The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 14 - The Nightmare of the Organism

I'm not really sure where Thomas Ligotti came from. I don't mean geographically, because who cares, and I don't mean who influenced him, because over the years Ligotti has been very clear about that (for the record, Poe, Lovecraft and Thomas Bernhard are high on that list). I mean, where was he first published, who first noticed him? How did he break through the wall of miserable 1980s and 90s horror fiction to become someone who is deservedly recognized not only as one of the best horror writers alive, but one of the best who has ever lived?

I don't know. I know that he started publishing his stories in small press magazines in the 1980s, and he developed a cult following. And that's about it. Eventually, he had compiled enough stories to start publishing books. His first three -- Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe and Noctuary -- were published by Carroll & Graf as mass market paperbacks. I used to buy a lot of genre fiction put out by Carroll & Graf in those days, and I remember they cost about $4.99. Now, used on Amazon, those three books run between $25 and $35 each. Not bank-breakers, maybe, but it shows that those books are definitely in demand.

Ligotti has said that he feels that he's one of the few genuine horror writers out there today, because it's the only genre he works in, he has no interest in writing anything else. He's drawn to horror because of what he views as its main potential (from an excellent interview that I commend to everyone's attention):

I think there’s a great potential in horror fiction that isn’t easily available to realistic fiction. This is the potential to portray our worst nightmares, both private and public, as we approach death through the decay of our bodies. And then to leave it at that—no happy endings, no apologias, no excuses, no redemption, no escape...

...Joseph Conrad said that he shunned the supernatural because it wasn’t necessary to depict the horror of existence. I wish he hadn’t. Because the supernatural is the metaphysical counterpart of insanity—the best possible vehicle for conveying the uncanny nightmare of a conscious mind marooned for a brief while in this haunted house of a world and being slowly driven mad by the ghastliness of it all. Not the man’s-inhumanity-to-man sort of thing, but a necessary derangement, a high order of weirdness and of desolation built in to the system in which we all function.

In short, Ligotti isn't dicking around. He means his fiction. Ligotti suffers from a panic-anxiety disorder and manic depression, and has said something to the effect that his life without his medication would be an unending, shrieking nightmare. His view of humanity is so uncompromisingly bleak that in another interview (which I haven't been able to locate...), when Ligotti was asked why, if he felt as he does about life and the human race, he didn't simply commit suicide, Ligotti replied that if it weren't for certain family members who would grieve for him, he would.

How does all of this manifest itself in his fiction? Well, the first story today is called "Severini". Honestly, it turned out to be a bad choice. It's not a bad story, it's just a little...flat, I guess. It's about a mysterious man named Severini who lives in a shack on the marsh. This shack is regularly visited by the local artistic community, who are later inspired by these visits to create works in various media with titles like The Black Spume of Existence and In Earth and Excreta. Our narrator, though an artist, does not accompany any of his friends to visit Severini, and he claims he has no interest in doing so. Still, he feels a certain connection with the man, based on what he hears from those who've met him, and from the art they later create. This connection has something to do with certain delusions from which the narrator suffers, involving open sewers and some sort of tropical region. All of these elements plant in the narrator's mind what he calls a "concept":

The concept to which I have been referring may be stated in various ways, but it usually occurred to my mind as a simple phrase (or fragment), almost a chant that overwhelmed me with vile and haunting suggestions far beyond its mere words, which are as follows: the nightmare of the organism. The vile and haunting suggestions underlying (or inspired by) this conceptual phrase were, as I have said, called up the by the titles of those Severini-based artworks, those Exhibits from the Imaginary Museum.

Eventually, one of the narrator's artist associates informs him that there is to be a showing of these exhibits, and that Severini -- who has never met the narrator -- specifically asked that he attend. Severini, she tells him, said the he and the narrator are "sympathetic organisms" and that "the way into the nightmare is the way out".

All of this gets a bit thick in the final pages, as the narrative gets deliberately fuzzy. In some ways, this story is a crystallization of Ligotti's main theme, that life is a kind of disease, or mistake. The problem that I faced with "Severini" is that, having read quite a bit of Ligotti in the past couple of years, I felt like I'd read this story, in some form, several times already. There was nothing new in it for me, not just in its basic philosophy -- you won't get a lot of philosophical variation with Ligotti -- but in its story, images and language. Actually, that's not quite true. There are images towards the end that were surprisingly down-to-earth for Ligotti, in an unpleasant kind of way, but everything about the story was fairly tangled up by the end, and these moments just seemed to be another part of the mix. Again, it's not a bad story, and for newcomers to Ligotti, it's possible that "Severini" could work quite well as a starting point. But I was left a bit cold by it -- which is not to say that any Ligotti story has ever left me feeling warm -- and if one of my purposes here is to excite people who've never read Ligotti before, and tempt them to do so, the story was unable to churn up that kind of energy in me.

Thankfully, my second choice was "Gas Station Carnivals". This story is pure Ligotti, and it is close to magnificent. It begins in a place called the Crimson Cabaret, a kind of bohemian nightclub where artists gather to drink alcohol or tea and occasionally turn towards the small stage in the corner to watch a performance: musical act, puppet show, poetry reading. Our narrator (a story writer not dissimilar, we gather, to Ligotti himself) is there one night, nursing an unknown stomach ailment by drinking cup after cup of mint tea and smoking "light cigarettes". He's worried that his ailment might be due to food poisoning, or a virus, or perhaps something else, a possibility he doesn't name. That night, his preference is to be left alone, but an associate of his, an art critic named Stuart Quisser, joins him uninvited.

At first, their conversation revolves around an apparent insult delivered by Quisser at a party a few nights ago to "the crimson woman", an artist who owns the Crimson Cabaret. Evidently, at this party Quisser called the crimson woman a "deluded no-talent", and our narrator is surprised that Quisser is showing his face in the club. The crimson woman, it seems, has certain connections and powers that make her a particularly forboding enemy. Quisser brushes away these concerns, because he would rather talk to our narrator about a phenomenon from his childhood he's been thinking about recently, called "gas station carnivals".

These are more or less what they sound like: small, half-assed rural attractions set apart from, but commercially connected to, the kind of small, no-frills gas stations one encounters in the middle of nowhere. Quisser remembers going to these "carnivals" frequently as a child, when on long road trips with his parents. Invariably, the only carnival attraction that ever functioned at these places were their low-rent version of the sideshow. Unlike traditional sideshows, these did not feature "freaks", but instead usually consisted of the briefest performances -- conducted in front of an audience that at most consisted of Quisser and his parents, and sometimes just Quisser himself -- of people in cheap costumes, the performers almost always doubling as the gas station attendant. Quisser had names for all of these acts, which seemed to reoccur at gas station carnivals across the country: the Human Spider, the Dancing Puppet, Dr. Fingers.

One such performer, however, was different. He did reoccur, but Quisser never wanted to see him, and only did so because his parents drew him along in their wake. And this performer did not also work at the gas station. Quisser called him the Showman:

Quisser contended that his parents actually enjoyed watching him sit in terror before the Showman, until he could not stand it any longer, and asked to go back to the car. At the same time he was quite transfixed by the sight of this sideshow character, who was unlike any other that he could remember. There he was, Quisser said, standing with his back to the audience and wearing an old top hat and a long cape that touched the dirty floor of the small stage on which he stood. Sticking out from beneath the top hat were the dense and lengthy shocks of the Showman's stiff red hair, Quisser said, which looked like some kind of sickening vermin's nest...Yet the figure never budged. Sometimes it did seem to Quisser that the Showman was moving his head a little to the left or a little to the right, threatening to reveal one side of his face or the other, playing a horrible game of peek-a-boo.

All the Showman ever does is stand with his back to his audience. He's there when you enter the tent, and he's there when you leave. Our narrator doubts Quisser's story, and says that it is a delusion brought on by something he calls "art-magic", performed by the crimson woman as part of her revenge on Quisser for his slight.

If you think Ligotti has aligned his pieces to set up a creepy but predictable pay-off, you're wrong. Well, you're right about the "creepy" part, but even that's not quite right. "Uncomfortable" might be a better word, because Ligotti believes in, and lives his life confident that he's absolutely correct about, the sort of sould-deep fear everybody in the world feels in their bleakest moments. He doesn't write ghost stories, but his work is about the supernatural, and in his work the supernatural is the manifestation of our darkest private philosophies. You don't need to buy into Ligotti's claims that humanity is a disease and life is horror -- I certainly don't -- but he forces you to admit that sometimes you do think that, and sometimes you do believe it. Then you close the book and move on, and find valid reasons to strengthen your comparatively brighter (it would almost have to be) outlook. Ligotti doesn't close the book, and he doesn't move on. He wrote the book in the first place.

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By the way, if you're interested in Ligotti, don't be scared off by the prices quoted above. You can find some of his work at prices cheaper than those, including a new, reasonably priced collection called Teatro Grottesco which is, if I understand correctly, a kind of "best of", and which contains both stories listed above. Oh, and look for the paperback, because that's the cheap one.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 25: Who Knows the Stench of God?

