"Got to Kill Them All" (2001)

I was impressed with this Dennis Etchison story, which I found on the Trigger Warning website. It might be my favorite by Etchison yet, though he remains something of a puzzle for me. So far, I only know Dark Country by him, a collection of stories from the '70s and early '80s, which is where we're generally told to start. His stuff is cryptic and yet evocatively over-the-top, elusive but packing a punch. Literal monsters stalk Los Angeles, killer robots, strange beasts. They show up in places like freeway rest stops and 24-hour laundromats. This much later story has a lot of his usual stuff—the closely observed worlds of Los Angeles, notably after hours—but somehow revs up an extra notch. He is always playing with fractured perception, but here it feels more psychotic and scarier than usual. The disassociations are visceral. Reality phase-shifts on us. This is also typical of Etchison, who generally manages to hang on to a narrative arc. Our first-person narrator here is a game-show host. The themes of the show rattle in his head, multiple-choice questions in which contestants must pick the wrong answer. His punctuation and syntax slip and become sloppy, a sign of his internal stress. He is mad at his wife and has thoughts of killing her—more than thoughts. He has bought the materials to knock her out, tie her up, and burn the house down. That's the plan. This comes to us in pieces as he picks up a guy wandering the streets who recognizes him. It's a random Los Angeles street encounter but he lets the guy in his car. The guy has been having his own fights with his girlfriend. "They're all the same," our narrator says. "Think about it." They both have bad attitudes, and encourage each other, but the new guy seems to be thinking of how he can make amends. They stop at a quicky mart and he buys cleaning products. He's going to clean as a peace offering when he gets home, hoping she will take him back. But the narrator still has poisonous thoughts. What's only clear about him is that he's not thinking clearly, and this passenger becomes a wild-card element in the seesawing misogyny and noirish Los Angeles tension. Etchison keeps us at a distance but drawn continually back into it too, fighting to close these gaps of reality and hallucination, delivered in cool evocative banalities. In this one everything explodes at the end. Spoiler alert.

Read story online.

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

UK, 118 minutes

Director/writer: Mike Leigh

Photography: Dick Pope

Music: Gary Yershon

Editor: Jim Clark

Cast: Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, Alexis Zegerman, Samuel Roukin, Karina Fernandez, Kate O'Flynn, Stanley Townsend

I was surprised to find this picture might have a higher profile than I thought or remembered. It got a bunch of awards and nominations and landed on a dozen or more year-end top-10 lists by a range of critics. Notable contrarian Armond White called it the best movie of that year (not necessarily an endorsement). And then, on director and screenwriter Mike Leigh's IMDb page, it shows up second in his "Known For" tally, just behind Secrets & Lies and ahead of Naked and Another Year. That latter was another surprise for me as I have also thought of Another Year as another overlooked gem. Also, yes, I would say Secrets & Lies is probably his best, but I haven't seen it in a while.

It's tempting to call Happy-Go-Lucky the self-conscious inverse of Naked. Where Naked is a portrait of a pathologically miserable human being, Happy-Go-Lucky is similarly a character study about a pathologically cheerful person. Perhaps needless to say, because this is a Mike Leigh picture, both feature amazing central performances. Sally Hawkins is perfect as the relentlessly upbeat Poppy, a single grade-school teacher in her early 30s who hangs out with her friends in London and cracks dad jokes like nobody's business. "Bear with me," says one character. "Is there?" Poppy says. "Where is it?"

"Dreaming of the Queen" (1993)

[listen]

Welcome to Very, coming into its own on approximately this track, flattening into shape with an eerie horizon that stretches further and further away. It is like the point in a road trip where you have been driving a few days and your home has started to become more like mere memory. All vestiges of normal life have fallen away. "Dreaming of the Queen" could be the best track here. The album is starting to feel like it's capable of anything now. The song is suffused with wistful sadness—because it is another song about a relationship ending—but it is also comical in surprising ways, drolly recounting a sleeping dream full of dreamlike details: "Diana dried her eyes / And looked surprised / For I was in the nude / The old Queen disapproved." In case you were wondering, yes, "Diana" is Princess Diana, still alive in 1993 and ending her storybook marriage to Prince Charles, and the "Queen" is the Queen of England, Elizabeth II. All these years later, with Princess Diana long dead and the Queen down with COVID, the topicality hardly lands the same way, but really the point is the sad mood of the song and making the dream feel real. The dry account of the dream is largely what makes it, but the music delivers on the pomp and dignity appropriate to the British royal family. "Dreaming of the Queen" is one of the more stately floats in this parade. As the song deepens into its sadness, the utility of the absurd context emerges from the wanton banal cliches: "Love never seems to last, no matter how you try ... there are no more lovers left alive, no one has survived, and that's why love has died, yes, it's true – look, it's happened to me and you." This is not a good dream, however funny we may find this singer taking tea in the nude with the Queen and Lady Di: "I woke up in a sweat / Desolate," he notes. "Dreaming of the Queen" is funny, it's sad, it's absurd, and you never know what's coming next. It's just like a dream.

