Shit in Your Hammock

[Beware of massive spoilers for Fierce People, like you give a shit anyway]

I think it's safe to say that as an actor, at least among Serious Film Types, Griffin Dunne is somewhat beloved. Or at any rate very much liked. This is all on a sort of cult level, but let's face it, it almost always is. On the basis of just two films, both of which exist in universal terms on that same cult level, those films being John Landis's An American Werewolf in London and Martin Scorsese's After Hours, Dunne, as an actor, has been able to cement his place. And good on him, because they're both wonderful performances. Dunne's delivery of the line "David! You're hurting my feelings!" in An American Werewolf in London was one of my favorite bits from that film when I was a kid, and remains so to this day. It's the way his character Jack (a rotting corpse by this point in the film) holds onto his naked but not, in this case, especially ostentatious sarcasm even in the midst of his state of undead horror that naturally appealed to my younger self, and I'd wager most people's younger selves, but even getting over that part it's just funny, it's a funny line and Dunne gives it the funniest reading possible. This all somehow helps sell the pity we must feel for Jack, and the other werewolf victims, which in turn allows the film to walk the very thin tightrope it ultimately succeeds in walking. And I've barely even mentioned After Hours, a great, 90 minute surreal Martin Scorsese comedy that Dunne carries on his shoulders. This is almost undefinable, but in that film the idea is for Dunne to play an everyman, but only sort of, and Dunne is the essence of an everyman who is nevertheless naturally specific and peculiar and not actually an everyman even while he's being one.

So he's great! As an actor! As a director, well, who among us can say? Dunne has been a director only sporadically, and he came to it late, directing his first feature, Addicted to Love, a romantic comedy starring Meg Ryan and Matthew Broderick, in 1997. Since then he's directed four more features, as well as episodes of various TV shows, but I'd never seen any of it until yesterday when I watched, for I was called upon to do so, Fierce People, Dunne's comedy/drama/thriller(!?) from 2005. This is a film about which I can at least say this: it would be impossible to watch the first fifteen minutes of Fierce People and then correctly predict what happens in the last fifteen. Or maybe even the first twenty-five minutes and the last twenty-five. It's a fairly bonkers piece of work, a film that to some degree you'd have to acknowledge as ambitious, but, as is often the case, with ambition comes misguidedness, tone deafness, ridiculousness. You have to know what you're doing, in other words, though I suppose a certain heedlessness is desirable, too. I don't know. I don't even known if what we're dealing with in Fierce People is negligent heedlessness or outright stupidity.

Whatever the case may be, I suspect that Dirk Wittenborn is largely to blame. The temptation is to say "mostly to blame," but since I have not read Wittenborn's original novel Fierce People, on which the film is based (a film for which Wittenborn himself did in fact write the screenplay, as well as serve as a producer), and since slavishly faithful to that novel and script though he may or may not have been, Griffin Dunne is still the guy at the wheel here, and it's supposed to be up to him how much of that source material is going to be chucked overboard. But all of this is verging on speculation on my part, so it's best to to drop that and explain what the film Fierce People is about. It's about this young guy played by Anton Yelchin named Finn Earl who...wait a second, come back. Named Finn Earl whose mother Liz (Diane Lane) is a booze-and-drug-addicted masseuse. His father is a famous anthropologist named Fox Blanchard who...hold on a minute, would you? Named Fox Blanchard, who we see via "archival footage" played by Dirk Wittenborn himself. Blanchard made a famous documentary about an especially fierce (have you clued into anything significant yet?) native tribe of South America; Finn has long been fascinated by this film, and his father, whom he's never met. One summer, all the ducks have lined up and it looks like Finn is going to get to travel to South America and visit his dad when he gets busted attempting to procure drugs for his mom. This incident urges Liz to clean up her act, and legally and financially the two of them are rescued by a very wealthy benefactor, one of Liz's clients, named Ogden Osbourne...I wish you'd at least hear me out.

