Beneath This Sea is Sea: The Books of 2017

I feel like no matter how long my fallow periods in the writing of this blog last, this one, my annual list of The Best Books What I Did Read, will always draw me back. I’ll spend most of one day at the end of every year writing it.

Anyway, if I ever don’t, it won’t be on a year such as this one, in which I almost doubled the number of books read in my previous best reading year, and almost tripled what I would guess my average to be. Because of this, while much of what’s to follow should be familiar to anyone who has read these lists of mine in the past – these books are not necessarily listed in an order of preference, until the last few, which I do consider the third, second, and first best books I read this year, etc. – you will find a whole new second thing here: the entire list of books I read in 2017. I include this entirely and only out of boastfulness; you’ll notice that I include no indication, outside of the main list of separated “best” books, what I thought of any of these, so other than saying to you “Lookit all these books I read,” what possible purpose could it serve? It should go without saying that not every book I liked can make the list of “best” books, so many of the uncommented-upon titles I liked very much, indeed. Others I hated down to my bones. I’ll let you guess which are which! And if you see a book on there that you count as one of your favorites, just assume that I despise it, and you, and all you represent.

All right, let’s get this fucking nonsense rolling! I’d like to be finished by dinner-time.

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King – For many years, after Cell, I was out of the habit of reading Stephen King, and this had been a habit I’d maintained as avidly as a smoker for many, many years. A few years back I decided to take it back up again on a limited basis, and it has provided me with limited, but real, enjoyment. This book, which I skipped even during my more passionate years due to my callow assumption that it would be dull, has by far been the most rewarding. The title character tells the entire story, the book written as though she were speaking to the cops who have arrested her for the murder of the old woman she worked for, and King finds greater success with this conceit than I expected. Dolores is a full person, her life and story equally so, with all the suspense and rural Gothic you could want from a book like this. That it’s sister novel is the nebulously, mysteriously, but unmistakably, and thematically, linked Gerald’s Game, also published in 1992, just makes the whole thing more powerful.

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally – This year was supposed to be my big Keneally year, but this, also the first book I read in 2017, is the only one I got to. Based on the true story of aborigine in 19^th century Australia who after years of being treated unjustly by white Australians, suddenly embarks on a rampage of violence. Harrowing and at times genuinely shocking, Keneally doesn’t make the mistake of glorifying what Blacksmith does. He’s simply saying, if one must simplify this complex novel, that that led to this.

Cops and Robbers by Donald E. Westlake – I wrote about it, briefly, here.

The Wardrobe Mistress by Patrick McGrath – One of several novels I read this year that actually came out in 2017, and one of several by writers I rank as favorites, McGrath’s unusual pseudo-ghost story about a woman dealing with the death of her actor husband, a few years after the end of World War II, and some alarming revelations that follow, may suffer from an ending that, while perfectly fine as far as what actually happens goes, feels so rushed that I wondered if McGrath’s manuscript was due later that afternoon. But that’s ultimately no big deal, because the rest of the novel is so sad, and so unnerving, and so full of little bits about the English theater at that time, the environment, and bombed out London. I think it’s McGrath’s best in years.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill – The story of a marriage teetering on the point of collapse, told in a meticulously assembled series of incidents and digressions and thoughts on whatever subject happens to seem relevant to the protagonist, even if she’s  unable to articulate why all this makes sense together. I don’t think I could articulate why this all works together myself, but it does. It’s like being inside the head of a sane person: everybody’s head is a jumble, even when it all makes sense.

Othello by William Shakespeare – It’s good! Also, I think Othello being a Moor might actually be relevant.

Dearest by Peter Loughran – Sort of like The Collector by John Fowles, but less ponderous, and written in a way that evokes actual life as it’s lived by some. It’s all the more disturbing for it. Relegated to the genre bin and therefore “disposable.”

Go Tell It On the Mountain  by James Baldwin – One of three books written by James Baldwin I read this year (as with Keneally, it was supposed to be more), along with If Beale Street Could Talk and The Fire Next Time. This novel, Baldwin’s first, stands out for me in the way it tells the story of John Grimes, a young boy living in Harlem, by telling the story of his mother, his father, and his step-father, each of whom lives completely here, and each of whom lives to create this heartbreaking little kid. Some knowledge of Baldwin’s life will help tell part of the story that the censors wouldn’t allow Baldwin to tell in 1953, though certain dots are probably not that hard to connect anyway.

Dead Air by Matthew M. Bartlett – I wrote about it briefly here.

Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher – An epistolary novel comprised entirely of letters (and e-mails, etc.) of recommendation written by one crushed-by-life English professor would seem to promise nothing but repetition, but Schumacher’s novel, which won awards and everything, is one of the funniest I’ve read in years. That the bitterness of Jason Fitger, the central academic, is predictable, because there is a tradition of such novels in English literature, means nothing because his bitterness is so pointed and eloquently nasty. I think the ending takes a too-sharp turn into the realm of “emotional weight” and so forth, but that’s fine. It’s one of the most satisfying and entertaining novels I read this year.

Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai – Conspiracy, death, animal cruelty, vast emptiness, endless alcohol, loneliness. It’s sort of a comedy. Hungary as the end of the world.

Green River Killer by Jeff Jensen and Jonathan Case – A true crime comic book about Jensen’s father, the lead detective in the hunt for Gary Ridgway, and the decades of his life he gave to finding a monster. The climactic moment between Tom Jensen and Ridgway is more frightening than any cinematic serial killer you could name.

At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien’s famously askance, let’s say, look at the Irish spirit, as well as Irish myth and stories, is very odd, and very funny, but at the end it suddenly put me in mind of Wallace’s Infinite Jest, in the most unexpected way. A dark cloud persists when I think of it now.

