“Vampyr” (1871)

I should start by noting that Jan Neruda’s very short story (also known as “Vampire” and “The Vampire”) is not the basis for Danish filmmaker Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 film of that name. That honor goes to Sheridan Le Fanu. Neruda is on Wikipedia as an important figure in Czech realism and a member of the May School, although I don’t know what those things mean exactly. But probably this story is a one-off of some kind. It features a small Polish family touring the Greek islands, with a daughter who is sick. This being a vampire story, I was instantly suspicious of the family members, especially the daughter’s new husband. That’s how vampire stories can tend to go. But the vampire in the story, eventually identified as “The Vampire,” is a Greek man, a traveling young artist renowned (or notorious) for making sketches of the corpses of people recently passed. But he does them ahead of time, before their deaths. The daughter who is ailing appears to be merely ailing, but it's possible the Greek man is doing a vampire thing on her too, that is, sucking her blood or energy somehow. The story is not really clear about the matter, nor even about who the vampire is, though eventually it is spelled out more or less. The Greek artist guy shows up after the family has been settled into a hotel and begins to sketch the daughter. He does so discreetly, with his back turned so no one can see his work. He’s less like a vampire and more like a social misfit with uncanny intuition. (I will note also that daylight does not seem to bother him, nor do we know whether the daughter has puncture wounds on her neck.) That’s basically all the story is giving us. I didn’t think it was very effective or interesting and also it seems to be out of step with Neruda’s main currents and larger career. I think vampire stories by definition are not realism of any kind, not even magical realism. So possibly this was written for the money? The story is quite readable for something in translation from the 19th century, but I would have to say it’s fatally slight.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Cowboy Copas, “Hangman’s Boogie” (1949)

[listen up!]

Cowboy Copas was a country singer out of Blue Creek, Ohio, who’s probably most famous now for dying in the same plane crash in 1963 that also took Patsy Cline. “Hangman’s Boogie” does not appear to be his best-known song but it’s one that has stuck with me since I found it in the Hillbilly Boogie box set (on the Proper label). I admit it took me a few turns to grok what’s going on here. I didn’t expect anything like it from a song with “boogie” in its title (which includes most of the 100 tunes on Hillbilly Boogie). The jaunty air of Copas’s vocal perfectly belies the doom and darkness of the scene he paints, with the singer scheduled for execution in the morning for rustling cattle: “I’m gonna do the boogie with the drop me beat / Just a corny rhythm where you swing your feet.” The song was written by Larry Cassidy, another obscure workaday midcentury country entertainer with perhaps a more morbid comical bent than usual, the author also of the seagoing disaster “Save the Alcohol” (“Save the kids and the women first, then save the alky-hall,” says the captain). Cowboy Copas can be found sitting on the back of a flatbed truck in the 1949 movie Square Dance Jubilee to sing this confounding upbeat tale of woe, which seems to play capital punishment for something of a lighthearted joke. (The movie is rated 4.0 by 61 people on IMDb, but I think it’s worth a look for the music. “Hangman’s Boogie” starts shortly after 31:00.) The song even invokes the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and says outright but calmly, “It’s a doggone pity but I gotta go.” The last line and its foul image kept creeping up on me, amazed to find it so baldly in a song like this, softly hollering into eternity: “I’m gonna be dancing in the strangest way / Doing the hangman’s boogie at the break of day.”

The House of the Dead (1862)

For those keeping score, the only novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky that Vladmir Nabokov liked was The Double, and the only one that Leo Tolstoy liked was The House of the Dead. Both cases make sense for specific reasons. The Double is arty and literary (and good), The House of the Dead is full of humanity (and very good). I have to say so far I’ve liked very much everything I’ve read by Dostoevsky, even more than I expected. The House of the Dead has a tone that is different from any of the others—more sober, with more pathos. Gone is the screaming edge of anxiety, outrage, dread, hysteria. It's fair to call it a novel but much of it is lightly fictionalized, closer to autofiction, with scenes from his four years in prison at hard labor, following his mock execution, an unimaginably cruel and traumatizing exercise in which he believed he was about to die. There is little narrative through-line here, just scenes of prison life organized by theme: first impressions, new acquaintances, Christmas, the hospital, punishments, and animals they lived with and loved—a horse, a goat, etc. This journalistic novel is also where I learned that Dostoevsky’s family of origin had the status of nobility. Dostoevsky’s first-person narrator here is also from that upper class, and describes how the majority of prisoners were peasants and hated him for his class. Just another problem to deal with in prison. The book is rich with characters, and Dostoevsky’s ability to bring them to life with vivid detail and concise anecdotes is more evidence of how he continued to get better as a novelist. It may have been serialized in its initial publication, but it does not feel fragmented. Rather, it is methodical in its treatment of the subjects at hand. Some of the foreshadowing and references to other parts of the text feel a bit awkward but I like the approach he has taken. The narrator is serving a 10-year sentence for “assassinating” his wife (in the Constance Garrett translation) whereas Dostoevsky served four years for participating in a subversive literary discussion group. There are many beautiful passages here—notably the sections on Christmas, a theatrical performance staged by prisoners, and the prison animals. But I really enjoyed all of it. It’s interesting to see how much skill he has even when he is adopting a more restrained voice. The House of the Dead belongs with the best of prison literature and it’s one of Dostoevsky’s best too.