Osbourne (Donald Sutherland) lives on a vast expanse of land, in a massive estate, on the grounds of all of which live many people, family and employees and the families of employees, and he offers one of the homes to Liz and Finn. Liz accepts, the idea being that she's going to be working for him as his personal and exclusive masseuse. Finn, meanwhile, is free to essentially gallivant about in various teenager ways, meeting along the way such eccentric characters as Jilly (Paz de la Huerta), his and Liz's teenage maid; Maya Langley (Kristen Stewart) and her brother Bryce (Chris Evans), two of Osbourne's grandchildren; and Whitney (Jeff Westmoreland), a mentally handicapped man who exists in the film to be somehow both enigmatic and completely ignored, to provide the solution to the film's big mystery in the only way a mentally handicapped person in a film can do such a thing, which is to say "poignantly," and to be referred to by Finn, our hero, as a "retard," though the effect this has on the story as a whole was perhaps unintended by the filmmakers. Then again, Finn is a genuine little shit to his mom regarding her attempts to get sober (not, please note, regarding her being a cokehead at the time when she was a cokehead), and we're evidently meant to read this as an example of a refreshingly idiosyncratic and loving mother-son relationship, so who the hell knows what Dunne and Wittenborn thought they were up to?

Finn falls in love with Maya and becomes good pals with Bryce. And this kid, this Bryce, he's a real wild card: born rich but disdainful of the wealthy hypocrites who surround him, he's capable of tearing a person to shreds with his words, you see, but he's usually doing that to rich assholes so we admire him. These relationships, as well as Liz's romance with a local doctor (Christopher Shyer) known to the Osbourne family and how this is viewed by Osbourne himself, form the crux of the film's loose plot. The idea is really to, well, listen, I'm just going to say it straight, to tear the lid off the lives of the super rich in America and to contrast them with crazy South American natives -- please notice how intricately the theme of "tribes" and "tribalism" is woven throughout Fierce People by having the word "tribe" repeated somewhere in the neighborhood of every sixth word -- so that we might finally ask the question who, really, are the "crazy natives?" Hence that title, Crazy Natives.

As a film, as, you know, cinema, Fierce People is undistinguished apart from the fact that it feels slightly out of time, though I guess it wasn't. I looked up what other films came out in 2005, to see if they all seemed like they should have come out in 1997, and in fact many did. White Noise and Memoirs of a Geisha and so forth. There was also Munich, which is a film that kind of acts as part of the transition to 2007, which historically now seems like a big deal, but anyhow the point is, in Hollywood the impulse was to cling to something very basic, visually. Fierce People belongs to "The Cinema of Cars Pulling Up in Front of Houses," preferably doing so just as the opening credits end. Which means that the structure of the film's first half or so is neatly mapped out: Something Has Happened, We Must Leave; Here is a Place We Can Go; Here We Are: Oh Boy This is a Weird Place. It's all very easy. You'd have to imagine that for Dirk Wittenborn there's an autobiographical element, as he himself didn't come from money but has, from what I've gathered, spent his life around it. On the website for his most recent book, called The Social Climber's Bible, written with Johnson & Johnson heiress Jazz Johnson, and by the way is anybody else getting tired yet?, Wittenborn describes himself as an outsider (with Johnson being the insider) in relation to the world of the super-rich. That he was able to channel this sense of himself into a pure Hollywood formula is, I don't know what, but it's something, of that I'm almost sure.

Dunne, on the other hand, grew up an insider. His father was Dominick Dunne, best-selling author (and frequent chronicler of high society murder cases), he's the nephew of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, and while there was obviously a more literary bent to the high-end life in which he was raised, it was nevertheless relatively high-end. From that perspective, Fierce People comes off as a piece of self-examination and attempt to tear down from the inside. And while I don't believe that having money, even being born into money, which is the secular world's version of Original Sin (or rather, it's one version out of about seven), is a bad thing, I think that as long as we all agree that examining one's life is a good idea, we can also agree that examining one's moneyed life is maybe an extra good idea. So okay. Now what? A Car Pulls Up in Front of a House...

