Matthew M. Bartlett is a horror writer I’ve been curious
about for a while, ever since Nathan Ballingrud, author of the terrific
collection North American Lake Monsters, started talking up Bartlett’s Gateways
to Abomination on Facebook. I finally satisfied that curiosity with Dead
Air, a collection of Bartlett’s early stories about radio station WXXT,
out of Leeds, MA. Dead Air is mostly comprised of on-air dispatches from WXXT,
often seemingly personal, and infernal, yet still tied to WXXT, which is,
ostensibly, a rock station. Most stories (and they’re very short, three pages
being the norm) have a tone of the absolutely horrific and bizarre, but also of
the comic. One story, called “The Broadcasts. Transmission 99” ends like this:
I woke to a sunny
morning and all was well. Remembering my fear and my dreams, I searched my
whole house and nothing was disturbed. My doors were tightly locked, even the
bulkhead. Satisfied, I grabbed a New
Yorker and headed to the smallest room in the house for my morning ritual.
I glanced at the mirror and I screamed.
You’re listening to
WXXT, radio for the foul, the fucked, and the furious. Keep it to 87.1 on your
radio dial. It’s 1:22 a.m. and morning is very far off. Stay tuned – up next is
a Genesis rock block…with a little solo Phil Collins thrown in for variety.
WXXT. Let us in.
Running through Dead Air is a macabre sort-of
history of WXXT, some peeks behind the scenes, but mostly it’s brief shots of
deadpan ghastliness. Bartlett has written extensively about WXXT, and in an
author’s note at the end of Dead Air Bartlett reveals that he
doesn’t really consider this book to be canon. The book is for those curious to
see how this corner of horror got started. Anyway, it’s where I started, and I’m
not sorry. I plan on continuing. I also wonder if Bartlett, who started writing
these stories and posting them online in the early-to-mid 2000s, has a case
against the Welcome to Night Vale people.
* * * *
Peter Prince’s short novel Play Things from 1972 is
an unlikely choice to be reprinted in America, being, as it is, not only about
120 pages long, but also about an unnamed protagonist whose job is to monitor a
local playground, but this is why we love Valancourt Books. Considered
something of a loser by just about everybody, including his wife, this protagonist
– referred to only as the Playleader – at first has to fend off the older who
children who would, and do, vandalize and destroy playground equipment, but
eventually finds relatively, he hopes, harmless yet softly extra-legal means of
protecting the park and the young children who use it. This brings him into
contact with some unsavory people, but then again, hints linger that the
Playleader is somewhat unsavory himself, and that the novel itself is, as well.
It includes, for example, a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a pedophile
(not the Playleader), which could be excused by or chalked up to any number of
factors, such as the time period, or finding something inherently pitiful, or
pathetic, about such a man. I don’t know. Didn’t sit quite right with me,
though. A note similar to the one I believe Prince was going for with this
subplot could have been struck without coming off as glib regarding the man’s
crimes, which Play Things does. Otherwise, Prince’s novel, which won the
Somerset Maugham Award in 1973, is an effective, modest black comedy, one with
a subtle heart.
* * * *
I recently finished reading You’re All Alone, Fritz
Leiber’s short novel from 1950 about a Chicago man who works in an employment
office suddenly learning that the world is a giant machine, and everyone in it
is essentially a robot, or a puppet, or dead. In any event, we’re all just
going through the motions that have already been plotted out for us, and if one
of us “wakes up,” as Carr MacKay does with the help of Jane Gregg, then we can
move around unseen outside of the preordained actions of those around us. If we’re
out of it, and someone still in the machine is supposed to hug us, they’re
going to hug empty air.
There’s a lot of good, creepy imagery in this vein, but I
think Leiber made a mistake by grafting a sort of vaguely noir-ish plot to it.
Jane is being chased by a trio of people who’ve always “awakened” and their
designs on her are pretty awful, but I found all this to be a distraction from
what Leiber could have been doing with is idea. Then again, there is something
bracingly nihilistic about his idea that most people who make the discovery
that the awake characters here do, that the world is a machine and its
inhabitants blind to anything outside of their pattern, would use this knowledge
to seek out grotesque kicks wherever they could be found. Maybe if he could
have made You’re All Alone longer, something he may have been practically
unable to do given the market at the time, he could have really had something.
* *
* *
I really like the song “She’s Long Gone” by The Black Keys.
Also I heard “I’ve Just Seen a Face” by The Beatles for the
first time in I don’t know how long, and it occurred to me that Paul Simon may
have spent a decent chunk of his career chasing that song.
* * * *
Earlier this year I finally read Madame Bovary (pretty
good!), and it inspired in me such an unquenchable passion for to works of
Gustave Flaubert that several months later I’ve now read a second one by him. Three
Tales is the last book to be published in Flaubert’s lifetime, and, I’ve
gathered, was one of the few out-and-out commercial and critical successes of
his career. Each story – “A Simple Heart,” “The Legend of Saint Julian
Hospitator,” and “Herodias” – is essentially Christian in its concerns, though
whatever grace can be found within them is of a distinctly jaundiced variety. “A
Simple Heart” is about serving-woman who lives almost her entire life at the
service of a widow and her two children. The servant, Felicite, once loved and
nearly married a young man, but when that didn’t happen no other love came her
way, save for the family she served, God, and, later, a parrot she inherits as
a pet. There is something so heartbreakingly proto-Southern Gothic about “A
Simple Heart” that I’m sure Flannery O’Conner must have loved it.