Ill Will by Dan Chaon – The thriller of the year, as far as I’m concerned. Wrote about it here.

An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge – Speaking of post-war English theater, this novel, perhaps Bainbridge’s best-known outside of her masterpiece The Bottle Factory Outing, approaches that world with a touch more warmth than McGrath did in The Wardrobe Mistress. But just a touch. Once again, Bainbridge strikes a tone of skepticism regarding people and the way they go about things, and by the end that skepticism is proved to have been warranted. It’s good, and fun, until it’s not.

The King in the Golden Mask by Marcel Schwob – One of the key works of early French surrealism, Schwob’s 1892 collection of stories also shows how inherently linked that movement is with weird horror fiction. Not that that’s what Schwob was writing by another name, but he sure did write it sometimes, and helped mark a path. The title story seems clearly influenced by Poe, elsewhere there’s devil worship and horrible violence, and there is no story here that isn’t imbued with the terrible unease felt when nothing feels right, or when everything is certain to go wrong.

Poor George by Paula Fox – Fox’s first novel is about a miserably unhappy teacher who meets a troubled kid when that kid breaks into the teacher’s home. The teacher then, against his wife’s objections, hopes to take the kid under his wing. Less a comedy of errors than a full-on disaster, and less a satire than the state of things delivered with a sad, heavy sigh.

The Big Bounce by Elmore Leonard – Wrote about it briefly here.

Point Omega by Don DeLillo – One of four DeLillo novels I read this year, an easily my (unexpected) favorite. This very short novel is political in its inspiration, but the power of the story – about a scholar with government connections being interviewed in the desert by a documentary filmmaker, about the scholar’s daughter who visits, and what happens then – is in its ultimate inexplicability. What’s unsettling isn’t what’s immediate about it, but what’s timeless.

My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf – More true crime, more serial killers, more comic books. This approach to the subject is truly unusual, though: Backderf went to high school with Jeffrey Dahmer, and hung out with him, and saw the budding psychopath without realizing what he was seeing. This perspective allows for an element of the everyday that accounts of the lives of serial killers often lack – it’s all nightmare, all horror, either inflicted on the killer as a child, or inflicted by the killer as an adult on others. Which isn’t to suggest that My Friend Dahmer isn’t chilling, because it is. It’s just that for once we, who will hopefully never face something or someone like this in our lives, are forcefully reminded that these things happen in the same world we wake up to every morning.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer – The first of VanderMeer’s Souther Reach trilogy, this short novel is about an expedition of women (not irrelevant) scientists, both hard and social, sent to explore a section of America that has been transformed, mysteriously and lethally. What they discover there is frightening and mystifying, otherworldly but somehow, seemingly, rooted inside this very planet. Though I have enough faith in VanderMeer to expect the trilogy to end well (I’ve also read the second book, Authority, which I liked, though not as much), I think Annihilation could have stood alone, brilliantly.

Holidays from Hell by Reggie Oliver – This, Oliver’s most recent collection of stories, would be a great place to start for anyone new to his brand of classic, yet nevertheless unique, horror fiction. Oliver is able to take premises that, if you think long enough about them, seem unsupportable, as he does here in the title story, which is about mysterious visitors at a seaside inn (that’s all I’ll say) and infuse the proceedings with puns before casting a genuine pall over the reader. Which isn’t to say this is his only mode, but rather an example of what he can do. My favorite horror book of the year.

Voices in the Night by Steven Millhauser – Wrote about it here.

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion – Life in California as existential nightmare spiral. Which was my guess, anyway.

Quake by Rudolph Wurlitzer – Speaking of California, nightmares, spirals, and so on, Wurlitzer’s novel about a massive earthquake turning Los Angeles into a fast-evolving Apocalypse really is just one damn thing after another, told with a lack of affect that seems, well, telling.

The Eighth Dwarf by Ross Thomas – My first Thomas novel, and it’s a blast. It’s curious to me how this novel, about the kind of men who hunted Nazis immediately after the war ended, and what the rest of the world did about that (not that I think this is a work of reportage, mind you) comes in at under 300 pages, whereas a similar novel written today would easily crack 500. I’m also interested in the fact that the title character is literally a dwarf but there really aren’t many jokes about that fact, nor is he, to be honest, the main character. I’m also interested in books like this which characters the author chooses to kill off and which he spares. There is much here to be interested in and amused by.

An Artist of the Floating World  by Kazuo Ishiguro – Lots of post-war shit in my 2017 reading, apparently. This, Ishiguro’s second novel, and one of the last two of his books I needed to read (I have The Unconsoled on deck, finally, for 2018), is about a Japanese artist and illustrator who, in the years following his country’s defeat, has to reckon with – or choose not to reckon with – his place in the war effort. It’s a bracing, complicated, and damning novel.

The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns – Comyns takes the titular fairy tale and turns it into a story of class, love, friendship, and freak tragedy. Comyns was a genius, seemingly without effort.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass – “The Pedersen Kid,” Gass’s novella about violence, numbing cold, and a particularly grim sort of freedom, is as good as you’ve heard, and is without question the centerpiece of this 1968 collection. But everything his is exhilarating in its way – though Gass’s prose is often very dense, certain passages have a striking clarity, like this from “Icicles”, about a realtor’s crisis (look, I have to describe it somehow, and I ain’t got all day):  

So he’d hear Pearson preach the power of imagination: Fender! think what you’re selling! happiness is is our commodity! you want to dream for them – dream! But Fender remembered how a Baby Ruth wrapper had ruined a sale, it had gone through their dreams like a brick…

Everything is worthwhile, including the preface, which is long, and reads like a writer’s autobiography.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert – Yeah, it’s not bad. I’m not sure what I can add, other than to say it is, or should be, the model of moral fiction that neither condemns nor glorifies, and of fiction that creates an entire community of not just people but buildings, houses, trees. It has also instilled in me what I expect will be a lifelong distrust of apothecaries.