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021)

This long documentary (available via Shudder) bears the subtitle A History of Folk Horror but it's more focused on movies and TV than horror literature. It is densely packed with video clips and titles so I'm not about to complain. For one thing, Wikipedia defines "folk horror" as "a subgenre of horror film for cinema or television." For another thing, I came away with another big list of stuff to look at. So fair enough. Director and writer Kier-La Janisse boldly attacks in the first of six sections, naming "the unholy trinity" of folk horror in three movies from the '60s and '70s: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). If you know any of them, notably The Wicker Man, you already have a good idea what folk horror is all about: superstitions of rural people and their connections to the mysteries of the earth. Witches are quite a big deal, and folk horror is often embedded in specific places—isolated rural settings, caves and shallow graves, abandoned homes going to ruin, and of course the deep dark woods. The first half of this documentary stays close to the British Isles, arguably the source for all folk horror—certainly this doc is willing to entertain that argument. But eventually it steps across the Atlantic to examine US traditions and contributions and then into the world at large, where folk horror or something like it appears to be everywhere: Greece, Japan, Laos, Mexico, Serbia, and many other points of interest. It also takes a look at a folk horror revival that has been going on in the past 10 years or so, with pictures like Midsommar, The Ritual, and The VVitch. And while it is mostly focused on movies and TV, Woodlands Dark takes time to note such writers as Algernon Blackwood, Shirley Jackson, and M.R. James, which I appreciated. For me, what's most immediately useful and interesting here are the TV movies from the '70s on, which often seem to slip through the cracks and elude me. I'm also excited to look into a number of the foreign titles, as Woodlands Dark lays bare some of my most significant gaps, such as Witchfinder General, which I hope to rectify pronto (I've meant to look at it for a while). This documentary runs over three hours, but it's packed with information and definitely worth a look.

The Soft Machine (1961)

I had some work trying to sort what's intended by William S. Burroughs and his publishers with this novel and a group of others associated with it. I'm reading a 1988 mass market Grove Press collection of three short novels—The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Wild Boys. The first two are cited with a fourth, The Ticket That Exploded, as a trilogy. Burroughs later said this trilogy was in no particular order and could be read all six ways possible and it was all the same to him. Most discussions of it go chronologically by publication, starting here, so I will do that too, pausing for a look at The Wild Boys before finishing up. The real unifying element, I suspect, is that all (including Naked Lunch before them and possibly The Wild Boys too) are drawn from a 1,000-page manuscript called The Word Hoard that Burroughs assembled as a source for his cut-up style. I approached this so-called Nova Trilogy carefully, having struggled with Naked Lunch in the past. In a way it's like meditation. You have to keep resisting the impulse to impose narrative coherence. It feels like it should be there, because you're holding a book and reading, but it isn't there. It can get frustrating. But passages absurdly sing and when he's lucid Burroughs shows a lot of ability to be vividly crisp and to the point. It's quite welcome, in fact, when it lasts for the majority of a single page. But wrestling through, sentence by sentence, clause by clause, actually can be enjoyable for the language itself, abstracted. The fragments are a barrage, preposterous, an affront: hustling sex, scoring dope, getting off in a murky world of danger and paranoia. Burroughs comes on like a literary aesthete, which he is, and in the best sense of the idea, but he serves up these coarse turds of the underground life, e.g., the redundancy of the recurring phrase "rectal mucus." I expected no narrative coherence and I got none, which somehow made it more enjoyable. As I would see, however, it grows more tiresome across four novels even if they are very short. What is perhaps most amazing to me is that Burroughs worked and reworked all of them—I think my 1988 book has about the second or third version of The Soft Machine, and there is now a "restored text" version published in 2014. A lot of monkeying around for something that doesn't really add up except as pure abstracted reading experience. But it's possible the revisions really were constant improvements.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Polyrock (1980)

