The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 5: It Won't Be Long Now

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Over the years, I’ve read a good handful of stories by Dennis Etchison, a writer of primarily short horror stories, and someone praised to the rafters by the likes of Stephen King, Peter Straub, Karl Edward Wagner, and so on. That good handful of stories I’ve read has never blossomed into a full Etchison habit, however, because Etchison strikes me as the American version of Ramsey Campbell, at least as far as they affect me personally, in that both men garner immense respect from their peers, but leave me a bit cold, and slightly confused as I try to work out what, precisely, is the big deal.
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As with Campbell, I don’t actively dislike Etchison, and in fact have fond memories of the first Etchison story I read, called “Talking in the Dark”, from his collection Red Dreams. That one is a horror story about horror fiction, which is something that always intrigues me, and it’s also, as I remember, fairly pulpy and demonic, which are two words I’ve since learned not to associate with Etchison’s fiction. More typical would be a story like the oft-anthologized “The Dog Park”, another of my early Etchison reads; that one (again, as I remember), is almost all mood, all strangeness. Which is great! It’s just that I’ve never felt like Etchison’s writing chops were at the level everyone else claimed they were. He often writes at the level of pulp, but with an eye towards Robert Aickman-level strangeness. This can be an odd mix.
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For today, I read two stories from Etchison’s collection The Death Artist (which also contains “The Dog Park”, for those interested, though as I implied it’s hard to buy an anthology of modern horror fiction that doesn’t have that story). The first story, “No One You Know”, is told mainly through dialogue, and as it’s only about fourteen pages anyway, this is a bit of a speed-read. It’s also not a supernatural horror story, or even the kind of terrestrial horror that so many modern writers have chosen to explore, by which I mean it’s not about a serial killer. No, this one is more about human cruelty, specifically male cruelty, and its overall impact has the feel of something Neil Labute might have written, before he shifted gears and became a journeyman Hollywood director.
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There’s not much to say about “No One You Know” that it can’t say better for itself. It’s almost all told through phone conversations, between Michael and Jeannie, the girlfriend he’s just cheated on, or Jeannie and her friend Mara, or Michael and Mara, whose connection you can perhaps guess. What pushes this beyond, or at least away, from and ordinary love triangle is the fact that Michael keeps threatening to shoot himself if one or another of the two woman doesn’t take him back, or take him in, depending on who he’s talking to. As a quick shot of a story, “No One You Know” works well enough, with one of those slow-dawning climaxes that has you thinking about, and then remembering, the story longer than you initially believed you would. No, it’s the other story I read, the one with the apparently hideous title “Deadtime Story”, that is really the one to talk about, as it’s the more typically Etchison-esque of the two, the one that really illustrates my pulp/Aickman comparison from earlier.
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“Deadtime Story” is very odd. It’s the story of a young college student named Shaun who works at a convenience store, doesn’t really have any friends, doesn’t have much of anything. As the story begins, Shaun is just showing up for work, and his boss warns him about personal calls on the store phone. Apparently, someone has been calling for him. Shaun tells his boss not to worry, he’ll take care of it, while idly wondering who might have been calling. He finds out soon enough when, after he's alone in the store, the phone rings again, and the man at the other end not only says that he knows Shaun, but that Shaun knows him, and that it's time Shaun paid up.

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It turns out that Shaun does know what this is about, though the reader is left in the dark. It has something to do with:

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That bored night at the Club, looking for something, anything to give the edge back to his life; the ones he had met there, the beers outside, then the game, and the promises -- the pact. In the morning it had seemed like a bad dream. He had hoped it would go away. But now he knew that it would not.

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That plain, cliche'-heavy prose is typical of Etchison, but the effect he's going for ultimately is something else again. The rest of "Deadtime Story" involves Shaun wondering around town, trying to figure a way out of the debt he owes. He goes back to the Club (which in daylight is much more drab and sagging then it had apparently been on the night Shaun made his mistake) and is told that without ID he can't be helped, or speak with anyone. On the bus, he finds himself surrounded by homeless people, one of whom tries to sell him a self-help book. Early in the story, before the mysterious phone call, a few pages are given over to Shaun asking his boss for more hours. Later, several pages are given over to his plan to ditch out on cab fair. Then there's the strange eleven-year-old who's having a party with her friends and wants Shaun to come over.

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The only other story/work of art I can quickly think to compare to "Deadtime Story" is Scorsese's film After Hours. While it's not a great comparison, both are strangely ominous, feature much that is inexplicable, encounters with odd strangers, and take place over a compact period of time. Still, while I have little doubt that someone, somewhere has argued that After Hours is a horror film, it's obviously not, and "Deadtime Story" obviously is. But it has the same sense of pinball randomness as the Scorsese film, less urban than suburban, maybe, though this difference strikes me as not entirely relevant.