Dark Awakenings by Matt Cardin is an unusual book. Not that I've read it all, but you can tell by the way its contents break down that it's not a typical horror collection. First off, you have your horror fiction, separated into a section called, appropriately enough, "Fictions". There are seven of these, including a novella called "The God of Foulness" (which I'm afraid I did not read for today, something I, having read the first few paragraphs, now rather regret), and they take up about 180 of the book's 300 pages. The remainder of the book is taken up with a series of academic essays by Cardin about the horror genre, and religion, and where the two converge in art and -- so I've gathered is the idea anyway -- in real life. Meanwhile, the dust jacket copy reads, in part:
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[A]uthor and scholar Matt Cardin explores this ancient intersection between religion and horror in seven stories and three academic papers that pose a series of disturbing questions: What if the spiritual awakening coveted by so many religious seekers is in fact the ultimate doom? What if the object of religious longing might prove to be the very heart of horror? Could salvation, liberation, enlightenment then be achieved only by identifying with that apotheosis of metaphysical loathing?
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Could be. All sorts of things are possible. But who can know? So that's Cardin's angle anyway, and I'm honestly quite intrigued. As it pertains to a real world philosophy, I believe Cardin is a bit, I don't know...fucked in the head, I think is the term, and more than likely doesn't even mean it, but as a literary philosophy to be applied to the writing of horror fiction, then okay, pal, let's have it. Plus, it's not hard to see from the above why Cardin -- whose second book this is, his first being the 84-page Divinations of the Deep, the contents of which I haven't been able to ascertain -- is often mentioned in the same breath as Thomas Ligotti (and also Reggie Oliver, although in that case the connection isn't as obvious. Anyway, I heard about Cardin in relation to Oliver, when horror critic Jim Rockhill said that Cardin and Ligotti were the only modern horror writers capable of writing at Oliver's level).
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For the record, the reason I now regret not reading "The God of Foulness" is because of the two Cardin stories I did read for today, one plays as a sort of declaration of intent, or as Cardin's personal horror manifesto, while the other seems to bear no clear relation to that manifesto, and is merely an excellent piece of horror writing (it's better than the manifesto, actually). "The God of Foulness", on the other hand, from my brief scan of its opening pages, is evidently about a religious cult who seeks out disease as a means of spiritual completion. So there you go, that probably would have been good to read, but no, I had to fuck it all up. But enough: let's get to what I actually did read, and see what shakes out.
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I'll begin with the manifesto, which is called "The Devil and One Lump". This is the story of a man named Evan, who was once "king of the mid-list horror writers", specializing in a brand of religious horror that sounds very much like the dust jacket flap of Dark Awakenings. As a character in the story describes it:
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You have created protagonists whose very search for salvation produces a backfire effect that damns them to a worse hell than they had ever imagined. You have speculated that the Bible contains a hidden subtext that runs between the actual printed lines and undermines the surface message at every turn. You have written of a narcissistic demiurge who is so enraptured by the beauty of his own creation that he represses the memory of his birth from a monstrous prior reality, so that when he is forcibly reawakened to this memory, he suffers a psychological breakdown that generates cataclysmic consequences both for himself and for the cosmos he created.
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This description of Evan's work is delivered by the Devil, and "The Devil and One Lump" is the sort of sardonic, one-room-setting, horror story version of movies like Bedazzled, where the Devil forces his point of view onto the misbegotten hero, and tests that hero's feeble philosophy, meanwhile revealing the Great Chess Match between Satan and God that uses folks like Evan as their pawn, and et cetera. Which means that "The Devil and One Lump" is sort of a comedy, and this is too bad. Though I hate this word, and am not in agreement with the philosophy, there is something truly subversive about "The Devil and One Lump" and the way it plays out, particularly the ending -- the material is here for a truly disquieting horror story. Unfortunately, the story takes place on two different planes of reality, and the connective tissue between the two is Evan's quest for his morning cup of coffee. This might put you in mind of the kind of mundanity mixed with cosmic absurdity for which Douglas Adams was so renowned, but "The Devil and One Lump" is minus all those pesky laughs Adams kept cramming in there.
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It's possible I'm being too harsh here -- "The Devil and One Lump" isn't written to be a romp -- but it's hard for me to take Cardin's approach to horror seriously when this is my first exposure to him. Possibly this is my fault, as I made the choice of where to begin, but all I'm getting here is an announcement hidden in a story, and one that's not particularly illustrative of Cardin's ideas. It's fairly explicit about those ideas, but that's not quite the same thing.
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One the other hand, we have "Blackbrain Dwarf", a story chosen by me because I thought that title was quite the grabber. As I mentioned before, this story is not especially in line, or not obviously in line, with Cardin's religion-horror philosophy, but that's only a problem for me, as far as writing this post goes, not for Cardin. Where's it written that you have to write the same kind of story all the time, even if you always wrote within one genre? And why exactly would you want to? If you're Robert Aickman, you can pull it off, but, as a matter of fact, if Thomas Ligotti has one serious problem as a writer -- and I'm an enormous admirer of his work -- it's that he's in danger becoming a bit of a self-parody. It's all strange towns with faceless citizens and psychotic businesses and mad art, and so on -- when he breaks out of it with a story like "Alice's Last Advenutre" or the deeply interesting and unnerving "Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story", it's jarring because I'm simply not used to it. So get it together, Thomas Ligotti. What the fuck. And good job Matt Cardin for mixing up your shit a little. Probably, I guess -- I've only read the two so far.
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So "Blackbrain Dwarf". This story is about Derek Warner, and the last day in which he experiences any moments of sanity. And there aren't many of those. Here's how it begins:
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But of course everything was all wrong. Derek knew it the minute he opened his eyes and perceived the vileness resounding from every angle and object in the room. Indeed, how could it be otherwise in a red-glowing world where the stench of blacksouls mounts to a deadening sky?
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When Derek's mind slips from our reality, it's signalled by those italics, and sudden Dark Ages/Lovecraftian bursts of thundering, blood-and-doom-soaked language. I have to say that "Blackbrain Dwarf" -- which is nothing to speak of as a plot, nor does it suffer for that -- is actually a pretty bracingly chilling story. The dwarf of the title is an evil little man who whispers the terrifying words into Derek's ear that lead to his total absorption into that fearsome world that keeps breaking into his daily reality as an unhappy lawyer in an unhappy marriage. The language of that other world has an awful poetry to it, and the idea that it didn't come from within Derek's mind, but was indeed from elsewhere, and was burrowing into Derek's mind made "Blackbrain Dwarf" all the more effective, as was the detail of a victim of Derek's late-story violent impulses repeatedly crying out "What's wrong!?", because their fear-blasted mind could find nothing else to say.
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So I was very impressed with "Blackbrain Dwarf", much less so with "The Devil and One Lump", but my only regret about this attempt to discuss the work of Matt Cardin is that there's a great deal of depth being implied in descriptions of what Dark Awakenings is, and what Matt Cardin is all about, and it may well all be true, but my choice of stories for today didn't really give me an opportunity to explore any of that. I read a couple of horror stories, as usual. But I don't think there's much that's usual about Cardin, for better or worse, so I'll keep reading.

Culture Diary - Day 3

9/5/17 – 9/8/17

I raced to the finish of Dan Chaon’s Ill Will, finishing the whole 400-plus page novel in about four days. On Social Media, I said that Ill Will was just about the most desolate ostensibly commercial thriller I’ve ever read. I’m having a hard time coming up with other candidates. It begins with over a dozen murders left unsolved, spread over two cases, and is told from the point of view of a variety of characters who may or may not be but probably are mentally, or emotionally, ill, and almost all of whom have suffered terrible tragedies. Among the tragedies is the death of the protagonist’s wife from cancer, which, as I said a couple of posts ago, is something Chaon himself has endured. Ill Will is not hopeful, it’s not about overcoming anything; if anything, it’s about succumbing after a life of torment. As Dustin Tillman, the protagonist who suffered abuse at the hands of his adopted older brother, whose parents were murdered when he was a child, and who watched his wife wither away, asks of himself, and others out there who may suffer as he has, “Do you ever think somebody up there doesn’t like you?” These emotions all unfold and expand and blacken alongside a thrilling plot.

Earlier this week I was listening to a podcast (which I realize now was my first mistake) in which the guest explained what he believed was the difference between an artist and an entertainer (my second mistake was to not stop listening right there): entertainers want their work to be seen by others, whereas artists, who create only for themselves, are content with shoving their completed work into a drawer somewhere. Apart from dismissing all of the performing arts as “entertainment,” this theory also, among many other head-slappingly dumb things, assumes that anyone writing fiction with the hopes of reaching a large audience (not necessarily with the goal of doing this; there’s a difference) is only an entertainer (in fairness, the person saying all this dumb shit considered himself to be an entertainer). Which, further, means that with Ill Will, a novel that has done quite well, Dan Chaon believed he was deliberately constructing mass entertainment, the kind of suspense novel everyone can enjoy. The fact is, Ill Will is a terrific contemporary example of what genre fiction is capable of, the emotional and aesthetic impact it can have, and that not all bestsellers are cut from the same cheap cloth.

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This week I also finished Voices in the Night, Steven Millhauser’s most collection of Millhauserian short fiction. I’d been reading it off and on for a while, and on Wednesday I pushed through to the end, starting with the last half of the book’s longest story, “The Pleasures and Suffering of Young Guatama” (the longest story here, and one I found to be a bit of a grind, but ultimately worth it), “American Tall Tale,” in which Millhauser says “Fuck it, I’m going to write my own Paul Bunyan story, “Home Run,” which is a few pages long, all one sentence, about a particularly impressive home run, and “The Voice in the Night,” a story that reads as a kind of fictional memoir centered around Millhauser’s atheism, what he thinks about it, his perhaps occasional struggle with it, and ultimate celebration of it. These stories make up a strong last third of a book, but the first two thirds ain’t no slouch, neither.