And then after that, eventually, Fierce People goes totally bugshit. Spoiling the plot of Fierce People wouldn't bother me too terribly much -- my only reservation is how much detail do I want to go into. In other words, how much of my own time do I want to spend on this? I guess I'll cut to the chase and say that after a while the fun times Finn has been smugly enjoying begin to sour, and somebody beats him up and rapes him. Who I ask you is the real fierce people and whatnot. Now it's a mystery thriller, this film, although figuring out who did this is probably not so tough. Because the film keeps the identity from the viewer, you're probably not going to think "I bet it's the guy everybody already hates!" And it isn't. In fact I'll tell you who it is, it's Bryce, the Chris Evans guy, the guy who was maybe a little too wild. His reasons for raping Finn are somewhat less clear than his reasons for murdering Osbourne -- by the way, he murders Osbourne -- but we have to get across to the viewer that frankly when you think about it? These super rich people? They're pretty twisted. And also? The South American natives? Even though we judge them? And think that we're better than them? We're really not. And rich people are probably the least better than them than anybody. If you don't believe me, what about that one guy who raped that other guy in Fierce People.

Dunne's work as a director of suspense sequences and fight scenes is largely of the template variety. If Fierce People becomes weird, that's only because the story is uncontrolled loony toons -- as a film it remains leaden. Which helps to make it weirder, I guess, but not in any way that's interesting. The film goes where it goes because I think Wittenborn didn't believe readers or film audiences would hang around to watch his weak-ass anthropology pun unless things turned violent at some point. But in the end we know who are the real fierce peoples of the world, and everything is good again.
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This post has been part of The White Elephant Blogathon hosted this year by Philip Tatler at his blog Diary of a Country Pickpocket.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 29: An Exquisitely Beautiful Skeleton

by Philip Tatler IV

Thinking it would boost her profile, Karen Blixen wrote under the male pseudonym “Isak Dinesen” for most of her career. Blixen/Dinesen is, of course, known best for her novel Out of Africa and her short story “Babette’s Feast,” both of which were adapted into acclaimed films (she also wrote “The Immortal Story,” which was adapted by Blixen uber-fan Orson Welles and unfortunately remains unavailable on DVD).

From the little bit of digging I did for this piece, Blixen sounds like a fascinating woman. She led a hardscrabble, lion-killing life in Kenya before returning to her native Denmark, where she started her official writing career at the age of 39, when she published Seven Gothic Tales.

What drew me to Dinesen’s Tales was its recent publication over at The Folio Society. (I imagine Bill has a healthy amount of bibliophiles that visit this blog so let me heartily recommend you folks head over to the Folio Society’s site and empty what’s left of your coffers; it’ll be worth the bankruptcy proceedings that follow, I promise!) I was also intrigued when, upon researching her, I discovered that both she and her father had contracted syphilis. He was diagnosed with it when Dinesen was 10 and promptly killed himself. She was 25 and living in Africa and suspected her husband’s infidelity as the root cause. I bring this up not for shock value, but because I think it has some bearing on the Dinesen story I chose for today's piece. Back to that in a second.

First, there's the term "Gothic" -- defining which is a bit of a sticky wicket; the term has become warped beyond recognition. For most people, "Gothic" has become truncated to "goth" and is used solely to describe those unfortunate teenagers with black lipstick and no curfews that haunt the malls looking for fellow Type O Negative fans. I'll revert to the loose description employed by H.P. Lovecraft in his Supernatural Horror in Literature:

...the infinite array of stage properties which include strange lights, damp trap-doors, extinguished lamps, mouldy hidden manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking arras, and the like. All of this paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness, yet sometimes with tremendous effect, throughout the history of the Gothic novel...

That's not really even a proper definition of "Gothic" so much as a cataloging of the elements which inform the style. However, Lovecraft's elements stack up nicely enough to convey what I think most readers of this blog think of when they hear the word. In essence, Gothic stories are fairy tales for adults, the logic of the fairy tales warping with age and taking on the more sinister stains of the mature world.

The story I chose was "The Monkey" and it certainly has some of the “stage properties” Lovecraft mentions. “Monkey” is, for me, another evocative word. Like extraterrestrials, I find primates upsetting on a soul-deep level. It’s their “same-but-other”-ness that gives me a chronic case of the willies. Humanoid in shape, beastly in manner, too smart for their own good. I figured a Gothic tale called “The Monkey” would do the trick on a cold autumn night.