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If After Hours can be simplified as a dark night of the soul, but funny, then "Deadtime Story" can possibly be simplified as a dark night of the soul, but not funny at all. An argument over how much, or how little, hope is offered at the end of Scorsese's film, as Griffin Dunne's character finds himself back at work, but no such argument would ever get off the ground in relation to "Deadtime Story" -- Shaun has a greater relation to his fate than Paul does in that film, so perhaps God is more merciful with Paul. Either way, most of the events in both After Hours and the Etchison story can be explained away as a bunch of random shit that just happens. So be careful. And for God's sake, try not to be bored.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 4: You Made Me Like It

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Every year, between Octobers, I go book-shopping with an eye towards replinishing my coffers for the next The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! I enjoy discovering writers who are new to me, or simply finding a good, new, fat anthology full of stories, old and new, based on a single cohesive premise (you know, like vampires). One of the books I scooped up following last year's month o' horror was a book by a writer I'd never heard of named David Nickle. The book is called Monstrous Affections, and the cover, which my wife is not at all fond of, looks like this:

In the introduction by Michael Rowe, I learned that Nickle is a Canadian writer, and that he writes fiction that is not only horror, but which, in Rowe's view, also can be categorized as "Canadian Gothic" (which Rowe claims is an "overused term", though I'll have to take his word for that one). "Canadian Gothic", I have to assume, has a definition that is similar to the US's "Southern Gothic", which is often weird, black, bleak, and occasionally morally rigorous. Having read a few of Nickle's stories now, I can say that he certainly writes horror stories, though any Gothic-ness, outside of what might be considered a natural element of the horror genre, seemed missing. Which is in no way the fault of Nickle, of course -- I just wanted some sense of what we're getting into here.

The first story I read is the first in the book, and it's called "The Sloan Men". One common trope of modern horror fiction is to take an every day event, one that is naturally bursting with discomfort and tension -- like, say, a job interview -- and injecting a shot of the otherworldly, or possibly the unexpectedly violent. Part of the idea, I think, is to allow the reader an identifiable way in to a fantastical premise (if that's the case, I would say that's unnecessary), but more to the point is a desire to highlight the strange and unpleasant aspects of our daily existence. In "The Sloan Men", Nickle chooses as his inciting incident the moment when you first meet the parents of your best gal or, in this case, best fellah. Nickle does not let the unsettling elements build gradually here, beginning the story with the line:

Mrs. Sloan had only three fingers on her left hand, but when she drummed them against the countertop, the tiny polished bones at the end of the fourth and fifth stumps clattered like fingernails.

So right out of the gate we, like Judith, our heroine, are off-kilter. Judith is engaged to Herman Sloan, the son of, obviously, Mr. and Mrs. Sloan. As Judith and Mrs. Sloan sit down to get acquainted, Herman and his father are departing the Sloan's home, to run an errand. In their solitude, we will see that Mrs. Sloan -- subtly abrasive towards Judith at first -- has much on her mind she needs to unload, and much she needs to ask of Judith. Those missing fingers, for instance, were cut off by Mrs. Sloan herself, intentionally. The photo album she gives to Judith to browse through has, on its first page, photos of Mr. Sloan and three young women, sleeping post-orgy. Judith's shock and outrage begins to recede when she feels a certain memory-obscuring mist lift, and she comes to realize how phsyically unpleasant Herman is, and how her lust for him not only makes no sense, and not only has essentially rendered her his slave, but causes her to attempt to rut with him publicly, including a scene in front of her own parents.

Mrs. Sloan has lived most of her life like this -- before meeting Mr. Sloan, she was a lesbian, in a relationship -- and the absence of both Mr. Sloan and Herman has cleared the cobwebs enough, both from her and from Judith, that she's encouraged to finally act, to try, with Judith's help, to escape. As her own hideous memories flood back, Judith finally agrees.

For better or worse, Nickle doesn't get caught up in his inciting incident, because he does have a story to tell, and an ending that, while not off-the-charts original, is still based more in human behavior than in paying off a gag. I remember Stephen King once talking about trying to write a story, one also based on every day discomfort, in this case the impatience mixed with worry one feels when your spouse goes into an airport restroom, and, as the minutes tick by, seemingly disappears within. King said that he kept ramping up the absurdity (the Army is called in at one point) but he had to eventually abandon the story because he couldn't figure out what the hell was going on in that bathroom. Well, Nickle did figure it out, and "The Sloan Men" is a full story, not a one-joke premise.

The other story I read, “The Delilah Party”, is much harder to pin down than “The Sloan Men”. While “The Sloan Men” gave the reader a universal situation to keep things at least somewhat grounded before cutting it all adrift, “The Delilah Party” begins with three characters – Mitchell, Stefan and Trudy – about whom we’re told almost nothing, who are in a situation the vast majority of people will have never experienced themselves. Specifically, one of them, Mitchell, has just been released from police custody, and his laptop has been confiscated. Why he was in police custody, and why his laptop was confiscated, we don’t know, and, in fact, we’ll never know, not precisely, though by the end of the story it will be safe to make certain assumptions.

Mitchell is our main character, a seventeen-year-old boy, who we gather has been recruited, in some vague sense, by whatever group Stefan and Trudy belong to. This group has some connection with a teenage girl names Delilah, whose disappearance is all over the news. When we met said group, they’re all gathered, rather convivially, together in one house watching news updates on Delilah’s case. Outside of Mitchell, who everyone is pleased to see, and who they treat as something of a mascot, albeit one with an important job (what that is, we’re never told, but again, by the end, certain assumptions…) the other members of this odd club are adults, and they’re all waiting for something, or somebody.

