“Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad” (1904)

Three commas for the title: M.R. James has a nice way of letting his stories unfold, almost conversationally, but with subtly strange structures and digressions along with the twists and turns. I like how golf gets involved with this one and that the third-person narrator is a little put off by it, taking pride in being ignorant of the game. Our main guy, Professor Parkins, is taking some time off to stay in the country, work on some kind of writing or research project, and “improve his game” (that’s the golf). An acquaintance asks him to look into a nearby site while he is there that may have the ruins of a “Templars preceptory.” I had to look up both terms—the Templars were deadly serious knights of the Crusades, and a preceptory was more or less a school for them. Professor Parkins, after playing a round of golf, does look into the site and does find evidence of buried ruins there. He pokes around a little and finds a strange cylindrical object. Can you guess what it is? That’s right, it’s a whistle, and when he gets done scraping away the dirt he sees that it has strange markings on it. Of course we see the danger coming. Don’t blow on that whistle, we really want to tell this guy. But of course he does and then the trouble starts. I like the way James describes the whistle’s tone. “It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and, soft as it was, [Parkins] somehow felt it must be audible for miles round.” The wind comes up suddenly and it’s difficult to close the window. The wind blows all night, and he has strange dreams. The next day, when he walks by himself, he has the feeling he is being followed. But when he turns around he sees only a strange figure in the distance that never gains on him. No problems with the golf—in fact, he plays better the second day. Children report that, while he was out, they saw someone in his room waving to them from the window. On his return to the room he sees someone has been using an extra bed there. I should also mention that Parkins is a rationalist who holds no truck with ghosts or the supernatural. His objections are cerebral and almost comic in the circumstances, but he staunchly insists on them. Among other things he is having his mind opened in this story. The ghost—ultimately there is a confrontation in the room—appears to be draped with a sheet (it has a “linen face”). You see the sheet thing a lot in cartoons and TV shows, but not actually so much in ghost stories, where they are usually more like mist if they are visible at all. But there’s an animated sheet here. The illustration above (by James McBryde) was used for a 2005 Penguin collection and is a reasonable approximation of the harassment Parkins endures. Fortunately, a believer is on hand to shepherd Parkins through and play golf with. This guy takes it upon himself to throw the whistle into a deep part of the sea. Problem solved. Or is it?

M.R. James, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories
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Showing Up (2022)

Director and cowriter Kelly Reichardt’s latest, her first feature since 2019’s First Cow, returns both to present-day Portland and to Michelle Williams, who plays Lizzy, a sculptor with a day job and a mostly unsatisfied life. Unsatisfied, but not without reason. Her hot water heater is out and her landlord Jo (Hong Chau), also an artist, is too busy and/or preoccupied with herself to take care of it. Her brother Sean (John Magaro) is mentally ill and her divorced parents—Jean (Maryann Plunkett) and Bill (Judd Hirsch)—are not inclined to recognize it, let alone do anything about it. It also seems likely they have neglected or downplayed Lizzy and her ambitions. They maybe aren’t the greatest parents. In one fraught scene, Jean tells Lizzy, obviously not for the first time, that Sean is a genius. He has just gone missing. Lizzy is fighting for equilibrium in all this as she prepares for a gallery show no one else in her life seems to care about. She has to push to get the show together in and around her day job, a significant breakdown of her brother, and a pigeon that her cat caught and harmed in the middle of the night. As in Wendy and Lucy, an innocent animal—this pigeon with a broken wing—delivers a lot of the deflected emotional weight here and certainly a payload of symbolism too, as its fate grows intricately tied to Lizzy’s. I’m not sure how well it works. It’s a little heavy-handed. But the performances in Showing Up are fine throughout, with a nice big cast of able character players. What I liked best was a sense of the artist’s life that felt true. They work out of compulsion, for the love of it, and as a responsibility to their talent. But people take them as indulgent hedonists. Then the work becomes hard and life can grow overwhelming, when all they wanted was the satisfaction of finishing a project and doing it well. Lizzy has to have good days. We just don’t see many of them. She is pushed to her limits preparing for the show. A lot of people in Showing Up are artists or free spirits and have built their lives around their own creativity, and they struggle with the fact that there is not more joy in it. Showing Up may be a little on the dreary side, but it hits a side of the creative life that most people prefer to ignore. It looks like fun, but it’s hard.