For years I’ve considered Millhauser to be one of my favorite writers, ever since I read his masterful first novel, Edwin Mullhouse, God knows how many years ago at this point, but until committing to Voices in the Night it had been several years since I’d read anything by him. The stories in this book confirmed that I have great taste. And while there’s not a loser in the bunch, of particular interest to me was the story “A Report on Our Recent Troubles.” The first story by Thomas Ligotti I ever read was “The Red Tower,” and as I read it I remember thinking “This is as if Steven Millhauser had written a horror story.” Well, “A Report on Our Recent Troubles” feels like Millhauser writing not just a horror story, but specifically a Thomas Ligotti story. The title even has the ring of a Ligotti title. It’s good stuff.

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Also finished this week was The Big Bounce by Elmore Leonard. It’s my twenty-first Leonard novel, and his first ever crime novel, written amid the few Westerns he was still cranking out as that market died. It was published in 1969 and holy shit, does it feel timeless. That this thing is almost fifty years old is almost unthinkable. I’m on record as being a Leonard fan, but not a die-hard fan, and I’ve taken issue with any number of his books, or at least chunks of them, but The Big Bounce seems almost perfect. The dialogue was already there (of course, I say “already” but he was in his 40s when this was written), but more pure, free of the tics that sometimes marred his later books; the scenes that other crime writers would leave out but which Leonard was celebrated for are here written with such ease that I could almost forget I was reading a crime novel. Interestingly, The Big Bounce is also one of Leonard’s more traditional noir stories, being, as it is, part of the femme fatale subgenre – a particularly Leonard-esque entry into that subgenre, but still.

Also of note: the character Mr. Majestyk, who not too long after The Big Bounce would star in his own eponymous novel and film, first appears here, in a major supporting role. What I find funny is that while in Mr. Majestyk the character is a guy who has to do some killing and does it, in The Big Bounce he’s just a kind, practical, smart businessman and Justice of the Peace. He’s not in on the action at all, but Leonard still decided to name the character “Mr. Majestyk.” Plus at one point, Majestyk is watching a Western on TV, and as described, the movie sounds an awful lot like The Tall T, the great Budd Boetticher film that’s based on an old Elmore Leonard short story. What this implies about the Elmore Leonard EU is too much for me to wrestle with right now.

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Not finished this week, but continued, is Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest, about the childhood of Adolf Hitler as told by the demon from Hell who got that particular ball rolling, and which would turn out to be his final novel. I’m reading this now because I had intended, or hoped, that it would be part of a reading, and subsequently writing, project involving fiction about Hitler, but I’m starting to think this thing is dead in the water. The problem is my enthusiasm, once robust, has shriveled like an airless balloon. At fault are the first novel I read, Young Adolf by the great Beryl Bainbridge. Or mostly great. That novel is about Hitler in his early 20s, visiting, or imposing himself upon, or invading, family in England. Put forward by some critics as a black comedy, I didn’t find a lot of humor in the book (though Bainbridge’s style of humor tends to be dry as salt), but worse, I couldn’t figure out what was going on in Bainbridge’s head. Now, I hate it when someone complains that a work of art “had no point” – indeed, if I had my way this would be a criminal offense – but I think we can all agree that Hitler as a historical figure looms sufficiently over humanity as it currently exists the world over that if one is going to use him as a fictional character, the reader should be able to understand why this choice was made. And as this all relates to Young Adolf, I was unable to do that. This is maybe my fault, I don’t know. I do know that Bainbridge ends Young Adolf with some bad irony, so even if it turns out that on that first point I am a dumbshit, the second bit is on her.

Anyway, so you add that to how I’m feeling about 200 pages into The Castle in the Forest, and I’m no longer sure this project has legs. I’m going to finish Mailer’s book, though, if for no other reason than after Some Came Running every book seems short. But it’s also a fascinating book, in its own way. If I was unable to figure out what Bainbridge was thinking when she wrote Young Adolf, that hasn’t been a problem so far with The Castle in the Forest. Mailer’s brain is splattered all over every page. His fixations and weirdness and foolishness and childishness are the book – fuck Hitler, he barely enters into it. Well, his anus does. But someone’s anus has featured prominently in each of the three Mailer novels I’ve, I don’t know, experienced. Then again, if the first part of The Castle in the Forest was about anuses, the second part has been about bees. My hopes are high that the third part will be about cardamom. Where this alphabetical journey will go from there, who can say?

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 2: How I Detest Those Fools

In the category of the modern weird story, it’s hard to know quite where to place Mark Samuels. This is probably because, outside of Thomas Ligotti and a few others, very few contemporary horror writers do anything more than dabble in this vaguely defined subgenre – it can’t help that, in my case, I only read my first pair of Samuels stories a few days ago, a fact which is, itself, explained by the troubling rarity of his books. His first collection, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales was first published in 2003 by Tartarus Press, and is currently out of print. His most recent book, Glyphotech, was published by PS Publishing in 2008, and it, too, is out of print. Used copies of each, as well as the two Samuels books that were published in between, fetch a very steep price, unless you happen to luck out (as I did, in the case of White Hands, at least). What this says about the state of the modern horror fiction market – both Tartarus and PS Publishing are very small presses – is both very clear and entirely depressing, so it’s best that we move on.

I first heard about Mark Samuels a few years ago when, in the early throes of my newfound passion for the fiction of Thomas Ligotti, I read an interview with the latter writer, in which the two were roughly compared. Essentially, Ligotti acknowledged Samuels as someone he was in tune with, but wondered if writers like Samuels were disturbed, and cut off from regular society, enough to achieve the stature in the horror field enjoyed by the likes of Poe, Lovecraft and (he doesn’t say but implies) himself.

Probably not, is the answer. Samuels, as it happens, is that rarest of creatures: a 21st century writer of horror fiction who is also a Christian – a Catholic, to be exact. On his website, Samuels writes:

Frankly, one has to tread carefully on horror messageboards if one admits to having faith. Particularly if you’re a Catholic (which I am, albeit not much of a churchgoing one). Once this fact is discovered it seems to be the case that it’s open season on your beliefs. I guarantee you’ll be the target of all sorts of wily attempts to draw you into an argument designed to make you see the errors of your ways and embrace the “rationality” of atheism (or agnosticism, most of whose adherents are, it seems, practically 99% atheist, but hold back a 1% doubt in order not to appear too judgemental).

And elsewhere on the site:

God, for me, is the fundamental core of reality itself. God does not exist, in the way we know a certain mountain exists. Without God there is no reality; God is the prime consciousness. God is infinite and eternal. He (I use the term “he” only for convenience) is not able to be directly understood by man, although we have intimations that allow us to conceive of his nature.

Science is not incompatible with belief in God. Since God is eternal and infinite, a process such as evolution, which may seem an incredibly inefficient way of producing humankind, is only inefficient from our temporal perspective.

Science cannot tell us why there are laws of physics. If one responds that this question is an irrelevance, since science makes no claim to explain the why in this instance, then it is an example that science cannot explain science. No closed system can explain a closed system.

If you don’t spend a great deal of time reading contemporary horror fiction -- and so it would follow you wouldn’t be spending any time on horror messageboards – you’ll have to take my word for it that Samuels is absolutely correct about the ways in which faith is treated in that community. Ligotti, the writer to whom Samuels is most often linked, is a full-bore atheist, at one point accepting the purely metaphorical existence of a creator only so that he could blame someone or something for the nightmare of human existence.

So all of this places Samuels in a unique position. In his faith, and fictional subject, he really does hearken back to the old days of Machen and M. R. James, a comparison that isn’t coincidental once you actually start reading Samuels’s fiction. His Catholicism isn’t exactly explicit in his story “White Hands” – a story I’ll get to in a bit -- though once you know his faith, the reader can sort of say, “Oh, okay. Sure.” Which is completely fine, and serves the story, or doesn’t, depending on what you want. Unfortunately, Samuels attempt to place his faith front and center doesn’t pay off too well in the other story I read, called “The Grandmaster’s Final Game”. Though the truth is that the Catholic nature of the story isn’t the problem – not only is that hardly the kind of thing that I, personally, am likely to complain about, but where would The Exorcist be without its faith? – but rather Samuels’s inability make the elements of this story cohere. Essentially a story of demonic possession and chess, most of “The Grandmaster’s Final Game” is told in the form of a confession told to Father Mooney by a man named Leonard Hughes. Hughes has specifically sought out Father Mooney to deliver his confession because, he says, “I know you were one of the finest chess players in Europe before you were called to holy orders.” Hughes goes on to tell of his life as a professional chess player, a career which didn’t take off until he found a bizarre chess set being sold for next to nothing in a local bookshop. The set was made unique by, among other things, featuring only black chess pieces. As I’ve already revealed that this is a story of possession, you can probably guess where we’re heading, and you’ll be correct.

Which is obviously a problem, but is not the problem, and, in fact, didn’t need to even be a problem at all. Though I strongly resist the idea that genre fiction – and, really, pick your genre, because this is said about them all – must necessarily follow formula and pay off in the way the reader expects, and that the only thing that can distinguish one genre writer from another is style and technique, I also know full well that great, brilliant work can be done while adhering to a given formula. So Samuels, a good writer who is a Catholic, and who, additionally, is very knowledgeable about his chosen genre, should have sailed through “The Grandmaster’s Final Game”. But he doesn’t. For one thing, there is no genuine sense of the infernal, something you obviously can’t say about The Exorcist, so that the inevitable final chess match feels as though it’s being waged between a priest who really wants to win, and a guy who really hates to lose.

