wondered if he had nightmares.

Outside of a brief description of a nightmare the narrator has, that's literally it. That's the kind of creative power Bentley Little is willing to bring to the table here. It's as though he simply wrote down what he wanted to describe, rather than actually describing it. And that's his prose style, as best I've been able to tell.

Each story in The Collection is preceded by a brief introductory note from Little. Neither of the notes for the stories discussed here are worth mentioning, but there's another story in the book called "Blood", and here's what Little has to say about it:

Before I moved in with my wife, I lived on macaroni and cheese. I spent so much time standing in front of my stove, stirring pots of boiling macaroni, that I used to stare down into the swirling, roiling water and imagine that I could see shapes in the foam the way some people see shapes in clouds.

I decided to write a story about it.

How could you possibly resist the urge to keep reading after that? I didn't read the story he's selling so aggressively here -- and clearly I should have -- but I think that little introduction highlights a couple of things that somebody (an editor, maybe?) should try to impress upon Bentley Little. One is that not everything is a story idea, and the other, more importantly, is that a story idea does not count as a story. And stretching out a description of that idea to ten pages is not writing. You'd think someone would have thought to mention this to him at some point over the last nineteen years, but I guess not.