“The Door” (1973)

This story by UK horror writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes is reasonably effective, but it’s not hard to see an argument for it being faintly ridiculous. It’s a haunted house type of story, except it’s just one door that is haunted. William Seaton, a writer, found it in a specialty shop and reworked his study to make it the door for his writing supplies cupboard. It is antique and ornate, from an estate recently liquidated. The door is out of place there, much too majestic for a cupboard and entirely too massive, but Seaton likes to look at it while he writes. Well, one night—he likes to write at night—he finds himself gazing at the door and letting his thoughts drift, but these thoughts soon become vivid and intense. He imagines himself in the grand room for which the door once served as portal. It’s the beginning of an obsession. Soon he is chasing this experience and he is eating and writing less. His wife Rosemary thinks it has something to do with the door. They talk about the door a lot and research its history. There’s a certain confusion about his dreamy experiences. We’re not always sure where he is during these interludes or what is going on exactly. I sometimes had the nagging feeling Chetwynd-Hayes did not know himself. Toward the end of the story Seaton finds a journal in the room beyond the door and reads it. “An Experiment in Darkness,” the fragment is titled. And while it is also doing some of the tedious work of exposition it is quite effective at setting a desperate supernatural mood. I call the exposition tedious because the story is often at pains to rationalize itself, which can undercut the horrors even as it clarifies. So this story has explanations and also a happy ending. I was a little disappointed with myself for being disappointed about a happy ending. After all, is an unhappy ending any less mechanical? And what am I looking for in horror anyway—miserablism? Perhaps. I appreciate the various terrors here, which are often well done. As a portal that might lead anywhere, doors (and windows too) are a good element to focus on. Finding something ruthless on the other side is good stuff too. But overcoming them in time for a hearty breakfast? Maybe not so much.

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

Calendar Girl (1956)

Even the cover art on this one—even the title, really—make it clear someone decided to market Julie London on her third album as a sex kitten, sultry and wanton. Sure, that’s already there in her singing style to some extent, which has range. But lay off the sledgehammer for pity’s sake. Unfortunately, the marketing conceit follows all the way into the musical arrangements, which feature horns, strings, and backup singers. Gone is the plain varnish of London’s voice backed only by soft electric guitar and bass. Whose idea was this? Calendar Girl is formally a concept LP, with one song each devoted to every month of the year (“June in January,” “February Brings the Rain,” “Melancholy March,” etc.), plus an extra, “Thirteenth Month,” to make a baker’s dozen. I don’t really know many of these songs, whose writers include Hoagy Carmichael, Arthur Hamilton, and many others. From my notes: ”’Sleigh Ride in July’ is a very bad Christmas song. ‘Time for August’ may be the most embarrassing sex kitten play of all.” The album is tainted by an unmistakable ‘50s style of upscale lounge music applied like frosting and it’s almost unlistenable to me for that. Yes, London’s singing and phrasing can be made out through the frippery, but these settings are so intrusive and repellent that it takes more work than worthwhile to get to them. I grabbed this up in the usual throes of a downloading frenzy, which is how it ended up on my list of albums to get to. Later research revealed for listeners like me that London’s second album, Lonely Girl (1956), and a follow-up to her first, Julie Is Her Name, Volume II (1958), are more like the obvious next steps after her first, done up very nicely much the same way. They all have the same producer too, Bobby Troup—even Calendar Girl. I don’t know what goes on there. And after that you’re on your own, because those three are plenty for me. I’m not one to listen to this kind of thing that much, for whatever reasons living in horrors of most popular music from the 1950s. Approach with caution. Trying to help you here.

Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

Popiól i diament, Poland, 103 minutes

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Writers: Jerzy Andrzejewski, Andrzej Wajda

Photography: Jerzy Wojcik

Music: Filip Nowak

Editor: Halina Nawrocka

Cast: Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa Krzyzewska, Adam Pawlikowski, Waclaw Zastrzezynski, Bogumil Kobiela

I better admit right away this movie has never worked well for me. I’ve tried it a couple times in the last 10 or 15 years, and if third time’s the charm—and by that I only mean I saw a case for it better, at last—it’s hard for me to rally around it much. Ashes and Diamonds is the third in a trilogy of World War II pictures by Polish director and cowriter Andrej Wajda, after A Generation (1954) and Kanal (1956). Seeing the others might have helped but I didn’t even know about them as a trilogy until more recently and was not motivated much by then for further research. Understanding Polish history and/or WWII history better might have helped too.

Ashes and Diamonds has the style of an art picture, with a swirling approach to telling the story and lots of impressive shots in a silvery black and white grain and fancy camera angles and movement. Wajda and crew are obviously naturals of film but the spy story in this peculiar and specific war setting can be confusing, taking place in Poland on May 8, 1945, the last day of the war in the European theater. It involves an assassination attempt on a Soviet official by the Polish resistance in an isolated countryside sequence that opens the picture. The attempt goes wrong, killing the wrong people. The would-be assassins, Maciel (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski), find that out on their return to town. They must finish the job before dawn. The wrinkle: Maciel falls deeply in love at first sight with a barmaid, Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska), and can’t decide if he’s still able to go through with “all this killing.”

French Braid (2022)

Anne Tyler’s latest may sound like typical fare—a multigenerational story of a Baltimore family—but it flat surprised me how good it is. If her work in the past 10 years has sparked up some, I think it still has not been up to the heights of her 20th-century work for quite some time. But French Braid reasserts her novelistic powers with a large-scale story told in small, telling scenes. My favorite part is that it’s not particularly nice—not so feel-good, except it felt good to read a really good Anne Tyler novel again. For one thing, she found a way to write around her difficulties with the contemporary world and especially its technology. After an opening salvo in the present day, the novel retreats all the way back to 1959, and brings the action forward one decade at a time. The ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s were arguably her heyday and she obviously feels more comfortable in those periods—even thrives in them, with sharp insight on feminism and families. The first generation we encounter is Mercy and Robin, an interclass couple who marry in 1940. They quickly have two girls, Alice and Lily, and much later a boy, David. Each of them, in turn, marry and have their own families. It does start to get a little hazy and confusing with the third generation. In fact, with the occupations of the youngest we are veering close to Tyler’s slightly Mr. Magoo view of present times. She is actually pretty good on the initial 2020 phase of the pandemic anyway. And frankly it doesn’t matter that much, because Mercy, Robin, Alice, Lily, and David are drawn so well and come to such vivid life. Nearing 80 as she wrote, Tyler can take the long view of life with considerable credibility. It’s a chief virtue here. The family is decidedly US middle-class but unpredictable and surprising, always in believable ways. They are typical only because all their heartaches and their joys too are unique and specific to them. Tyler even finds ways to lean into her usual repressed character types, more or less her signature, by drawing back from them a little instead of focusing on their extremes of withdrawn behavior. There are still extremes. There is a story about a cat I can sense is going to haunt me for a while. Lily’s fate made me insanely happy because it felt like just one of those redemption stories that happen to people. Mercy, the family matriarch, is probably the main character in this cast. She’s prickly and difficult to be easy with. She makes some strange decisions. On the internet, she’s the reason many people don’t like French Braid. She is unlikable in many ways, but she’s also heroic, and sounds the feminist note with a good deal of cool clarity. I started this novel with low expectations and by the halfway point had an idea how good it was. One of her best.