On a much more encouraging note, the other Samuels story I read was “White Hands”, and it follows a familiar track of weird fiction in that it concerns itself with horror fiction and scholarship. The story is about an ambitious unnamed narrator who seeks out Alfred Muswell, at once a well-known academic and scholar of of “literary ghost stories”. Muswell was a disgraced former don at Oxford, who instructed his students to focus their reading on the works of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Vernon Lee, M. R. James and Lilith Blake (Blake being the one fictional character on this list, and, the reader discovers, the source of the story's horror). Though Muswell is a scholar of all of these writers, when Muswell meets our narrator and discovers that he prefers the work of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, Muswell immediately dismisses those other writers (of Machen he says, "That red-face old coot with his deluded Anglo-Catholic rubbish!") and says:

“…No, no. Believe me, if you want the truth beyond the frontier of appearances it is to Lilith Blak you must turn. She never compromises. Her stories are infinitely more than mere accounts of supernatural phenomena…”

As the reader will shortly learn. Despite his ambivalence about her, our narrator is looking to make his name by writing a monograph on Lilith Blake, a proposition that becomes more and more likely the more time he spends with Muswell. He sought out Muswell in the first place because Muswell is the foremost – and probably only – expert on Blake’s life and writing, and once our narrator has gained his confidence, the older scholar makes his collection of pictures, biographical material and unpublished writing free to the young man. Everything except one unpublished book called The White Hands and Other Tales. Muswell explains:

”This volume…contains the final stories. They establish the truth of all that I have told you. The book must now be published. I want to be vindicated after I die. This book will prove, in the most shocking way, the supremacy of the horror tale over all other forms of literature. As I intimated to you once before, these stories are not accounts of supernatural phenomena but supernatural phenomena in themselves.”

Samuels’s terrific story – both old-fashioned and unique – is one of those small but intriguing number of works of horror fiction that seems to take the horror genre itself as its subject (others in this category that I can think of off the top of my head are Joe Hill’s chilling “Best New Horror”, Ligotti’s bizarre “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story”, and the Amicus film The Skull). Lilith Blake is clearly bad news, and at least two men, two fans, get sucked far too deeply into the genre’s genuinely black heart. Muswell, in fact, disdains all other kinds of fiction, and the title of this post, How I Detest Those Fools, is taken from a line delivered by Muswell about a group of scholars studying James Joyce. Horror is all to him, and it will become all for our narrator. The nastiness and violence and hopelessness of horror consumes them. Had they enjoyed some other kind of reading material, there would be no “White Hands” by Mark Samuels. Though I suppose there still would be a “White Hands” by Lilith Blake, waiting for some other poor curious soul to take things too far.

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UPDATE 10/12/09: In the comments section, a fellah by the name of "tartarusrussell" informs me that not only is Mark Samuels's The White Hands and Other Weird Tales not out of print, but is available for a very reasonable price through Tartarus Press here. Call me a shill if you must, but Samuels deserves to have somebody shilling for him. Even if it's only me.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 8: The Two Hands of the Strangler, Not the Two Hands of the Lover

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I first heard about Brian Evenson on Sept. 26 of this year, when, in the comments section of this post, the mysteriously named frequent commenter "otherbill" offered Evenson up as a suggestion of a writer I might wish to take a look at this October. In response, I claimed that Evenson sounded vaguely familiar, and while I'm sure I believed it to be at the time, now that I've researched Evenson a bit I'm pretty sure otherbill's mention of him was the first I'd encountered. But mention Evenson I'm glad he did, because this is a writer I would hate to have missed out on.

The essential fact of Evenson's biography, as a writer at least, is that he used to be a member of the Mormon Church, and a teacher at Brigham Young University, and is no longer either one of those. In the case of his split with the church, my understanding is that it more or less immediately followed the publication of his first collection of stories, called Altmann's Tongue. Though I've read nothing of that book, a quick perusal of his subsequent work -- four more story collections and four novels -- shows a certain dark preoccupation with the Mormon faith, and a not necessarily glowing regard for its history or contemporary practice. As for Brigham Young University, well, for some reason Evenson's resignation letter is available online, so I'll leave that to you.

Evenson is largely unknown, but beloved by those who are familiar with his work. He has been praised by Peter Straub, Kelly Link, George Saunders, Samuel R. Delany, and collector of obscure writers throughout history, Jonathan Lethem. He has been compared to Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, Jim Thompson, J. G. Ballard and Paul Bowles. Who, I think it's fair to ask, the fuck is this guy? I can't even really ask "Where did he come from?" because to a certain degree I have that answer. But I can wonder why I'm just now hearing about him.

That comparison to Paul Bowles, by the way, strikes a particular chord with me -- now that someone else has mentioned the two writers in the same breath, I can nod wisely and say "Yes." Both of the Evenson stories I read for today (not the only ones I've read, though), taken from his 2004 collection The Wavering Knife, have that same creeping distance and merciless progression towards a horrible doom that can be found so often in Bowles's stories. Not just Bowles, but Thomas Ligotti, another writer I found insinuating his way into my mind as I read Evenson's "The Wavering Knife". That story begins like this:

Despite the unfortunate and increasingly serious illness of my benefactor, I continued to work without cease or rest to salvage my analysis of the Gengli oeuvre. The image of the wavering knife, which I had for years perceived as the unifier and ultimate hingepiece of Eva Gengli's philosophy, had, under the severe scrutiny made possible by her private papers, collapsed, and I could discover no adequate trope to stand in its stead. Indeed, Eva Gengli's private papers had led me to realize with an alarming degree of clarity that the Gengli philosophy was exceedingly more complex than I had first imagined.

Already, with the philosophical works of Eva Gengli, we're dealing with the kind of scholarly arcana often found in Thomas Ligotti's fiction, and, indeed, in weird fiction going all the way back to whenever it is that all began. Except here, Evenson has removed the supernatural element; he's even removed the question of it. "The Wavering Knife" is unambiguously the chronicle of a disintegrating psychology, in this case the one belonging to our narrator, who will become so deeply obsessed with what would appear to be utter gibberish -- that is, Gengli's philosophy-- that his neglect for his bed-ridden benefactor will become positively demonic:

I might have sat in the same position [contemplating Gengli] for another seven or eight hours except that I began to grow hungry and, growing hungry, realized that I had not fed my benefactor for several days.

Gengli isn't just gibberish, but contradictory gibberish. It's this facet of her work that so winds up our narrator, and which gives this post its title. There's probably an easy point to make about the fractured nature of Gengli's philosophy and how that relates the fracturing of our narrator's mind, but I'm not going to bother to make it, mainly because I don't think Evenson would much care to, himself. The horror of "The Wavering Knife" is the kind that exists above such easy metaphor. At the same time, I don't think it would quite do to call what happens in the story senseless -- it is, of course, but try telling that to our narrator.

If "The Wavering Knife" casts a chill of unease, disquiet and indifferent brutality, then so does our second story for today, called "The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette", except this time with jokes. Since Evenson seems to be especially skilled with openings, let's quote the beginning of this story, too:

One winter morning, watching Bein read his breakfast paper, Kohke decided to kill him. He stood behind Bein, aligned a pistol barrel with Bein's skull and worked the trigger. He had reasons for wanting Bein dead, but watching his lover shake about the floor, smearing blood on the linoleum, he could not bring those reasons to mind.

Nor does he ever. Bein goes on to not, in fact, die, despite the fact that Kohke shot him twice (Kohke is bewildered to learn this, believing he'd only shot him once). Bein does go blind from his wounds, and he is rendered paralyzed from the neck down. And even though Kohke would appear to be a complete incompetent (after firing, he hides the pistol in a pitcher of orange juice) he is somehow not prosecuted by the authorities. So what he's left to think about is this relationship with Bein, and how he'd meant to end it, but now it seems to be ongoing, and should he a) visit Bein in the hospital (no, he decides); and b) bring Bein back into the home they once shared together. To this, he decides that yes, he will, though the thought of pushing Bein's wheelchair over the same patch of floor where he'd lain bleeding is just too much, so Kohke rents an identical apartment a few floors down from their old one. When he finally brings Bein home and puts him to bed, Bein notices a difference:

"Welcome home," [Kohke] said. He lifted his ex-lover out of his chair and into the bed.

"This is my bed?" Bein asked. "It doesn't feel like my bed."

"Nothing feels the same after you've been shot, Bein."

"How would you know?"

.

"That's just what they say."

"The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette" is mad, black, awful, and savagely funny. The relationship between Kohke and Bein (and that's a big word in this story -- "relationship") is very similar to that of the narrator and his benefactor in "The Wavering Knife", and the brutality of both stories is about as appalling. It's an interesting, even fortuitous pairing of stories for today, though I think it hardly represents every tool in Evenson's kit. I know it doesn't, in fact, as I've also experienced the mild Kafka vibe of "White Square", the wry satire of "Promisekeepers", and the plainly experimental nightmare of "Garker's Aestheticals". Evenson is a major writer. Forget about horror for a second -- Evenson is simply a sensational talent. Take note, everybody.

Thomas Ligotti

My new piece for The Bulwark is about the great horror writer Thomas Ligotti. Check it out.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 16: A Loneliness That Was Not Human, and a Melancholy That Was a Kind of Evil

Quentin S. Crisp is not Quentin Crisp. For a long time I thought they were the same person. Perhaps you can guess why. In any event, this mistaken assumption led me to also believe, for some years, that the collection of horror stories by Quentin S. Crisp called Morbid Tales and published by Tartarus Press, used copies of which were priced well above what I was willing to pay, was the work of Quentin Crisp. Quentin NMI Crisp, I mean, The Naked Civil Servant and whatnot. I became very interested in Morbid Tales, and bitterly mourned my not-rich-person status. Of course, part of my interest hinged on the belief that The Naked Civil Servant had written it, because I hadn't been aware that horror fiction was anywhere close to the kind of thing he ever wrote. Now, over the course of my periodic obsession to learn more about this, certain clues should have indicated to me that this was another different Quentin Crisp altogether (why that "S" all of a sudden, for instance), most of which I won't bore you/embarrass myself by relating. But skipping ahead, an entirely affordable copy of Morbid Tales finally revealed itself to me, and I pounced (if I hadn't, I doubt it would have been available much longer). When it arrived in the mail, I turned to the introduction by Mark Samuels, which opens with this:

Sometime during 2001, Matt Cardin, a friend and correspondent of mine in the United States, suggested I contact an author then resident in Taiwan who shared our interest in the work of Thomas Ligotti. I think my first reaction was to ask whether the author's name was genuine. Doubtless those of you who have bought this book without first being in contact with its author have asked yourself the same question. So to clear up any confusion, this Quentin Crisp is a thirty-one-year-old writer and not the late Quentin Crisp, 'Professor of Style' long exiled in New York.