Bits of dialogue, and shreds of information, lead the reader to understand that these people are behind Delilah’s disappearance, but as I believe I’ve indicated, Nickle plays most of his cards pretty close to his vest right through the story’s suddenly violent climax. We do know that Mitchell was recruited partly because he knows Delilah (though if Delilah was chosen because she knows Mitchell, or vice versa, is never said) and partly because he’s fucked up. This last aspect of his personality is very important, apparently, and Stefan is quite keen on making note of it, although Mitchell doesn’t do much that’s particular fucked up until the end. And why or how he’s needed, why it’s important that he’s fucked up, and so on so forth, Nickle doesn’t etc.

It’s a strange story, is “The Delilah Party”. The kind of club, or cult, we’re dealing with is stated outright at one point, but given the source of the information we can’t be sure it’s entirely accurate. If it is accurate, then the revelation is a bit of a “That’s it?” moment, but there’s also the sense that Nickle doesn’t want or expect you to make too much out of that anyway. “The Delilah Party” is more about Mitchell, who basically seems like a sweet boy who it would behoove you not to let get too close to you, which turns out to be a problem for the people who recruited him. But not, ultimately, the problem, because they have another one, too, which is either that they’re all monumentally incompetent, or their intended target shares certain skills with Mitchell.

If you don’t know quite what to make of my description of “The Delilah Party”, that’s because I don’t quite know what to make of “The Delilah Party”. It’s an engrossing story, at least on a surface level, but I don’t know what it all adds up to. It doesn’t work as a cautionary tale – information about internet chatrooms might indicate that’s the direction Nickle is going to take things – nor does it seem to care to be. It would function more as a portrait of a deranged personality, or personalities, if we had a clearer picture of those personalities, and what they were up to. But oddly, Nickle doesn’t seem to want that. Is it a good story? Yeah, I guess. Maybe. I think so. It’s certainly not bad. I just don’t know what it wants from me.

Still and all, though, Nickle strikes me as a writer to remember. Monstrous Affections is his first book, and he strikes me as a guy who has more polish and imagination than most.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 3: What a Body

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As a horror writer, Suzy McKee Charnas is probably most closely associated with vampires, which may go some way towards explaining my general lack of interest in her work. Not that I've read a whole hell of a lot of it, but some time ago I did make my way through her signature novel, The Vampire Tapestry. The one thing that appealed to me about that novel was its structure -- the novel is, as the title might imply, made up of interlocking short stories about a single vampire, a professor named Dr. Weyland. I also liked that the morality of the book could shift from story to story, so that the reader could never be comfortable with some easy, phony subversive idea that the vampire was the real good guy. What I didn't like about The Vampire Tapestry is that I simply didn't think it was very well written, or compelling in most of its specifics, or an especially interesting new take on vampires, this last being a near impossible thing for Charnas to have achieved (not that she would have cared, but I have a point of sorts to make here), because I really do not find the vampire species to be as endlessly and transformably fascinating as half of men and I guess all women do. I know, I know, they're darkly erotic. Well, did you know that some people have a thing for licking their lovers' eyeballs? Where's their epic trilogy?

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Fortunately, neither of the Charnas stories I read for today's post have anything whatsoever to do with vampires. The first is a very recent story called "Lowland Sea", which was selected by Ellen Datlow for the second volume of her The Best Horror of the Year series. This is a plague story (the plague in question is nicknamed the "Red Sweat" and it, you know, kills you if you get it) that succeeds in staking out a reasonably unique setting -- the Cannes Film Festival -- and then doing nothing with that setting. For all Charnas seems to care, or know, about films, "Lowland Sea" could have been set anywhere that rich folks gather to flaunt their wealth and pretend to care about global catastrophes. Though I myself am not terribly fond of the way politics gets filtered through the self-righteousness and easy philosophy of the entertainment business, Charnas's stand-in for Hollywood hypocrisy, a writer-director known only as Victor (whose knew film, Hearts of Light, casts him as the white-skinned savior of impoverished African children) is so fantastical in his self-regard that I can't fully believe he's a fair representation of the common reality, even in a more low-key form that Charnas has expanded on for the sake of satire. When his estate has to shut its doors to keep the encroaching Red Sweat out, Victor has his army of showbiz hangers-on put on a show, acting out their own versions of TV shows and so forth, because the entertainment industry can soldier through anything. Or so is the cynical point I think Charnas is making.

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Even worse, the real focus of "Lowland Sea" is an African refugee named Miriam who as the story begins has completed her journey from Victor's lover, one he rescued from an abusive family life in a war-torn country, to housekeeper he's become bored with, to periphery figure he barely remembers exists. This current existence leads to her ultimate fate, and the retribution she's able to squeeze out of it, and element of the story that is reasonably effective. But if Charnas's idea is to blow the whistle on Hollywood waste, indifference, and lip service, all of which are certainly worthy targets, it might have helped if Charnas didn't simply sense that such things existed in the world, but actually understood how they worked, and looked, and sounded. In the story, Miriam expresses a complete indifference to films (because she knew too much about the tricks, both of technology and personality, that allow them to be made), and it's more than clear that Charnas shares this indifference -- twice the inhabitants of Victor's estate are described playing movie trivia games. In one, they're supposed to name as many deaths, and the particulars of said deaths, as they could remember from the Final Destination franchise. In another game, the goal is to list "which actors have played which major roles in green body make-up'. Okay, so, the Final Destination game is stupid, but some less stupid version of a game kind of like that has probably been played by somebody at some point. But the green body make-up one? Is that what Charnas really believes hardcore movie fans talk about? Green body make-up, and who has worn it? If she's so far removed from the world she's writing about that she doesn't even know what the people in that world talk about, why pick it as a target?

