Very Quickly Now

(Vague but major spoilers for Let the Right One In are contained within the first two paragraphs of this post)

Over the weekend, I finally got around to watching Let the Right One In, the Swedish vampire film, directed by Tomas Alfredson, that last year was hailed as one of the best movies of the year, one of the best horror films ever made, and possibly the best vampire film, period, full stop, the end. It's all a little too fresh for me to make any similar proclamations, but it is a damn good film, easily the best horror film I've seen in at least a few years. Last year, I wrote about the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist on which the film is based (don't click on that link if you don't happen to feel like it, because the post is nothing to get too worked up about), and the short version is that I wasn't too keen on it. Apart from problems with either the prose itself, or the translation, it's clear to me now that the novel's greatest problem was massive bloat: it's about 500 pages long, and truly didn't need to be more than 300. A film that clocks in at just under two hours is going to have needed to hack away at a lot of that, to carve away anything that wasn't essential. Sometimes, what's inessential to a novel is part of what makes it great, but in the case of Lindqvist's novel that which was intended to add color simply drained all the life out of the story. .

Not so the film, which is wonderfully moody and sad, and which preserves everything strong about the novel. Part of the genius of Lindqvist's story (and he wrote the screenplay) is that in rooting for Oskar -- the young boy who is relentlessly bullied at school, and who leads a largely friendless existence until he meets a young girl name Eli, a girl who treats him well, who likes him, and for whom he feels immediately protective -- the audience is basically rooting against themselves. Everyone -- everyone who's not a bully, at least -- wants the weak and bullied to finally lash out against their tormenters, and when we see it happen in movies, when the asshole at the summer camp finally gets knocked into the lake, our impulse is to cheer. But in reality, when the tormented strike back, it's not always the bullies who get lashed. Let the Right One In, it seems to me, without ever mentioning it, is based on this idea. At the end, Oskar and Eli are on their own, traveling who knows where, to live their lives together. But we know what it takes for Eli to stay alive, and so does Oskar. Eli will take what she needs from whoever she can find, and if Oskar becomes like Hakan, Eli's previous keeper, he will provide for her at the expense of the first person he can lure.

Root for Oskar and Eli if you want to -- I did -- but you do so at your own peril.

* * * *

I just finished watching Erik Nelson's documentary about science fiction, horror, and etc. writer Harlan Ellison, Dreams with Sharp Teeth. It was more or less what I expected it to be, except maybe a little bit better. Clearly, Larson came to the project as an acolyte, and Ellison is his altar. The only words spoken against Ellison -- this man who has amassed such an array of enemies that at one point they formed a club -- in the entire film are those uttered gently and with love by his friends and admirers. Ellison himself has claimed that Larson should have interviewed some of the many people who hate him, but Larson's excuse is that Ellison is his own worst enemy. True enough, and up to a point, but believing that does not make the film more interesting.

But I grew up reading Ellison, and though I now find him to be an obnoxious, insufferable egomaniac, he can still be a darned entertaining one (his rant about writers getting paid is a highlight of the film). If you've read enough of Ellison over the years, especially his autobiographical essays (all of his essays are finally about him, no matter what his ostensible subject is), then you've heard all this before, so it probably helps if you have some distance from that part of your reading history, as I do, before checking this out. It's a hagiography, but I can't find it within myself to get too worked up about that. Ellison's an old guy now, and he's written some terrific fiction, and he got kicked around a lot when he was a kid. Let him have his movie.

* * * *

Speaking of documentaries with which Harlan Ellison has some involvement, when is this thing coming out?
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I can't pretend to be any kind of expert on the bizarre work and life (presumably also bizarre) of Brother Theodore, but what small taste I've had over the years -- on Letterman, in films, now in internet clips -- really makes me want to be an expert. Singular, hilarious and disturbing, Brother Theodore has been a background fascination of mine for years. How could I get my hands on his albums? Is it possible I could ever see him perform live? The answer to the second question is now, of course, "No", and the first one is "Probably not", due to the steep prices at which used copies are currently selling. And knowing just enough about some obscure artist to make me want to know more, only to have a full understanding and appreciation of the art thwarted by that very obscurity, until finally I have to settle for scraps and biographies or documentaries, is not a fate with which I'm unfamiliar. So I'm used to it. Once again, you've defeated me, The Universe. Now at least let me see this goddamn documentary.

"Originality" has become a meaningless word. The loss -- not physically, which is inevitable, but in terms of cultural memory -- of people like Brother Theodore is the reason -- the entire reason -- for that. Far too often, true originality gets buried with the body. If no one tells you, or shows you, what the word means, how will you ever know? That's why I want to see the film: to remind myself what genuine, mad innovation really is.

A Quick One While I'm Away

In a few hours I'm going to be jetting up to Northern VA to see the family, because we have a new addition to the ever-expanding crew (welcome, little Melanie!) so I want to get a quick, not-much-of-anything post in before that happens.

All's I really got to say is, don't forget Rick's sure-to-be-enlightening post for this month's The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club pick, Boudu Saved from Drowning this coming Monday, March 16! You'll be able to find it, as if I need to even tell you, at Rick's own Coosa Creek Cinema, so be there, or go suck an egg. I actually haven't watched the film yet, but I'm bringing it with me on my trip, just in case I find myself in the vicinity of an open TV and DVD player with a spare hour-and-a-half. Otherwise, I'll have to squeeze it in on Sunday when I get home. But watch it I indeed shall.

Also, after bailing on Brian Keene's insipid zombie novel, The Rising, my scramble to find something else to read has landed me on Jim Thompson's The Grifters. It's been ages since I've read any Thompson, and so far this book is just terrific. God bless the Jim Thompsons of the world -- there haven't been enough of you guys. A lot of pretenders, but very few of the real thing.

So have a great weekend, everybody, and remember, as Thompson says, via Lilly Dillon in The Grifters: "They can kill you, but they can't eat you."

It's About Time

Finally, Peter Yates's adaptation of George V. Higgins's masterful crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle is coming out on DVD. This thing has been in some sort of loony-bird home video purgatory ever since there was such a thing as home video, but I've come to learn that you can count on Criterion to untie all those knots for us, and they've come through yet again.

It's been more than a few years since I read Higgins's novel, but I still remember parts of it vividly, and how the spare prose and uncommonly on-target dialogue made me think that Higgins had to be describing what the world of low-level, half-assed garbage criminals was really like (and maybe he was, and maybe he wasn't, but Higgins was an attorney general and mob prosecutor before becoming a writer). And the film is just as good. Apparently, as someone who has seen Yates's movie, I'm a member of a pretty elite club. I caught it (with commercials and apparently edited for content, although I don't think there's much content to be edited out) a long time ago on Bravo, back before that channel chose to switch focus from airing old movies and instead run shows about what life is like up there on those fashion runways you're always seeing on TV. Yates got everything right, and the casting of Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle in the leads is so perfect as to be inevitable.

This will be released on May 19. Seek it out. And read the book while you're waiting for the DVD. I mean, what the hell, right?

Eye M A Detective

With 59 episodes to his credit, John Swartzwelder has written more episodes of The Simpsons than anyone else. Among other episodes, he's the man responsible for Bart Gets and Elephant ("In theory, Communism works. In theory"), Homer's Enemy ("Pigs tend to chew") and Radioactive Man ("Oh my God, you've killed the original Alfalfa!"). If you read about the history of The Simpsons, or listen to the DVD commentary tracks, you've probably heard that Swartzwelder is a recluse -- he doesn't like having his picture taken or taking part in public Simpsons events -- and he left the show in 2003. I don't think it's a coincidence that the quality of the show has been in a pretty steady decline since then (some would say longer, but I happen to think the show's good years lasted longer than most people).

Since 2003, John Swartzwelder has been writing novels. The novels look like this:

There have been five of them so far, they are all as bland looking as this, they're published by some company called Kennydale Books, and they can only be bought on-line. My wife got me the first three -- the title pictured above, Double Wonderful, and How I Conquered Your Planet -- for Valentine's Day (I got her a bunch of grapes), and because the length of these novels appear to top out at around 150 pages, I decided to go right ahead and read the first one.