In a few of the Lutheran countries of northern Europe,” the story begins, “there are still in existence places which make use of the name convent, and are governed by a prioress or chanoiness, although they are of no religious nature.

The setting is remote, off-kilter: a nunnery for women who aren’t religious and who are, in fact, desperate to be married off to whomever will take them. The convent is presided over by an imposing Prioress who keeps a pet monkey from Zanzibar, gifted to her by a suitor. The women joke that the creature is the Prioress’s Geheimrat or “secret counselor.”

…it would be found … in the library, pulling out brittle folios a hundred years old, and scattering over the black-and-white marble floor browned leaves dealing with strategy, princely marriage contracts, and witches’ trials.

The monkey has interesting, and significant, choices in reading material. It also has, Dinesen reminds us several times, glittering eyes, which made me wonder if she hadn’t read Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” at some point before writing this.

The story begins with a visit to the convent from the Prioress’s nephew, Boris Boris has recently become embroiled in a career-damaging controversy “(connected) somehow with those sacred shores of ancient Greece they had till now held in high esteem”, which is Dinesen’s polite way of telling us that Boris is either a homosexual or a pedophile. Either way, he’s not exactly pursuing interests that are encouraged in nineteenth century Europe, especially within the military. This kerfuffle has driven him to the arms of his aunt.

Initially, Boris is the soft center of the tale and presumably our surrogate. Boris is a young man “under some great agitation of mind” and therefore immediately sympathetic. The convent gives him “an unsure welcome, as if he might have been … a young priest of black magic, still within hope of conversion.” His last hope to save face is to marry a woman and, since his aunt’s convent is chockablock with eligible virgins of various ages, he’s come to the right place.

However, his aunt’s solution to the quandary is to do a bit of outsourcing; she suggests he marry Athena, his childhood playmate and the daughter of a local Count. The Count’s star has fallen a bit; his fortune has been sliding, “House of Usher”-style, into decadence for years, as it’s been tied up in a legal battle the Count expects to die fighting. “Athena,” the Prioress points out, “has never had an offer of marriage in her life.” We learn later that Athena has been virtually the Count’s only companion and he has, in turn, raised her as something like a son. Her manliness is emphasized in Dinesen’s description (“a pair of shoulders which could lift and carry a sack of wheat”) so, if Boris’s predilections lie that way, it’s more than implied that Athena’s a viable close second.

“If Athena will not have you, my little Boris,” his aunt says, “I will.” The statement is equally playful and presciently menacing. Boris is too desperate (and weak of character) to protest and he’s immediately off to the Count’s to plead his case.

Throughout “The Monkey”, Dinesen effortlessly weaves layers of biblical and Classical allusion, while also drawing heavily on folk myths of the region, to create an atmosphere thick with transcendent tradition. Two asides – before we even dig into the paranormal meat of the plot – keep the Gothic torch burning. As Boris rides to the Count’s castle, he is suddenly struck by the enchanting landscape:

…[It] seemed cool, all blue and pale gold. Boris was able now to believe what the old gardener at the convent had told him when he was a child: that he had once seen, about this time of the year and the day, a herd of unicorns come out of the woods to graze upon the sunny slopes… The air smelled of fir leaves and toadstools, and was so fresh that it made him yawn.

During the journey, Boris has another recollection of a time when he and a friend were travelling this same countryside on a three week holiday:

One night they had come, very tired, to a farmhouse in a grass field, and had been given a large bed in a room that had in it a grandfather’s clock and a dim looking-glass. Just as the clock was striking twelve, three quite young girls appeared on the threshold in their shifts, each with a lighted candle in her hand, but the night was so clear that the little flames looked only like little drops of the moon. They clearly did not know that two wayfaring young men had been taken in… and the guests watched them in deep silence from behind the hangings of the big bed… one by one they dropped their slight garments on the floor and quite naked that walked up to the mirror and looked into it… absorbed in the picture. Then they blew out their candles, and in the same solemn silence they walked backward to the door… and disappeared… The two boys remembered that this was Walpurgis Night, and decided that what they had witnessed was some witchcraft by which these girls had hoped to catch a glimpse of their future husbands.