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis – A mad, romping smear of a kind of autobiographical something, soaked along the way with a bathtub-full of mortal dread. It’s a very odd book, in other words, and the comedy may not always lay easy upon it, but God is it absorbing.

Hell Hound by Ken Greenhall – Finally back in print, thanks to the good people at Valancourt Books, I’ve wanted to read this book for ages. It doesn’t disappoint. About a chillingly smart pit bull named Baxter that enters a suburban neighborhood and takes what it wants. Which is not all Hell Hound is. This novel is ultimately more disturbing, even sleazy, then I’d expected, but never dumb or pandering or cheap. It left me feeling very uncomfortable.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – Robinson may be the finest writer of prose currently alive in America. As all such proclamations are, this is arguable. But Gilead, about a minister named John Ames as he nears the end of his life and reflects on his faith, his family, his neighbors, war, the land, life, and death, written as a long message written by Ames to his young son, is more full of exquisite language and imagery than any other five contemporary novels you might choose to squish together into one volume and throw into the pit with it.

Last Look by Charles Burns – Another comic book (oh yeah, that’s another difference in the list this year: this one has some comics in it), and possibly my favorite one. In Black Holes, Burns used horror as both metaphor and as literal presence in the world of the story. With Last Look he doesn’t something different, and harder to pin down. Last Look may seem smaller than Black Holes, but like his magnum opus it is entirely impossible to shake months, and I suspect years, after putting it down.

The North Water by Ian McGuire – Wrote about it a little bit here. Suffice it to say, comparing it (in incident if not in language) to Cormac McCarthy at his most violent wouldn’t be inaccurate. Truly blood-drenched and horrifying. It’s a good book!

Nutshell by Ian McEwan – With this strange take Hamlet, McEwan has written his liveliest, most vivid prose in ages. In terms of tone and content, it’s like a throwback to his more genre-ish early work, but with the spark of a great writer who has found new life. Terrific fiction.

Indignation by Philip Roth – This novel, in addition to being a real honest to God novel, is an argument. A moral and political argument, more specifically, and, this being Philip Roth, it’s so mad it spits. The conclusion it ultimately comes to after considering the events of the novel is not the one I came to as a reader, and I feel confident that if we ever met, Philip Roth wouldn’t like me. But rarely, if ever, have I read the side of an argument I myself would have represented expressed as clearly and as intelligently and as eloquently by someone who rejects it utterly. Philip Roth is a great writer, and Indignation is a great novel.

Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson – When Johnson died unexpectedly earlier this year, this is the novel I immediately wanted to read. Johnson seemed able to write anything, and seemed to want to. This is his post-Apocalyptic novel, and is the most believable, authentic-seeming novel of this kind I’ve ever read. In Fiskadoro Johnson imagines a world that is far away from what we currently know, but understandable in its primitive struggles toward something familiar. It is as sad and as beautiful as anything Johnson ever wrote.

Some Came Running by James Jones – Wrote about it here. And while it may not be the best book I read in 2017, it is certainly the one I lived with the longest, and will continue to live with probably forever, and the one I know best. I know it like it’s alive inside my house. (Just don’t, you know, quiz me about it or anything.)

In the Money by William Carlos Williams – The second, after White Mule, in Williams’s trilogy of novels about the Stecher family and their rise (so far) to relative affluence. Set during the early 20^th century, In the Money is ostensibly about how the Stecher patriarch, Joe, launches his own printing business after snatching from his former employers a major contract to print money orders for the government (FDR has a cameo!). But as a novelist, Williams was primarily concerned, as in his famous poem “This is Just to Say”, with the things that make up someone’s day. Especially if that someone is a child. No writer I can think of has a better eye or ear for the way children are, what frustrates and frightens them. One chapter, all about the two young Stecher girls going to the park with their mother, includes a moment so heartbreaking that I don’t like to think about it. And though Joe Stecher’s climb towards success may be difficult, and his wife Gurlie’s attitude towards it all may seem uncomfortably mercenary, what I’ll remember most about In the Money, what matters most, is the chapter about the youngest Stecher, Flossie, and what it’s like, and why it’s so awful, for a baby to be alone in a dark bedroom.

The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes – Each of the three novels about Harlem cops Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones were absolutely berserk, and, not incidentally, completely wonderful. But nothing I read in 2017 made my jaw hang open like The Real Cool Killers, Himes’s second novel in the series. It begins with an insane knife attack in a night club, the consequences of which spill out into the street and lead to the plot’s central murder, and climaxes – that is, the beginning of the novel climaxes – with Gravedigger Jones fatally shooting a teenager because the kid...well anyway. If I told you, you might decide this is all just too ridiculous. But somehow it isn’t, and somehow Himes is able to maintain this pace, and somehow The Real Cool Killers becomes, by the end, deeply moving, deeply sad and world-weary, and weirdly open-hearted, given a lot of factors you’ll notice and think about and bring into the book when you read it. It’s the crime novel as novel of absurdity. It’s the novel of absurdity as a kind of mourning.

Okay, here's the full list. In reverse chronological order because it would be a pain in the ass to do it any other way.

