A High Wind in Jamaica (1929)

This novel by Richard Hughes is a great and unsettling adventure story involving seven kids from two families living in Jamaica as colonialists. From the summaries it’s easy to reach the conclusion that this is some kind of YA story. It is decidedly not that. Five of these kids are the children of an English couple there shortly after the British empire emancipation of slaves in 1834. The plantation system with its mansions and slave quarters is still evident, but in a state of ongoing decay. Big things are going on here. First there is an earthquake and then there is a hurricane. The descriptions are vivid and unique, playing to Hughes’s strengths as a writer. The parents decide Jamaica is no safe place for children. They pack off their five, along with two from another family, sending them back to England. The ship, however, is attacked by pirates, who take the children. It’s a decision they soon regret as the kids take over the ship for playing purposes. They are so young they don’t understand their danger, which is real, as a few surprising and even shocking incidents demonstrate. Part of me was surprised the pirates didn’t just throw the kids off the boat, but on another level I can buy it. Even pirates must blanch at killing children. I admit the general premise sounds like it could work as a Disney fantasy type of feel-good movie. But much of what is going on here—by suggestion as well as direct revelation—is not even PG-13 but full on very close to R. The two oldest in the family of five are the main characters. They are about 12 and 9. The tale is great, not a bit sentimental, and Hughes’s writing is impeccable. The descriptions may be his strong suit, but the pacing is just as good—the story never stops plowing relentlessly forward. And it’s full of things you just can’t expect, though they make perfect sense as they go down and wrench the story in new directions. A novel like this is the reason I’m willing to go through the Modern Library’s arguably predictable list of the best novels of the 20th century. I’d heard of this one before, and heard the fulsome praise too, but was inclined to discount it. Don’t make my mistake. Put A High Wind in Jamaica high on your list to read.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“Some Strange Desire” (1993)

More weird sex: this story by Ian McDonald is another longish, exotic, sexualized (not erotic) fantasy. Something must have been in the air? This one riffs on evolution, gender, and ancient vampire-like secret societies. It was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in the Short Fiction category in 1994. It seems that a mutant form of homo sapiens has lived among us for centuries. They embody both (or all) genders and can physically transform into them at will. And there are humans who get off sexually on them. What could possibly go wrong? The mutants are mostly just surviving, with little interest sexually in humans. Anyone annoyed by confusing pronouns will be annoyed here too, as the mutants are all referred to as “he” even when they are in female form, even as family bonds are referred to as “sister,” “daughter,” and “mother.” I don’t miss that the story was published in 1993, which is reasonably early for the kind of sophisticated LGBTQIA+ discourse given here. So points for vision, though of course Samuel Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin were basically already there and had been for years. The story is dense with concept, giving hurry-up explanation that must be parsed as we go, with a narrative that is perhaps necessarily butt-simple: one of the mutants is dying and unfortunately a human must be sacrificed for it to live. I never managed to get into this story. I understand the difficulty of what it’s trying to do—maybe it should have been a novel? That would have given the ideas here more room to breathe. The ideas are interesting but we are breaking down things like mutant terminology most of the way through, which thwarts narrative momentum. The story has so much concept to pack in that it really shorts character and story value. The concept could well be exactly what people like so much about this story, but I found myself getting impatient quickly with the slow pace and spoon-feeding of the ideas, however necessary. As I say, it probably just should have been longer to do that concept justice. Contrary to popular writing advice, everything doesn’t have to be showing. You can just tell us some things. It’s often quicker and more efficient—part of what the old-fashioned framing stories were doing.

Edited By, ed. Ellen Datlow
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Read story online.

Kinks, “Mr. Churchill Says” (1969)

[listen up!]