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

“Murgunstrumm” (1933)

Hugh B. Cave’s ginormous action-packed whomper of a tale—it’s longer than Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, and faster!—delivers pulp juice by the barrel. It starts with a nighttime breakout from a mental institution and proceeds to the Gray Toad Inn way out in approximately the New Jersey sticks. It has hypnotic shape-shifting vampires, a battlin’ chauffeur, blazing firearms, an abattoir down in the cellar, and a cannibalistic homunculus named Murgunstrumm. He’s not really the focus of the story but he has such a cool name, may as well make it the title—that’s how they do it in Strange Tales in 1933. Also, he’s Serbian. Our main guy and his girlfriend Ruth have been locked up as crazies in separate mental institutions after some strange incidents at the GTI seven months earlier. At the Gray Toad Inn, the whole thing has a “cabin in the woods” vibe, as properly signaled by the name of the joint. It’s way out there ... and the things that are going on. Murgunstrumm runs the place and serves the vampires, dining on the remains of their victims. Oh, brrrr! The vampires dress for society, which is where they seem to be finding their victims, as they are invariably decked out with furs and diamonds and such. In human form, the vampires have European accents and names: Costillan, Maronaine, etc. There is even someone named Von Heller who appears to be a vampire hunter, if you can imagine that. Cave doesn’t shy from making the vampires less than appealing. They also appear as wolves, bats, and purplish clouds with green glowing eyes. But he saves the most repulsive details for Murgunstrumm. A lot of things happen in this story as our guy works with his chauffeur to solve the mystery of the GTI, restore his reputation and Ruth’s, and get Ruth sprung from the bughouse. Except for the vampires and some extremes around Murgunstrumm, it feels more like zippy mystery story with noir touches—convincingly seedy, depraved, and lurid. But all’s well that ends well, as they say. Cave kind of got lost in the pulps shuffle, if I understand where he’s coming from. He always wrote a lot, even into the ‘80s and beyond, but focused on horror more in the prewar years, then went more for light romance in slick-page magazines like Good Housekeeping. Not sure I have all this straight, but something led me to the Murgunstrumm collection, which was first published in 1977 and I got as a kindle product published in 2011. This long one is a blast—curious to see how the rest go.

Hugh B. Cave, Murgunstrumm and Others
Story not available online.

A Thousand and One (2023)

This year’s big winner at Sundance is not so easy to classify. It’s part romance, part coming-of-age story, and part gritty tale of a Black woman surviving in the big city of New York, taking us to Harlem. But A Thousand and One also has a giant plot twist I was not expecting, in case you like those kinds of things (a friend of mine caught it from the trailer so there’s that too, I must have missed something). Teyana Taylor owns most of the screen time here as Inez, who we see released from Rikers as a 22-year-old and looking up her 6-year-old son Terry in the foster care system. He has a wound on his face and he says he wants to be with her. So she takes him. At first she homeschools him but then she finds papers and a false name to get him into public school. And it turns out he is very bright, in the gifted range, with many opportunities opening for him, although his ambitions are more to be a music producer. Along the way, the man Inez says is his father shows up (William Catlett)—"Lucky,” he goes by, though he explains ruefully at one point he has that nickname because he is not. I was all set up thinking it was going to be a movie about difficulties of single-adulting but Terry is not that old before Inez and Lucky make it more or less a regulation nuclear family. We see three versions of Terry as the movie skips ahead from 1994 to maybe 2005 or so, when Terry reaches the age of 18: Aaron Kingsley Adetola as a 6-year-old, Aven Courtney as a 13-year-old, and Josiah Cross as a 17-year-old. For the most part, through a good many predictable but relatable ups and downs, they seem to be a pretty good family unit. Then, in the last third of the picture, they become victims of a new landlord intent on redeveloping the property. Things generally go to hell at this point, the incoming plot twist shakes things up even more severely, and you will likely want to have a hanky on hand because the immovable resilience of this family essentially encounters the irresistible force of modern life. It becomes an urban survival story after all. Do things work out? We don’t really know because the movie leaves us hanging on the next chapter, which also turns out to be a very good point to end it—ambivalent, suggestive, with room for hope and reason for despair. Something to talk about over pie and coffee. I’m not sure I believed everything going on in A Thousand and One but I’m glad I saw it, for Taylor’s powerful performance and a healthy jolt of feels.