141. Jizzle by John Wyndham

140. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass

139. Samedi the Deafness by Jesse Ball

138. Mayhem by Sarah Pinborough 

137. Authority by Jeff VanderMeer 

136. In the Money by William Carlos Williams 

135. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher

134. In the Middle of the Night by Robert Cormier 

133. Who is Rich? by Matthew Klam 

132. Matchbox Theater by Michael Frayn

131. Ratman's Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert

130. The Wardrobe Mistress by Patrick McGrath

129. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

128. The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns 

127. The Eighth Dwarf by Ross Thomas

126. Nothing by Henry Green

125. The Forensic Records Society by Magnus Mills

124. Nutshell by Ian McEwan

123. Smile by Roddy Doyle

122. An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

121. The Ballad of Typhoid Mary by J.F. Federspiel

120. The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf

119. Fear is the Rider by Kenneth Cook

118. Cops and Robbers by Donald E. Westlake

117. The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons

116. Othello by William Shakespeare

115. Experimental Film by Gemma Files

114. The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer

113. The Snowman by Jo Nesbo

112. The Tragedy of Brady Sims by Ernest J. Gaines

111. Three Tales by Gustave Flaubert

110. You're All Alone by Fritz Leiber

109. Play Things by Peter Prince

108. Dead Air by Matthew M. Bartlett

107. The Poor Mouth by Flann O'Brien

106. The North Water by Ian McGuire

105. The Big Bounce by Elmore Leonard

104. Voices in the Night by Steven Millhauser

103. Ill Will by Dan Chaon

102. Some Came Running by James Jones

101. Strange Monsters of the Recent Past by Howard Waldrop

100. Lunar Follies by Gilbert Sorrentino

099. Young Adolf by Beryl Bainbridge

098. Poor George by Paula Fox

097. Indignation by Philip Roth

096. You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann

095. Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson

094. Journey of the Dead by Loren D. Estleman

093. The Crazy Kill by Chester Himes

092. Conscience by John Skipp

091. The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales by Angela Slatter

090. Idaho Winter by Tony Burgess

089. An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge

088. The Changeling by Victor LaValle

087. The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty

086. Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman

085. In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware

084. Revenge by Yoko Ogawa

083. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

082. The King in the Golden Mask by Marcel Schwob

081. The Happy Man by Eric C. Higgs

080. The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille

079. The Lake by Yasunari Kawabata

078. Backflash by Donald E. Westlake

077. Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind by Michael Fessier

076. The Monster Club by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

075. The Silent Gondoliers by William Goldman

074. Pictures of Fidelman by Bernard Malamud

073. Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane

072. Kubrick by Michael Herr

071. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle

070. Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson

069. The Pistol by James Jones

068. So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

067. The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud

066. The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge

065. Players by Don DeLillo

064. Neonomicon by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows

063. Dusk and Other Stories by James Salter

062. Green River Killer by Jeff Jensen and Jonathan Case

061. A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr

060. Stranglehold by Jack Ketchum

059. The Fisherman by John Langan

058. My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf

057. Red Lights by Georges Simenon

056. Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

055. Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages by Manuel Puig

054. Devils' Spawn by Charles Birkin

053. Last Look by Charles Burns

052. The Dinner by Herman Koch

051. Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly by John Franklin Bardin

050. Junky by William S. Burroughs

049. A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

048. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin

047. Hell Hound by Ken Greenhall

046. Resurrection Man by Eoin McNamee

045. The Fates by Thomas Tessier

044. Where Furnaces Burn by Joel Lane

043. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

042. I Should Have Stayed Home by Horace McCoy

041. The Hero Pony by David Mamet

040. The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

039. Shadow of a Broken Man by George C. Chesbro 

038. Death Poems by Thomas Ligotti

037. The Sensitive One by C.H.B. Kitchin

036. Quake by Rudolph Wurlitzer

035. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

034. Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett

033. The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales by Mark Samuels

032. Dirty Tricks by Michael Dibdin

031. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

030. Project X by Jim Shepard

029. All the Little Animals by Walker Hamilton

028. The Patriot Game by George V. Higgins

027. Ray by Barry Hannah

026. Holidays from Hell by Reggie Oliver

025. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

024. White Mule by William Carlos Williams

023. Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

022. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

021. The Scarf by Robert Bloch

020. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

019. If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

018. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

017. The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes

016. A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes

015. The Secret of Ventriloquism by Jon Padgett

014. Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin

013. Swift to Chase by Laird Barron

012. Dearest by Peter Loughran

011. Street of No Return by David Goodis

010. I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas

009. Dog Eat Dog by Edward Bunker

008. Chess Story by Stefan Zweig

007. Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

006. The Body Artist by Don DeLillo

005. Point Omega by Don DeLillo

004. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

003. Hogg by Samuel R. Delany

002. Running Dog by Don DeLillo

001. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally 

Capsule Reviews: What They Grow Beyond

The Whales of August (d. Lindsay Anderson) – The feature film career of Lindsay Anderson (there were some TV things after, which, though I haven’t seen Is That All There Is? or Glory! Glory!, sound by no means negligible), the man who brought the world such wild and wildly aggressive satires as If…, O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital, ended in a seemingly unlikely way. The Whales of August, from  1987 and which Kino Lorber has just released on Blu-ray as part of their Kino Studio classics line, was written by David Berry, based on his own play, and is play, almost stereotypically, almost parodically, through and through. It’s about two elderly sisters, one of them blind, who spend their summer together in a seaside cottage that has been in the family forever. During that time, the sisters spar, with the blind one, Sarah, picking away at emotional scabs and unleashing a cruel streak now and then which tests Libby, her gentler sister, who still mourns the loss of her husband in World War II. And all this time, they await the seasonal return of the whales to their part of the sea, a natural phenomenon that has meant much to them ever since they were young.