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The second story for today is much more successful, though a certain distance from her subject matter, and an unwillingness to engage that subject as it actually exists, can be detected, although this time around the result is just reader amusement, rather than a near complete derailment of the story (to dispense with it quickly: the story was written in 1989, and in it a girl in her early teens recalls the lyric "shoefly pie and apple-pan dowdy"). "Boobs" is the title of this one, and it takes one of the classic metaphors of werewolf stories, or stories of supernatural transformation in general, and makes it explicit. The narrator of "Boobs" is a young girl named Kelsey, and due to her early development, at school she's received the nickname of the title. Kelsey is routinely bullied, by one boy in particular, and despite her stepmom's sincere and good-hearted attempts to help, Kelsey can find no rest. Until one day when she gets her first period and simultaneously transforms into a werewolf. Kelsey takes to this new existence, and decides to use her sense of confidence, and very real physical power, and desires, to her advantage.

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As a narrative, "Boobs" could not be more simple. What's interesting about it where it ultimately goes. I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say that Kelsey, while she is our protagonist, and one we genuinely root for, she possesses a rather inconsistent morality. It's one thing, in fiction, to seek violent retribution against a merciless bully, but it's another thing to not stop there. My source for this story was the Stephen Jones-edited anthology The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men, and in his introductory notes to "Boobs", Jones notes a slight hiccup in the story's publication history, which to do with its first printing being possible only because Charnas agreed to soften the ending. Later, she was able to publish her preferred version (the one Jones prints, though he wasn't the first), and Jones quotes her as saying to her stepdaughter, who also objected to her original ending:
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I reminded her of: a) the tendency in the young toward a very narrow morality ("What hurts me is unforgivably awful and what I do is okay"); b) the surprising failures of empathy in children that can lead to the most shockingly loathsome behavior committed in a very casual manner...

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No argument from me, although the danger of presenting such things on the page -- depending on whether or not you care how people react -- is that since some acts are easier to justify as moral in a work of fiction, immoral acts in the same story performed by the same character, can seem not so different, or can feel like the cost of doing business, especially after our hero(ine) was treated so badly to begin with. But to travel to far in that direction is to engage -- and I'm going to go ahead and mix my metaphors here, because it's late and I'm sleepy -- in some rather tiresome hand-wringing. Besides which, "Boobs" is a first person story, and Kelsey's way of seeing things is simply her way of seeing things. Any attempt to express what Charnas herself believed would have been dishonest, and it's to Charnas's credit that she simply let Kelsey speak.

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One other note: before reading "Boobs", I was reminded of its existence not by flipping through The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men, but rather a completely different lycanthropic anthology, this one edited by John Skipp, called Werewolves and Shapeshifters: Encounters with the Beast Within. "Boobs" is not included there, but in an introductory note to a story by Cody Longfellow called "Howl of the Sheep", John Skipp makes a passing and admiring reference to Charnas's story, and says that it was the inspiration for the film Ginger Snaps. Except that I've been able to uncover no credit for Charnas's story in the credits for Ginger Snaps. I don't necessarily blame Skipp -- he should have checked his facts, but it's a reasonable assumption to make, considering that the core idea of Ginger Snaps is, also, the core idea of "Boobs", except of course that Charnas's story came first. Ginger Snaps is a bit of a cult classic, having spawned at least two sequels. I wonder just how much tooth enamel Charnas has ground away in the years since its release.

The Marlin, the Trout

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I've decided to break into the very early goings of this year's edition of The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! in order to discuss this movie about some website that I've heard some people have left the theater claiming they enjoyed. And this is the thing about David Fincher's The Social Network -- everybody loves it. Or nearly everybody, and so far, but still, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive up to this point. I can only imagine that Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin are sitting in their respective homes, patiently awaiting the crashing waves of backlash that are unquestionably set to sweep them away.

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Well, I'm not going to be a part of those waves, despite the fact that I'm a minuscule part of the internet that Sorkin doesn't seem to like very much. Which is fine, because I don't happen to like Sorkin very much, and in fact initially resisted The Social Network not because, as many others seem to be doing, it's a movie about Facebook (follow me on Facebook's Networked Blogs, won't you?), but because of Sorkin's involvement. I'm simply not a fan, and I've given the man a fair shake, having seen several episodes each of his major TV shows, and a number of films he's written. His rapid-fire, "Hey lookit me, I'm Ben Hecht!" brand of wiseass banter that makes us laugh as we cry has not only always seemed to me to be too clever by half, but also led me to an understanding of what "too clever by half" actually means, which is this: the cleverness is presumed by the writer to be inherent in the words being spoken, but fails to manifest as such in the ears of the listener. Something like that anyway.