The first one is The Time Machine Did It, and it tells the story of Frank Burly (real name Edward R. Torgeson, Jr.), a private detective who is, by his own admission, terrible at his job, and prefers to not work that hard at it:

The kind of case I like is where I've just deposited my retainer in the bank and I turn around and there's the missing person I've been hired to find and I say something like 'hey your horseshit wife is looking for you' and he says something like 'No kidding! Thanks for the tip. I'll call her up right now'. And the case is solved. That's the kind of case I like.

The Time Machine Did It is not about one of those cases, however. No, in this instance, Burly's client is Thomas Dewey Mandible III, an apparently homeless man who claims to have been the richest man in town just the night before, but now his entire fortune, including his house, back accounts and stocks have been stolen ("Sounds like a very serious robbery you had there," says Frank). The only thing Mandible wishes to hire Frank to retrieve, though, is a small statue of "Justice Holding the Scales", which he says is a family heirloom. Not sure how this homeless man is going to pay his fee, Frank nevertheless agrees, and the plot is off and running.

But for Swartzwelder, the plot only exists to be made fun of -- in fact, everything in the novel exists only to be made fun of -- so spending any more time on summarizing it would be time wasted. Suffice it to say, the first half of the novel involves Frank using more-or-less traditional methods of detection. For instance, at one point he consults a man who fences stolen goods with whom he has had contact in the past:

The first person I went to see was a fence I knew named Frank. Frank the Fence, we used to call him. Then we'd laugh a little, because there were two 'F's in there.

And so on. Eventually, Burly discovers that the town's criminal element has gotten hold of a time machine, which is shaped like a briefcase and was invented by a local scientist, and used that technology to ruin the Mandible name and fortune before it was even really made, and the reasons for all of this are discovered in the book's second half, which deals with Frank's largely accidental adventures along the space/time continuum His first temporal jaunt takes him to 1941 (he doesn't know it, but that's when all the important parts of the plot actually happened). When he realizes that he has traveled over 60 years backwards through time, he has a very hard time believing it, and goes about seeking proof. First, he buys a calendar off a "calendar boy", whose wares further indicate that he is in 1941. But that's not enough for him:

I walked up to some people who were filming a movie on the street and asked Sydney Greenstreet and Humphrey Bogart what year it was and they both confirmed the date I had been told before. When I was leaving, shaking my head with amazement, I heard the director say: "Wait, maybe we should leave it in. Maybe it's great." But then some other guy say: "Naw, it stinks." And they started re-shooting the scene.

As I said before, the plot of this novel exists to be mocked, and therefore very little of what transpires in the second half of the novel actually serves to move the narrative forward. It's mostly just jokes -- one absurdist, dead-pan and frequently hilarious joke after another. For instance, after traveling to 1941, Frank managed to lose the time machine, and so, shortly after his encounter with Bogart, he decides to find out if anyone can simply build him a new one. He consults a "likely looking mechanic".

"It's shaped like a briefcase," I told him, "but that's only part of the story. It's also got all sorts of wheels and blinking lights and things inside. As illustrated here. Because it's a time machine as well as a briefcase. It's two things in one."

The mechanic gives building the thing a whirl, but the resulting gizmo only manages to knock Burly unconscious for five hours. Furious, he goes back to confront the mechanic.

"...This is a lemon. I'm not paying you for this. Do they have a Better Business Bureau in this time period?"

[The mechanic] hesitated for a moment, moved sideways to the left to block my view of something, then said, no, there wasn't one. Lucky for him.

This is easily one of the most ridiculous books I've ever read. I'm not even sure it counts as an actual novel. It's roughly a novel in length, and everything in it is made up, thereby qualifying it as a work of fiction, but there aren't any genuine characters as you and I understand such things to exist and function in works of art, or a story that follows any kind of logic, or anything. It's actually just a bunch of jokes. Really, really funny jokes. From where I stand, jokes seem to be getting much less funny these days, so the idea that there's a guy like Swartzwelder out there, who wants only to make you laugh, and is able to do so without making endless pop culture references or playing for applause milked from his audience and their political philosophies, is a very rare and welcome thing.

Affinity #9

So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.

- Martin Amis

London Fields

RIP - John Updike

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must point out that I have never been able to finish a John Updike novel. I've tried many times, and each time I came up empty. It's possible that my tastes are simply not compatible with Updike's very thick (as opposed to dense) style, although I doubt it, as I'm a fan of many writers whose writing could be similarly described. I don't know what it is, but I'm not going to choose the occasion of his passing to try and figure it out.

Because really, my opinion of Updike's fiction doesn't matter. He has made his mark on the vast landscape of American literature -- not just that of the 20th century, but the whole of it. Since I've been aware of him, he -- along with Roth, Bellow, and a few others -- were considered the gold standard, and each of them have achieved immortality. They will be read for centuries, and their humbling prolificacy, particularly Updike's (although lately Roth is really cranking them out himself) showed what it really meant to be a writer, and to live as a writer: in short, for that to be what you are.

Updike's output is truly staggering: 27 novels, 13 collections of short fiction, 9 collections of poetry, 10 collections of essays, and 1 play. He won two Pulitzer prizes, for Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and was perversely denied the Nobel Prize, I guess so the committee could squeeze in Dario Fo and Elfriede Jelinek. His last (or most recent, at least; who knows how many unpublished books are on their way) novel is The Widows of Eastwick, a sequel to his famous The Witches of Eastwick. That was published last year. His last (or most recent) collection of stories is slated for this year, and is called My Father's Tears and Other Stories.

As someone who does not count himself among Updike's legion of fans (which is not necessarily the same as "admirers", among whose number I do count myself), I can say without hesitation that Updike was unquestionably a giant of American fiction.

RIP.

Affinity #8

"I just wanted to get away," Eric said minutes, addressing the space between his hands. "I was scared."

"Was what?" Matty squinted in disbelief, then turned to Yolanda. "He was what?"

Yolanda looked helpless and grief-stricken, a powerless mother watching her child being beaten by her husband.

Eric finally raised his face, stared at Matty, gape-mouthed.

"Yeah, you look me right in the eye, you fucking ant."

"Matty..." Yolonda finally put out her hand.

"I have listened to you shit in here all day. You are a self-centered, self-pitying, cowardly, envious, resentful, failed-ass career waiter. That's your everyday jacket. Now, add to that a gun and a gutful of vodka? I don't believe that shooting last night was an accident. I think you were a walking time bomb and last night you finally went off."

Eric sat there in a rapture of attention, chin uptilted as if for a kiss, his eyes never leaving Matty's.

"We are giving you one last chance to tell us what happened. Save your own skin and give us any version you want to justify your own part in it, but you get the ball rolling right here, right now...And I swear to fucking Christ, if you hand us one more time that pernicious horseshit about a, a Hispanic and, or, and, or some, some black guy coming out the shadows or wherever, I will make sure this goes down for you in the worst possible way."

They waited. Eric shimmering in his seat, Yolonda giving him the mournful big eye, Matty glaring at him, but praying that he was even vaguely justified in laying into the guy like this.

"All I can say is what happened," Eric finally said, his voice infinitesimal, his eyes still fixed on Matty's.

And there you have it.

-Richard Price

Lush Life

The Things that Never Occur to You

From an AV Club interview with Donald E. Westlake, from 2006:

AVC: ...It's more than 20 novels into the series now, and we still don't know [Parker's] first name.

DW: Well, he wasn't supposed to be a series. He was supposed to be one book, and if he was only going to be in one book, I didn't worry about it. And then an editor at Pocket Books said "Write more books about him." So I didn't go back at that point and give him a first name. If I'd known he would've been a series, I would've done two things differently. First, I would've given him a first name—I don't know what the hell it would be, maybe Frank—but I probably wouldn't have named him Parker, because that means for 27 books, I've had to find some other way to say, "Parker parked the car."

Top Books of the Year

I haven't seen enough new films to work up a best-of list, and I stopped keeping a list of all the films, from whatever year, I saw in 2008 awhile back. However, I do keep a running list of all the books I've read, so picking my favorite ten from that was relatively easy. Below, wouldn't you know it, I've posted the results. By the way, only two of these novels came out this year, but oh well. Live with it, suckers.

10. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

Foster's devestating suicide earlier this year spurred me to finally take a serious stab at his fiction. Following my usual pattern, I chose a collection of his short fiction. None of you know this, but I tried to hack out a whole post about this book, but the complexities, brilliance and occasionally infuriating gimmicks defeated me. This book is unlike anything else I've ever read. In all honesty, it's also not the sort of thing that would usually be a natural draw for me. But it's also clearly the work of a man who was feircely talented, incredibly smart, and, more likely than not, bound up too tightly inside his own head.