So it’s about memory and death, plus whales. I have no doubt that Anderson had deeper reasons for wanting to put this not-exactly-electric play on the big screen, but watching it now the big idea seems to have been to give some old Hollywood stars another swing at the ball. Bette Davis plays Sarah, her unique vocal cadence only intensifying with age, and Lillian Gish plays Libby. I like both of them here, though at times Gish’s movements feel practiced. Bette Davis musters all her energy to Bette Davis the hell out of the thing, and I can but tip my cap. Also present are Ann Sothern as a somewhat nosy, but not unfriendly, neighbor, Harry Carey, Jr. as the local handyman, and Vincent Price his own self as a recent widower who the ladies all like.

My instinct is to say that, with all due respect to Anderson and the cast, it plays like a kind of novelty film – check out all these screen legends, now very old, in one movie. Then again, I suspect I feel that way because today no one would make a film populated almost entirely with a cast like this unless the story was about how one of them was dying and he wanted to blow his savings with his old pal at their favorite strip club one last time. But The Whales of August really does kind of just sit there. It feels like boilerplate theater. Even if I was wrong about where exactly this would all end, I feel like that’s only because the writer lightly tweaked things so that it didn’t head directly into the predictable. It’s the difference between turning right and bearing right.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (d. Rian Johnson) – Yesterday I learned of the existence of a petition, drawn up by some numbnuts or other on a popular useless and meaningless petition website, called “Rian Johnson Must Admit That The Last Jedi is Awful.” The thinking behind this, if I understand it correctly, is that Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the latest film in the popular franchise, is so bad that the man who wrote and directed it, Rian Johnson must stand before the nation and tearfully (one assumes) admit that his particular Star Wars movie is not any good at all, and, I believe it is implied, he knew this all along. I think I have this right. (Furthermore, this petition is seeking 1,000 signatures, a goal it may well have reached by now, so, Rian Johnson, your day of reckoning is at hand.) If I were to dig one layer deeper into this, what I believe I’d discover is that hardcore Star Wars fans are fucking dipshits, a truth that I believe each layer thereafter would only confirm. They are entitled, by and large, and quick to anger; their notions of what a story should be, or even can be, are a sludgy porridge of tiresome and dull theories put forth over and over again by what’s-his-dick who wrote The Hero With a Thousand Faces and online screenwriting guides. In their enraged insistence that art must reach what they imagine are their own very high standards, they are in fact anti-art.

The above being the reality of the world we all inhabit, Rian Johnson is expected to apologize for what struck me, when I saw the new film the other day, as not especially world-upending tweaks to the universe and characters and themes and “philosophy” thus far established in the previous Star Wars films. In this one, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), here a major character in the series for the first time since 1983’s Return of the Jedi, is kind of a curmudgeon when dealing with Rey (Daisy Ridley), who has sought him out both to help her understand her own powers, and to bring him back from his new life as a hermit to help the new Rebellion, which is losing its war against the new Empire. Luke doesn’t want to, and in fact wants to burn down, literally, the world, beliefs, and history of the Jedi. Following some bad business when attempting to train Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) some years back, Luke became disillusioned, you see.  Some fans are taking serious issue with this portrayal of Luke because it’s only been thirty-four years since Return of the Jedi – nobody changes at all in that amount of time. So the thinking goes, I guess. I can tell you that if I was Luke, I’d have reached his point of grumpy reclusion in half that time, and by the time Rey showed up would have gotten to the point that I’d just throw rocks at her until she went away.

So Luke changed, as people do, but this is no good. Also I’ve gathered that many are upset that Johnson is letting the story’s themes drift away from the Chosen One narrative and into the idea that maybe to defeat evil you might do better with two, even three people. I feel like that’s always sort of been there anyway – Luke may have flourished under the construct of the Chosen One, but in the very first movie he’d have been blown all to shit without Han Solo swooping in like he did. Then, too, is the frustration that with Han Solo having died in the previous film, The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams’s “the same but again” crowd-pleaser, and the sad death of Carrie Fisher rendering any plans for her Leia moot, these new heroes and villains – Rey, Rebel fighter pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), former Storm Trooper turned heroic defector Finn (John Boyega), villainous, deeply conflicted, patricidal Jedi prodigy Kylo Ren – don’t have the oceans of complexity within their souls to carry one more movie. I actually saw someone on Twitter ask those who had the audacity to enjoy The Last Jedi to reflect on what we, the audience, knew about Luke, Han, and Leia at the end of the very first Star Wars movie, and compare that to what we know about Rey, Finn, and Poe. I would say “Go ahead and reflect on that, buddy.” There is a strange delusion among Star Wars true believers that those original, indisputably iconic characters, were somehow something other than mythopoeic rubber stamps. What carried Han, Luke, and Leia beyond that was Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher (and obviously George Lucas). If the complaint, then, is that none of these new young actors have the charisma of Harrison Ford, well, why not just ask for the moon while you’re at it. Ridley, Isaac, and Boyega have proven over the course of these two movies that, in terms of talent, they’re doing more than fine – I think Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver are giving the best performances of the entire series of nine movies. No one has been as committed to a Star Wars performance, ever, as those two.

None of which is to say that The Last Jedi is a great film – I don’t even think it’s a great Star Wars film. I think the first hour or so sags under the weight of bad jokes, thin, uninteresting political commentary that it nevertheless seems proud of, and some performances from good actors who seem, in this environment, very uncertain (I’m thinking primarily of Laura Dern here). But at a certain point, Rian Johnson shifts his film into another gear, and one rousing action sequence, performance choice, or image is stacked upon another, so that the ultimately I’ve found it hard to remember what specifically I found so objectionable in the first hour. There’s a lightsaber fight involving Rey and Ren that is visually one of the most stunning things I’ve seen in a while, and emotionally intense and viscerally absorbing, all at once. It has massive, powerful moments for the most important characters in the series, and they work. So what if Benicio del Toro seems to be playing Kramer from Seinfeld, or that a decision made by one character new to the series is so wrong that even though Johnson seems to want the audience to embrace it, it’s clear that he, himself, can’t? So what, in other words, if The Last Jedi isn’t a perfect Star Wars film? If that’s what you want, you haven’t seen one yet anyway, so what’re you complaining about? In ten years, if you suddenly think “Hey The Last Jedi is actually pretty good” keep that shit to yourself, you fucking crybabies. 