In retrospect maybe my favorite thing about this album now is Philip Glass sitting in on piano and keyboards—basically a member of the band. He's also formally a coproducer with Kurt Munkacsi. But Polyrock and Polyrock (their first album) are also examples of a nervous, twitchy type of new wave that I tend to go for, typified by Talking Heads, the B-52s, Blancmange, and the Tom Tom Club, which are obvious influences here, although of course in the first place Glass is more of an influence on them, so it's all kind of a moebius strip in a way. It's further complicated because Glass was not the leader of Polyrock although he produced. Maybe he was thinking of himself in 1980 as Brian Eno with his own rock band finds. The leader of Polyrock is singer and guitarist Billy Robertson, who wrote all the songs here with his brother Tommy. Billy, who died in 2018, may well be the yelpiest of this whole new wave class, a master of vocal anxiety like David Byrne, making you nervous just to hear it. It suits the quick tempos of the band's attack anyway: chukka-chik guitar rhythms and great guitar effects, a drummer working the high-hat, soaring harmonies like washes of color, and synthesized keyboards setting the main tone, sounding the melodies, marking the bridges, delivering the washes. It is tense and coiled music, but more nervous than menacing, like a day of drinking one coffee too many. It is always inviting with abandoned dance grooves. The whole thing runs under 35 minutes and works well like an informal suite building to multiple and various highs. It notably takes off on the third track, "This Song," guitar-driven with Star Trek vocals by way of the harmonies of Catherine Oblasney and Billy, occasionally interrupted by a more sweaty Billy. Sublime ultimately. Then who's mashing the keyboard on "Go West"? It could be any one of three or perhaps combinations (I keep wanting to know what Glass is doing on every track). Crazy blubbulous noise groove. "Bucket Rider" is another with an absolutely neck-snapping rhythm, an instrumental this time. Six of these 11 songs are under three minutes—the new wave aesthetic. "Your Dragging Feet," the longest at 4:58, is virtually epic in this environment, with another showcase for Oblasney and Billy. Nice to hear this one again.

"The Family of the Vourdalak" (1838)

A.K. Tolstoy was more famous for historical fiction, but he wrote this ripping vampire tale when he was 20 or 21. It's mostly lucid and straightforward, with blood-sucking duly noted as primary feature. A.K. Tolstoy's "vourdalak," which he credits to Serbian lore, is a specific type of vampire that preys on family members and friends, swiftly turning whole clans and villages into undead. These creatures are vulnerable to the cross and other Christian artifacts and can only be killed with an aspen stake to the heart. (However, all the aspen is over on the other side of the mountain, so not always convenient when needed.) These vampires seem to be fine with sunlight. In a way, A.K. Tolstoy is playing with much the same elements as, say, The Walking Dead and other TV series, zombie or otherwise—that is, familial attachments (and horror) are deep and persist even after death. This story is old but moves along briskly, driven by dialogue and scenes in the modern fashion. It has a frame story; the teller is wry and charming, an old man remembering his womanizing youth and flirting with the ladies who listen to his story. He's larding up the events as he tells them with his past loves and crushes, apparently for the sake of these "mesdames." Typically, he describes himself as too apt to fall in love. Meanwhile, family members are sucking the blood out of one another in the main story. They felt more like zombies after they turn but can also maintain personalities and appearance enough to fool others, though loved ones may sense something is terribly wrong. The natural test seems to be asking them to hold a cross, which doesn't seem that natural. But the creatures recoil and won't touch these holy objects because they burn their flesh or something. The setting is Central Europe, maybe Serbia, maybe Romania, maybe Moldova—one of those cradles of the vampire legend. And the story moves quickly, with lots of action, fights, and intrigues. Speaking as someone who often bogs down in Poe, I found "The Family of the Vourdalak" engaging and entertaining all the way. I also appreciated how plainspoken the Russian A.K. Tolstoy (and/or translator) is about the blood-sucking. That's what these creatures do and that's what he calls it. What this story does is arguably a little pulpy, but don't say that like it's a bad thing. Side note: A.K. Tolstoy was second cousin to the vastly more famous Leo, and there's another remote relative in the family, Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, who had some success as a science fiction writer in the 20th century. Vourdalaks!

Listen to story online.

Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (2009)

Carol Sklenicka's biography of poet and short story writer Raymond Carver is very good, packed with research and interviews and inevitably nearly as heartbreaking as some of Carver's stories. It was good to get to the bottom, more or less, of Carver's relationship with Gordon Lish, which is surprising in many ways. It's fair to say Lish is almost wholly responsible for the "minimalist" tag Carver was stuck with by Lish's alarmingly aggressive editing of the What We Talk About When We Talk About Love collection. Carver was generous and deft in circumventing the subsequent problems, but I believe he is still taken as a literary minimalist by many. In typical fashion, he was happy to accept the glory and evolve his writing from there in the limited time he had left. Inevitably, also, as biographies will, Sklenicka reveals the clay portions of Carver's feet. Some of this is painful to learn, such as the way he treated his family and first wife. He always meant well, at least you can say that about him. By the time he and his first wife were deep into their alcoholism there were incidents of domestic violence. Those things are less fun to learn. Still, Carver produced some great work in his 50 years on the planet. Calling him the American Chekhov is a reasonable proposition, although we should also remember Chekhov was a doctor, died six years younger than Carver, and produced about five times as much work. I don't know Carver's poetry very well (or anyone's), but I see his stories putting him in the company of Sherwood Anderson, early Ernest Hemingway, and John Cheever, which is no shabby lineage. I look forward to reading all his stories and reading them again. At the same time, there's a slightly sour taste from some aspects of his life, particularly the way his first wife was treated in the aftermath of his death. Sklenicka appears to have no dog in any of these fights in Carver's life, but I did come away with somewhat dimmed views of both Lish and Carver's second wife, Tess Gallagher. "Money changes everything" as a rock band from Atlanta called the Brains once noted—an eternal truth and no less so here. But Carver was a great writer and always will be. This biography does a solid job of telling the story.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Naked (1993)

UK, 131 minutes

Director/writer: Mike Leigh

Photography: Dick Pope

Music: Andrew Dickson

Editor: Jon Gregory

Cast: David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, Katrin Cartlidge, Greg Cruttwell, Peter Wight, Ewen Bremner, Susan Vidler, Deborah Maclaren, Gina McKee, Claire Skinner

Naked made quite a splash when it first came out in 1993, getting a lot of love at Cannes that year, but it's a movie that is easier to admire than to like. The main character, Johnny, is one of the most detestable characters I know in fiction. David Thewlis puts him over completely in an amazing performance that was the source of most of the picture's honors. Naked opens on Johnny raping a woman in the street, stealing a car, and fleeing to London to look up an old girlfriend, Louise (Lesley Sharp). She is cold to him, so he seduces her roommate Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge and an indelible accent). Johnny never stops talking and mocking. Self-destructive does not even start with this guy. He's so extreme the idea of derangement and mental illness inevitably intrudes. He is highly intellectual and freely rants conspiracy theories, many rooted in the Bible and Book of Revelations. Whether he actually believes them, or is once again just "taking the piss," is hard to tell.

Last time I looked at Naked was my third time. The first was when it was new. I was caught up in the hype and liked it reflexively. It's by director and writer Mike Leigh who knows what he is doing making a movie. The second time I liked it less—the dreary look and feel, the harping rants, Johnny's prolific bad behavior. It's a lot. This third time I came down more in the middle, partly because I knew how to set my expectations. It's basically people being beastly to each other in serial fashion, although inevitably there are some good people too in this trainwreck, plus lots of ciphers. The main problem, and it's not just Johnny, is a kind of toxic immaturity, a selfishness and smallness to most of these people that is unrelenting. A typical exchange as someone is leaving someone else's premises: "Are you coming back?" "What the fuck for?"

"Carmilla" (1872)