9. The Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd

This novel tells the highly fictionalized story, based on fact, of Charles and Mary Lamb, two devotees of Shakespeare in 19th century London who, in Ackroyd's version of events, became involved with William Henry Ireland (another historical figure) best known for writing, among other things, entire plays which he was able, for a while, to pass off as lost works by Shakespeare. This book is quietly and darkly observant, and, by the end, more than a little chilling.

8. The Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurtry

I put off reading this sequel to McMurtry's masterful Lonesome Dove for, well, a really long time. I mean, it couldn't be as good as that first book, could it? McMurtry's just trying to soak up more of that sweet Lonesome Dove cash, isn't he? The answer to the first question is, "No, it's not." The answer to the second question is, "How the hell should I know?" But The Streets of Laredo is pretty great, whether you think it measures up to its predecessor or not. McMurtry's prose can be lean to a fault at times, but at other times, for long stretches, you have to wonder how he's able to do so much with so few words.

7. The Hunter by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake)

Finally -- finally! -- I was able to read the first book in the series upon which Donald Westlake's ultimate legacy will be based. The Hunter is his first novel (writing as Richard Stark) about Parker, a cold-blooded, amoral thief. Parker is a true anti-hero, in that nothing that he does can be considered morally good. If he lets someone live, it's only because killing them would cause him too much hassle. If he kills someone, he does so because letting them live would cause him more hassle. He's a stone cold bastard, but he's also smarter than everyone else. Westlake is a great writer, and The Hunter is a great place to start, if you want evidence of that fact. (Note: This year, I also read the second novel in this series, The Man with the Getaway Face. It wasn't as good as The Hunter, but it's still excellent.)

6. The Man in the Ceiling by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem

The best book I read for my The Kind of Face You SLASH!! series.

5. The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith

I read this novel, my first Highsmith, around the beginning of the year, so it's hard now for me to summarize what I loved so much about it, both as a story and a piece of prose. But I did indeed love it very much. Like McMurtry, Highsmith tells her chilling story about everything going to hell for a small group of people in very spare language, completely free of pretense, which forces you to focus on what matters most: the people, and what's happening to them.

4. In the Garden of the North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff

Another writer I read for the first time this year is Tobias Wolff. I'd been hearing about how great he supposedly is for a long time, and the sheer volume of it eventually wore me down to the point where I said, "Fine, goddammit, I'll read one of his stupid-ass books". The one I chose, one of his several collections of short stories, knocked me out. There are few writers, of the short story or any other kind of fiction, as precise as Wolff. There are even fewer for whom the word "perfect" would seem like anything other than sheer hyperbole. But Wolff acheives perfection m0re than once, in this collection alone. Here, read the brilliant Hunters in the Snow for yourself. Tell me I'm wrong.

3. Lush Life by Richard Price

Richard Price is one of America's greatest living writers. His mastery of dialogue is the equal of David Mamet's, and his observation of human behavior is as keen as any I've ever encountered. His last four novels can be roughly categorized as crime novels, but, while I bristle at the idea of calling them "more" than that, I would have to say that they are crime novels while also being several other things. Lush Life tells the story of a random, senseless murder and its investigation and consequences. If that sounds like old-hat to you, than you're going to miss out. Price is a genius, simple as that.

2. Old School by Tobias Wolff

Wolff is primarily a writer of short fiction, but a few years ago he did publish Old School, his "first" novel ("first" in the sense that it's actually his second, but it's the only one he's willing to acknowledge), about the narrator's experiences in a private school in the 1950s and 60s. Each year at this school, a distinguished writer is invited to speak to the students. Each year also brings with it a writing contest, the winner of which will be able to have a one-on-one meeting with the visiting author. Roughly speaking, the novel follows the narrator as he tries to win each contest, and an opportunity to meet, respectively, Robert Frost, Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway. Wolff proves with this that he should write more novels. It's really exquisite -- beautiful and funny, and it has one of the most moving final paragraphs I've read in a long time.

1. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

See below. How's that for an anti-climax?

All Limbo's Clamor

Who, I wondered, towards the end of Outer Dark, actually read this book when it was published in 1968? Who closed it and thought, "Oh, I have to tell my friends about this one"? Who, in turn, was told about it and then rushed to the bookstore to buy their own copy? Now, forty years later, Cormac McCarthy is widely considered one of the greatest -- if not the greatest -- living American writers, and along with that reputation comes a sizable audience who wants to know what all the fuss is about. Those people will start with the most famous books, like No Country for Old Men or The Road, and if they're keen enough on those will begin working their way through the rest of them. But if anybody should happen, for whatever reason, to start with Outer Dark, will they wish to continue?

Well, of course some of them will. Had I started with Outer Dark, I feel pretty confident I would have continued to read McCarthy. After all, it's a work of bizarre, unique genius. But it's also one of the most gut-turning, unblinking and disturbing horror novels I've ever read.

More about that word "horror" later. First, I'll give you a brief idea of the story. Somewhere in the American South, probably around the end of the 19th century, a woman named Rinthy Holme is about to give birth. Her brother, Culla, is the father. Upon giving birth, Culla takes the baby (a boy, or "chap", as he's referred to throughout the novel) into the woods and leaves it there. He tells his sister that the baby died of natural causes. In fact, the baby didn't die at all, but rather was taken from its lonely patch of forest by a tinker (referred to only as "the tinker"). Rinthy discovers her brother's lie, and, believing that Culla traded the child to the tinker, sets out to find her "chap". Shortly after that, Culla sets out to find Rinthy.

The novel tells its story in alternating chapters: one chapter following Culla, the next following Rinthy. Every third chapter, or so, is broken up by short accounts of three mysterious, unnamed, deeply dangerous men. These men begin to leave behind them a trail of corpses (one of the killers, "the bearded man", uses a large knife to "unhinge" a man), though the reasons behind these murders are mysterious, as is the connection between the killers and Rinthy and Culla.

As always, McCarthy's prose is striking: a bizarre mix of Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce and the Bible, but still completely McCarthy's own words. As one might imagine, this mixture produces disorienting results. A clean, precise sentence such as...

It was later afternoon when they set forth again, out from the town, the wheels rasping in the sand, back down the yellow road.

...is followed up immediately by sentences like this:

Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen near mute with dew. On their chairs in such black immobility these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.

That "starblown" is particularly Joycean. There are a lot of brand new compounds like that (see also "redgummed" and "spraddlelegged", along with many more). As with Joyce, this has the effect of very concisely and poetically describing an image by using words that, in effect, hadn't existed before. But also like Joyce, he can produce nearly impenetrable (or actually impenetrable, in the case of Joyce) passages that make you want to put the book down and not speak to it for a few hours:

It howled execration up the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleagured with all limbo's clamor.

That was from the second of two paragraphs, back to back, early in the novel that made me begin to fear I'd pulled the wrong book from my shelf, when I read this about four months ago. I do find this kind of writing infuriating, and I don't really understand why the critical community doesn't also look at it a little askance. But it's so taken for granted with McCarthy that even the back cover copy of my edition can't help but get into the act, with its proud and giddy use of the word "fabular".

However, that kind of writing is very rare, and more often we get this kind:

Holme left the road and clambered up the rocky slope to give them leeway. The first of the drovers was beating his way obliquely across the herd toward him, the hogs flaring and squealing and closing behind him again like syrup. When he gained the open ground he came along easily, smiling up to where Holme sat on a rock with his feet dangling and looking down with no little wonder at this spectacle.

This scene, which describes Culla Holme watching a sea of hogs being herded through a field, will turn sour for Culla. Many of his experiences during the course of this novel do. Each of his chapters described him searching, often vainly, for work to support himself during his search for Rinthy. He's occasionally accused of crimes he didn't commit (while only the tinker, who we do meet again, is aware of the crime he actually did commit). Rinthy's chapters, on the other hand, describe her finding kindness and charity almost wherever she goes, though her search for the tinker and her son seems hopeless. Meanwhile, those three men have started killing people, and we gradually realize that we've met their victims earlier in the book, when Culla encountered them in his travels.