Culture/Horror Diary - Day 11/6: You're a Destroyer

10/17/17 – 10/30/17

Since last we spoke, despite my pledge to keep going with Karl Edward Wagner’s collection In a Lonely Place, I’ve thus far only read one other story. It’s called “The Fourth Seal,” and it strikes me as one that was likely one of his more personal stories. For one thing, when he died in 1994, he was working on a novel with the same title – presumably an expansion of the story. It also deals with the medical profession, and Wagner was a trained (though I don’t know if he was licensed, or ever practiced) psychiatrist. Judging from “The Fourth Seal,” Wagner viewed the medical world with a somewhat jaundiced eye, you might say. The story is full-blown horror paranoia, and one of the angrier and more political stories I’ve read by Wagner. I also didn’t exactly love it, but at least it’s clearly from his heart, something I can’t say about “Beyond Any Measure,” the last Wagner story I wrote about. Or if it did, he didn’t get that on the page.

Coincidentally, on some level “The Fourth Seal” does line up with a couple of short novels I read last week, and the two short novels pair off quite well all on their own. One, The Ballad of Typhoid Mary by J. F. Federspiel, is, I suspect, a highly fictionalized account of the “career” of Mary Mallon, the titular plague-carrier. Mary spreads disease through New York City and environs, at first unknowingly, but after a while the awful truth of what she brings with her to every job dawns on her. Meanwhile, in The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf, a medieval village, and the castle of knights that rules brutally over them, become the victims of a plague of infernal black spiders, borne from the face of a woman who tried to outsmart the devil. Of course, Gotthelf never calls this a plague, but you don’t need to strain yourself connecting it to the Black Death, and the stories that have grown around that horrible bit of history (black marks on the face and so on).

The Ballad of Typhoid Mary is something of a dark comedy, the victim of its satire largely being  America and class; The Black Spider doesn’t have a lot of jokes, but class, and how too much money and power can corrupt, and too little can debase one’s morals, is all over it. Thematically, in that case, “The Fourth Seal” fits in rather neatly, though its pile of corpses is largely implied whereas Federspiel and Gotthelf heave them at the reader by the wagon-full. Each of these works takes place in a vastly different era, so I think another theme is that death on a massive scale is ever-present. Have a spooktacular Hallow-scream.

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It’s been so long since I posted that I never told you guys that I rewatched Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Well, I did! And it’s still fine! I made some points on Social Media about how the satirical point forces Peele to twist everything else to its bidding, and so as a story I don’t think the thing really works particularly well. But it’s still danged entertaining. Still, this “masterpiece of horror” nonsense can take a walk. Great cast, though.

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I also forgot to tell you dinguses that I saw Indestructible Man, directed by that science-fictionally named Jack Pollexfen, and starring Lon Chaney, Jr. as a dead murderer brought back to life via lightning, a gift he uses to hunt down his former criminal partners. It’s not much, I have to say, but there’s something about Lon Chaney, Jr. that lends almost everything he was in a certain poignancy. Spider Baby is twice the movie with him than it would have been without him, and The Wolf Man lives or dies by what he brings to Lawrence Talbot. Indestructible Man never hits those levels, certainly, not even close, but even so, there are worse ways to spend an hour.

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I’ll tell you an absolutely shit way to spend nearly two hours, and that is by watching Annabelle: Creation, a completely boilerplate evil doll Conjuring spin-off (this is the second one, at least!) that I had been assured was “surprisingly good” by I don’t know how many shit-brained nimrods. There is nothing to recommend it. It’s not unusually nimble as a piece of filmmaking, it doesn’t have any even meager, thin-soup kinda tricks up its sleeve. It has nothing for you or anybody.

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I finally caught up with Eric Red’s Body Parts. All I have to say about it is that it seems like the kind of film one makes after one has killed two people in a bizarre, psychotically-motivated car accident, not before.

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I got into a whole thing on Twitter with the director of Found Footage 3D (for the record, I did not seek him out), and I’d rather not tempt fate by getting into that again. Suffice it to say, the movie’s garbage and you shouldn’t see it. Also, I watched the 2D version of the film. I had no other option, but it still strikes me as an amusing choice.

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Tomorrow, Olive Films will be releasing two quite different films on Blu-ray. One is the seasonally appropriate The Vampire’s Ghost, a title that is ridiculous, and which puts me in mind of the episode of that show Morton & Hayes that featured Michael McKean as Mummula (“part mummy and mostly Dracula”). But the film, directed by Lesley Selander and written by John K. Butler and the great Leigh Brackett, is actually rather good. It concerns an apparent vampire loose in an African village (this is mostly bad because the white plantation owner is losing workers), but what distinguishes this odd, brief little film is the vampire played by John Abbott. Abbott’s vampire is very, very, very old, and while he is evil, he doesn’t wallow in it. He’s just evil, by our standards. By his own, this is simply how his life has always been. The weight of centuries of life is on his shoulders and in his face.

Of course, The Vampire’s Ghost is also the kind of film in which the vampire tells the hero “I can only be killed with fire, but of course, you would never do that” and its ending is more or less by the numbers. But Abbott is terrific, and I loved how wrong the heroes were on occasion, or how weak they sometimes were in the face of this supernatural being. It’s a surprising film.