Mischief (1950)

I don’t really know Charlotte Armstrong at all, but I see she was fairly prolific, and this short novel is a dandy, coming on like a Jim Thompson story before even Jim Thompson was writing them. First there is a glamorous, loving couple that reminded me of Nick and Nora Charles from the Thin Man movie—debonair, witty, and good-hearted. Instead of an adorable terrier dog they have an adorable 9-year-old daughter named Bunny. They’re staying in a midtown hotel because the husband, Peter, is being given some honor at a formal banquet that evening where he will be giving a speech. It’s a momentous occasion in his life and career. At the last minute his sister calls to say she can’t babysit that night as planned. It puts them in a jam, but Peter asks around the hotel and finds an elevator operator, Eddie, who says his niece can do the job. Eddie has been at the hotel for 14 years. They take his word as good. But Nell the niece is not what she appears. She is the crazy Thompson element and Armstrong is positively gleeful about laying on the mayhem. Mischief walks a fine line between almost-horror and brazen comedy with very few missteps. Nell’s nature is revealed by degrees. At first she seems like a painfully shy young woman but once alone with Bunny (who she mostly ignores) her actions are progressively more shocking. The way she trashes that room is amazing, a thing to behold in itself. Armstrong sort of knocks us around with this and then delivers Nell’s backstory, which raises the stakes to the sky. This is the first of these “suspense” novels from the Library of America series that I thought actually had some suspense, wondering how far it was going to go. Among other things, it’s an expertly done hotel story, using its setting well. Nearly all of it takes place there. I also like the high contrast of the successful and sophisticated couple with Nell. Nell is not only psychotic but also specifically lower-class. There’s a 1952 movie made of this novel with Marilyn Monroe as the miscreant, Don’t Bother to Knock, but it’s nowhere near as good. Track this one down if you have to. It’s worth it.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Annihilation (2018)

USA / UK, 115 minutes

Director: Alex Garland

Writers: Alex Garland, Jeff VanderMeer

Photography: Rob Hardy

Music: Geoff Barrow; Ben Salisbury; Crosby, Stills, and Nash

Editor: Barney Pilling

Cast: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac, Tuva Novotny, Benedict Wong

I avoided seeing Annihilation for a little while after it came out because it seemed to be getting bad word of mouth on the social media I was seeing. I had the impression that, because it privileges five women over a few side-line male characters, the gripe was that it pandered to #MeToo sentiments. I know Jeff VanderMeer, author of the literary property of the same name, only as an anthologist, with his wife Ann, an impressive team—and I still know him only that way. I haven’t read Annihilation the novel, nor the rest of the Southern Reach trilogy. For his part, director and cowriter Alex Garland only read Annihilation, the only novel from the trilogy published at the time he started work on the movie. He kept it that way on purpose to stay with his own version of the story. That was another complaint—some aspects of Annihilation the movie are out of step with points in the larger trilogy.

Disregard this grumbling if you have not seen Annihilation. It is first-rate science fiction mixed with impressive bolts of horror and—VanderMeer’s declared favorite—the “weird” (he claims “The Other Side of the Mountain,” for example, as a major influence here). The visual effects team rises to the occasion—whether that’s production designer Mark Higby, VFX supervisor Andrew Whitehurst, VFX houses Double Negative and Milk, makeup artist Tristan Versluis, or whoever. In many ways their work rivals H.R. Giger’s on Alien. This is bewildering, consummate world-building. VanderMeer likes Annihilation the movie too, in spite of its departures from what he wrote. It has the cool, clinical style that Garland showed in Ex Machina, a more cerebral exercise. Annihilation is more often inclined to get you by the throat and make it hard for you to breathe. It has a great premise and story, spectacular visual effects, a never-ending palpable air of menace and dread, and one of the greatest monsters in all monster cinema. Who cares if it gets incoherent in its finale? So does 2001: A Space Odyssey. What else are you supposed to do with these great big SF concepts?