So where is all of this heading? It's heading, as is usually the case with McCarthy, to a kind of Apocalypse. (Spoiler) For McCarthy, in book after book, the sick, mad, shrieking end of humanity is represented by the violent death of infants. Babies are murdered by the handful in Blood Meridian; a baby is roasted on a spit in The Road (and though I don't wish to drag politics into this, I'd be remiss if I brought up this motif and didn't mention that, in No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell speaks very unfavorably about abortion). These infants are always faceless and nameless, but by being slaughtered so casually and motivelessly in Blood Meridian, or used for sustenance by depraved adults in The Road, their humanity is somehow heightened. This, McCarthy is saying, is as bad as it can get. Once this happens, nothing is salvageable. In Outer Dark we get this act presented, by its perpetrator, as a kind of infernal lesson, or as a rebuke. It's a way of saying to the one who witnesses it: See what you did?(End spoiler)

I've thought a lot today about the violence in McCarthy's fiction, and I think that, for myself, one of the reasons it's so jarring is because it's so uncommon in literary fiction. Other writers of McCarthy's stature and ambition have dealt with savage violence from time to time, but with those writers it tends to be a sort of experiment, or an itch that needed scratching before returning to their other work. But in McCarthy, grotesque, brutal violence is always there, and it's depicted at a level so graphic that the only equivelant in fiction I've seen is in the horror genre. But what I realized today is that, in horror fiction (of which I read a lot), if the book is especially violent it tends to also be especially bad. The truly great horror writers are generally more subdued about violence, often only suggesting the worst; if they deal with it straight on, they only very rarely dwell on it. But McCarthy takes the violence of "splatter" horror and weds it with the stark poetry of great American fiction. It's a jarring combination, almost appalling. And in Outer Dark, it's also otherworldly. The three killers float through the novel like ghosts, and they shouldn't know, or care, about the events of this story; they shouldn't know about Culla or Rinthy or their baby. But by the end, the bearded man seems to know more than he's saying. In fact, he knows more than we do.

It Helps if You're Mad

The other day, I was talking to one of my co-workers about films and books. We were approaching these subjects in a general sort of way, but I was eventually able, as I often am, to steer things towards one of my specific interests, in this case the writer Derek Robinson. I was proud of my skill in turning the conversation to my favor, but this morning it occurred to me that, as a blog proprietor, I can turn "conversations" my way any time I want, and with much less effort.

Which brings me to Derek Robinson. I first heard of him, indirectly, from a couple of my brothers, who watched the Masterpiece Theater adaptation of his novel Piece of Cake many, many years ago. I remember very little of what they said about it, other than that the title stuck in my head, as did the fact that this was a World War II story that centered around a British fighter squadron. As I say, I have no idea why all this stuck with me, although, now that I think about it, it might have something to do with the fact that I didn't see the series myself, and, being a kid at the time, anything my older brothers got to see or do that I didn't see or do myself (not that Piece of Cake was forbidden to me, like Monty Python, but you get the idea) had a tendency to lodge in my brain.

Anyway, some years later, after my obsession with books had well and truly taken hold of both my body and spirit, I came across, in a used bookstore, a novel called Piece of Cake, by Derek Robinson.

A quick investigation confirmed that this was the source material of the Masterpiece Theater series, so I bought it and, at some point during the intervening years, read it. I sometimes tell people that Piece of Cake is my favorite book, but it's been so long since I read the whole thing that I should probably stop saying that, just in case a subsequent re-reading of the novel should make me out a liar. But it is a great book. It tells the story of an RAF fighter squadron, called Hornet Squadron, from September 1939, up to the Battle of Britain in September 1940. Robinson gets across what it must have been like to be a young man at the beginning of World War II, getting ready to take up one of the most insane and dangerous jobs in any military at that time, and he does so with a great deal of sardonic wit and a complete lack of dishonest sentiment.

Without even opening the book, I can still rattle off the names of the main characters (of which there are quite a few): Pip Patterson, Mother Cox, Moggy Cattermole, Flash Gordon, Moke Miller, Rex, Kellaway, Baggy Bletchley, Stickwell, Fanny Barton, Christopher Hart III (known as CH3)...I also remember, to a man, whether or not they make it out of the novel alive, and, if not, how they died. More than any other novel I know, Piece of Cake kept me completely off-balance regarding my confidence in the fate, and life expectancy, of the characters. Anybody could be killed at any time. No one was ever safe. In this sense, Piece of Cake feels like the most realistic war novel I've ever read. And it's still a very funny book, from the first page to the last.

I've since read many of Robinson's other novels. He certainly does seem to favor war novels about fighter (or bomber) squadrons bearing ironically frivolous titles (see also A Good Clean Fight and Damned Good Show), and he also really likes to write about Hornet Squadron -- apart from Piece of Cake, this squadron also appears in the aforementioned A Good Clean Fight, and in his World War I novels War Story and Hornet's Sting (and you can find Hornet's prototype in Robinson's Booker Prize-nominated Goshawk Squadron). I've read all of these, except Hornet's Sting, and I like them all, but I'll be honest and say to anyone interested in Robinson that there is a sameness to these novels that might wear on you, so if you wanted to pick just one, then go with Piece of Cake. With that novel, he was working at the height of his powers: it's his epic, and his masterwork.

Robinson does write other kinds of books. He's written a few spy novels, an American Civil War novel (Kentucky Blues), and many non-fiction books about both war and rugby. He's still writing, but his kind of fiction is apparently, and unfortunately, out of style, because he's had to self-publish his newest novel, Hullo Russia, Goodbye England, about Cold War spy-plane pilots. This guy has been nominated for a Booker, he's been adapted by Masterpiece Theater, and now he has to self-publish. I'm disgusted, but unsurprised. But oh well. I'd say that I hope Robinson isn't bitter about this turn of events, but having read a number of his novels, I think the odds are that he probably is, which is fine, because he has every right to be. After all, he's the guy who wrote Piece of Cake. Read that book, all of you. It's another great novel in danger of being forgotten.

Has He Hurt You? Are You Sad?

Spoilers for the novel Let the Right One In are to be found below!! BE WARNED!!

Where do I begin? The problem with beginning this particular post is that I, quite frankly, don't really feel like jumping headlong into a critique and analysis of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Let the Right One In, which has recently been turned into a very highly acclaimed film by Thomas Alfredson and Lindqvist, a movie which everybody in the world seems to have seen, except me. No, I decided to read the novel first -- which is my usual way of doing these things, if it's a novel I especially want to read -- and will now most likely have to wait until the film comes out on DVD to find out how in the sweet name of crap they crammed all 472 pages of this bloated mess of a novel into 114 minutes of screen time.

Okay, I'm being unfair to the novel, and to Lindqvist. One of the ways in which I'm being unfair is that, by saying the above, some might think that I'm implying that Lindqvist isn't at least trying to do something interesting within the sections of the novel that I believe contribute to the bloat and the mess. But he is. He's trying to bring in, and flesh out, the kinds of characters you rarely see in horror novels, such as Stockholm's unemployed and alcoholic fringe dwellers. He wants these characters, and the more stock ones, to live, and he doesn't want their every action to further the main engine of his (admittedly interesting...for a while) vampire story. All well and good, and in fact I wish more horror writers would try this. But damn it, much of it, especially in the last half, is just not very good, and the elements that are relatively new to the genre that Lindqvist is bringing in are simply not very interesting. These fringe dwellers only take on life when they become part of the plot, and even then it gets dicey.

Before going too much farther, I suppose I should write up a brief synopsis of the story. Okay, so, Oskar is an overweight Swedish kid who is mercilessly bullied on a daily basis. Living next door to him is Eli, a twelve year-old girl who he runs into one night in their apartment complex's playground (he had been stabbing a tree, imagining that the tree was one of his bullies). She's quite friendly, and Oskar sees in her the possibility of a sort of emotional freedom. Unbeknownst to him, at first, is the fact that Eli is a vampire, and living with her is a middle-aged pedophile named Hakan, who murders people in order to supply her with blood. Although Hakan does many terrible things, and some unforgivable appetites, he does feel a great deal of remorse, and is beginning to psychologically break down...or, well, break down more, I guess.