Not for nothing does Boris recall this instant. To him marriage – and women – are an eerie, mystifying, erotic mess that he’d probably rather view from “behind the hangings of the big bed.”

This is the whimsical stuff of fairy tales – certainly an important element in horror, Gothic and otherwise. The sinister side of the fairy tale coin – the witches who eat children, the trolls under bridges, wolves who stalk grandmothers – enters the story soon enough. Pulling up to Hopballehus – the Count’s estate – Boris is greeted by his potential father-in-law:

...the old Count appeared at the top step, standing like Samson when in wrath he broke down the temple of the Philistines… his mighty head surrounded by a mane of wild gray hair, like a poet’s or a lion’s… scrutinizing his visitor, like an old man gorilla outside his lair, ready for the attack… imposing upon (Boris) a presence such as the Lord himself might have shown had he descended, for once, the ladder of Jacob.

Obviously, the Count isn’t a man to be trifled with. Dinesen has constructed the story in such a way as to make us immediately defensive of young, sensitive Boris in the face of this imposing man. However, the tone shifts and the Count is immediately warm toward Boris. He enthuses over his recent legal victories, which have effectively restored the Count’s fortune and good name. He doesn’t hesitate to offer up the hand of his virtuous, strong-willed daughter (pending, of course, Athena’s acceptance of the arrangement). Everything becomes very “Happily Ever After” very quickly.

Except, there’s about two thirds of the story to go and Dinesen has very carefully left crooked signposts along the way that suggest we’re not in a safe world. There’s the unicorn, the witches, the bizarre aunt-nephew relationship, the oddly close (again, echoes of Usher) father-daughter relationship, and that damn monkey, who disappears after he’s introduced, only to be spotted by Boris on his way back from receiving the Count’s good news. This brief sighting signifies a change in the story:

And suddenly it came upon (Boris) that somewhere something was not right, was quite wrong and out of order. Strange powers were out tonight. The feeling was so strong and distinct that it was as if an ice-cold hand passed for a moment over his scalp. His hair rose a little upon his head. For a few minutes he was really and genuinely afraid, struck by an extraordinary terror. In this strange turbulence of the night, and the wild life of dead things all around him, he felt himself… terribly and absurdly small, exposed and unsafe.

All of that business above about defining “Gothic” wasn't to pad out my word count or make this sound like a grade school book report. This book comes wrapped in a label that suggests horror, hence my choosing it. However, for a while “The Monkey” seemed like it was just headed toward territory that was sort of Bronte-lite – yearning young lovers in a haunted landscape. Nothing wrong with that but not particularly horrifying either. About twenty pages in to the story, I started wondering if I should put it down and make another choice. But there was still that titular beast to contend with.

“The Monkey” certainly takes a turn for the Gothic – and extremely unnerving – in its last few pages. I won’t spoil it except to say that rape, attempted murder, and shape-shifting pay rather unexpected visits to the convent. And Boris becomes less and less sympathetic. Okay, I’ll spoil it a little, because this passage is just too wonderfully bizarre not to share:

“Boris, in the meantime, had been looking at Athena, and had let a fantasy take hold of his mind. He thought that she must have a lovely, an exquisitely beautiful, skeleton. She would lie in the ground … a work of art in ivory, and in a hundred years might be dug up and turn the heads of old archeologists… Less frivolous than the traditional old libertine who in his thoughts undresses the women with whom he sups Boris liberated the maiden of her strong and fresh flesh together with her clothes, and imagined that he might be very happy with her, that he might even fall in love with her, could he have her in her beautiful bones alone… Many human relations, he thought, would be infinitely easier if they could be carried out in bones only.”