Happy for a While (2023)

Phil Dellio’s sixth book—most of them in collaboration with Scott Woods—sees him going solo and focused primarily on one thing: the song “American Pie” by Don McLean. The book was originally intended for the Duke University Press “Singles” series—Joshua Clover, Roadrunner; Chris Molanphy, Old Town Road; and more on the way. Much like the 33-1/3 series with albums, these short books focus on more or less hit singles, “distributed to and heard by millions that create a shared moment [that they are] bound to outlive.” I’m not entirely sure “Roadrunner” has been heard by millions, but it’s been around nearly 50 years and is much beloved, including by me, so maybe. Happy for a While was subsequently declined after news came to light of McLean pleading to domestic violence charges in 2016. At that point, Phil (full disclosure: a friend) returned once again to the self-publishing well of his last three books, expanded this one beyond “American Pie” into a fuller meditation on early-‘70s pop music, specifically 1972, and appended some long perspective on life, pop music, social media, and other matters in an epilogue (hence the subtitle “American Pie,” 1972, and the Awkward, Confusing Now). The result may be the best thing Phil has written yet. He expertly argues for the unique mitigating factors that could produce such an odd hit as “American Pie,” including the ’50s nostalgia that started in the late ‘60s, the rise of singer-songwriters in the early ‘70s (by far the most successful commercial period for these various troubadours), and the increasing acceptance of longer songs on hit radio and in general. Writing 50 years after the fact—not unlike McLean writing a dozen years after his central fact, the plane crash that took Buddy Holly—Happy for a While inevitably trucks in nostalgia to some degree. When I characterized it on social media as “a great treatment of how the '50s became the '60s became the '70s in music,” I stopped and realized that’s old. The frequent sadness of Phil’s writing accommodates the nostalgia well, but it is also countered by the clinical precision of his analysis. He charts with exquisite detail, for example, how the average length of #1 hits grew by approximately 61 seconds from 1966 to 1972. He loves what he’s talking about and he knows what he’s talking about. My only complaint about this book, aside from the usual small quarrels over tastes—he likes the Carpenters more than me and I love “Superstar”—is that Phil had to self-publish it. It’s already essential for any collection of books about 20th-century music. Hey, publishers. If you want it, here it is. Come and get it.

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

Julie Is Her Name (1955)

More because I encountered people online who were high on Julie London in the era of the D/L, and less because she had once been the wife of Jack Webb, but maybe a little of both, I came to be a fan of Julie London several years after her death in 2000. Oh, I knew the Arthur Hamilton chestnut from the 1950s, “Cry Me a River,” which opens the festivities here. But I associated it with Barbra Streisand, Joe Cocker, and such. You ought to hear Julie London’s version. Her debut LP is about as good as I’ve heard her. “Cry Me a River” was her only hit (#9 in 1955) but it sets the tone for this whole album and baker’s dozen package: a bass that softly grounds it (Ray Leatherwood), an electric guitar played low and gentle (Barney Kessel), and London’s vocal, approximately one notch above bruised murmur but exquisitely competent at these hushed levels. Credit to producer Bobby Troup for reining it all in so assiduously, and to London even more for delivering the goods. Julie Is Her Name smolders with contained power—it has it, it doesn’t have to wield it, you can feel it in every phrase. It’s the less-is-more idea in action. “Gone With the Wind,” the album closer, finishes it exactly right. Written by Allie Wrubel and Herb Magidson in 1937, the song has nothing to do with either the movie or the novel, except it was written the year after the blockbuster novel came out, so just saying. But London’s version makes it a bon voyage, sending us off with all the breezy essence of the album. It feels like she’s waving from the deck of a departing ocean liner. The album recedes into the horizon. In between “Cry Me a River” and “Gone With the Wind” there are four songs under 2:00 and covers of standards by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Jimmy Dorsey, and more. “It Never Entered My Mind,” a Rodgers & Hart tune the internet seems to think is a Miles Davis song, gets a particularly nice treatment here. In fact, it’s been playing a lot in my head lately, when I wake up or do the dishes or anytime. Earworms are only bad when you fight them. Inspirational line (from “Easy Street”): “Just lie around all day, just sit and play the horses.”