Out here on the deep cut tip it’s possible this song is enjoyed best in the context of the whole album, Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)—strained concept (in the parenthetical) and all. Concept rock albums were all the rage at the time, of course, but the song reads as ambiguously to me as the LP at large. On the one hand, it seems to be valorizing Winston Churchill and the UK’s World War II effort, an easy piety today and in 1969. But songwriter Ray Davies’s vocal sounds mocking when the song gets to the Churchill quotes, Wikipedia includes it in a list of antiwar songs, and Davies, when questioned in an interview, said, “When the battle's over and you've won, you always look good. But what was achieved by it?” So it looks like a clear case of go figure, perhaps comparable to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” which sounds jingoistic but is actually approximately the opposite. In many ways the 4:43 “Mr. Churchill Says” functions as a novelty—my favorite part is when the air raid sirens start at about 1:35, which never fail to light me up. The guitar-playing shifts into a loose-wristed mode and the band revs up the tempo. The nervous energy somehow suggests the terrors of the German bombing campaign. Eventually there’s a thoughtful guitar solo from Dave Davies. When the singer is back with his yobs they still sound mocking, but it’s not hard to take the propaganda at “keep calm and carry on” face value either: “Mr. Churchill says we've got to hold up our chins / We've got to show some courage and some discipline / We've got to block up the windows and nail up the doors / And keep right on 'til the end of the war.”

KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters is approximately exactly what you think, with a glitzy K-pop soundtrack, fabulous animation, and scary demons. As the story goes, generations of female K-pop acts have secretly been demon hunters, running down the dark creatures with great ferocity and protecting their fans and humans generally. Now it’s the fictional girl group trio Huntrix picking up the mantle. The specific narrative arc here is that one of the singers in the group—Rumi, the one with the stupendous coil of hair—is secretly part-demon and must learn to come to terms with it. Awww... The animation is mainly what makes the picture work as well as it does, wild, vivid, expressive, verging on the psychedelia of the Spider-Verse movies. Besides Huntrix (with Rumi, Mira, and Zoey), there is a five-piece boy band, the Saja Boys, who are under the control of the Satan figure here, Gwi-Ma. Gwi-Ma is in the business of buying up and consuming souls. Jinu is the leader of the Saja Boys. Naturally he and Rumi fall in star-crossed love. Rumi must learn to accept and love herself for who she is while Jinu is trying to work through a lot of well-deserved bad karma. But he’s not so bad himself. Awww... Out here on the K-pop tip I don’t know much so my expectations (and hopes) were more for something in perhaps an EDM vein, rhythmic and seductive sexy and romantic for the dancefloor, but as I should have known what I got was a lot of pop warbling about self-help self-esteem self-care, with selfies for the fans etc. Huntrix’s songs are explicitly written in the sessions we see as messages of hope and strength for their fans. Awww... The animation does not fool around with these demons—I can believe they would be quite scary for little kids. Some 13 minutes are reserved for the end credits and include live-action shots of the main voice artists singing and carrying on—it’s as fun as the best parts of the rest of it, so think about sticking around awhile. If the music would have been better (the Saja Boys are no better than Huntrix but there’s no reason to expect them to be), and the story a little less on-the-nose inspirational, KPop Demon Hunters might have been something special. As it is it’s reasonably entertaining, not that I mean to damn with faint praise.

“Dying in Bangkok” (1993)