I have to say, I was vaguely disappointed to learn this, despite the fact that whoever had written Morbid Tales was being noticed and approved of by, as far as I was concerned, all the right people. No doubt this is why, the night the book arrived, I read two short stories, dubbed them good but uninteresting, and set the book aside. But let me, at long last, cut to the chase: Quentin S. Crisp has been publishing books since 2001, many through small specialty presses, many out of print and basically unavailable (or actually unavailable, in some cases), but in recent years has founded, or co-founded -- I don't know the details -- an excellent publishing company called Chômu Press that makes books by writers like Mark Samuels, Reggie Oliver, Michael Cisco, and plenty more, available at regular normal-person prices. And as you might expect, and as you might wish (if you're me, at least), Crisp has thrown a couple of his own books into the mix: "Remember, You're a One-Ball!", his first full-length novel (he'd previously published a stand-alone novella called Shrike through PS Publishing), and just last month a reprint of his 2009 story collection, All God's Angels, Beware!.

Earlier this year, I got over my moping over this being a different Quentin Crisp and read "Remember, You're a One-Ball!". Certain blurbs contained in the pre-book ancillary pages proved too fascinating to resist, none more so than this one, which is not a blurb but rather a "rejection from a publisher who wished to remain anonymous":

You write like a dream, Quentin, and the novel is well paced, but the subject matter is so challenging; so unremittingly inhuman, cruel and full of hatred that it is unbearable.

I'm not sure about all of that, but it was certainly cruel, it contained at least some hatred and inhumanity, and Quentin S. Crisp does, as it turns out, write like a dream. "Remember, You're a One-Ball!" also turned out to be fairly challenging, unquestionably bizarre, occasionally baffling, both sickened and sickening, despairing, sexual, morbid, melancholy, and lonely. That title doesn't refer to billiards, incidentally.

So I was somewhat primed, if not a little bit uncertain, when embarking on today's reading. In fairness to you, at the height of my beneficence, I have chosen to work from All God's Angels, Beware! rather than Morbid Tales, seeing as I snapped up the last affordable copy of that one in existence. After some research, I finally decided to go with what might be considered the centerpiece of All God's Angels, Beware!, a 70-page novella called "Ynys-y-Plag," which, I know, sounds Lovecraftian, but don't worry, it's only Welsh. Although I suppose the Lovecraftian lilt, or warble, of "Ynys-y-Plag" is probably no accident -- there is a certain Lovecraftian spike to the story itself, I suppose, though in terms of influence, two other writers stand out much more sharply: Thomas Ligotti (a Lovecraft acolyte anyway) and Arthur Machen. Machen's "The White People" in particular comes through strongly in the first half, as does Ligotti's "The Red Tower," with its total absence of any people, by which I mean any characters, only a kind of inexplicably sinister production.

But "Ynys-y-Plag" is very much its own thing, and it's something of a masterpiece, I think. It takes the form of a new introduction -- ostensibly an introduction, I should say -- to a reprint edition of our narrator's most famous book of photography. Our narrator is nameless, of course, but the story is written as if we should obviously know who he is. He's a famous and successful photographer, an artist, and the book for which he's writing this introduction, Traces, is a very well-known and sought-after collection of his work. The photographer himself, however, is ambivalent about his own talent, and rather less so about Traces:

If I can call Traces great art, and if I can also say that I dislike the work, that -- let me be frank -- I hate it, it is because in a sense it is a work that has little to do with me as an artist. It is a work, also, that I wish had nothing to do with me as a person. It was created by circumstance and a camera, and I, unfortunately, was there at the time, pushing the button.

"Ynys-y-Plag" then takes the form, as you might expect from the kind of introduction that it's pretending to be, of a "making of" account. The photographer explains the course of his career up to the point that the idea for Traces occurred to him, though he does so with a sort of bitter indifference, and how the idea for the book transformed into something else. Essentially, he'd hit on the idea of exploring parts of England and the rest of the UK with which he was unfamiliar, being an "urbanite," so he'd started putting a map on his wall, closing his eyes, and sticking a pin into the map. If the pin marked a location that was at all usable -- not in mainland Europe or in the ocean, basically -- then he would drive there, and the location would become his subject. One day, when he was ready to begin a new project, he stuck his pin into Ynys-y-Plag, a town in Wales. So that's where he went.

The first twenty to thirty pages of "Ynys-y-Plag" are very dense with descriptions of the the Welsh landscape, and the strange effect Ynys-y-Plag, the town, has on the photographer. I read a quote from Crisp where he said that his greatest strength as a writer is "description," which might seem like an awfully general thing to single out, but reading this novella I think I know what he means. Here he's describing a particular photograph of a strange dome he took in Ynys-y-Plag, one that wound up in Traces:

I still don't have a very clear idea of the purpose of the dome. A high and untrimmed hedge along one section of the main road largely obscured the dome from sight. Its round, tiled apex, however, rose about the hedge outlandishly, as if it were a flying saucer squatting on some private but poorly concealed landing pad about which no one dared enquire...When I looked upon the dome in daylight, it gave me a bleak feeling of being lost -- like a a child separated from his parents in a strange place -- and seemed a symbol of the kind of emptiness that creeps increasingly into life when you reach adulthood, casting over everything an irreversible chill that tells you there is no such place as home. However, the photograph I took in daylight somehow failed to capture this feeling, and I knew I had to come back at night. When I did, what I saw gave me a quite different feeling. Beneath jellyfish bells of sodium streetlight glare, and the blue light of the moon that made all shapes bestial and squinting, the dome seemed otherworldly. This was a stage beyond emptiness. If nature abhors a vacuum, then it seemed, looking at that dome in the crabbed and space-distorted darkness of the miserable night, that all that was left in the universe to fill the vacuum of the soul was some alien spirit whose strangeness was so potent that it could not whisper and sigh within the knowledge of a human being without intoxicating, possessing and transforming.

There's a lot of this kind of thing in "Ynys-y-Plag", and in Ynys-y-Plag. Upon entering the town, the photographer experienced a wash of uneasy feelings, including that he was trespassing just by being there at all, and that his trespass was not going unnoticed. His descriptions of his own photographs dig deeper, though still deepening the mystery. Traces most famous photograph, the one that graces the cover, is of one of the town's many bridges -- indeed, every road and path seems to lead to another bridge -- and what inspired, or rather forced, perhaps, the photographer to take that particular picture was the presence of a child's shoe. Later he finds different manholes sunk into the earth, which may lead, as you'd expect, to the sewer system, but may not. At one of these manholes, he sees a tiny sock nearby. At both manholes, he feels a terror at the very idea of turning around, though he must in order to retreat. Elsewhere, he sees a massive tree that grows up and out over a slope of ground, and over a body of water. From one of the branches hangs a swing made of a rope of blue nylon and a stick. He takes a picture of this, wanting to capture a particular stillness to the swing, and the strange light of Ynys-y-Plag's twilight, and then he meets a man. The man approaches him, and points out an otter swimming in the water behind him. As the two men begin to talk, the stranger begins to sound more and more wild as he warns:

"...There's a bug down there. Some people round here catch it sometimes...You see something strange, though, you don't look, unless you want to catch the bug...They say that sin and evil's human, but there was some kind of sin here a long time before people came. The worst time was the plague. That's when it was everywhere..."

Ynys-y-Plag, by the way, means Island of the Plague.

There is so much going on in this story. The plot is actually fairly rich -- it's not all mood and atmosphere, and the horror imagery becomes increasingly more explicit, before drawing back again into insinuation by the end. Along the way, Crisp writes of the strangeness of humanity, the seeming near-emptiness of Ynys-y-Plag, a town rich with creeping, eerie nature that itself is dotted with man-made structures, such as bridges, the dome, the lights that light the trees as night falls -- it's like weeds growing through a split in the pavement, but in reverse. Yet there's almost no one around. The photographer meets three townspeople within Ynys-y-Plag limits. The photographer learns about that swing, and about the bug the man -- "The Otter Man," the photographer dubs him -- warned about, or rather, in Welsh, the bwg, which itself, we are told, is the origin of "bug," but when we see centipedes and millipedes and flies and caterpillars and think "bug," that is a misuse of an ancient word with an ancient meaning that we can't know about, though we are probably in some subtle, unnoticed way infected by the "bwg," the disease that crouches within Ynys-y-Plag. If there's a horror image Crisp wants you to leave his story and dig up for yourself, and presumably connect to "Ynys-y-Plag," it's this little...lady? The Kikimora, anyway, a monster from Slavic myth, illustrated here -- and this is the exact picture Crisp specifically refers to on three different occasions -- by Ivan Bilibin:

I hasten to add, this isn't cheating on Crisp's part. It's a symbol.