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

Batman Returns (1992)

USA, 126 minutes

Director: Tim Burton

Writers: Bob Kane, Daniel Waters, Sam Hamm

Photography: Stefan Czapsky

Music: Danny Elfman

Editors: Bob Badami, Chris Lebenzon

Cast: Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Michael Gough, Michael Murphy, Cristi Conaway, Pat Hingle, Paul Reubens, Andrew Bryniarsky

Director Tim Burton’s sequel to his first Batman movie makes it more obvious how much even that picture was attempting to split the difference between the campy ‘60s TV version and Frank Miller’s ‘80s reimagining of the caped crusader as a grizzled vigilante and sadistic mental case. The production design and some elements of the story lean hard into the latter but then there is Jack Nicholson taking top billing and slobbering all over the set in whooping cocaine-addled fugue states. Soundtrack by Prince. We might have thought the 1989 Batman worked, to the extent it did, because we wanted so badly the kind of Batman movie it took nearly 20 years to get. “We” meaning fans of the Frank Miller version, which I adored in the ‘80s.

Batman Returns is more like return of the camp. Casting Pee Wee Herman in the prologue as the Penguin’s father kind of gives away the game, as do casting Danny DeVito as the Penguin (who prefers to go by his given name, Oswald Cobblepot) and Christopher Walken (wearing a helmet of white hair) as Max Shreck, Gotham City’s power company tycoon implementing a dastardly scheme. Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle, who becomes the Catwoman, is another case. We’ll get to that. Early in the picture, when she is still a meek stammering secretary to Max, Batman rescues her from an assault. “Wow,” she says. “The Batman. Or is it just Batman?” The very question! So meta! “Batman” is in the tradition of the ‘50s and ‘60s comic book version leading into the TV show, whereas “the Batman” (subtle distinction!) is the original moniker for the creature of the night (including “the Bat-Man”) which Miller was trying to revive.

Arthur Smith, “Guitar Boogie” (1945)

[listen up!]

I was reading an interesting book by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes called What Was the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Record? (review next month!), which included this instrumental as one of its 50 candidates. Then I noticed the tune is included in a Hillbilly Boogie box set on the Proper label I’ve been listening to lately (with Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “The Shotgun Boogie” and one more gem for next week). Arthur Smith and his music have traveled under many names, in part because there was a Grand Ole Opry player named Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith and in part no doubt because the Smith name is so common. So we have Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, Arthur Smith’s Hot Quintet, Arthur (Guitar Boogie) Smith & His Cracker-Jacks, etc., etc. Notably, he also wrote a song in 1955 called “Feudin’ Banjos” that was adapted by Eric Weissberg & Steve Mandell as the #2 1973 hit “Dueling Banjos” (from the movie Deliverance). Arthur Smith got around. I would not remotely consider this the first rock ‘n’ roll record—I’m not even sure it’s rock ‘n’ roll. Its chief virtue, as with “Dueling Banjos,” is the technical skill of the players and the “tasty” polish of the performance. It’s simple but resonant, and if it’s a quintet that must be at least three acoustic guitars with a bass. I’m not even sure I hear a drummer—one of the guitars is doing that duty. The tune has a nice boogie feel, of course, and some interesting interplay and solos. Overall it seems much closer to me to straight-up country—it’s telling that Wikipedia lists the people influenced by Smith as Glen Campbell, Roy Clark, and Hank Garland. In just that way “Guitar Boogie” is so smooth it’s almost soothing.