So that's the important stuff, story-wise. Part of the problem with the novel must be the translation, by Ebba Segeberg. I don't want to come down too hard on Segeberg, because the art of translation is largely ignored, and I would guess it is also immensely difficult. But there are long stretches of this book where Segeberg simply seems to be unable to find any interesting or evocative English equivelant to what Lindqvist has written (so, actually, maybe it is Lindqvist's fault. Anyway, it's the fault of one of them). Surprisingly, to me at least, Segeberg is able to best find her (his?) stride in some of the novel's humor, such as in this passage, where Lacke, the primary alcoholic fringer dweller, is wondering about the practical aspect of sterilizing the apparently dozens of cats owned by Gosta, the most pathetic alcoholic fringe dweller:

Lacke imagined Gosta getting on the subway with maybe...twenty-five cats. In one box. No, in a bag, a sack. Go to the vet and just pour out all the cats. "Castration, please."

Segerberg can also occasionally nail some of the novel's more poignant moments, such as this bit taken from a note left for Oskar by Eli:

Sorry I broke your music machine. Take the money if you want. I have a lot. Don't be afraid of me. There's no reason for you to be. Maybe you know that. I hope you know that. I like you so very much.

The passages where Segerberg and/or Lindqvist do not nail it are harder to quote, because it has less to do with flat-out bad writing (although there is some of that) as it does an accumulation of teeth-grinding flatness. And this can often come at the worst times, such as in one of the major suspense sections towards the end. But the section I'm thinking of, which deals with one of probably half a dozen returns by Hakan, is so standard issue and over-the-top -- a very bad combination -- that I'm not sure top-notch writing could have really saved it.

Which brings up another point. I haven't seen the film, as I mentioned, but having finished the novel I decided to read two reviews of it, by my good pals Fox and Marilyn. First of all, I'd like to digress briefly and say that Marilyn's review has really renewed my interest in seeing the film, something that reading the novel had dimmed considerably. Second, Fox's review -- which is less enthusiastic than Marilyn's, but still positive -- focuses on an element of the story that I think should have been focused on more in the novel, which is not just the relationship between Oskar and Eli, but the motives of Eli. But that's neither here nor there, because that's still one of the novel's stronger elements. No, what both reviews indicated to me is that many of the novel's particularly ludicrous plot elements appear to have been completely excised from the film (except for, if I'm understanding Fox's review correctly, the stuff about the cats...), such as -- and here are my big SPOILERS -- the nonsensical and unexplained "zombification" of Hakan, and the utterly baffling and pointless revelation that, before she got vampirized, Eli used to be a boy. Whose name was Elias, don't you know, and whose dad(?) de-manned him for what would appear to be purely sadistic reasons, leaving Elias looking like a girl, but also leaving his genital area (that would be the crotch) completely smooth, like, I don't know...a robot.

What in the world is the point of this? Is it simply Lindqvist's way of playing around with the (to me utterly boring) idea that a vampire's sexuality is ambiguous? If so, that's a damn stupid way of going about it, and it also doesn't make any sense because, in the novel at least, any sort of sexual involvement between Oskar and Eli seems off the table due to the complete indifference of both.

Anyhow. I'm still looking forward to the film, because it sounds as though everything that should have been toned down in the novel has been toned down in the film, and everything that should have been cut from the novel has been cut from the film. And there truly is a good story buried somewhere in Lindqvist's book. I just hope the film found it.

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UPDATE: On reflection, I'm thinking this post is probably very disjointed. I wrote it way too fast, and had no clear idea of how I wanted to progress from one paragraph to the next. Right now, I'm too tired, hungry and lazy to proof-read and see if I'm correct, so if you read this and agree with me....then I'm sorry, I guess. It's not like I'm charging you money, or anything. Although I probably should.

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UPDATE UPDATE: I just added an ending. Of sorts.

Affinity #6

...Once I had revealed to Edwin that I was going to be his biographer, once he had allowed the idea to take hold and sink in, he became fascinated by my project, indeed obsessed by it, and proved at times almost aggressively helpful in providing me with information -- information which, I am grieved to say, was often at variance with my own precise and infallible memories.

- Steven Millhauser

Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an

American Writer, 1943 - 1954

by Jeffrey Cartwright

RIP - Michael Crichton

I just saw the news that Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain and many other novels, has unexpectedly passed away. I say "unexpectedly", but as he died of cancer, and his battle with that evil disease has been described as "private", I have to assume those close to him saw this coming for some time.

I'm not going to do any sort of career overview of Crichton's work, as I haven't read any of his books in a long time (including his recent, controversial books, such as State of Fear, though I'll admit I'd like to). I'm also not going to write one of those weasly, self-serving "Yes, his books were fun, but..." posts that use the death of a famous person as an excuse to tear them down. Because really, take his writing for what it was, or don't, but you can't argue that he was, more than anything, a fiercely intelligent guy. Plus, I'll be damned if Jurassic Park wasn't one hell of a gripping novel.

No, the main point of this post is to inform anyone who doesn't already know, and to express my genuine sadness that Michael Crichton has left us.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 31 - Everything We're Telling You Here is True

Prior to reading The Man on the Ceiling, I had read four short stories by Steve Rasnic Tem, and not one word of fiction by Melanie Tem. That was a mistake, because this book -- which is part memoir, for lack of a better word, and part novel, also for lack of a better word -- is about them, and their lives together with their five adopted children, and why they write what they write. And what they write, for the most part, is horror. So, not being overly familiar with their fiction before tackling this book was a mistake, but not a fatal one, because despite that I found the book to be absolutely gripping, unsettling, and deeply moving.

The dedication page for The Man on the Ceiling says this:

For our children, who gave us their blessing

The very next page also contains one sentence only:

Everything we're about to tell you here is true

This second line, in one form or another, will pop up again and again throughout the book, although not everything within its pages is actually, literally true. The Tems describe The Man on the Ceiling as a"biography of their imaginations", and that's about as good a way to describe this highly unusual book as any I could come up with. It begins, for instance, with Steve (the book, incidentally, sometimes alternates between his point of view and Melanie's, while other sections are written by them together) describing a car trip with his family, Melanie riding shotgun, and their children piled in the back.

Along the side of the road, as far as the eye could see, the children waited. Some of them were babies, owning nothing but the baskets they were in and their own dirty blankets. Sometimes the older kids -- and by "older" I mean two or three years of age -- would take care of them, holding and singing to them because that came instinctively, feeding them out of other people's garbage cans.

...Outside the car windows the children came in droves. Some had barely escaped house fires: you could see places on their necks bubbled like a plastic toy left on the stove. Some had crawled out of floods or earthquakes, their faces smeared and broken.

...There was no more room in the car. I wanted to stick my head out the window and tell them that, and somehow apologize for it, but frankley there were so many I was afraid...

All of their children, as I said, were adopted: Gabriella, Joe, Veronica, Chris and Anthony. Chris, they tell us, has spent most of his adult life in prison. Anthony died. And it's possible -- though his parents will never know the truth -- that this nine year-old boy committed suicide.

This book is exceptionally difficult to describe. There is no straight narrative line, it bounces from the childhoods of the Tems, to their feelings about Anthony's death, to the future, to a recounting of the worsening Alzheimer's of Melanie's father, to the death of their cat, to their grappling with the man on the ceiling, who follows them wherever they go.

To say that the man on the ceiling is a personification of the fear the Tems feel not only for their children, but for themselves and the disasters that occur within every family at some point, would be accurate, as far as it goes. But the Tems never state that plainly, and it feels somehow wrong for me to do it in their place. This is how Melanie describes her relationship with the man on the ceiling:

The man on the ceiling gives my life an edge. He makes me uneasy; he makes me grieve. And yet he also fills me with awe for what is possible. He shames me with his glimpses into the darkness of human cruelty, and he shocks me when I see bits of my own face in his. He encourages a reverence when I contemplate the inevitability of my own death. And he shakes me with anger, pity, and fear.

Much of the book is like this, which is to say a description of the way the Tems's imaginations shape their experiences and filter into their fiction, although at no point do they explicitly tie their experiences, fears, or losses to any particular novel or story that one or the other of them has written. They never even mention a single title. However, scattered throughout this book are little short stories that each has written to illustrate, or extrapolate from, an idea, as with Melanie's story "Just Her Size", which imagines an encounter she never had with a neighborhood teenager she barely knew when she was a child, who she later learned might have been a pedophile, or in "The Yellow Dog", when Melanie wonders about how her daughter Gabriella must have processed the fact that, as a young girl, she was a witness to the deaths of both the family cat and Melanie's father.