Thomas Ligotti once said that the next great horror writer would be someone writing from the fringe of society, a badly socialized and slightly, but genuinely, unhinged person like, he said, H. P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe ("or me," he didn't say, but didn't need to, but he would have been right if he had). I don't know enough about Crisp to say if he fits the model, but from what I've read of his work, some of the recurring ideas are a resistance to suicide only because "Why bother?" is just as strong in its lack of action as suicide would be in its action, a crippling loneliness that one doesn't fight to conquer but to accept, a fear of sex, a disgust of sex, an inability to take pleasure from sex, abuse and cruelty and terror and confusion. "Ynys-y-Plag" itself uses occasionally blatant horror ideas to deal with almost all of this, as well as the loss of childhood and family and home -- the growing into adulthood as the awakening into horror. The more straightforward horror elements of the novella are among the more unsettling I've encountered in some time (a dead body is described without detail but with just the right simile that I could picture it instantly, and was jarred by what Crisp was showing me), and the ideas, very much like Ligotti though not quite antinatal, are at least regretful about that the idea of "human life" was ever considered.

"Ynys-y-Plag" is not perfect. Towards the end, Crisp goes about explaining more than I would have expected. There's a lot he doesn't explain, but explaining almost any of what's going on here is surprising in a story like this. It becomes very talky as a result, but by no means fatally so. Not even close. Whatever flaws pop up along the way, the final, overall effect of "Ynys-y-Plag" is one of hopeless, queasy terror -- the terror of uncertainty and of loss, and of not being a part of a world that everyone else seems to be a part of, of life, of death, and of a universe that possibly not only doesn't care about you, but hates you. In the hands of an honest writer, this is horror.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 21: Is the Trickling Oil of Rot Tastier Than Blood?

I can't find any biographical information about William Scott Home. I don't know when or where he was born, or whether or not he's still alive. I can't find any pictures of William Scott Home. When you do an image search for his name, you mostly get, along with pictures of various mugshots of people named either Scott or William, images of Seann William Scott. He is a different person from William Scott Home, so this is no help. I first learned of Home from Will Errickson, who pointed me to this interview with Thomas Ligotti. Towards the end of the interview, Ligotti is asked about the weirdest piece of fiction he's ever read, and he answers:

The weirdest stories I’ve ever read composed the collection Hollow Faces, Merciless Moons (1977) by William Scott Home. The prose is so complex and recondite that it’s all but unreadable, much like that of Clark Ashton Smith. Furthermore, Home’s narratives are baffling and sometime barely comprehensible, somewhat in the manner of Robert Aickman. For a while I thought that Home was either an inexpert writer or a mental case. Then I found an essay by him in a festschrift devoted to Lovecraft called HPL. The essay was lucid and insightful.

"So complex and recondite that it's all but unreadable" paired with comparisons to Clark Ashton Smith and Robert Aickman combined into quite the heady perfume, and it very rapidly became clear that William Scott Home was a writer I needed to learn more about. And I have been unable to learn anything more about him. Other than, I guess, if this counts, that back in the 1970s, and into the 80s, he wrote a healthy handful -- but still only a handful -- of short stories (as well as a few poems and a couple of essays), some of which found their way into annual best-of horror anthologies, and could at the time most frequently be found in the pages of an annual fanzine called Weirdbook published by W. Paul Ganley between 1968 and 1995. To give you some idea of Weirdbook -- and you may have picked up by now that there is somewhat more information available on this publication than on William Scott Home -- this website describes it as having been " typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter." At one point in my life, which honestly isn't that far behind me, the implications of that description would have made my blood run cold. But I'm a tiny bit wiser now, or at least more open to certain possibilities, and I suspect I'll be doing my damnedest to hunt down as many of the back issues as I can.

Because William Scott Home, professionally anyway, was apparently joined to Gainey's hip, and I'm in a position now to decide that this reflects well on Gainey. From what I can tell, Home published three books, Black Diamond Gates, a collection of poetry that is short enough to possibly be labeled a chapbook, Stain of Moonlight, which I'm almost positive is a collection of stories, and a third book, one I know without a doubt is a collection of stories because I have it here in front of me (and besides, this is the one Ligotti mentioned in that quote above), called Hollow Faces, Merciless Moons. Hollow Faces, Merciless Moons, in fact, was published as "a WEIRDBOOK special issue," and that IBM Selectric got another workout on this one. To give you some idea, one of the stories I read for today, "The Last Golem," contains German names and Czech city names (a made up Czech city, from what I can tell), with umlauts and Czech accent marks and so forth, and these were very clearly handwritten into the original manuscript, and from there copied into the print run. I've decided this is charming, though if Home wasn't so singular I'd probably be a much bigger asshole about it.

So. William Scott Home. The book itself, by the way, has the dimensions of the old-style graphic novel comic books (that term meant something different when I was a kid), which is the first thing I think of when I look at it, but for the unaffiliated these dimensions are also similar to a regular spiral notebook. Or a magazine, I guess. Some magazines, anyway. The text is in two columns, so that the 95-page count is deceptive, as is the fact that many of the stories run under ten pages, even under five. I don't know how this would all translate into a more normally laid-out book, but I'd think the book would just about double in size in that case. It's unusual, as a book, is all I'm getting at.

So. William Scott Home. Ligotti's description of Home's prose as being so recondite (or, if you prefer, acroamatic, a word Home uses in one of the stories I read) as to be unreadable strikes me as fairly absurd. Not the recondite part, but the unreadable part. I found it all quite readable, once I got into the rhythm, and quite exciting, even. Clark Ashton Smith is a pretty good comparison -- that's certainly the closest association I could make -- but in any case Home's is a rich, enveloping style, his desired mood is struck instantly in the first paragraph of the first story, "The Utter Dark Where Blind White Sea Snakes Crawl" -- well, the mood is struck just by that title alone, obviously, but Home ramps that up with:

The first impression of decay -- or hasty genesis -- which the old Carib town of Stann Creek imparts to its visitors is quickly overtaken by a bland sensory honey compounded of the overwhelming sunlight, an exuberance of blossoms -- hibiscus all year, jasmine and oleander seasonally -- and the aleatory rhythm of feet and heads, rumbling trucks and padding waves. The creek itself, bridged at the centre of town, would pass without notice if it were not a rim to rim bed of water-hyacinths; from the exclusive huddle of paintless houses green fields mediate with the sea, mangrove, and spongy fabric of rain forest which softens the startling karst of the Stann Creek Valley.

This story is the only one I read -- which does not mean it's the only one by Home in existence -- that matches what Ligotti says about the narratives being "sometimes barely comprehensible." It's not at all like Aickman, though. Aickman, even at his strangest, which is considerably strange, has a precision the result being, that which is withheld, the element that is being kept deliberately incomprehensible, still contains enough evidence for the reader to conclude that something whole is being submerged, and we're only a witness to little islands of a greater weirdness. "The Utter Dark Where Blind White Sea Snakes Crawl," on the other hand, seems like a mad jumble. Not an uninteresting one, by any means, but this story about, I can only assume, a white doctor in a small Caribbean village and another man, our narrator, who it is eventually revealed is building a submarine to plumb the ocean depths where creatures quite unlike and far more soul-shreddingly terrifying than what we know, churn the waters, discuss, among other things, occult medicine, vampires, the undead, fear, myths -- and how mythical fears grow up in parts of the world where the actual things, which do exist in the world of this story, don't exist, and the parts of the world where they do exist, these things are taken in stride -- and just...lots of things, this story, as I say, is impossible to summarize in any coherent way. And it's true, sometimes the language contributes to this confused, off-balance feeling. Take this bit, when the narrator enters the hospital and finds the doctor, Arzu, treating a badly injured local woman:

Arzu was painting iodine on the lips of an elderly woman, whose lumpy squinted features were rather blank. Both upper and lower lips had been cut into, quite neatly, but they were already purulent. When her mouth was closed the wound was a perfect ellipse, as though someone under the inspiration of Hugo had driven a biscuit-punch clean through her flesh.

First: biscuit-punch? Second: Hugo? First I've heard of him. Maybe "Hugo" when paired with "biscuit-punch" combines to form a reference that I simply don't get. If you do, please elucidate.

I don't want to get too bogged down with this one story, though. The next one I read is called "The Uncomfortable Words," and for a while it's far more traditionally surreal. It's made up primarily of a long conversation between two old women sitting on a bench, Miss Smitt and Mrs. McKey. Miss Smitt does most of the talking, and in tones that would indicate she's trafficking in run-of-the-mill, but still juicy, local gossip, she says things like:

"...But just this Sunday, do you know, out in that same part, back where the mud is so bad behind the sheds -- remember, I told you? -- there was the girl -- I told you about her, didn't I? been there some time, the one with the red hair and freckled nose? -- well, she was cornered, and a man I hadn't seen before threw burning gasoline across her face. She fell against that fence, and it's so weak, you know, it collapsed right under her, so she fell there and lay twitching and writing like a half-squashed spider while the gasoline burned her face off. It didn't catch the rest of her, because it was burning when he threw it, but she wasn't quiet until night was over."

Miss Smitt's gossip is just a parade of horrors, you see, and only Mrs. McKey has the decency to be upset about any of it, though even then not quite as much as you'd expect. "The Uncomfortable Words" has a great, violent, bizarre drive to it, and creates a world where these old women meet on park benches to discuss the never-ending nightmare of blood that is their hometown, before finally taking a surprising turn towards something more...I don't want to say ordinary, because that would imply that I don't think it works. The turn was, I'll admit, slightly disappointing, but more unexpected, in its very classicism, than anything else.