Once I decided to get to Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu it made sense to get to this long story and stone classic of vampire literature sooner rather than later, and glad I did. Mostly I've only read ghost stories by him so far. "Carmilla" feels different from other Le Fanu, even in that last collection, In a Glass Darkly, where it appears with some of his best stuff. It leans brazenly into erotic themes—"Carmilla" is not just a vampire tale but a lesbian vampire tale, circumspect yet insistently overt. I heard an interesting theory lately that interest in vampires rose in the late 19th century with the onset of embalming. The idea is that knowing corpses of loved ones were preserved in lifelike form freaked people out even more than knowing they decomposed. Certainly, predating Bram Stoker's Dracula by 25 years, "Carmilla" trucks in the uncanny spells of attraction under which people fall for these handsome and beautiful creatures who never age, according to the ancient legends. Setting aside embalming, "Carmilla" may be the place where vampire erotics as we know them start. It's typical of Le Fanu in that the writing is restrained and straightforward, and it's also typical of vampire lore in specific ways. For example, it has become almost comic to me how often in these stories a charming stranger shows up like a Jane Austen rock star and everyone is enchanted and wants to know them. But at the same time a sudden rash of unexplained diseases, wounds, and deaths erupts in the isolated rural area around them. Most of these incidents are going on offstage in "Carmilla," but it's a steady drumbeat. People are always late to understanding the obvious in horror and sometimes it makes you want to scream (you fools! wake up!), but it works that way in life too. Victims can often be the last to suspect they are victims. Le Fanu also plays the anagram game here, another notable influence on Stoker—other names used by Carmilla across her centuries-long vampiring career are Marcilla and Mircalla. In appearance she is young and vibrant, though notably "languorous," and in this story she is preying specifically on a 19-year-old innocent, our Laura, the first-person narrator and heroine. It's all so luscious with campy appeal. Serialized originally, the story's 16 chapters are short and move the busy lumbering tale along, with doppelgangers, churchyards, midnight rambles, shrieking in the night, and, yes, puncture wounds. Le Fanu assumes our understanding of vampire rules, which are notoriously slippery. Carmilla keeps late hours and sleeps until the afternoon, but appears to tolerate sunlight. She seems able to affect dreams and confuse her victims. Laura is entirely susceptible to her. The titillating erotics are a lot of outrageous fun, slyly flouting Victorian expectations, and include BDSM edges as well. "Carmilla" had obvious influences on Stoker and Dracula in terms of vampire lore—in many ways "Carmilla" is the bolder tale. It is slowed some by antiquated language and overworked structure, but mostly it is lucid and proceeds with all due speed. Carmilla shows up and takes charge of Laura, even as Laura writes. She does what she likes with Laura and makes her forget a lot of it. It relies on our own imaginations to fill in the gaps and get over and so it does, in the best ways.

Read story online.

Top 40

1. Rilo Kiley, "Dreamworld" (4:43, 2007)
2. Beharie, "Don't Wanna Know" (3:53)
3. Avalanches, "Since I Left You" (4:22, 2000)
4. Mamman Sani, "Five Hundred Miles" (5:53, early 1980s)
5. Wipers, "When It's Over" (6:34, 1981)
6. Chi-Lites, "Oh Girl" (3:36, 1972)
7. Link Wray, "Rumble" (2:27, 1958)
8. Keith, "98.6" (3:13, 1966)
9. Fortunes, "You've Got Your Troubles" (3:22, 1965)
10. Danse Society, "Dolphins" (3:02, 1981)
11. David Fanshawe, "African Sanctus: African Sanctus" (2:57, 1972)
12. Earl Hooker, "Wah Wah Blues" (4:36, 1969)
13. Rascals, "Peaceful World" (21:25, 1971)
14. Coldplay, "Viva la Vida" (4:02, 2008)
15. Juno Reactor and Don Davis, "Mona Lisa Overdrive" (10:08, 2003)
16. Neutral Milk Hotel, "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" (3:22, 1998)
17. Weakerthans, "Left and Leaving" (4:46, 2000)
18. Chicken Shack, "First Time I Met the Blues" (6:27, 1968)
19. Gas, "Pop 4" (9:51, 2000)
20. Ed Sheeran, "Bad Habits" (3:50)
21. Lil Nas X, "Montero (Call Me by Your Name)" (2:17)
22. Lil Nas X, "That's What I Want" (2:23)
23. Lil Nas X, "Sun Goes Down" (2:48)
24. Let's Eat Grandma, "Hall of Mirrors" (5:11)
25. Lana Del Rey, "Arcadia" (4:23)
26. Psychonauts, "Rockabella" (2:56, 2019)
27. Caleb Landry Jones, "Bogie" (3:09)
28. BadBadNotGood, "Signal From the Noise" (9:02)
29. Wild Feathers, "Ain't Lookin'" (3:22)
30. Sneaker Pimps, "Fighter" (4:07)
31. R.E.M., "Sitting Still" (3:14, 1981)
32. Fetty Wap, "Trap Queen" (3:42, 2014)
33. Hawkwind, "Magnu" (8:15, 1975)
34. Wire, "Two People in a Room" (2:10, 1979)
35. M.I.A., "Paper Planes" (3:25, 2007)
36. Cal Tjader, "My Little Red Book" (3:22, 1968)
37. Robert Walter's 20th Congress, "My Little Red Book" (3:36, 2019)
38. Nirvana, "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" (4:52, 1993)
39. Oasis, "Wonderwall" (4:18, 1995)
40. Gaslight Anthem, "The '59 Sound" (3:10, 2008)

thanx: Billboard, Spin, rockcritics.com, unusual suspects

The Boy Behind the Door (2020)