Suffice to say, in “The Monkey” Dinesen works out what I imagine must have been some serious trust issues regarding men and sex. Having a syphilitic father and subsequently being infected with the disease via an unfaithful spouse has to take its toll. Which is not to reduce this beautifully written (and deeply disturbing) story to mere Freudian analysis; there was enough capital-W Weird going on here to sustain the mood well after I’d finished reading it (in fact, in light of the startling revelation at the climax, “The Monkey” certainly warrants a reread). I look forward to reading the other six of Dinesen’s Tales.
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Philip Tatler IV writes occasionally for GreenCine and his blog, Diary of a Country Pickpocket. His as-yet unproduced screenplay, Eyepole, won Best Screenplay in the 2010 Knoxville Horror Film Festival and he plans on resting on this laurel for the rest of his days.

The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 16: A Terrible Good

by Philip Tatler IV

It is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE hell unless it is nipped in the bud. – C.S. Lewis

I used my participation in The Face You Slash this year as an excuse to finally delve into the work of Charles Williams. These days, Williams is best known – if he is known at all – as a contemporary of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Even the bio on the back of his book can’t get through one sentence without mentioning these two fantasists.

Williams was a member of the Inklings, an unofficial Oxford literary group where Tolkien et al. met regularly for drinks, theological debates, and discussions of their beloved fantasy and fairy tale literature. According to the Inklings legend, it’s also where Lewis and Tolkien test-marketed the Narnia and Middle Earth material that would sell millions and make them both household names. (See? I can’t even write about Williams without derailing into Tolkien/Lewis talk.)

Obviously, no one’s making big-budget Happy Meal movies out of Williams’ work. However, during his lifetime, Williams was read widely enough to attract the attention – and accolades – of literary luminaries like W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot. It was Eliot’s description of Williams’ novels as “supernatural thrillers” that made me consider Williams for this project at all. In the end, I chose to read Descent Into Hell (1937) – Williams’ sixth (and penultimate) novel – because the publisher’s blurb called it “arguably his best novel.”

Based on this book alone, Eliot’s description is technically on target but a little misleading. The supernatural is present every page and Williams’ aim is certainly to create an atmosphere of dread, which is an important ingredient for a thriller. But Williams’ sensibilities are informed very much by his theology and a more accurate genre descriptor for Descent Into Hell is “theological horror” (a phrase I’m not by any means coining; in fact, Googling it turns up several Charles Williams-related links).

I guess what I’m getting at is that – for Williams, at least – the intersection of horror and theology is not chockablock with thrills; it’s a pit of despair. In many ways – good and bad – Descent Into Hell is an oppressive, depressing read. It begins and ends with the most horrifying of all concepts (especially to someone steeped in Williams’ Christian beliefs): hell.

I’m not opposed to theology playing a role in horror. M. R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood – just to name a few of my favorite horror writers – all came from extremely religious backgrounds and a lot of their works liberally incorporated their beliefs and traditions. I’m all for horror mitigating serious philosophical and theological questions. However, after wading my way through Descent Into Hell, I realize I’m not for the opposite.

Descent Into Hell takes place in a suburb of London called Battle Hill. Williams sets the action contemporaneously, but he’s quick to imply that Battle Hill doesn’t necessarily obey the laws of time as we know them. Battle Hill is posited as a sort of crux between the past, the present, and -- man’s ultimate destiny -- the grave.

A dreamer might have had nightmares of a magnetic attraction habitually there deflecting the life of man into death, Williams writes. …The amphibia of the past dwelt about, and sometime crawled out on, the slope of this world.

The plot is filament-thin: members of the town’s intelligentsia are planning on producing a play by Peter Stanhope, a world-renowned poet and playwright and scion of one of Battle Hill’s oldest families. This framing device allows Williams to focus on a few key members of the production over an indeterminate period of time as they wrestle with toxic levels of self-centeredness. Right off the bat, Williams equates the horrors of hell with a sort of terminal self-involvement. In his estimation, hell isn’t other people, it’s yourself.