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Saying now that I believe The Social Network is the finest work of Sorkin's career probably sounds hopelessly faint, but I truly do believe the man has written a hell of a good movie here, and I'll return to Sorkin in a minute. First, though, I'll remind you that The Social Network is a film about Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), an arrogant, brilliant computer programmer who, while at Harvard, is pegged by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer, in an extraordinary feat of "twin acting", which, on the levels of both performance and camera trickery, is all the more brilliantly effective for being so casual) as just the guy to help them launch their intra-Harvard social networking website. Zuckerberg accepts, and then becomes, as far as the Winklevosses (or "Winklevi", as Zuckerberg refers to them at one point), a hermit, only to suddenly become the big man on campus because he, along with best friend Eduardo Saverin (Alex Garfield), is the genius behind another website called "The Facebook", which at the level of idea is very similar to the Winklevosses site. As The Social Network is primarily about the legal turmoil that followed the inception of Facebook, and even more about the shocking levels of condescending egomania that can exist in the mind and soul of a single man, it's Zuckerberg's indifferent (on his part) break with the Winklevosses that the ball gets rolling on a film that is pretty relentless as a piece of storytelling, and as a piece of entertainment.

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Because The Social Network is so packed full of words, the film feels like it belongs more to Aaron Sorkin and that excellent cast of actors than it does to director David Fincher, whose attachment pre-release was the soothing balm many people felt they needed to get past the fact that this was a movie about Facebook. But Fincher's craftsmanship is most gratefully noted by me, because this goddamn movie about Facebook absolutely zips along. Meanwhile, on a purely visual level, The Social Network is both beautiful and amusing to look upon. "Amusing" because Fincher's pallette might best be described as "dim" -- watching The Social Network, you might think that the Harvard University campus was in a state of perpetual power outage. In a more forgiving state of mind, one might think that, with all the candles and natural light, Fincher was taking a pretty major cue from Kubrick and Barry Lyndon, though with perhaps a less logical basis for his lighting choices. Either way, the movie looks great, even inviting; I wasn't blessed enough to attend Harvard, but if I knew, or thought, that it constantly looked so rich and dusty and medieval, I probably would have studied harder in high school. Plus, apparently if you give girls Ecstasy they'll kiss each other.

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I've mentioned before that the cast is excellent, and it is. Prior to this, I've been lukewarm on Jesse Eisenberg, and it's very possible I still am. If the idea behind Adam Sandler's magnificent performance in Punch-Drunk Love was that the character he'd been playing in films like Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore suddenly found himself transformed into an actual human being, then Eisenberg's work as Mark Zuckerberg is the sinister twin of the awkward, twitchy fellows he's been playing, with some wearying overlap, in Adventureland and Zombieland. But all that means is that Eisenberg is, at the very worst, perfectly cast as Zuckerberg. At best, he's as good an actor as everybody has been insisting he always was. Eisenberg is helped considerably by two things, the first and most obvious being that Aaron Sorkin has given him some truly plum moments of stratospherically egomaniacal condescension to play throughout. These moments remind me of what I used to consider Sorkin's best piece of writing, the "I am God" speech from Malice, and they can pop up anywhere, but they most memorably occur in the scenes when Eisenberg is being deposed for one or another of the various lawsuits in which he's become embroiled (these deposition scenes also form the film's spine, everything else spinning off from them in flashback). My favorite is when Zuckerberg, in full-bore sneering wiseass mode, checks the very simple math of the attorney for his former best friend, Eduardo.

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Who, by the way, got screwed by Zuckerberg, and is suing him. Because Zuckerberg is an asshole who knows just about everything, except what being an asshole is one day going to cost him. The Zuckerberg of the film was always headed this way, but he's helped along by former Naptser mastermind Sean Parker, played here by Justin Timberlake in, I must say, a very finely tuned performance. The way Timberlake takes Parker from charismatic whizkid to someone you want to punch straight in the mouth is really deft, and might remind the viewer of similar, real-life experiences, in which a friend or friendly acquaintance gradually revealed themselves to not be quite the fun, pleasant guy you thought, but rather someone with a heart full of serpents; and it might remind you of your own reaction, which was one of anger and disappointment, but, surprisingly, not quite surprise.

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Since The Social Network really is Sorkin's film, it's fitting that if anyone gets in the film's way, it's him. Sorkin's style that I've so disliked in the past annoyed me only three or four times in the course of the movie, which is about nineteen or twenty fewer than I'd expected, but which are still damaging. The whole chicken cruelty subplot, which is actually a crucial hinge in the Zuckerberg/Saverin friendship, comes off as so desperately writerly, no matter how closely it might mirror the reality (I have no idea, for the record), that it set my anti-Sorkin sensors flaring. Worse are the various conversational digressions (if you've seen the film, take the "3,000 pound marlin" bit as an example), meant to capture, I suppose, natural human speech and distracted thought processes, but from Sorkin are a bit proud, and unfunny (the latter being especially noticable in a film that is often very funny).

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Then there's the neatness of it all. To hear Sorkin tell it, Zuckerberg's monstrous ambition is fueled, including the monstrous part, by the girl (Rooney Mara) who dumped him. I have no problem with the idea that this moment, which is The Social Network's opening, had a profound impact on him, but I could have done without the later scene, when Zuckerberg sees her again, their meeting goes poorly for him, and he immediately decides to expand Facebook yet again. The Social Network doesn't exhaust itself trying to pin Zuckerberg down, for which I'm thankful, but when it veers that way -- out of obligation, I feel -- it's pretty simplistic. As is the film's final line, which if it wasn't the last line I'd quote in full. Suffice it to say, it's the kind of line that sounds good, but which leads me to wish the screenwriter were in the room so I could ask him "And what exactly does that mean?" Coming at the very end as it does, is a bit unfortunate.