I googled up some yearend best-of horror movie lists and this is the first one I decided to try. The title is somewhat misleading, as there are two boys who are both behind a bunch of different doors, so it's hard to make out the specific point beyond "sounds cool," which I admit it does. These two boys—Bobby (Lonnie Chavis) and Kevin (Ezra Dewey)—have been abducted and are trying to make it alive out of a house of horrors. It's international sex trafficking, we're given to understand, catering to the rich, for those inclined toward topicality in their horror movies. But The Boy Behind the Door is basically an enclosed space kind of hunt and chase exercise (Alien in a true-crime setting), and doesn't do a bad job of it. I didn't think the editing was entirely that sharp because I didn't always understand where people were or the layout of the place but that could have been intentional too (and/or I'm the one who's not so sharp). I will say there are too many entirely gratuitous wounds designed purely for our discomfort, such as one of the boys tearing out a fingernail trying to escape a room. Once, maybe, with this stuff, to set a certain edge. Codirectors/cowriters David Charbonier and Justin Powell reached for it four times by my count, which became merely annoying. Some of the wounds serve the plot, so OK, but others not so much. (Content warning: wounds. See also DoestheDogDie.com.) They weren't necessary because the beats of the chase keep this thing pretty tight. This is a picture not afraid to take some hairpin turns, hit you with surprises, and pull them off. There is a certain surprise right in the middle, for example, but one result is the best performance here, by Kristin Bauer van Straten creating a fearsome never-say-die monster out of one of the kidnappers who occupy and run this hell-house. Even at 88 minutes there were points where The Boy Behind the Door felt like it might be thinking about overstaying its welcome, but overall it's a tidy little ride with some nice ideas to ratchet the suspense.

Murder by Candlelight (2015)

The first thing I noticed about Michael Knox Beran's Murder by Candlelight is that it's hard to figure out what it's about. Subtitle: The Gruesome Crimes Behind Our Romance With the Macabre. Blurbs and jacket copy are no more illuminating. The best way to describe it might be as a true-crime book written by an academic who is embarrassed by his interest in true crime. He discusses crime cases of the past, but Thomas Carlyle, Thomas de Quincey, and literary headnotes by the handful are here too for some reason. Detective fiction is specifically pilloried. Beran goes out of his way to throw shade at William Roughead, the great Scottish true-crime writer, who scoffed at de Quincey's account of the Wapping murders of 1811. (De Quincey does not strike me as more credible than Roughead.) The crimes Beran looks at are from the late Romantic or early Victorian first half of the 19th century. These cases were mostly new to me, with varying degrees of interest. The main attraction appears to be treating the Jack the Ripper case as having numerous precedents. They were new to me but not surprising crimes. Beran's argument is that the only thing that set Jack the Ripper apart was his taunting of police and media. Wait, what? That's like saying the only thing that set Babe Ruth apart was the homeruns (not that Jack the Ripper is to be glorified). As with Beran's intemperate lunges at detective fiction he more often makes the case against himself with views like that. Mostly these crimes remind again that crimes like these go on all the time. And whatever the age—Enlightenment, Romantic, Modern, 21st Century—that is the sad constant. Beran is incoherent on "evil" (as are we all, I guess) but seems to be trying to warn us of our own naivete. I never get any sense of what his prescription would be. I was interested to find the Goodreads community, usually mild-mannered (in my experience), in an uproar on this one. Murder by Candlelight has its defenders there, but they are drowned out by the naysayers, most of them responding to Beran's maddening arrogance in the face of being so muddled. I got the book as a public library discard within six years of publication, which suggests not even librarians are really on his side. The cases in this book are mostly interesting and he obviously researched it fairly thoroughly, whatever his "it" actually is. Beran could have done with a bit more of Roughead's clarity. Instead, he comes off as peevish and his arrogance unwarranted.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.