As for Steve, I felt a particular kinship with him. He is a man who lives in an almost constant state of fear and worry -- sometimes a mild form, sounding somewhere in the back of his mind like the background hum of an air conditioner, sometimes clanging like a fire alarm -- that something terrible is about to happen to someone he loves. Hints are given in the book that Steve had a very rough childhood, and I had a very happy one, but I still understand living inside your own head like that. In one of the sections that seems to have been written by both of them, they talk about how, when the fear and worry gets too strong for him, Steve gets into his car and goes for a drive:

The man on the ceiling is out there, on the ceiling of the world, masquerading as a star or a flock of night birds or the wingtip of lights of a doomed plane, just waiting for the right moment to squash itself against Steve's windshield and make him drive off the road or into oncoming traffic, into the path of cars carrying everyone he's ever loved.

Okay, I'm not as bad as all that, but I do understand it. Hell, everyone does, to one degree or another. Some people are just better than others at turning down the alarm.

Steve writes about writing more than Melanie does (though I feel like most of the short stories included here were written by Melanie), and when he does this his prose turns towards the surreal -- which, I'm lead to understand, is not an unusual direction for his fiction to take). And when he writes about his life as a father, he is absolutely heartbreaking:

My baby. You hold their small hearts, their lungs in your hands and it is unimaginable: both their lives and their deaths are unimaginable. How they came to be out of nothing and how this miracle has been put into your undeserving hands to nourish or to fail. Sometimes it brings the absolute best out of people and sometimes the absolute worst. I've seen people snap under the pressure, we've all seen them, dissolving in the presence of a miracle.

Clearly, I've let the Tems write a fair chunk of this post, but I feel as though that's as it should be. The Man on the Ceiling is so completely theirs that to try and interpret or analyze it would be a greivous error. What you do is, you just let the book absorb you into it. And you learn, among many other things, why the Tems write horror. This book is not a horror novel, but it was borne from horror. It doesn't explain why everyone writes horror, nor does it explain why readers such as myself read it (though it comes closer than anything else I've ever read). And quite frankly, to say -- as I very nearly did -- that this book was produced by the horror genre would be to give that genre far, far more credit than it deserves. This book was written by the Tems, and I feel like it would exist, as would their other books, whether the genre existed or not.

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Well, that's it, folks. The end of The Kind of Face You SLASH!!. And thank Christ for that. It's been fun (sometimes), and educational (for me, anyway), and long as shit. And now it's over. And I am never doing this again.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 30 - Very Far from the World of Meaning

Not sure what I wanted to read today, I was in my bedroom, searching through all the books I'd set aside as possible options for this month. Nothing was jumping out at me, until I noticed The Stories of Paul Bowles, which I'd taken from the shelf just a few days ago, because something I'd read about it sparked my interest, and because I felt like I should have considered it for this project.

The piece I read that had sparked my interest was Terry Lamsley's brief essay in Horror: Another 100 Best Books on Bowles's collection Pages from Cold Point. This book was apparently a fairly short one, containing about six or seven stories, all of which, as you would imagine, found in the large collection of Bowles's work I'd taken down. Lamsley briefly describes each of the stories, and then says of Bowles:

He never wrote specifically for the horror genre, but many of his tales are much more strange and disturbing than those by some writers who do. One such, "Kitty", about a girl who wants to turn into a cat, was written for a children's book and rejected by the publisher as being far too gruesome. I have never come across any of his stories in a horror anthology.

Neither have I, and now that I've read a few of them, I'm as perplexed by this fact as Lamsley. I chose three of the stories Lamsley talks about, and one other that, from what I knew of it, sounded particularly suited to this project.

The first two stories are very short, and I'll breeze through them. The first one, "The Hyena" is written as a fable about a stork meeting a hyena at a watering hole. The stork has heard that if a hyena marks you with his urine, you will be forced to follow that hyena wherever her goes. The hyena notes the stork's nervousness, and claims he knows the reason. He tells the stork that the magic powers ascribed to his species are pure fiction, and he and the stork engage in a brief philosophical discussion. This parable about trust -- a description I honestly hesitate to use, because it feels reductive -- has a grotesque ending, one far more jarring in its details than even the darkest stories of its kind I've read in the past.

The next story is called "The Garden", and it deals with a man who over the years has cultivated a beautiful garden outside his home. He takes great pleasure in it, and one day, when he goes inside, his wife notices how pleased he looks and immediately assumes that he's hiding treasure from her. With the help of a local witch, she begins poisoning her husband, in the hopes of weakening his mind enough to let her ply the secret of his treasure from him. This doesn't work, there being no treasure, and he doesn't die from the poison. And this is just the beginning of an unusally rich and disturbing four pages -- it's really amazing how much impact Bowles can fit into so short a length.

The third story is "Allal", and that's the one I felt was most suited to this project. It's about a young man named Allal, who was abandoned by his mother at the hotel where she worked. When he reached a certain age, the owner of the hotel put him to work, but refused to pay him. After a while, Allal moves to town and finds a job. He is ostracized by the locals, who, because his mother abandoned him, refer to him as a "son of sin".

Allal quietly goes about his life, earning his pay, and hating everyone in town, until...

One hot summer evening shortly after sunset he was walking under the arcades that faced the town's main square. A few paces ahead of him an old man in a white turban was trying to shift a heavy sack from one shoulder to the other. Suddenly it fell to the ground, and Allal stared as two dark forms flowed out of it and disappeared into the shadows. The old man pounced upon the sack and fastened the top of it, at the same time beginning to shout: Look out for the snakes! Help me find my snakes!

Allal helps the man and invites him to his home, where he becomes enamored of the snakes -- of one, in particular. He makes up his mind to steal this snake, which he does, after which he attempts to bind his mind and spirit to the animal. His attempts have a different result, however, and Allal finds himself winding through the town in body of the snake.

At first, the reader might assume that this is all a hallucination, because Allal has been eating kif, a kind of drug popular in the Middle East and Asia. But the ending of the story made me wonder. In any case, Bowles's fable-like style is used not only in "The Hyena", but in "The Garden" and in "Allal" as well. Because "The Garden" and "Allal" have no lesson to teach us, as we would expect a fable to do, the effect is somehow more disturbing than if Bowles wallowed in the sun-bleached darkness of these stories. I quoted Lamsley above mentioning a children's story by Bowles that was rejected for being too gruesome. I don't doubt it. Apart from fumbling with certain words and references that are particular to Middle Eastern cultures and ideas, a child would have no trouble reading and understanding either "The Garden" or "Allal" (the more openly cerebral "The Hyena", ironically, would be a much bigger challenge), but doing so would scar them.

Which brings me to the last story, called "The Delicate Prey". This story was particularly singled out by Terry Lamsley as the main reason he chose to write about Pages from Cold Point. He says:

The events [of the story], which I see no point in describing, are related as if from a very great distance, but with absolute clarity, and the reader is led into somewhere dreadful and left there.

Not a bad way of putting it, and I share his reticence about describing the events of "The Delicate Prey". I'll only say that the story is about two leather merchants, brothers, and their young nephew, and about their journey from Tabelbala to Tessalit, and what happens when they meet a friendly man in the desert. "The Delicate Prey" may be the most off-handedly disturbing story I've ever read. A telling detail, I think, of Bowles's style is that the most horrifying violence is often buried one or two sentences into a six or seven sentence paragraph. Most writers would tag such moments at the end of a paragraph as a kind of climax. For Bowles, the violence (which can be extremely harrowing) is simply another thing that happens, like the watering of camels, or the decision to move from Tabelbala to Tessalit.

I had read Bowles before this, when, in college, I had to read The Sheltering Sky, which is still his most famous work. I felt no confidence that I would like that book, or even be able to finish it, but I not only finished it, I found that I'd enjoyed it quite a bit. In other words, it wasn't what I expected. With Bowles's short fiction, I've now had that experience again. I've never read anything quite like these stories. They are merciless.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 29 - It's Important that We Talk

Well, this day's not going the way I'd planned. One of my big posts for this month was going to be about Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan", as well as M. John Harrison's story of the same name -- you know, a compare and contrast kind of thing. Well, before the month had even quite gotten started, someone told me that they thought Harrison's novel The Course of the Heart was an expansion of that short story. I didn't bother verifying this until last night, when I was going to begin reading Machen's story. It would be a little hard to explain to you why this knowledge has put me off reading these two short stories (not forever, just for now), but suffice it to say that for the sake of my own reading interests I want to put them off for another time.