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The other movie Olive Films is releasing tomorrow is the somewhat less seasonal Stay Hungry. Directed by Bob Rafelson, and co-written by Rafelson and Charles Gaines (based on a novel by Gaines), it’s a sort of mash-up of zany Southern comedy and zany, er, bodybuilder comedy? It features the first major screen performance by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is weirdly good here; over the years, he’s somehow gotten worse. It’s been pointed out to me that by playing an Austrian bodybuilding training for the Mr. Universe competition, he wasn’t exactly being pushed to the bleeding edge of his talents here, but I was still fairly impressed by the unmistakably human being he puts across here.

He’s helped along by the fact that, for most of its running time, Stay Hungry is a pretty amiable knock-off of Robert Altman in a light-hearted mood. It even has an Altman-esque cast: in addition to Schwarzenegger, the film stars Jeff Bridges and Sally Field, and features R. G. Armstrong, Scatman Crothers, Robert Englund, Ed Begley, Jr., Fannie Flagg, Joe Spinell (who you’d want in your movie set in Alabama), Roger E. Mosley, and Joanna Cassidy. The loose plot involves Jeff Bridges trying to buy the gym owned by R. G. Armstrong to help out crooked businessman Spinell’s crooked real estate deal, but losing focus after he falls in love with gym employee Sally Field, and just generally having a great time with all these wackos. This being a romantic comedy, everything does sort of go tits up for Bridges, everybody gets mad at him, and he has to make things okay again.

What sinks Stay Hungry is that Bridges finds his way back into the good graces of his buddies and the woman he loves by (BIG SPOILER COMIN’) fighting off R. G. Armstrong who, it turns out, is a drugged out loon who tries to rape Sally Field. Well, at the end the film throws in the detail that Armstrong only got as far as trying to rape her, but the actual pair of scenes that deal with the attack imply strongly that he overpowered her. My guess is, at some point someone involved in the production realized that, even in 1976, it’s hard for a film to return to its previous light tone after something like that. And as it is, that “attempted” tag, even if I bought it, comes after the catastrophic lunacy of the crime, as it plays on screen, and the madcap antics of a group of bodybuilders capering through the streets of Birmingham. On top of which, you’d have to accept that attempted rape was sufficiently light-hearted to make the rest of this shit allowable.

So Stay Hungry is a decently enjoyable movie that very quickly becomes a ridiculous disaster. Enjoy?

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Finally, I also read, in the wake of his very much-deserved Nobel Prize win, Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. Ishiguro is so good, his control so complete, that it frankly pisses me off. Read him.

Horror Diary - Day 5: At Whatever Pain to Others

10/16/17 – 10/20/17

I read just the damnedest story the other day. It’s one many of you might well have read, but it slipped by me for years. It’s a story by Conrad Aiken. All I know about Aiken is that he was American, primarily (this might be arguable) a poet, but also a prolific writer of prose. On the back of my copy of The Short Stories of Conrad Aiken is a very nice quote from Malcolm Cowley that reads in part:

Mr. Aiken…has never played the literary game – has never read his verse over the radio, has never been the guest of honor at a literary dinner or gossiped with critics at a literary tea, has never autographed his books in department stores, has never scratched backs, rolled logs, or mended his fences. For thirty years he has stuck to his job of writing, while living very modestly…working hard and never talking in public about himself…He is one of the few American poets whose work has continually developed in technical skill, in richness, and individuality…”

Pretty flattering, I’d say. The extent to which his prose, meanwhile, has crossed over into the horror genre I don’t really know, nor do I know if the stories that do cross over were specifically intended to do so by Aiken. Whatever the case, he did write at least one story which the genre has embraced, or stolen. Anyway, it’s called “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” and it’s about a young boy who, one morning, starts to believe that it’s snowing outside. It isn’t, and he knows it isn’t, at least it isn’t for anyone but him. He does believe that it’s snowing for him, and this creates for him a world of comfort, mystery, and a satisfaction that this is true but only he knows it.

As far as plot, that’s pretty much it. The story escalates when the reader begins to realize that this young boy, Paul Hasleman, is insane. The story’s about twenty pages long, so I shouldn’t say more, but this is one major source of the story’s horror – that a child has irrevocably lost his mind. Overcome by dreams of snow and an obsessive focus on the sound of a mailman’s footsteps (muffled, he believes, by a blanket of snow), Paul closes himself off from his teachers, his friends, his parents, his doctor, the rest of the world. I’ll say that this isn’t a violent story, but ends on a note of terrible pain. It’s horror of a different sort.

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Another writer I recently partially got around to is William Sansom, a British writer who in his day was admired by Elizabeth Bowen and compared to Graham Greene. Like Aiken, there is a back and forth crossing over between genre and “literary” fiction (as there was with Bowen), and in her introduction to my copy of The Stories of William Sansom, Bowen makes a point of highlighting three stories in which the “[p]ortrayal of terror…reaches three of three of its highest levels…” These are “The Vertical Ladder,” “Among the Dahlias,” and “How Claeys Died.” In my view, only “The Vertical Ladder” (which is about a teenager who is pressured by his friends and the girl he likes to climb the tall rusted ladder of an old gasometer, and subsequently charts his terror) is really horror, or anyway fits any of the very many molds and many, many, many varieties of types of stories that have somehow crowded together in a massive jumble of styles, plots, moods, themes, and bottomless subgenres, that spills out over into every other genre, style, and level of ambition, to create what some people have decided is the horror “formula” (the influence of “The Vertical Ladder” can be found in a fucking Adam Green movie, for cryin’ out loud). “Among the Dahlias” is just a “crisis of the self” story, if that’s a literary term (it’s certainly stupid enough to be one), and not a good one – the last line is just the theme, stated. “How Claeys Died,” meanwhile, is excellent. It’s a war-haunted story about the ruins of Europe after WWII, and how a good, well-meaning man dies at the hands of men merely reacting in a way that makes sense because of a way of thinking that years of senseless cruelty had instilled in them by an enemy that wasn’t even close by.