There’s a lot to sort out about the provenance of this strange story by Dan Simmons. It’s already on the long side (ca. 25 pages) but word is there’s an even longer version (called “Death in Bangkok”) which was incorporated into his 1989 novel Carrion Comfort. The premise from that novel—people among us who can use mental powers to control others—is not really part of this story, or anyway not in the version in the Year’s Best anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Datlow and Windling used “Dying” in the title whereas ISFDB is adamant it is supposed to be “Death.” Somebody has something wrong. The story is extremely and ridiculously over the top and full of cliches, with Vietnam grunts on R&R during the war encountering depraved and decadent scenes in Bangkok brothels. It’s not erotic but there is a grotesque blowjob scene (actually more than one) involving a prehensile tongue that’s what? two and a half feet long? Guys come so hard they shoot blood, which is then consumed by these monsters. I mean... Simmons just patiently lays it out there deadpan. It’s incredibly repulsive stuff but he never breaks character as narrator, just keeps telling it. It’s basically a revenge story, as the main character’s best friend was killed by these exotic prostitutes. He takes years to find them again and set his own trap, which is tediously timebound by attitudes of the ‘80s and ‘90s. His plan is to get infected with HIV before he has his sexual encounter with them. My first and obvious complaint is how racist, and how boomer, everything is here about Bangkok. Simmons reels off statistics about the sex trade in Bangkok and its high levels of HIV infection. He views it all as a freak show and the biggest freaks tend to be Asian. Then the sex scenes are gross, overly detailed, and go on way too long. What I remember of Carrion Comfort is that Simmons had some sadistic tendencies, by which I mean he doesn’t just traffic in extreme violence but also puts his most likable characters in great peril and makes us watch. I never felt like he was getting off on it himself (unlike, say, John D. MacDonald in his Travis McGee novels) but it does feel mechanical about being extreme. Let me tell you about a prehensile tongue that’s two and a half feet long and makes you come blood. Too much! And the revenge story is weak. So I do not count this story as a good one, but I was happy to be reminded of Carrion Comfort, which is a pretty good horror novel.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Anthology of American Folk Music (1952)

I grew up with my head in top 40 radio from the age of 10 and some sort of innate resistance to most folk music. I associated it with church youth groups or something. Glenn Yarbrough’s “Baby the Rain Must Fall” was more my style, thanks to that same top 40 radio (and Shindig). I never much liked singing “This Land Is Your Land” in grade school exercises (whereas now I’ll join any random singalong I encounter). I hated We Five with a deadly passion (whereas now I have come to love their hit “You Were on My Mind”). I had little use for the Kingston Trio or Burl Ives, and “Puff the Magic Dragon” was only a guilty pleasure by the time I reached junior high. I could go on. I was still having problems in the ‘60s and ‘70s with a lot of the Laurel Canyon stuff. These are my excuses for missing one of the most influential releases of the 20th century, by reputation a treasure house for anyone associated in any way with “folk” music, including Canned Heat, Bob Dylan, the Holy Modal Rounders, Steve Martin, and Pete Seeger, to briefly sketch parameters (and noting the possible exception of Paul Simon). I’m not sure I even knew the Anthology of American Folk Music existed until the 1997 CD reissue and Greil Marcus’s fierce beating of the drum for it.

In a way anthologist Harry Smith—a record collector among many other things—invented the mixtape with the Anthology. All 84 songs are commercial releases from 1926 to 1933, professional studio not field recordings. They come from Smith’s massive collection, and you get a sense of how important the sequencing is just by scanning the track listings. The Anthology has both broad themes—“Ballads,” “Social Music,” and “Songs” (whatever exactly they mean)—and obvious fine tuning within and across them. Several artists appear more than once, sometimes by pairs of songs together but more often scattered across the vast field of this sprawling set. Smith seems to be following the rules and aesthetics of the old mixtapers, thinking about the organization and sequencing and even cover art and liner notes at least as much as the music itself. It’s largely a lost art now, a neglected consideration. Burning to CDs and building and sharing playlists from streaming services offer some close approximation, of course—but choosing to listen on shuffle (as I typically do with playlists these days, and no one is burning me CDs anymore) undermines the main points of sequencing.

At the same time, the Anthology is just so big I have had a hard time for years getting my arms around it. I enjoy it when it happens to be on, usually at someone else’s place, but I rarely play it for myself, instantly flummoxed by my lack of a context for the whole thing or how it works together. Hailing it as the “old, weird America” is not enough help for me. There’s lots more where this came from that’s available now on streaming services, yet something unusual and distinct remains about the Anthology. What is it? I decided to rely on the convenience of the CD package and treat it as six separate albums in the way I approached listening to it. There’s a high degree of consistency across the whole thing (I understand some feel the “Social Music” sets are not up to the rest but that’s not entirely my experience). I should note upfront that I still don’t have my arms around it—I may never—but here are some thoughts on the songs and individual CDs.