But Home, it turns out, is not at all immune to the pull of tradition; he simply approaches it in his own, possibly mad, way. You can tell by the title "The Last Golem" that he's drawing on what has come before, though his story -- a Holocaust story, not an unheard of take on the Golem myth, though it may have been when he wrote this -- is, again, mostly a long conversation, this time between a Nazi officer and a Nazi doctor. After the butchering of a group of Jews during the liquidation of a Czech ghetto, and the burning of the synagogue where the massacre took place, a body is found that the doctor describes, reading off the official medical report, this way:

"...Skin and features, extremely coarse. There are no fingerprints -- nor are the fingers covered with any scar tissue indicating they might have been eradicated. There are no creases in the hands, nor on the soles. Inspection of the mucous membranes, eye structure, and the like, suggests a remarkable lack of tissue differentiation."

Plus, no hair, and etc. During the conversation, the officer is trying to feel out the doctor because he wants to know why the doctor's questions, and request to be allowed to study this being, rather than shoving it in the oven like all the others, seem so informed of Hebrew mysticism -- he's poking at the doctor for hints of sympathy, or at least empathy, if not something "worse." The doctor, meanwhile, claims he simply wants to see if the golem myth was possibly based in real science, and if so, perhaps this knowledge can be harnessed into strengthening the Master Race's armed forces. This doesn't really cut any ice with the officer, who finds the very suggestion deeply offensive, as you might imagine, but Home is taking all this into some very heady territory, as the already metaphorically rich golem takes on a fascinatingly moral dimension as it connects to the Hebrew notion that the path to atonement is through strict adherence to laws, something a golem, by its very nature, can manage, no sweat. The doctor wonders, about the golem, and about himself, and about everybody:

What the unfeeling copulations of the super-savages could achieve, the express of will, ideal, mountain-jostling faith, understanding of and sympathy with the deep flows of the universe could easily match or best. That happenstance body was no vacuum from which nature recoiled -- but rather this one, this synchronized, healthy form from which the persona moulded by sun-oriented life had been expunged by intentional, vital will -- the body which, having known the savour of paradise in its nostrils, opted instead for blood-fumes to slake the ravening beast.

The last story I read is called "A Cobweb of Pulsing Veins" (Home is generally very good with titles -- at least I think so -- but one I have yet to read is called "Ship of Ghouls," and, man, I don't know about that one). It was included in the 1978 volume -- volume six, it was -- of the old The Year's Best Horror Stories, and it's not hard to see why. It's about a man, our narrator, who I initially believed was a simple grave robber for hire, but turned out to be a "resurrectionist," or body-snatcher. A fair chunk of the story describes him moving through a cemetery, looking for a specific mausoleum, and a specific coffin, as he's been paid by a mysterious figure to do so. In this story, Home is at his most Clark Ashton Smith-y:

The door of one mausoleum was long broken, swung so far inward that it was pinioned by a gout of earth to the wall behind. Spiders alone maintained its interdiction. I stepped within to scan the diagram once more. The stagnant atmosphere which dropped on me as I entered was shocking; fear is a syllable of child's babble to those of us who cull our living from the dead, except when it faces us astride warm breath.

The coffin he's been hired to dig up and remove turns out to be very small and wrapped in chains. Upon removing it from the ground, the body snatcher notices an eerie blue light dimly filling the mausoleum, and spreading and brightening the closer he gets to removing the coffin -- the iron coffin -- from the boundaries of the cemetery. Eventually, once the body snatcher is home and awaiting his client's arrival, to pay him and take the coffin and its contents, a curiosity fueled by considerable fear causes him to open the coffin, but only briefly, because what he finds within is so...alarming, let's say.

"A Cobweb of Pulsing Veins" is pretty terrific, and the story continues into some still stranger areas once the inhabitant of the coffin is revealed. This story, too, becomes dependent on certain traditions, but Home never lets go of his special brand of madness. In fact, this story could almost be said to have a happy ending, even an inspiring one (for all its bleakness, "The Last Golem" is also not without a certain spirituality), if it wasn't for that last sentence. That last damn sentence, man, ends things on such a creepy, shocking, baffling note that I don't finally know what to think about the morality of it all, which is something I think is probably always to be considered in Home's work. But whatever the morality of "A Cobweb of Pulsing Veins" is, whatever the positive morality is, it's still fairly hideous. Maybe not specifically morally hideous -- though even then, I don't know -- but objectively hideous all the same.

Among the stories in Hollow Faces, Merciless Moons that I didn't read, there's one called "Chameleon That Blinks Barbed Stars." It's over thirty pages long, which, given the already described text layout and book dimensions, would have to mean that it's well into novella length, and would therefore have to be counted as one of Home's major works. I desperately wish I'd done a better job, or any kind of job, of scheduling my reading of William Scott Home, because now I wish I'd read that one, and could tell you about it. I bet it's insane. Brilliantly insane.

The Kind of Face You Shoot: With All My Heart I Hope For the Worst

Currently, Nic Pizzolatto is having his ass handed to him. By this I of course mean that both the professional and the amateur reviews of the second season of his much-discussed HBO crime show True Detective have thus far, two episodes in, been pretty withering. Then again, set against the critical and amateur reviews of season one of True Detective, which were rapturous to an almost bewildering degree (and I say this as someone who liked that season) almost any dip in enthusiasm would have to count as withering. But I'll tell you, I'm utterly unable to account, on logical or critical grounds, for the shift from adulation to sneering mockery which this show is now experiencing. Whose aunt did Pizzolatto throw off a cliff? Whatever problems season one had are, I'll admit, still there -- among these I myself would count a certain thoughtless adherence to formula, an over-fondness for reference, and possibly an inability to distinguish good poetry from bad -- but so are all the good things: strong lead and secondary performances, a wonderful air of grim mystery, menace, and suspense, a willingness (even a need) to take genre seriously (something Pizzolatto is being dinged for now, though, somehow, not then). And finally, my favorite thing about True Detective, a willingness to be straight-up weird, something that has made its way into the show, ironically, via something that has become one of the show's deficits, which is that fondness for nodding too hard at the works of others. This is a plus and a minus, in other words. When it works on the show, you get, in season one, the weird horror of Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft, and, most intriguingly, Thomas Ligotti pulled into the mix of a homicide investigation. In season two, the strong James Ellroy influence that I also noticed in season one becomes foregrounded, as this year's storyline (and each season is a new self-contained story, with a new cast and new characters) and structure almost begs you to think about Ellroy's 1988 masterpiece The Big Nowhere. Recently, it also wants you to think about Georges Franju's film Judex, but never mind about that.

So what happened? Fucked if I know. I'm enjoying season two of True Detective as much as I enjoyed season one (in other words, a reasonable amount). As usual, the backlash can only be observed from a distance and wondered at. You can't assume anything about those engaging in the backlash -- or, rather, you can, and it's possible that I have, but you can't say, publicly, that there's any sort of dishonesty at work here because you just can't know. (And to be extra clear, I don't know, but I am baffled; also, if you never liked the show then obviously you're off the hook.) This is a relief because as it happens, while this post is about Nic Pizzolatto, it isn't about True Detective. In 2006, Pizzolatto published a book of short stories called Between Here and the Yellow Sea. It received praise from such writers as Adam Johnson, Ellen Gilchrist, Tom Franklin, and William Gay. (This, in and of itself, shouldn't necessarily mean anything to you, though I would argue that it's not something that should mean nothing to you, either.) In 2010 he published a novel, called Galveston. The reaction to that, which included a rave by celebrated crime writer Dennis Lehane in The New York Times Book Review, probably greased the wheels that led to True Detective happening at all. None of this, of course, means that True Detective is any good -- if you don't like it, you don't like it. But in the wake of that show's season two premiere, which might have to be regarded as disastrous, Pizzolatto has been accused of being phony, and a bad writer. And I'll admit that if a certain thing that many predict will happen in episode three of season two does in fact happen (we'll all find out in about six and a half hours), then I will have no choice but to call out Pizzolatto on some pretty egregious bullshit, storytelling-wise. Nevertheless, I've read selections from Between Here and the Yellow Sea as well as all of Galveston, and I'm telling you, Pizzolatto means what he writes. You can scoff at it and think his work "takes itself too seriously" (whatever in the world that means), but just because he takes the crime genre more seriously than you do, that doesn't somehow mean he's lying.

Of the three short stories I read from his collection, the one that comes closest to being a traditional crime story is the title story, "Between Here and the Yellow Sea." In it, a young man named Bobby Coressi remembers the day Amanda Duprene, the cheerleader he loved, unrequitedly, in high school hopped into a Chevy and took off forever, leaving behind her father, that same high school's football coach:

I was there the day she left. I mowed lawns back then, and on that Sunday I worked the yard next to Coach Duprene's house. A red Chevy Blazer parked in their driveway. Four boys I knew from school were in that truck. The back end sagged with boxes and bags, a surfboard. High school was over, and they were all moving to California. Coach Duprene watched from the porch and didn't wave as the truck rolled way.

Someone, we can now say, should have stopped that Chevy. It's no secret. She makes movies under the name Mandy LeRock. I've only seen one.

Some time later, Bobby and Coach Duprene join together for a road trip to California, with the vague notion of saving Amanda from the clutches of the porn world. You might envision some kind of bloody showdown with porn goons, revelations that Amanda has sunk beneath the level of mainstream pornography into something more shadowy and frighteningly transgressive, but no. There is a rather dark revelation, or rather a hint towards one, but otherwise Pizzolatto lets the story play out to a deliberately anticlimactic end. The conclusion that not everyone wants or even especially needs your help is not the kind one is usually asked to draw from a crime story.