So what do I read now? I haven't decided yet. In the meantime, here's another half-assed post about a few stories that are only about three or four pages in length (I was going to do this today anyway, in addition to a larger post, in order to get the post count to 31). You might remember that the first time I did this I read a story each by Steve Rasnic Tem, William F. Nolan and Chet Williamson. Well, I've decided to stage a rematch, and read another story each by those guys. Last time, Chet Williamson smoked the competition with his terrific "The Assembly of the Dead". Who will win this time!?

First up is Chet Williamson, and his story "Ants". Williamson's not going to repeat his victory, I'm afraid. This is one of those stories about a down-on-his-luck asshole who cheated on his wife, so she divorced him, and now he's poor and has very few pleasures in life. But among those few pleasures is the delight he takes in killing ants. And the ants, as you know without me having to tell you, don't like that, so they take the battle to him. And so on. The copyright for this story is 1987 -- I would have thought this particular horror sub-genre had been exhausted at least twenty years before that. Actually, it probably had, but people kept writing the stories anyway.

Next is William F. Nolan's "Dead Call". Our narrator, Frank, receives a call from his old friend Len. The problem is that Len has been dead for several months. Frank was under the impression that the car wreck that killed Len was an accident, but Len informs him that he is mistaken. Len actually killed himself, because his life was falling to pieces. And, Len points out, isn't Frank going through some pretty rough times himself?

You may be able to tell where this one's going. At three pages, though, I think that's to be expected. It's a pretty creepy little story, though Nolan's dialogue skills are fairly pedestrian. Still, this one's eerie, and it might make you pretty uncomortable if you sit and think about it for too long.

Finally, we have Steve Rasnic Tem's "At the Bureau". It concerns a man who works for a government licensing bureau. The function of this office has changed repeatedly over the many years he's worked there; last time they issued fishing licenses, but they're about to change again. The narrator seems content with his job, even though it's a dead end. There's no room for advancement beyond his current position, and there will be no more raises. His wife wants him to quit. And the guy in the office next door keeps standing in front of the narrator's frosted-glass office door, casting his shadow as he tries to peer in. Whenever the narrator tries to catch him at it, the guy hurries back to his own office.

The twist to all this is pretty bleak and hopeless. I would say this is the best of the three, as it's the most interesting, and it's better written than the other two, though I still prefer Nolan's central idea. But I don't believe these stories were intended to do much beyond sending a brief shiver through their readers, so it's best to end things here...

There will be another, more substantial post later today.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 28 - The Nightgown Wraiths

Guess what I went and did? I left the book containing today's horror selection at work. Fortunately, I had finished the story, so I can write about it, but unfortunately I don't have it here in front of me for reference. Or to quote from. So this one will probably be pretty short.

The story -- another long one -- is "Mr. Dark's Carnival", by Glen Hirshberg. Hirshberg is what is known as a "rising talent" in the genre: he's in his early forties and has a mere three books to his name, but he's raked in a healthy portion of award for his short fiction, and has earned praise from the likes of Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, and others. Campbell, in his introduction to Hirshberg's collection The Two Sams (from which "Mr. Dark's Carnival" is taken), compares him to M. R. James and Thomas Ligotti. Well then.

As it happens, earlier this year I read Hirshberg's novel, The Snowman's Children. That novel is more of a coming-of-age thriller -- a genre designation I may have just now coined, but which has a long history anyway -- than a horror novel, but I found it to be pretty skillful and intriguing, if a little too earnest. Hirshberg has really made his name with his short fiction, however, which I've always gathered is firmly and unquestionably horror, so I figured now was a swell time to dive in.

I was hestitant to pick "Mr. Dark's Carnival", as the title seems to hint that it's some sort of reflection on Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, and, since I've never read that book (I should really stop admitting that sort of thing), I didn't want to read a 40-plus-page story that I wouldn't be able to fully appreciate. But Ramsey Campbell, in his introduction, said that the story deeply explored why readers and writers are drawn to fear, why we seek it out (or something like that), and considering that we're at the tail end of this horror project, I thought the story might be especially appropriate.

So here's what the story's about. In a small town in Montana, a college history professor named David Roemer is winding up his annual Halloween lecture, which deals with a bit of local legend. Back in the day's of America's Western expansion, and before Montana was officially a state, a man named Al...bert? See, this is the problem with not having the book in front of me. Well, whatever. We'll go with Albert. Anyway, a man named Albert Dark took residence in this little town, and became judge. Apparently, for the most part, he was a pretty lenient judge. But on four different occasions, during his many years as judge in that town, posses hauled men who they claimed had committed some sort of crime to Dark's home, demanding swift justice. On each of these four occasions, the judge complied, with the stipulation that before the man was to hang, he would spend his final night in the judge's home, and, when the time came, Judge Dark himself would do the hanging.

From this grew a legend of a place called "Mr. Dark's Carnival", which was actually one of those haunted house attractions that go up around the world every Halloween. This legend is not gone into specifically, beyond the fact that there were apparently unusual invitations to the haunted house issued. But Professor Roemer claims that such a place never existed, that it is in fact only a legend.

Towards the end of his lecture, he gets word that a troubled former graduate student of his has committed suicide. This man's girlfriend, Kate, was also one of Roemer's former students, as well as one of his former lovers. He goes to comfort her, and, long story short, comes across an invitation to Mr. Dark's Carnival. Which he and Kate excitedly attend.

Frankly, I don't quite know what Campbell was on about in his introduction. All this story really explores is why people go to haunted house attractions, which is, if not self-evident, at least uninteresting. As you can probably guess, Roemer and Kate make it to the carnival, and find it far more elaborate and bizarre and intriguing than they'd hoped it would be. And as you can probably also guess, there are really only two ways this thing can end, and, again, neither one is all that exciting. I was really struck by how ordinary this story was. Not bad, just ordinary. This, from Glen Hirshberg, who, of the genre's new breed of talent, is one of horror's most respected torch-bearers. I mean, really, Glen Hirshberg? A haunted house attraction on Halloween that might actually really be haunted?? I just don't know what to say. I enjoyed it. It would be a nice campfire story, if you took out all the stuff that doesn't lead anywhere, which would be about half of it. But "Mr. Dark's Carnival" is the definition of "nothing special".

For instance, the subplot about the troubled ex-student who committed suicide seems poised to supply some unusual pay-off, either thematically or narratively, but all it does is provide the explanation for a rather tired twist at the end. What's ironic about the by-the-numbers quality of this story (which, in all fairness, is not a weakness from which Hirshberg's The Snowman's Children suffers) is that throughout Roemer's journey through the fake-or-is-it haunted house, any time he's not suitably impressed with what he takes to be effects or clever bits of misdirection, he expresses his disappointment about some standard bit of haunted house business that he's seen too many times in his life to count. Was Hirshberg not aware that he was practically begging his readers to make similar complaints about his story? Was that part of his point? I really don't think it was, and I'm left just feeling befuddled.

And remember when I said that one of the drawbacks of The Snowman's Children was that it was too earnest? Well, this next complaint is connected to that, although I'm not sure "earnest" is the right word here. But at one point, Roemer actually says the following:

Walking through a haunted house properly is a lot like making love.

Okay, well, that just about shreds it. If he'd said "Walking through a haunted house properly is a lot like fucking", I might have respected him more.

All right, well, that was a major disappointment, which is an odd thing to say about a story that isn't actually bad. When considered with other horror stories that revolve around Halloween night and haunted houses, it works perfectly well. I was just expecting more. I'm nowhere near done with Hirshberg -- not even close, really -- but I'll adjust my expectations accordingly next time.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 27 - Dust in the Balance

H. P. Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood were rough contemporaries -- Blackwood's writing career got started a bit before Lovecraft's -- and the former author was a great admirer of the latter. Of Blackwood, Lovecraft said:

Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood's genius there can be no dispute; for no one has ever approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordingary things and experiences.

Not only that, but check out that name! Algernon Blackwood! That is friggin' nuts! With that name, Blackwood had, by my count, only two viable career choices: horror writer, or malevolent super-scientist, the kind who rides around in zeppelins, commanding his zombie army via remote control. And it was his real name, too. It's not like he was born "Sidney Loomis", and traded up to "Algernon Blackwood" when he turned eighteen. No, that was his name out of the gate -- although, regrettably, his middle name was Henry.