Ace in the Hole (1951)

USA, 111 minutes

Director: Billy Wilder

Writers: Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels, Walter Newman, Victor Desny

Photography: Charles Lang

Music: Hugo Friedhofer

Editors: Doane Harrison, Arthur P. Schmidt

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Porter Hall, Robert Arthur, Richard Benedict, Ray Teal, Frank Cady, Richard Gaines

Director and cowriter Billy Wilder is one of my favorite filmmakers—Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd. are on my short list of the best of all time, and The Apartment is not far behind—but I’m reluctant to make too much of Ace in the Hole, which Wikipedia among many others includes with Wilder’s major work. I like the noirish feel of it but struggle with the narrative, which exaggerates outrageously under cover of being a satire. And I guess I may also have a Kirk Douglas problem. He plays Charles Tatum with his typical feral intensity, a weaselly ankle-biting reporter on a downward spiral, washing up in Albuquerque and hunting for a break. Any break will do.

The story involves a type of US news item that seems to recur and catch national attention every 10 or 20 years: kids down a well, specific people isolated in floods, miners in a cave-in. Stuff like that. The most famous case at the time of this picture may have been Floyd Collins, trapped for days in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave in 1925. The story was seized on for constant coverage by then-new radio broadcasters. An example on this side of the 20th century is “Baby Jessica,” who was 18 months old when she fell down a well in 1987. It took 58 hours to get her out. In Ace in the Hole the victim is Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), plundering a burial ground in a nearby mountain considered holy by local Native Americans. So among other things Ace in the Hole offers up an early version of violated Indian graveyard business, later a staple of horror pictures. For a long time everybody has hated the media, from newspapers, radio, and TV of the last century to the internet-driven landscape today. As hard as it may be to believe, it has been worse in the past (though we are presently challenging that more and more). This is one of those stories, a theme sounded in the great Citizen Kane, Meet John Doe, A Face in the Crowd, and many other movies.

Kinks, “King Kong” (1969)

[listen up!]

This Kinks obscurity caught my ear on the CD deluxe edition of their great album Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). I like it because it reminds me of T. Rex, which in 1969 was still the fey Tyrannosaurus Rex. It’s possible the song had some influence on T. Rex honcho Marc Bolan—he probably would have heard it, right? Although he would have had to be a fan. It was released as the b-side of “Plastic Man,” a hippie-like screed about convention and hypocrisy and such (compare the spoken-word interlude on Jimi Hendrix’s “If 6 Was 9,” compare The Graduate). “Plastic Man” fizzled because the BBC had a strict policy they would not play any song that included the word “bum.” “Plastic Man” and “King Kong,” widely considered inferior Kinks songs anyway at a time when the band was verging on moribund, were thus relegated to album homeless status, only appearing later on expanded editions of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, Arthur, and elsewhere. Fair enough—“King Kong” qualifies as dum and stoopid in many ways, with a primitive stomping attack, chiming guitars, monotonous bass, and obvious regard for a rampaging movie monster. I happen to have some affection for that movie monster myself (and for T. Rex too), which I guess makes it more of a natural for me. And even when songwriter Ray Davies goes primitive his deepest instincts remain musical. “La-la-la” and “doo-doo-doo” once again sweeten the pot nicely. The opening line, “I’m King Kong and I’m ten feet long,” may be all you need to know, but note that the next line—“Got a big six-gun and everybody is scared”—suggests some unhappiness with the US. Who, in 1969, could blame them (indeed who, in 2026, could blame them?)?