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So the movie's merely excellent. It is not, I don't think, transcendent, which is about the level at which a lot the praise so far is being pitched. And initially, after seeing the film, I thought I might have to do something about that. You know, to stand up for injustice and everything, and begin a campaign to chip away at the Tower of the Overpraisers (as I'd begun to think of them, and it, the instant the end credits started to roll). But then I thought, well, maybe it's enough that The Social Network is really, really good. Maybe that's not a good enough reason for a pacifist such as myself to launch an assault. Then I thought that sometimes this whole deal where people compare and argue over their individual reactions to a given film can sometimes, if you're not careful, get a little bit silly.

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The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 2: Decaying Vegetable Matter

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When you do an internet search for the name "Oliver Onions", you are more likely to gather information on the Italian folk music duo than on the English writer who actually had that name, and wrote dozens of books, and was best known for writing ghost stories. Why this should be, I don't know, although the Italian guys wrote a lot of soundtracks for Bud Spencer/Terence Hill movies, while most of the English guy's books have turned to dust. Of those books, the biggest exception, the great survivor, is a collection of short stories from 1911 called Widdershins (a word which means, according to Onions in his brief author's note, "contrary to the course of the Sun"). The story, or rather novella, that serves as Widdershins' launching point is called "The Beckoning Fair One", and if, as seems likely, Widdershins is the sole reason Onions is remembered today, "The Beckoning Fair One" is quite possibly the sole reason Widdershins is still in print.

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I say "quite possibly" because, first off, who among us can know such things, but also, and more to the point, because "The Beckoning Fair One" is thus far the only Oliver Onions story I've read (and that's pronounced "oh-nee-ons", by the way, not "un-yuns", which might be another reason his star has faded -- that's like having a last name spelled "Mouse" and insisting it be pronounced "moe-yoos". I'd refuse to reprint your books, too, Mr. Oh-nee-ons!!) But throughout my life as a reader of horror fiction, "The Beckoning Fair One" is one of those ubiquitous titles, along with "The Great God Pan" and "The Rats in the Walls" and The Turn of the Screw. If you hadn't read one of those stories, it was made abundantly clear that some day you damn well better, if you expected to have any authority in this field. "The Beckoning Fair One" is one of the tentpoles of horror literature, whereas the remaining stories found in Widdershins -- "Benlian", "The Accident", "Hic Jacet", for instance -- aren't, exactly. Which is no comment on their quality, because I'm in no position to make any such comment. But Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft and Henry James all had more than one story to live on. Onions doesn't, apparently, and I can't help but wonder if there's a reason for that.

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Because I didn't much care for "The Beckoning Fair One". I mean, it's fine. But it's also a bit exhausting. At 70-ish pages, the plot of "The Beckoning Fair One" requires almost no summarization, consisting, as it does of the travails of a novelist moving into a new flat, after which point he stops writing the novel he'd been working on, and slowly goes mad, or maybe he's being possessed by a ghost. Both of these things are equally likely! Who knows the real answer, and so on.

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The very idea of summarizing a story like "The Beckoning Fair One" defeats me, even though there are interesting elements here and there. I do like that our protagonist, Paul Oleron, is what we would now call a mid-list writer, who writes fiction very much as a profession, with one eye on artistic ambitions and the other on a living wage, and there was a time, after Oleron announces to his friend Elsie Bengough (whose love for Oleron is not only unreciprocated, but also unnoticed) that he plans on ditching the fifteen chapters of his novel, Romilly Bishop, he's already written so he can start from scratch, that I thought perhaps Onions was aiming to marry the themes plumbed so deeply in New Grub Street, George Gissing's 1891 novel of tragedy, ambition and pandering in England's literary world, with a classical ghost story, and I became quite interested (quite!). But Onions isn't doing that -- Oleron is a writer, I suspect, because so is Oliver Onions, and it just seemed like the thing to do. Plus, it simplifies things narratively, cutting out any co-workers that and otherwise employed Oleron -- who will become a recluse over the course of the story -- might have to deal with, and limiting his necessary social interaction to Elsie, and a nosy neighbor or two.

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Instead, the only thing that might count as interesting here is the -- sigh -- ambiguity regarding whether or not the ghost, who manifests itself as a female through action -- the house seems jealous of Elsie, Oleron hears the sound of a woman brushing her hair -- rather than appearance, is real. Because it might not be! When Oleron starts to go crazy, it may not be because a ghost is making that happen. He might actually be going crazy. And I'm just flat tired of this sort of thing. It can be handled brilliantly (see Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla"), but by and large it's something of a trick, even a cheat. The writer refuses to commit, so the reader, who may be biased, is able to choose the interpretation that best suits his or her taste. What's so wrong with that? you might ask. Well, it sticks in my craw more than a little when I hear that Edmund Wilson was fully on board with James's The Turn of the Screw, right up until somebody told him that James always intended the story to be taken as a straight-up ghost story, whereupon he grabbed his copy off the shelf and shit-canned it at once (I'm speaking figuratively here, at least as far as I know). It betrays a certain embarrassment about the very genre you're writing in, an embarrassment it is assumed the reader shares, and therefore a window is opened that will allow us all to scamper out the back, unnoticed by the Edmund Wilson's of the world.