Amélie (2001)

Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, France / Germany, 122 minutes

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Writers: Guillaume Laurant, Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Photography: Bruno Delbonnel

Music: Yann Tiersen

Editor: Hervé Schneid
Cast: Audrey Tautou, André Dussollier, Rufus, Mathieu Kassovitz, Maurice Bénichou, Urbain Cancelier, Artus de Penguern, Dominique Pinon, Isabel Nanty, Serge Merlin, Lorella Cravotta, Claire Maurier

The title character in Amélie is a humble young Parisian woman who works as a waitress. She is played in warm style by Audrey Tautou. Amélie is shy and introverted. She lost her mother in a somewhat comical episode when she was still a child. Now her father is remote and preoccupied with his hobbies. In the busy opening, the picture races through introductions to many of its many characters, with a voiceover narrator (André Dussollier) offering a litany of things they like and don’t like. We learn, for example, that one character’s cat “likes overhearing children’s stories.” Amélie likes watching old movies and noticing details no one else sees (there’s an example from Jules and Jim), but she hates when people driving in these pictures don’t keep an eye on the road (that’s an older Hollywood picture with Spencer Tracy). Amélie is a romantic with little interest in sex. “Instead,” Dussollier tells us, “she cultivates a taste for small pleasures. Dipping her hand into sacks of grain [at the market], cracking creme brulee with a teaspoon [accompanied by some very satisfying ASMR], and skipping stones at Canal Saint-Martin.”

Amélie finds her calling when she discovers a box of keepsakes kept by a boy and hidden years before in the wall of her apartment. She sets out to find the owner and return it to him. It takes some effort and detective work (and more charming characters along the way) but she finally manages it, in a strangely elaborate manner that is quite moving for the recipient. At that point, Amélie starts pursuing many more of these elaborate pranks which would be so hard to pull off in any other setting except a light-hearted romantic comedy movie. Fortunately, that’s basically what we have here, and not a bad one.

“The Question My Son Asked” (1962)

[spoilers] Stanley Ellin (not to be confused with Stanley Elkin) was a successful and prolific writer in a mystery verging on horror (or “suspense”) subgenre favored at midcentury. He wrote several novels and some Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes but was known more as a short story writer, which won him a bunch of Edgars and eventually a Grand Master Award in 1981 from the Mystery Writers of America organization, of which he was a longtime member and past president. This is a horror story insofar as it is a look inside the mind of a homicidal maniac—or that’s the twist anyway, revealed in the last sentence. The first-person narrator is an electrician by day, an executioner on the side. He somewhat primly tells us he calls himself an “electrocutioner” because the electric chair is his medium. He is equally pedantic about defending the death penalty, saying that juries and judges are as culpable as he is. He keeps his work a secret because of the stigma, but he is seething with resentment about society’s judgment. Also, this is an “all in the family” enterprise—his father was an electrician and executioner, and he hopes his son will be too. Indeed, the son is already an electrician. But he recoils when his father tells him of his electrocution work. I’ve seen accounts around the internet saying this story is ambivalent or ambiguous about where it stands on the death penalty. It doesn’t seem so to me. In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court was not far from outlawing capital punishment altogether, which stood for 10 years or whatever, until Gary Gilmore came along and got us all mixed up again. This story has also been published under the title “The Question,” so portentous does it want us to take the plot point that goes on at the end:

    You enjoy it, don’t you? [my son asked]....
    Enjoy it?
    That was the question my son asked me. That was what he said to me, as if I didn’t have the same feelings deep down in me that we all have.
    Enjoy it?
    But, my God, how could anyone not enjoy it?

Rimshot. And therein lies the rub, or something. The story is pretty clearly opposed to the death penalty, making its principal out to be a psychopath, and thus less horror and more social commentary. The narrator and electrocutioner is not likable at all. He’s thin-skinned and petulant. When we find out he’s a sadist who enjoys killing people with the electric chair, deaths he describes in some graphic detail, it doesn’t help us like him any better. But, come on, it’s not fair to imply that anyone who favors the death penalty is a homicidal sadist—as social commentary it’s a little like holding soldiers responsible for foreign policy. It might be even less fair to claim this is a competent horror story, as much as I may agree with the moral of it. It is intended primarily to shock but only in the service of a larger social point. Horror is better off without social points and morals.

These Will Chill You, ed. Lee Wright & Richard G. Sheehan (out of print)
Listen to story online.