My Mom Jayne (2025)

Until this documentary came along, I did not know that Mariska Hargitay, flinty star of the longest-running live-action TV series of all time, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, is a daughter of Jayne Mansfield. Jayne Mansfield, of course, relegated to sex kitten status, was one of the midcentury “Three M’s,” the so-called blonde bombshells of the ‘50s and ‘60s, with Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Van Doren. Hargitay directed this picture, a patient and loving unraveling of the many complexities associated with Mansfield, her career, and her family and loves. Mansfield had her first of five children at the age of 16. She had wanted to be a Hollywood star for most of her life by then. After winning a series of beauty pageants she finally made it there at the age of 21. Hargitay interviews her brothers and her older sisters, visits storage units that have been left untouched for decades, and peels back the layers of family secrets, eventually uncovering a major one that involves Hargitay herself, Mansfield’s fourth child. She was named Mariska but Mansfield insisted on calling her Maria for most of the few years left to her—it’s a clue to this labyrinthine past. Full disclosure, I’ve never been a fan of Law & Order: SVU, which I think largely just leans into outrage about sex crimes to the point of monotony. A lot of my problems there persisted here as Hargitay often feels like she’s performing in her seething Olivia Benson mode. There’s no doubt, however, about her bravely facing the headwinds of heartache and family agony, and in many ways her tough detective mode is a perfect fit for this investigation. As with Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield was no dumb blonde, but was frustrated by the limitations, long-term as well as immediate, of the sex dolly roles that amounted to most of her opportunities. I still love the 1956 movie The Girl Can’t Help It (more for Little Richard and the other rock ‘n’ rollers) but have always found Mansfield hard to watch, it’s such a parade of stereotypes and cliché, pious about her maternal instincts, openly bug-eyed about her boobs. Hargitay skillfully if somewhat ham-handedly restores Mansfield’s dignity here. She doesn’t dwell much on Mansfield’s worst roles or the grotesque details of her death. She reaches out to and includes all the children and extended family of Mansfield, including Hargitay’s stepmother Ellen Hargitay as well as Mansfield’s friends and husbands still alive and she drenches it all in a lot of love. I would say it’s better than any episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but that’s a low bar for me. Good one especially for fans of SVU and/or Jayne Mansfield.

Quinn’s Book (1988)

The fourth novel in William Kennedy’s Albany cycle is fairly called a doozy. The opening scene, which describes a natural disaster, is insanely vivid and the tale at hand proceeds from there, with drowning victims recovered and a resurrection scene so over the top all you can really do is laugh. Daniel Quinn is there as a young teenager and he saves Maud Fallon, equally young, from drowning. She begs him to steal her away from her guardian, a sex worker and stage performer and her aunt with her own oddball retinue in tow. The rest of the novel never quite lives up to this amazing opening, but the glow lasts all the way. The incident takes place in 1849 and we stay with this motley group for about a year, before the novel shifts into the wartime future of 1864, with a brief stop in 1858, mostly in flashback. I was 100% on the side of Quinn and Maud but alas things don’t always go the way you’d like or expect. Some tantalizing details, such as a mysterious shiny disc recovered from its concealment at the bottom of a birdcage, never seem to amount to anything. Maybe this disc appears elsewhere and is explained in the cycle? For that matter, as familiar as the name Quinn is from the first three novels (Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and Ironweed) I don’t remember the circumstances and couldn’t find anything on the internet about him. Ironweed won all the awards and attention for Kennedy and his Albany cycle of novels, but I liked Legs more and Quinn’s Book might be even better. Kennedy is one of those writers who loves language and writing and his own voice, so he tends to be a pleasure to read no matter what. He’s even making up words my kindle dictionary doesn’t know, though their meanings are always plain from context. In many ways this feels like what you’d get if J.D. Salinger wrote Blood Meridian. I love the 19th-century setting—including, of course, as it must, the Civil War—even though the sensibility driving it is thoroughly late 20th century. I was worried for Fenimore Cooper’s stultifying voice, given his tales could well have taken place in upstate New York. But Quinn’s Book is way better than any Cooper I know. My advice, if you like Kennedy, is don’t stop with Ironweed.

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

“The Lodger” (1993)

Fred Chappell’s story is very clever and enjoyable exactly for that reason. I found it in a Year’s Best anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and what’s more it also won a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction too. Clearly a lot of people have enjoyed it. But I think it’s closer to literary satire than fantasy, let alone horror. The clear target is postmodernism. At the same time it certainly has affinities with the bookish surrealism of Jorge Luis Borges, so give it that too. “The Lodger” manages to eat its cake and have it too in many ways. Chappell namechecks Alfred Hitchcock (whose 1920s silent movie supplies the title) and Edgar Allan Poe. The main character, Robert Ackley, is a low-level librarian in a university with a modest collection (by the tone) of 2 million volumes. He spends his evenings plunged into the strange finds he makes by day in the library. He likes the weird and elusive and obscure. He may be living in the right universe for it because this is a strange one. It’s much like our own but with certain key differences, such as, apparently, no Allen Ginsberg or Howl. Instead, there is Gerald Grayforth and Squall, which has obvious fragments from Howl and affords Chappell the opportunity to unleash, in 1993, some no doubt long-simmering mockery of the beats. There are other targets I recognized here as well and many more I suspected. Basically Chappell is making a party out of it. Everyone’s invited. One evening Ackley is reading an obscure poet from Cleveland, Lyman Scoresby—something to do with Hart Crane—and picks up Scoresby’s spirit, who then lives in Ackley’s head and begins to systematically take him over. The story then becomes a contest of wills between them and a good time is had by all. I like it because I am open to this assessment of the po-mo project. As someone who loves Ginsberg and Howl, however, I also got a glimpse of what highbrow condescension looks like coming from a vanity-damaged specimen like Scoresby, in which case I’m afraid Chappell, by extension and presumption, looks merely smug. So perhaps he and I are both smug about postmodernism, if you follow me. It stands to reason. And the story remains entertaining on balance, an intriguing piece of intellectual stunt work, especially in the way it resolves.