Another story, called "The Guild of Thieves, Lost Women, and Sunrise Palms" is about a young guy named Hoyt who lives in an RV park with his dad. One day, his dad gives Hoyt two thousand dollars and says that he has to leave for a while, and that money will have to last Hoyt until he gets back. In the meantime, Hoyt hangs out with his friend CB, a war vet who now deals drugs with Hoyt's help, and whose RV is across from a palm reader. If this all seems a little too colorful, Pizzolatto's prose is always clean, letting whatever feels like it might be a bit much just exist, unadorned:

CB has told Hoyt that CB used to mean Charles Bailey but now it meant Coffin Boat. CB used to be enormous. He used to hold the state triple-A division record in the shot put. He has a composite plastic plate in his hip and a note that excuses him from metal detectors. He's always refused to tell Hoyt stories about Iraq. CB's skin is dark brown and hard like wood, and he has a thick face, a flat nose, black eyes. He is full Choctaw. Great pink scars engulf his left arm -- a gnarled arm seeded with shrapnel, always bent in a way that reminds Hoyt of the tiny, useless claw of a T-Rex. Hoyt met CB two years ago, pawning the first thing he ever stole, a neighbor's shiny .45 Magnum.

Again, as with "Between Here and the Yellow Sea," the elements of a crime story are laid out, but "The Guild of Thieves, Lost Women, and Sunrise Palms" doesn't even employ the kind of crime plot that "Between Here and the Yellow Sea" subverts -- Hoyt's story is instead completely aimless, as is Hoyt. The idea, one supposes, is to take crime out of the high-plotting we usually associate it with, such as you'd find in Chandler, or Ellroy, or, you know, True Detective, and put it back into the realm of bored, angry reality. Which Pizzolatto pulls off rather well, although he's not immune to letting the language of fiction mar the reality he's trying to construct. At one point, two cops are questioning Hoyt about his father, and during one tense moment of the interrogation Pizzolatto writes "One of the deputies idly examined a fingernail." Which, frankly, is pure movie horseshit, a shortcut to "jaded" or "heartless" that has been rolled out unimaginatively in countless films.

And it's odd, too, that Pizzolatto would choose to compound this sort of thing with his blatant references to other crime novels and films. In the other story I read, "1987, The Races," which is pretty much not a crime story at all, about a boy spending a day at the tracks with his kind, yet stupid and desperate, father, the boy, whose mind is all jumbled up with his parents' divorce, his loyalty to his dad, his dad's own frustrating behavior, that he feels great anger at a well-meaning woman at the tracks his father likes (and I'll add for the sake of context, has just given a lot of fruit to), and anyway, Pizzolatto writes:

[The boy] wanted to grab the sack of oranges and beat her with them, like he'd read about a man doing to a woman in a crime novel his father had.

The decision to so blatantly and awkwardly reference Jim Thompson's The Grifters is all the worse because "1987, The Races" is a good story -- it has immediacy and real heartbreak in it. Nothing is brought to the table by basically saying to the reader "We both like crime fiction so much that I'm not even going to name the book in question because you don't need me to." It would be far less irritating if Pizzolatto had chosen to pay homage to The Grifters by writing a story in which someone is beaten with a sack of oranges, with no mention that the idea came from a Jim Thompson novel. That is, in fact, the kind of reference Pizzolatto is messing around with in True Detective: the Ligotti, Chambers, and Lovecraft stuff in season one, and the James Ellroy stuff now in season two. At no point in season one did anybody say "Have you ever read Thomas Ligotti? Well let me tell you..." Whereas in "1987, The Races" he's essentially stopping his story to say "The Grifters by Jim Thompson." Although it was not mentioning Ligotti by name in season one that led some people to accuse Pizzolatto, rather absurdly I believe, of plagiarism, so maybe he shouldn't listen to me.

Anyway, the decision to clumsily insert genre references into his writing was not an impulse he was able to shake by the time he wrote Galveston, his novel from 2010. About midway through the book, the narrator, Roy Cady, is talking to another tenant of the motel where he, Rocky, a young prostitute, and her three-year-old sister Tiffany are staying. This other tenant, Tray, says to Roy:

"You know you remind me of, man?...Guy from the movies. What's that guy? He was in the movie about the cockfighter. And the other. Ole boy driving around with a head in the car."

Two words never uttered in the ensuing exchange are "Warren Oates," because we know, we don't need to be told. Although I do wonder about somebody who has seen both Cockfighter and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia yet can't remember Warren Oates' name. On the other hand, now we know that Roy Cady looks like Warren Oates.

So, I don't like that sort of thing, but otherwise I did like Galveston because Pizzolatto, when he's not simply scratching some pointless genre itch, is a good writer. In the novel, Roy Cady is muscle for a New Orleans gangster. As the novel opens, he's just learned that he's dying of lung cancer -- the x-ray showed in his chest "a blizzard of soap chips." When he hits the bar out of which much of Stan Pitko's, his gangster boss, business flows, Roy orders Johnnie Walker Blue, a $40 a shot Scotch that also recently turned up on True Detective, so that's another thing with Pizzolatto, apparently. Anyhow, Roy starts drinking Johnnie Walker Blue because why not? The gist of the rest of Galveston's set-up is that for a variety of reasons, both business and personal, Roy begins to think that the job he's being sent out to do will result in his murder, as ordered by Stan Pitko. He turns out to be right, but, lung cancer or no, Roy doesn't feel like going out like that, he fights back, kills his murderers, and ends up fleeing the house where it all went down with Raquel Arceneaux ("She pronounced it Arson, oh."), aka Rocky. They're now both on the run from the same people, and they find themselves heading to Texas. Galveston specifically, though there is a detour to pick up Rocky's kid sister, which shocks Roy, as does the gunshot coming from Rocky's family home that precedes her leaving with the three-year-old Tiffany. Did Rocky murder her father while she was in there? She claims she just scared him.

Galveston is a much more traditional crime story than anything I read in Between Here and the Yellow Sea, although much of the novel, after that groundwork has been laid, involves the journey of Roy, Rocky, and Tiffany, as well as Roy's relationship with Rocky, which he can't bring himself to make sexual even though she seems almost too willing. This sort of gender mess is one of the things that raised folks' antennae even during the much ballyhooed first season of True Detective -- why all the hookers, why is sex such a huge factor in the makeup of the female characters? -- and it's almost as if this genre, which is a beloved and respected one by, I'll go out on a limb and say, many of the same people now down on the show, had never before contained any strong component regarding the power of female sexual wiles. But I almost feel like it kind of did? For a little while there? Speaking for myself, I liked the character of Rocky a lot, and though she's a bit of an archetype (you can use a less flattering word if you'd like) she's a well-drawn one. At one point, speaking about her to someone else, Roy says that Rocky "had a hard life," which you can see early on (the particulars are eventually made clear, though they're easy enough to predict); you can also see that this hard life has thrown her into an awful situation that she's trying to deal with. And she's about twenty years old. People tend to have abundant sympathy for such people in real life but denounce them as sexist cliches when someone writes about them in fiction.

Of course, Galveston is mostly about Roy, whose own life up to and including his cancer diagnosis hasn't been a barrel of monkeys. Early on, he lays out his family situation:

I was seven when John Cady got back from Korea, and less than two years later he'd fallen of a cooling tower at the refinery and broken his neck, drunk before noon. I called him dad but as I grew older several things made it pretty obvious he was not my father -- our looks, the timeline of my conception. He was always kind to me, though we didn't know each other long. Around a year after we buried him Mary-Anne dropped off a bridge. She preferred me to call her Mary-Anne instead of Mom, which she claimed aged a woman ten years. They said she jumped, but I don't believe the people she was with are to be trusted. Then the group home and the Beidles and the cotton fields.

And now I was dying and everything that had ever happened to me was starting to seem hazily important.

I'd say roughly about a third of the way into Galveston, the plot takes a surprising left turn. Though it comes somewhat early, I'm still somewhat loathe to spoil it here. Suffice it to say, it opens things up considerably, in terms of how we think about certain characters going forward, and how Pizzolatto then manages the suspense, and increases it, in this not terribly plot-heavy book (though the element of suspense, of various kinds, is inherent in the novel's very premise). It also heightens the dread, and the doom, which, given the turn in question...well, never mind. But it works a treat, as they say.

One of Pizzolatto's great gifts as a prose writer is his ability to sketch out an environment, and side characters, with such breezy authenticity that, in all honesty, highlights the hopelessness of that Warren Oates gambit. Speaking of which, Tray, the character with whom Roy has the Oates conversation, is a great piece of added menace, and that section of the book at the Texas motel is a wonderful bit of atmosphere. Pizzolatto is also able to write about poor white Texans without condescending to them, or portraying them as unlikable unless, of course, they happen to be unlikable. This is a distinction not many are able to draw. There are a variety of, for lack of a better term, "civilians" that Roy, Rocky, and Tiffany encounter in their travels, and Pizzolatto seems to understand intuitively how they talk, and how the good ones differ from the bad ones, and what is quickly, noticeably specific about each. Pizzolatto isn't one of the all-time great crime writers by any stretch of the imagination, but that sort of gift is not one to be dismissed. In any genre, but, you might could argue, in this genre especially.

Eventually, Galveston reaches a conclusion that will satisfy some but not others, but which is, fittingly, in tone and incident somewhere between the plotless endings to the stories (the three I've read, anyway; not much of a sampling) in Between Here and the Yellow Sea and the kind of stylized mayhem of True Detective. I liked it. I like his TV show, too, even though most people seem to have decided he's doing the wrong thing. If, however, as a result of this backlash, True Detective gets buried, I'll be okay with it (certainly more okay than Pizzolatto would be), because I assume that would lead him back to writing novels. I'd like to read his next one.