“The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” begins as horror and
ends in sainthood. It was interesting to see that the way a man treats animals
has pretty much always been seen by society indicator of both their moral
strength and their mental health, never mind how that particular society treats
animals in general. The early stages of this story contain several depictions
of Julian’s cruelty to animals (one of which in particular will probably always
haunt me), and it’s understood that this means his soul is in danger. That in
thirty pages Flaubert can credibly bring him to sainthood is saying something,
although the moment of that sainthood is described in such a bizarre way that I’m
still not sure how to take it. I bet Flannery O’Conner didn’t mind this one,
either.
“Herodias,” a re-telling of the story of Salome and John the
Baptist, affected me less strongly, though I liked how a big chunk of the
second half takes place at a party, or I guess a banquet, with a lot of
characters talking back and forth to each other, from which Salome eventually emerges,
and et cetera. And the last line is great, too.
* *
* *
I still can’t watch anything good. Or at least, I’ve been
too exhausted this weekend to watch anything good. I can read whatever, but I
only want to watch mindless stuff. You may take the preceding as you will when
I now add that this led me to American Vandal, a new comedy on
Netflix that I was hearing was just the best, you guys. It’s what they call a “funny
fake documentary” (I think that’s the term) in the now-popular “true crime”
style. Set at a California high school, the mystery revolves around who
spray-painted a bunch of dicks on a bunch of teachers’ cars. One stoner dropout
guy has already been all but convicted, but the student filmmakers behind the
documentary we’re watching have their doubts. And so on, ad infinitum. There
are some decent jokes here and there, and Jimmy Tatro gives a really, really
good and funny performance as the accused kid. But American Vandal is
essentially opportunistic bullshit, hitching its star to true crime by
pretending to have anything to “say” about it. Not everybody is as bad as they
seem! But I swear, when this thing actually starts to get serious about halfway
through, I thought “What kind of balls…” The mystery is exasperating and
repetitive, I can’t believe anyone watching is or was invested enough in
finding out who painted dicks on cars to justify the way they keep spinning it
out, and the filmmakers, the actual ones, not the fictional ones, show no
interest in sticking to the cinematic (ha ha just kidding) constraints that
they’ve set up for themselves, making the whole enterprise give off an even
greater stink of phoniness.
* * * *
At age 84, Ernest J. Gaines, author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane
Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying, has published his tenth book, a short
novel called The Tragedy of Brady Sims. Set in Louisiana sometime in the
1960s, it opens with a black man, the title character, shooting his son in the
courtroom where that young man had just been sentenced to death. Sims then
tells the two deputies present to tell the sheriff to give him two hours. Then
he leaves. Much of the rest of The
Tragedy of Brady Sims is given over to other characters talking about
Sims, his past, what kind of man he is, and how it all came to this. A big part
takes place in a barbershop, where the novel’s main narrator (there are two
first person threads, though one is extremely brief), a black reporter, has
gone to find material for a human interest story he’s been ordered to write. This
is all on the day of the shooting, and in the barbershop is a guy who isn’t
local. I liked this section a lot, in part because as the story of Brady Sims
is being told by various characters in the barbershop (though one character
dominates the telling), this out-of-towner becomes increasingly exasperated by
how many irrelevant detours the storytellers take.
Anyway, The Tragedy of Brady Sims is an interesting
book, a good one, that approaches its questions with the same unwillingness to
create easy demons (and the same unwillingness to make excuses for evil) as
Gaines’s earlier A Gathering of Old Men.
* * * *
I watched a couple of movies. I don’t care to spend much
time on either of them, and in one case I don’t even like admitting I watched
it. But 30 Years of Garbage: The Garbage Pail Kids Today is another
entry in the “if I liked it when I was a kid it must have immense historical
importance” documentary subgenre. There’s some good stuff early on about the
history of Topps, and the artists who created Garbage Pail Kids, and some good
stuff about the technical aspects of it all. But when it tries to go deeper, it
slips and goes barreling headlong down a flight of stairs. Even Art Spiegelman
can only offer up boilerplate “question authority” shit.
I also watched The Little Hours, an adaptation of The Decameron
by the guy who made Joshy. Then again, I’ve never read The
Decameron so maybe I should watch my mouth. Still, I didn’t much like The
Little Hours. It’s never that funny, though it thinks it’s a hoot, cast
to the gills with comedy stars both hip (Aubrey Plaza, Nick Offerman) and
venerated (John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon), all of who do perfectly decent work
in a film that wants to be Your Highness up until the point
where it wants to actually be The Decameron.
Anyway, it’s over, and I’m choosing to move on with my life.
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