But I didn’t find an actual horror story by Sansom until “A Woman Seldom Found,” which is just a few pages long, and which is about a young man who has traveled to Italy, and finds it lonesome and unfulfilling until he meets a beautiful woman who is interested in him. I felt pretty sure I knew where this was going, and in a sense I was right, but in a more important sense I was not. The ending of “A Woman Seldom Found” is simply one of the best horror endings I’ve ever encountered, wonderfully creepy, so unsettling an image that I almost smiled.

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I watched The Ghost of Yotsuya, a horror film from 1959 by director Nobuo Nakagawa. Like so many great Japanese horror films of that general era, it’s set in feudal times, and is about a pair of women whose lives are taken over by two men. These men have murdered their way into the lives of these poor women, and they treat their wives cruelly. A ghost eventually exacts revenge, as they do. I wouldn’t belabor this, but I found The Ghost of Yotsuya to be pretty terrific, atmospheric and satisfying.

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I’m back to reading Karl Edward Wagner, who I’ve praised here in the past, and who looms large over 80s horror. I read “Beyond Any Measure,” which is almost long enough to be a novella, and may in fact be one. This story has a bit of a prurient reputation, or once did. It’s pretty mild now, but it’s about a woman, Lisette Seyrig, and American in London, who lives with another woman, Danielle, with whom she’s having a somewhat casual affair (Lisette fully intends to return to America in about a year’s time). Lisette is happy, except for a series of nightmares she’s been experiencing, which seem to place her in the Victorian era, in a bedroom, with traces of blood around and something horribly about to be revealed. These affect her sleep, so she visits Dr. Magnus, an acquaintance of Danielle’s with ties to the occult, who believes in past lives. So “Beyond Any Measure” (a title that, common phrase though it is, in this instance comes from, it is eventually revealed, The Rocky Horror Picture Show; can’t say I was thrilled to learn that) is about Lisette trying to learn the source of these dreams, all while being carried into a high-living whirlwind of debauchery in 1980s London.

And I’m afraid to say that it’s not very good. Wagner was not an especially distinguished prose stylist, but his genuine power as a writer came from his wild imagination, which could be viscerally extreme, or just fascinatingly different – the stories collected in Why Not You and I? illustrate what Wagner could do beautifully. But “Beyond Any Measure” is too conventional to overcome his weaknesses. I think he must have known it was conventional – in addition to The Rocky Horror Picture Show there are references to Hammer films, to let the reader know that we all, Wagner and his audience, know what’s going on here. Wagner could often turn horror into a snake eating its tale with tremendous results (see “Sign of the Salamander by Curtiss Stryker, with an Introduction by Kent Allard” in Why Not You and I? for example), but here it’s all just references, amounting to not much. I plan on continuing to plug along with this collection, In a Lonely Place (which includes his classic story “Sticks,” the only story from this book I’ve read) and just hope things improve.

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Kenneth Cook was an Australian writer who is now best known, certainly in America but I’ve gathered in Australia as well, for writing the novel Wake in Fright, which was turned into the terribly harrowing film by Ted Kotcheff, and featuring one of the finest performances ever given by Donald Pleasance (and a real on-screen kangaroo massacre that I could not endure). He died in 1987, leaving behind a manuscript for a horror novel called Fear is the Rider. For some reason, this wasn’t published anywhere until 2016.

Fear is the Rider, which began its life as a film script, is very short, and propulsive: it’s about a man who is driving through the outback when he meets, at a bar in one of the towns, Cook explains, made up of a handful of buildings that provide travelers with occasional respite, a woman. They chat over a beer and she leaves. Both of them are outsiders to this part of Australia, and he likes the look of her, so he decides to follow the route she told him she’d be travelling, hoping to meet her again at the next town. Along the way, though, she is attacked by what appears to be some kind of feral man. She escapes, the man finds her, and soon the two of them are being stalked by a crazed man-animal with an axe, who has stolen the woman’s Land Rover, leaving the heroes to traverse the unforgiving land in a Honda.

It sounds a lot like Duel, and it is a lot like Duel. The biggest difference is you see the driver of the other car. Or maybe the biggest difference is that it’s nowhere near as good as Duel. Cook’s prose, at least in this book, is nothing more than functional. It does function, but since the story provides little space some of the other traditional satisfactions novels can provide, a strong ear for language would have been more than welcome. And Fear is the Rider was never going to be able to rise too high in my estimation after the bit where the man, our primary point of view, finally has the drop on their attacker, who knows this land and how to survive it much better than they, can actually easily kill him, but thinks instead that he can’t kill someone who isn’t at that exact second attacking him. Never mind that this maniac has been literally attacking them for hours at this point, and is, in fact, at that moment carrying out a plan to trap and kill them; our hero is unable to act unless this monster has already opened fire on him with a machine gun.

What purpose can this have served for Cook? It can’t be a case of simple awkward plotting that led him to think “Well if he kills the bad guy here, the book’s over!” because to avoid it all Cook would have needed to do was not give our hero the drop on the maniac in the first place. So it’s “character development” I guess, but if so it’s a small drop in a book that almost by design doesn’t have much. So why bother?

Fear is the Rider isn’t bad, though. It certainly gets the job done, which is all, I imagine, that Cook hoped it would do. It does make me wonder what the novel Wake in Fright is like, though.