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

Tennessee Ernie Ford, “The Shotgun Boogie” (1950)

[listen up!]

Tennessee Ernie Ford had a big hit with this entertaining story-song in 1950, which sat for 14 weeks atop the Rockabilly & Western Swing chart. It hits with a rollicking piano, hip-wrigglin’ boogie bass figure, and upbeat nimble tempo. Our narrator is a good old boy living off the fat of his land with his shotgun standing in the corner. In the first part, he is out hunting. “The big fat rabbits are jumpin' in the grass / Wait 'til they hear my old shotgun blast.” Said blast is replicated throughout the song by hard hits on the snare drum, probably my favorite part of the song and its most ingenious. It sounds right purely by context. “Look out bushy tails, tonight you'll be in the pot.” In the second part, he meets a Daisy Mae type of beautiful backwoods gal. Among other things, of course, she is a deadly shot with her own shotgun. He is instantly smitten. “I looked her up and down, said, ‘Boy, this is love.’” But the usual complications soon prevail. “I sat down on a log, took her on my lap / She said wait a minute, bud, you gotta see my pap / ... He don't like a man that's gonna trifle.” And so our guy follows the script. “Well, I called on her pap like a gentleman oughter / He said, ‘No brush hunter's gonna get my daughter.’" And raising his shotgun, fires. No worries, our guy gets the drift and outruns the shot. “I wanted weddin' bells / I'll be back little gal, when your pappy runs out of shells.” Ford’s voice is homely and flat, especially on the long notes, but it’s all part of the charm.

“The Bride” (2020)

This story by Shaenon K. Garrity is another good one from Black Static magazine, which unfortunately closed down operations in 2023 after 30 years. Garrity’s bio says she is a cartoonist, and maybe some of that accounts for the vivid imagery here, but really this is more compelling on a meta-textual level, at once riffing on the Frankenstein mythos and addressing the reader in chanting, taunting, hypnotic ways. It opens: “As you drive south, the heat rushes up to greet you like your name is in the guestbook and it has your room prepared.” It’s set in the early 1930s insofar as it has a time setting, which suggests some affinity with the Universal movie franchise. But it is wild and cold and sophisticated more like Mary Shelley herself. It’s not Bride of Frankenstein but it’s in the neighborhood. This Frankenstein’s monster is made from the corpse of a beautiful young woman by a “Doctor” to be his mate. It is in the form of an animated dead girl. She smells bad. She falls apart easily and must be put back together with wax and other adherents. Radium as well as electricity was involved in animating her, so she is also radioactive. Her vision is x-ray and she sees and hears with her entire body. The relationship between the Doctor and the dead girl is, of course, fraught and desperate. Eventually she leaves her rotting body behind entirely and exists as a kind of energy vortex, dimly seen but in the shape of a woman. Meanwhile there is another narrative thread going on in second-person that has us driving and searching for something that appears to be the end of the story? It’s still not finished at the end, leaving us in limbo, even though it certainly seems to finish the story of the bride, but implies it hasn’t to keep us going? Maybe. It’s actually a pretty neat trick, a kind of narrative moebius loop. It’s one of the best stories I’ve read in a while, contemporary or otherwise. It is splashed with bolts of color. The language is blunt. It may be coy about its Mary Shelley and other Frankenstein sources, but they are there. Garrity even slips in an ”It’s alive!” But I like even more how she pushes beyond that, into a next phase of “the Bride” as a glimmering energy vortex. It wasn’t just life that was created in this experiment, but something more profound. And it’s irresistible! (Note: I see there is a movie called The Bride! set to be released this March. It sounds like it has a similar premise and shares elements with this story, but I don’t see Garrity’s name anywhere associated with it. Credit for direction and screenplay goes solely to Maggie Gyllenhaal, so maybe it’s just one of those “something in the air” coincidences. Obviously, I haven’t seen it yet, but plan to.)

Black Static #77
Story not available online.