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The other thing -- and I've mentioned this before -- is that stories like "The Beckoning Fair One" get praised, independent of their literary qualities, for the simple reason that they employ that most sought after creative device that we call "ambiguity". Ambiguity, I've come to learn, is an absolute good. Or so we're supposed to think. The sort of people who think that the absence of irony (which means there's an abundance of sincerity) is always a bad thing are the same people who think a fantastical premise presented with conviction and without ambiguity is a sign of artistic weakness. By this rationale, if you read a really good epistolary novel, no non-epistolary novel can possibly match up.

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Ambiguity's just a device, is what I'm saying, and when it's applied to a ghost story like "The Beckoning Fair One", it has the tendency, in my view, to render the whole thing meaningless. By the end of Onions's story, some rather unfortunate things have occurred, and these things are irreversible. Given that we don't know the answer and never will, what in the world does it matter whether there really was a ghost or not? More to the point, what good can "deciding for ourselves" do? And since this is a fiction anyway, which renders this next question the only one that matters, what does leaving the question hang add to the reader's enjoyment or appreciation or understanding of what's just been read? No new or extra or brighter light will be shone on the story's climax, whichever side of the ghost fence we find ourselves on. So what, finally, is the function of Onion's ambiguity? I submit that, whether writers like Onions and a host of others actually felt this particular motivation, the function is to allow those who would rather not think they've just read a horror story to convince themselves that they haven't.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 1: The Beginning of a Whole New Way of Life

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Joan Samson died in 1976. At the time, she was working on her second novel, and her first novel, The Auctioneer, published in 1975, was being prepped as a film. The film, for reasons lost to time and indifference, never happened. Had the film been made, and had it been any good, Samson's novel might not be quite as obscure as it is today. Which isn't to say that it's entirely forgotten: a bathroom/reference volume published last year called The Horror Book of Lists includes a list put together by Bentley Little of his favorite horror novels written by people who, for one reason or another, never turned to the genre again, and on Little's list was Samson's The Auctioneer. Not only that, but later this month Centipede Press, home of insanely overpriced horror fiction, is putting out a deluxe reprint of the novel, with an introduction by crime and horror writer (and Westerns, too) Ed Gorman.

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Reading the novel now, it's not hard to see why some writers and editors in the field have refused to let The Auctioneer die. It's a flawed, but mostly very good, piece of work, both very much of its time, and timeless, and original in a way the modern horror fiction almost never is. The story Samson tells is a simple one, pushed, at times, to frustrating lengths. At the very beginning of The Auctioneer, we meet most of our major characters. There is the Moore family, headed up by John, and his wife Mim. They are farmers, whose home and land is located at the very limits of the small town of Harlowe, New Hampshire. They have one child, a four year-old girl named Hildie, and John's mother (known in the novel only as "Ma") lives with them as well. As the novel begins, they are visited by the town sheriff, a pleasant put sluggish man named Bobby Gore. There has been a severe uptick in crime around Harlowe lately, severe by their standards anyway, which was topped off by the strangulation murder of Amelia Fawkes, who rented out rooms to out-of-towners. Gore has been unable to solve this murder, a fact which both troubles and embarrasses him. During his visit with the Moores, Gore lays out the essentials of Samson's story when he relates two things: an auction has been scheduled to support the hiring of police deputies (Gore is not only the sheriff, but the only cop in Harlowe, period), and both parts of that idea -- the auction, and the need for deputies -- were suggested by Harlowe's newest citizen, Perly Dunsmore. Dunsmore, we learn, is an auctioneer by trade, and though he is a city boy by birth, and general worldliness, he has been to Harlowe before. In fact, a year or so before he moved to the town for good, he rented a room from Amelia Fawkes, and it's her home that he's recently moved into.

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This auction, Gore goes on to say, will need items to auction off, and the Moores give him a few odds and ends that they neither need nor use. After the auction, the Moores are surprised to receive a check from Dunsmore, for a small percentage of the money their donated items sold for.

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After this, however, problems develop, and they are twofold, or maybe threefold: the auctions don't stop; the request for donations don't stop; and in fact become more aggressive, and Gore doesn't stop hiring deputies. In John Moore's opinion, Harlowe barely needs any deputies, let alone the vast number it's accruing. Worse still is the fact that most of the men who are hiring on to the police force are known troublemakers, even functionally psychotic, like Red Mudgett, a man with, among other things, animal torture in his past. Mudgett, along with Gore, seem to have become Perly Dunsmore's top men. But how does Perly Dusnmore rate having top men? He's not an elected official of any kind. He's not even a native to the town. He's just an auctioneer.

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You will perhaps have some sense of where this is going. Soon, donations for the auctions are simply taken, and resistance is met with barely veiled threats. Sometimes, the Moores hear about certain townsfolk having bad accidents, a few of which are fatal. This lends a certain verisimilitude to the threats, and the Moores, for all the anger they come to feel, as all their possessions are whisked away, including their milking cows and farm tools, find themselves completely unable to resist Dunsmore's growing power.