But anyway. Blackwood's fiction, though it has remained in print (off and on, I would imagine) since his death, never took hold in the popular psyche the way Lovecraft's did. If you want to know why exactly that is, I'm not the guy to ask, although my knee-jerk, horror-snob answer is that Blackwood was by far the better writer. I don't really know what that means, though, and I don't actually believe it. That is, I don't believe that's why Blackwood's work is obscure, compared to Lovecraft; however, I do believe -- based, admittedly, on scant evidence -- that Blackwood was a far superior writer.

Thus far, I've read one Blackwood story (finished mere minutes ago), the nearly-novella-length "The Willows". In it, an unnamed narrator and his friend, known only as "the Swede", are traveling down the Danube by kayak. Due to flooding and fierce winds, they suffer what seems to be a mild shipwreck on a small island somewhere in East Jesus, Hungary. Their kayak is undamaged, they have plenty of provisions, and so, not at all put out, they decide to make camp on this tiny island, which is covered, not incidentally, with willows.

Early on, they they see a couple of fairly strange things. One is an otter, swimming along the river, which, at first glance, they mistake for a human body. Shortly thereafter, they see, in the distance, a man in a boat, who at first seems to be signaling to them, but whose motions they eventually decipher as the man making the Sign of the Cross.

Still dealing with very strong winds, the two men decide to take to the river again the next morning. That night, the narrator takes a little walk, and begins to feel extremely uneasy about the island, the willows, and the general surroundings:

But my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself more particularly to the willow bushes, to these acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening. And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.

This "attack" will increase in strength and continue unabated until the end of the story. The narrator -- and eventually the Swede -- begin to see things at night, in the willows, that inspire a kind of awe-struck horror, and they begin to hear a sort of gonging sound that seems to come from everywhere at once, and which "defies description". These incidents, mixed with mysterious damage to their kayak and depletion of their food, works on the men's minds. The Swede appears to be more sensitive to their new, terrifying reality -- to what it is and what it means -- and together the two men come to understand this small island as a kind of intersection of two realities: the world as we know it, and another world, filled with beings whose purpose is grim on a cosmic and metaphysical scale, a scale so large that it is impossible to understand, however much the men might desperately crave understanding:

An explanation of some kind was an absolute necessity, just as some working explanation of the universe is necessary -- however absurd -- to the happiness of every individual who seeks to do his duty in the world and face the problems of life. The simile seemed to me at the time an exact parallel.

This is an essential passage, I think, because it is the core of what Blackwood is writing about, his specific reason for writing horror, which is the great doubt every human being, no matter how confident they are in their own view of the universe, has at some point, that not only is there no benevolent God, but there is no comfort in our existence. There is only pain and horror and despair and meaningless suffering. Everything else is just a mask. Or -- and this may be closer to the point -- if there is a force governing the universe, it is malignant. This is what Thomas Ligotti is writing about, and it's what many claim Lovecraft is writing about as well, although it's hard, sometimes, for me to see it in his work.

And it doesn't matter if you're an atheist (the atheists I know have a much warmer view of the universe than this), and it doesn't matter if you firmly believe in God. It doesn't even matter if your belief in God is some day proven correct. All that matters is that you also sometimes see things Blackwood's way, that you harbor that fear, however mildly, and however rarely. If you do -- and you do -- then "The Willows" will make its mark on you.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 26 - Entertainment for a Monster

Here's how the editors of Playboy introduce Ray Russell's story "Sardonicus" in the anthology The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural:

Russell's Gothic canon is unique in contemporary fiction. Not since the Romantic novelists of the 19th Century has there been a writer with quite his panache, eloquence and mastery of the art of terror. He is a symphonic writer, unafraid of big emotions and stunning effects, lavishly orchestrated.

Man, the editors of Playboy sure know how to sell a short story, don't they? But wait...according to Kim Newman and Stephen Jones, editors of Horror: Another 100 Best Books (one of those 100 being the Playboy anthology) there was only one editor for the book, and his name was Ray Russell. So I guess what I should have said was, "Man, Ray Russell sure knew how to shamelessly promote himself, didn't he?" (There are actually two Russell stories in this anthology, and his introduction to the second story, "Comet Wine", hilariously begins: "Ray Russell's work is 'Staggering, wholly convincing, filled with the dark powers of life and minds,' according to the tough-minded Virginia Kirkus book review bulletin".)

"Sardonicus" -- a long-ish short story, at 40 pages -- is my selection today, and, to be fair Russell wasn't the only person to have such a high opinion of it. Russell actually was a highly respected horror writer in his time (mainly the 1960s and 70s), and "Sardonicus" was widely anthologized. It was also turned into a famous film by William Castle in 1961, called Mr. Sardonicus (I haven't seen the film, although it's on TCM this Thursday, so I can correct that soon. Still, the more films I admit to not having seen, and the more books and stories I admit to not having read, the more I think I'm not very good at Knowing a Lot About Horror).

Though written in the middle of the 20th Century, "Sardonicus" is told in the style of a 19th Century Gothic thriller. It's about Sir Robert Cargrave, a highly respected physician who specializes in muscle paralysis. One morning, he receives a letter from Maude Sardonicus, who Cargrave once knew (and secretly loved) as Maude Randall, inviting him to visit her and her husband in Bohemia. Cargrave feels that he's in need of a vacation, and he'd very much like to reacquaint himself with Maude, so he hastily agrees and makes the journey as soon as he can.

When he meets Maude, she's just as beautiful as he remembered her, but her once bright and lively personality has had a shadow cast over it. He begins to understand why when he meets her husband, Mr. Sardonicus:

...the gentelman before me was the victim of some terrible affliction that had caused his lips to be pulled perpetually apart from each other, baring his teeth in a continuous ghastly smile. It was the same humourless grin I had seen once before: on the face of a person in the last throes of lockjaw. We physicians have a name for that chilling grimace, a Latin name, and as it entered my mind, it seemed to dispel yet another mystery, for the term we use to describe the lockjaw smile is: Risus sardonicus.

Soon enough, Cargrave learns a couple of important things: one is that "Sardonicus" is not the man's real name. His real name is Marek Boleslawski. As a young man, he raided his newly deceased father's grave to liberate a winning lottery ticket, which he subsequently used to start his fortune. But upon digging up his father, he saw that the corpse's face had twisted into an alarming rictus. The shock, horror (and, probably, guilt over what he was doing) caused Marek's own face to twist and freeze into a mad and repellent grin, which he's suffered with ever since. His inability to pronounce "Boleslawski" due to his new deformity lead him, with bitter and intentional irony, to choose "Sardonicus as his new surname (the problem here, though, is that Sardonicus is an extremlely verbal character, and at no point in the story does he avoid plosives or...uh...whatever "M" sounds are called).

The other thing Cargrave learns is that Sardonicus is a monster. He persuaded Maude to invite Cargrave because, predictably, he wanted Cargrave to cure him, but he eventually threatens both Maude and Cargrave by informing them that should Cargrave refuse, or try and fail, to cure him, a quite horrible form of punishment will rain down upon Maude. Filled with rage and disgust, Cargrave has no choice but to agree.

Ray Russell may have been an arrogant little so-and-so, but this really is a damn good story. Russell occasionally overdoes the Victorian Gothic style, what with his use of words like "thither" and "yestereve", but by and large he gets it right, and "Sardonicus" ends up being an awfully nice -- however unintentional, on my part -- companion to Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The thematic similiarites are strong enough between the two that Russell may have been primarily inspired by Stevenson's novella, but "Sardonicus" is its own crazy entity. And yes, it's kind of a loony story, but he makes it work. You buy into it (even that thing about Marek stealing his dead dad's lottery ticket, which I admit sounds absurd when described glibly, as I did, works perfectly fine, fleshed out and in context). And Mr. Sardonicus himself is a great creation, a memorably, hateful and creepy villain. It would be selfish to ask for more than that.

Russell was apparently not very prolific -- I can only find three titles to his name -- but on the basis of this story I'll be happy to seek out the rest. And by the way, according to Russell's gushing introduction, "Comet Wine" is a sequel of sorts to "Sardonicus", in that the hero is, once again, Sir Robert Cargrave. That's all I need to know.