The book opens as the creative community discuss their approach to the play, a conversation that quickly spins off into what feels like a deleted scene from Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow. Suddenly, everyone is talking about the Bigger Questions raised by the work, an eye-rolling bit that allows Williams to trot out his theses for Descent Into Hell. “You mustn’t play down to your audience, but you mustn’t play away from them either,” says the ball-busting woman in charge of production. “…If things are terrifying, can they be good?” one of the actresses asks the playwright (who, ultimately and awkwardly, will be a kind of stand-in for Williams and his ideas).

Needless to say, Descent Into Hell isn’t exactly off to the races when in opens. But then it veers off in a fascinating direction for the next three chapters or so.

Following the meeting, the book’s POV drifts over to Pauline, an overly-empathetic shy girl a bit obsessed with the playwright. As she walks home, she’s overcome with anxiety, increasingly worried that she’ll encounter her doppelganger:

She was trying not to look ahead for fear she saw it, and also to look ahead for fear she was yielding to fear. She walked down the road quickly and firmly, remembering the many thousand times it had not come. But the visitation was increasing - growing nearer and clearer and more frequent.

Apparently, encounters with this spectral twin have been increasing since she relocated to Battle Hill to take care of her dying grandmother (who, “ignoring the possible needs of the young, went on living”).

Williams’ writes Pauline’s walk home as a nightmarish microcosm; for Pauline, walking those few blocks at dusk is a terrifying journey. Williams does a brilliant job creating Battle Hill’s twilight atmosphere and sets the stage for the next few vignettes. It’s a numinous moment and the most terrifying rendering of the idea of the doppelganger I’ve read.

Next, Williams briefly introduces us to Battle Hill’s history of death and despair and, specifically, focuses on the suicide of an unskilled worker that occurred a few decades before. It’s here that Williams delves into the aforementioned notion of “the amphibia of the past” (a phrase I love) – the ghostly interaction between the living and the dead inhabitants of Battle Hill.

The suicide sequence is perfectly rendered – the best part of the book and reason enough to seek it out. In ten searing pages, Williams is able to drag us through the annihilated soul of someone who commits suicide, without passing judgment over the proceedings. The poor worker’s motives are laid out in a devastating passage:

A certain unskilled assistant had been carelessly taken on; he was hungry, he was ill, he was clumsy and slow. His name no one troubled to know. He shambled among the rest, their humorous butt. He was used to that; all his life he had been the butt of the world, generally of an unkind world. He had been repeatedly flung into the gutter by the turn of a hand in New York or Paris, and had been always trying to scramble out of it again. He had lost his early habit of complaining, and it only added to his passive wretchedness that his wife kept hers… since she usually kept her jobs, she could reasonably enjoy her one luxury of nagging her husband because he lost his. His life seemed to him an endless gutter down which ran an endless voice. The clerk of the works and his foreman agreed that he was no good.

What follows is truly chilling. The miserable man conspires to hang himself in the skeleton of one of the houses he had been working on:

…he did not change his purpose, nor did the universe invite him to change. It accepted the choice; no more preventing him than it prevents a child playing with fire or a fool destroying his love. It has not our kindness or our decency… All he knew of the comfort of the world meant only more pain.

Here’s where that theological horror is really driven home: the cold, cruel reality of a life without (Williams would argue) God’s – or man’s – love. Williams effortlessly sustains this mood through the next few moments in the book.

We meet an arrogant history professor who’s becoming more and more aware of his mortality:

He knew time was beginning to hurry; he could at moments almost hear it scamper.

His main concern with aging is that he’s no longer desirable to Adela, one of the local young ladies he’s becoming more and more obsessed with. His lust eventually creates a chilling tulpa of her. He becomes enthralled by this shadow version of his desires (Williams describes it as the “feminine offspring of his masculinity”) until the rest of the world begins to fade away and he withdraws from life completely. It’s a sickening relationship -- a weird sort of proto-pornography addiction – and another thing that Williams does well.

After these episodes, I was fully prepared to wrap myself up, bank the fire on the hearth, and settle in for a spine-tingling time. In fact, I thought the book was essentially going to be a series of loosely tied hellish vignettes, each expounding on his thesis.