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The Auctioneer is a strange book. Sporadically, it feels like Samson intended it to be a kind of catch-all allegory for the 1970s, especially during the brief and jarring references to the Vietnam War. But just when you think it's going to be awfully hard to tie her existing metaphors to that conflict, she drops it, as if even she realized it was a bad idea. In fact, Samson drops a lot of things, such as religion. Early on, before Dunsmore's true nature begins to show itself, we're told that he plans to open up a Sunday school for the children. In general, though Harlowe has a church, and a preacher, the townspeople seem rather religiously indifferent, and the possibility that Samson intends for The Auctioneer to be the umpteenth "savage"/fish-in-a-barrel critique on organized religion (rural division) to appear in the annals of horror literature seems strong. And Dunsmore does open his school, and Hildie Moore does attend. But we never see her there, and though she stops going because Dunsmore "scared" her, we never know why. And that's the last we hear of the Sunday school. Further, none of Dunsmore's auction monologues ever veer into religious territory, and while one scene in the novel does take place in church, which is now being overseen by Dunsmore's deputies, nothing happens there. It's a basic church service that doesn't effect anybody, or the novel, one way or the other.

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No, what Samson really seems to have her eye on is gentrification, of the rural rather than the urban sort. It's clear very early on that the whole point of Dunsmore's scheme is to drive Hawthorne's current citizens out, by any means necessary, so that other, better-heeled folks can swoop in. If this idea sounds insufficiently horrific, in genre terms, and more of a satirical conceit, you should remember that satire is, for better or worse, a fairly common element of horror, and, in any case, The Auctioneer isn't in any way funny, nor is it intended to be. It's meant to be plainly sinister, and mournful of the death of a certain way of life, as well as angry over the apathy towards the displaced (the world over, I should add, and not just in rural America. Hence the nods to Vietnam. But mainly rural America). That apathy can be felt not just by distant observers, Samson seems to be saying, but by those being displaced, as well, because in her novel John Moore shows a distrust of Dunsmore very early on, a distrust that only grows exponentially, but he only manages to force himself to do anything about his situation until near the book's end.

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The Auctioneer is a frustrating but oddly propulsive novel. Moore's inaction can make you want to tear out your hair, but this is clearly part of what Samson's going on about. At the same time, this very inaction can rob the story of any momentum, until Dunsmore demands something even more outrageous. Which he always does, and pretty soon the auctions are selling things that cross a line far behind personal possessions and milking cows. I'll tell you, speaking of this book being weird: eventually, Dunsmore is auctioning off children, which is a possibility you might have your eye on well in advance. So this puts Hildie Moore in jeopardy, which John and Mim Moore take quite seriously, teaching little Hildie how to hide any time a car pulls up to the house. But the threat of Hildie being taken is all Samson ever writes about. There is no point where someone actually comes after her. This, to me, is an odd choice for a writer to make, if the writer wishes to build a sense of helpless terror and dread. I'm not saying it's a bad choice, mind you -- just an odd one.

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Overall, there's a sense that The Auctioneer isn't interested in paying off anything in a traditional way, and it does have a hell of a nice last line, as well. And, as I said, it's oddly propulsive; though for much of the book John appears only able to talk a big game about fighting back, I was still weirdly compelled to read about it. Meanwhile, apart from its central theme, Samson's points, such as they are, are scattered around and diffuse. But The Auctioneer still carries an undeniable power, which -- though I really don't wish to overstate things -- has a whiff of the same kind of hopelessness that Kafka sometimes trafficked in. Okay, let's not go nuts, but I'm just saying that I think I see where Samson was going with this. It's a terrible shame she was only allowed to go this far.

By the Time You Read This, I Will Already Be Dead

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Dead set on cranking up The Kind of Face You SLASH!!!! again, that is!

Yes, October is peeking around the corner, which means that very soon film and book bloggers everywhere will be assaulting their readers with horror and Halloween themed posts. 'Round these parts, what I do is, I read horror fiction all month, and every day I write about what I've read. Simple! Yeah, for you maybe! To be honest, I came very close to not doing it this year, because -- without getting too whiny about it -- this project is a pretty big commitment. But I've done it two years in a row now, and given my tastes I want to do something for October, and if not this, then what? And if not me, then who? I mean, other than Will Errickson.

For those of you new to this blog, or at least to what I do every October (or rather, both Octobers), this link should take you to every The Kind of Face You SLASH!!!! I've written so far, so you'll have a pretty good idea of what this entails. One thing that might not be obvious is that I do my durndest to focus each post on one, or possibly two, writers I haven't covered before (which is the other thing -- every novel and story I write about will have been read for the first time, by me, for the purposes of this October dealy). I admit that I haven't stuck to this arbitrary rule every single post -- I've written more than one post at least partially covering fiction by Steve Rasnic Tem, for instance -- but for the most part that's been the plan. This year, I can't say for sure if it still will be. As I say, it's a more or less arbitrary rule, and as I enter, which I'll be doing Oct. 1st, my 63rd post of this type, the number of writers that I both want to write about, and whose work I have ready to hand, and who I haven't already covered, dwindles. Dwindles, I say, but doesn't expire, so we'll see what we'll see. I'm just giving you a head's up, for whatever that's worth.

The only other thing I want to mention here is that as I prepare for The Kind of Face You SLASH!!!!, you'll probably see far fewer new blog posts until October. I'd really like to do as much early prep work as I can before we begin, to ease some of the daily grind. So for the next eight or nine days, don't expect to see much, or anything, new here. But after that, you won't be able to get away from me! There'll be so many new posts that you'll be "Hey, that's a lot of posts! Stop it, you dick!" And I'll be "But I thought this is what you wanted!" Then you'll grab your keys and storm out, slamming the door behind you, and I'll fall to my knees sobbing. By that time, October will probably be over, so who cares?