The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations (1895)

Arthur Machen’s early short novel displays his fascination with the occult and also, perhaps, his difficulties in organizing longer pieces. His long story or novella, “The Great God Pan,” published the year before, is another example. The images are striking, the situations unsettling, the language resonantly weird, but the narrative lumbers along like trawling a boggy swamp at night. The Three Impostors is so episodic, in fact, that two of its chapters (“The Novel of the Black Seal” and “The Novel of the White Powder”) (no, not that white powder) have been broken out verbatim and anthologized as short stories, which in turn exercised influence on H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and others. But the overall arc of the novel is much darker than either story. The “three impostors” are two men and one woman who belong to an occult society. They are hunting for “a young man with spectacles.” Two more main characters, Mr. Dyson and Mr. Charles Phillips, are middle-aged friends who see one another frequently for cigars and brandy and such. Dyson is something of a spiritual adventurer, or occult detective, while Phillips is a hardheaded proponent of the scientific way of thinking. They enjoy kicking it around. There’s a lot going on in the background of these scenes. The impostors have decided Dyson can help them find the young man with spectacles. They work to meet Dyson as if by accident, win his confidence, and accept his invitation to tell their stories, which include “Black Seal” and “White Powder.” The three plant clues in their stories to manipulate or lead Dyson to the conclusions they want him to reach. I think that’s what is going on here anyway. Machen can be so indirect and allusive about these themes it’s not always easy for me to make out. It’s possible I was missing things. There’s a lot compacted into this. We have no idea how horrifying the opening scene is, for example, until we have finished the novel. Then the opening becomes shocking. What I love most about Machen at his best is the powerful sense that more things are going on in heaven and earth beyond what we can detect or know with our senses. We only get glimpses of these realities, whatever they are, which are almost too awful to let ourselves contemplate. There are levels beyond levels beyond levels in the best of his stuff, which includes this novel. It may be awkwardly constructed, the dense language may hover near maddeningly opaque, but it is still a novel, not an accidental collection of breakaway stories. In a way, The Three Impostors is more like the opposite of a fix-up novel.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

San Francisco Days (1993)

Chris Isaak is a Roy Orbison pastiche so good that, with his pouty James Dean good looks, he was a natural for David Lynch and the Twin Peaks franchise. He appeared in Fire Walk With Me as an FBI agent on approximately the same psychic wavelength as Special Agent Dale Cooper. Isaak’s biggest commercial splash occurred with his previous album, from 1989, Heart Shaped World, home of the #6 “Wicked Game,” his only hit (which makes him technically you-know-what). He has carried on since, with a half-rack or more of albums over the years. In many ways San Francisco Days represents the beginning of the back side of his career, featuring, for the last time, Isaak’s secret weapon of lead guitarist Jesse Calvin Wilsey, the so-called “King of Slow.” Wilsey helps make the best song here, “Can’t Do a Thing,” with his sultry play. But the song is also a good example of Isaak’s songwriting skill, which is not negligible. He’s got an Orbison / Lynch theme about dreams and dreaming running through much of his material, but in “Can’t Do a Thing” it takes a notable turn. The singer rues a relationship he is still not over, taunting her passive-aggressively, in his mind, with the things he can imagine. And she can’t do a thing to stop him. Example: “Makin’ love with somebody / Exactly like you.” The sad, irresistible “Except the New Girl” follows, continuing the best part of the album, with a tender loser sensibility and Wilsey’s piercing play on the lower strings. “Beautiful Homes” positively glides. “Waiting” may or may not be a response to “I’m Not Waiting” on Heart Shaped World. Yes, much of San Francisco Days, even the best, is not far from the usual Orbison place, taking a somewhat rancid turn occasionally. But I have to forgive because Isaak and Wilsey make love-sickness work so well and so effectively. “I Want Your Love,” a total smoothie, plays more in the rockabilly mode, a reedy organ taking command. Orbison played rockabilly too, of course, but in the end the better model for Isaak might be Neil Diamond, which he seems to signal in a way by closing the album on a perfectly conceived cover of “Solitary Man.” Diamond was a great songwriter too, and even moody bruised singer in his own right, but the way Isaak records and sequences his cover here feels significant, even if it’s not much in the running for best tune on the album. Then here comes the rest of Isaak’s career.