However, Williams takes the book in a different (and decidedly wrong) direction. Soon, his characters begin speaking in philosophical abstracts. Then, for the most part, his characters stop talking all together and the book becomes a tortured, novel-length collation of Williams’ fevered philosophical musings. This direction doesn’t just break the excellent atmosphere of the earlier chapters, it obliterates whatever story Williams thinks he’s telling and makes the book dreadful in the least interesting way. The book doubles and triples down on the philosophical, semantical mumblings that serve as its opening scene.

The writing takes on the flavor of passages like this:

She had had the last act in mind as she turned, the act in which physical sensation, which is the play of love, and pardon, which is the speed of love, and action, which is the fact of love, and almighty love itself, all danced together: and now a shadow lay across it, the shadow of death and cruelty, the living death. The sun was still bright, colours vivid, laughter gay, and the shadow was the centre of them all. The shadow was a hollow, filled with another, quite different, fact. She felt the pang of the last hopelessness. If the living who walked in the gutters of mind or spirit, if the present misery of the world, were healed, or could be forgotten, still there sprang out of the hollow the knowledge of the dead whose unrecompensed lives had gone before that joy.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz- oh! Sorry! What? All I heard in there was “shadow of death” and something about gay colors. Maybe I’m just too thick-headed but paragraphs like the above – which comprise most of DESCENT – offer diminishing returns. Williams works extremely hard to create an amazing atmosphere of dread and then talks your ear off about it so that the feeling is no longer spiritual horror so much as being cornered by a crazy lady who wants to read you her poems.
Even the great elements of the book have to be revistied and picked apart until there’s nothing left. Of the history professor’s tulpa/lover, Williams writes:

He could exercise upon it all arts but one; he could not ever discover by it or practise towards it the freedom of love. A man cannot love himself, he can only idolize it…

And then goes on and on in a similar fashion for innumerable paragraphs. These are the type of passages it would be better to trust the reader to infer. Williams has essentially written a few great short moments of horror and then spent the rest of the novel analyzing them to death. If brevity is the soul of wit, then prolixity is the over-burdened brain of the philosopher.

By the time his characters choose either hell or heaven, it’s really hard to care. Salvation is posited as a sort of transcendent unselfishness and comes from an unlikely source. So unlikely, in fact, that I found it really jarring and hard to swallow. A character previously described as fatuous is suddenly dispensing unmotivated wise words of martyrdom and salvation. It doesn’t really add up (and, frankly, it’s not interesting anyway).

Williams attempts a Christ allegory but then mixes it with a discussion of Christ himself, so that the allegory and the thing being allegorized become a useless jumble. It would be like C.S. Lewis writing the slaying of Aslan so that Jesus shows up in the middle, nods his head, and says “hey, that’s very much like what happened to me.”

For a while, I thought maybe I was too dumb to really absorb all of Charles Williams’s philosophical ramblings (that might still be the case). But near the end, I realized that I’d signed on for what the back of the cover describes as a “(novel full of) suspense, mystery, and supernatural conflict” and that this wasn’t that at all.

I feel somewhat vindicated knowing I’m not alone. Williams fans both amateur and collegial (T.S. Eliot) regard Descent Into Hell as a slog and a serious departure from Williams’ less-serious earlier “detective fiction”. Which gives me hope that I might find something to like in War in Heaven or one of his other less ponderous works.

Williams is tackling a subject that has fascinated humankind for millennia even before Dante wrote his definitive take: what happens after we die, especially the villains who seem to escape justice while on earth? Many times, the book is reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’s GREAT DIVORCE – but Lewis’s work is a better, tighter portrait of capital-H Hell that manages to somehow be more obviously allegorical and less didactic at the same time. There’s a fair amount of the existential horror (a term I hate) of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman or Satre’s nastier work. But Williams has more of a black-and-white sense of morality which somehow makes Descent Into Hell much bleaker.

If only Williams didn’t keep getting in his own way.

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Philip Tatler IV writes occasionally for GreenCine and his blog, Diary of a Country Pickpocket. His as-yet unproduced screenplay, Eyepole, won Best Screenplay in the 2010 Knoxville Horror Film Festival and he plans on resting on this laurel for the rest of his days.