“Eumenides in the Fourth-Floor Lavatory” (1979)

I have found myself in general to be too PC for Orson Scott Card, though I enjoyed both Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead before his politics drove me away. I was interested after all this time in seeing what he could do with the horror or so-called “dark fantasy” genre. And this is a dilly in many ways, in spite of the terrible title and even though it’s also a little derivative of Harlan Ellison (start with the terrible title). But Card really has created a monster of fiendish, fearsome, and wonderful qualities, which in many good ways deliriously overwhelms everything else about the story. Eumenides is not some Greek philosopher, as I assumed, but a term (Greek, yes) for mythological “Furies” entities—goddesses of vengeance, it says on the internet, sent out to bring justice to people who have committed crimes. Our main guy and victim of righteous justice is a rich dude in New York City, bitterly separating from his wife, defiantly trying to manipulate her by moving into a hideous Bronx tenement fourth-floor walkup with shared bathroom. He is plainly nasty business. Unfortunately for the story, his greatest crime, raping his 14-year-old daughter, is kind of handled sideways. It comes up as a certainty too late. Anyway, the good stuff: the bastard comes home drunk from a party and goes to the bathroom around 3 a.m. That is where he finds it. At first it appears to be a baby someone has attempted to flush down the toilet. The scene is vivid and squalid and I have to admit I’m here for it. It hits hard. Once he pries it loose he finds it is not a baby. A lot of what makes the scenes so riveting and appalling is that Card keeps talking about it as a baby. Good God man, it's the Eumenides! You keep thinking with him that he has finally put it away, but you are both wrong. The story is from early in Card’s career and shows him still on the learning curve in certain ways. The last third is devoted more to explaining it—it’s when we learn that his daughter may be pregnant, a detail that should have come up earlier if you’re going to truck in this kind of bombshell material. I think Card had much the right idea in the first place. Forget the explanations. Let the cosmic revenge factor speak for itself. End it on a bleak note, over and out. So it’s flawed but worth reading for the great and amazingly original monster—and Clive Barker not even on the scene yet.

A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
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Identifying Features (2020)

Here’s a tense and effective slow-burn thriller with its point of view south of the US-Mexico border. Magdalena’s only son, not even 18, has left their farm for work he has heard of in Arizona. But he never even makes it to the border, the friend he was traveling with has been found dead, and there is no further word. Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández) decides to travel north to find out what she can, embarking on a journey that takes us all on a trip. The closer she gets to finding out what happened to her son the more people keep telling her to go home and forget it. She comes to understand that the bus he and his friend were traveling on was hijacked. The feeling you get is that such incidents may not be common but they’re not unknown. Passengers are robbed of all they have, brutalized, often killed. It appeared obvious to me anyway that her son was gone and Magdalena should take the advice of all the people telling her to go home. Yet she perseveres. She learns of a man who might have knowledge of her son, but he lives in a distant village in a territory that is inexplicably dangerous. Bandits seem to be taking it over. Along the way she meets a young man, Miguel (David Illescas), who has been recently deported after five years in the US. He is returning to his home and mother and so confident that nothing has changed there that he invites Magdalena to stay with them and assures her his mother will get along with her. There’s good mother-son chemistry between these two. But things have changed, as recently as days or weeks. Miguel’s mother is nowhere to be found and all their livestock has been slaughtered. We are plainly on a downward spiral and Identifying Features is not pretending to be anything else. The ending has something of a false note. People may see it as more or less a problem. It is there to be discovered. I was a little disappointed by it but only because everything to that point was so good. Director and cowriter Fernanda Valadez has a sure hand and a keen eye. Hernández and Illescas are great. Identifying Features is one that sticks with you.

Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese (2011)

This title from the 33-1/3 series had some surprises for me. First, it’s an album and even band I knew little about going in—had not even heard of the album. Then it turned out my old college paper editor, Dave Ayers, who has gone on to an impressive career in the industry, is heavily involved. He signed Ween to Twin/Tone in the early ‘90s or so and was the band’s manager still for this 1994 album. Other bands he’s associated with include the Jayhawks, Soul Asylum, Babes in Toyland, the Uncle Tupelo / Wilco / Son Volt axis, Helmet, Sparklehorse, Vic Chesnutt, the Jesus Lizard, and Robbie Williams, among others, not to mention working closely with Yoko Ono on her 1995 album Rising. Good going, Dave! And Ween. I was only dimly aware of them as some kind of smarty-pants lo-fi act. As it turns out, that is accurate, but Chocolate and Cheese is a transitional album, when the two principals—Gene Ween (Aaron Freeman) and Dean Ween (Mickey Melchiondo)—started to make more conscious use of studio technology and became a kind of psychedelic landmark jam band act. The first thing that impressed me about the album, in fact—and it’s a pretty good album—was the high production values and general levels of musicality. Hal Shteamer wrote this book about it. I don’t know the name but he put in a lot of years at Rolling Stone (“senior editor”) and elsewhere. He’s also a musician. The book seems solid to me, bearing in mind I am a total Ween neophyte. But I took Shteamer as pretty good getting me up to speed. I’ve learned Gene and Dean don’t like the comparison, but they remind me a lot of early-‘70s Frank Zappa, the period after the Turtles vocalists had come on board. An unusual point in this book is that, in the song-by-song rundown, Shteamer discusses them out of sequencing order, writing, “Rather than discuss the songs in their actual running order, I’ve chosen a sequence that seemed most relevant to the themes dealt with in this book.” Does that mean they are stack-ranked? Is 1994 when digital programmability took over? It didn’t work for me perhaps because all things Ween are still so new to me. For the most part, these books are intended for fans who have already absorbed most of the basics, such as opinions about each of the 16 tracks on the 55-minute album. It might be the right call on Shteamer’s part. I must say I also appreciated that he spent some time and research effort on the arresting Chocolate and Cheese cover art. How in the world did it take me 30 years to get to Ween?

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

17. Soft Boys, Underwater Moonlight (1980)

[2012 review here, 2012 review of “I Wanna Destroy You” here]

There’s so much sleaze on the second album by the Soft Boys (Robyn Hitchcock, Kimberley Rew, Mathew Seligman, and Morris Windsor) that I had to keep checking the genre designations to make sure I was where I belonged: “neo-psychedelia, post-punk, new wave, psychedelic pop, jangle pop, power pop” (Wikipedia). Underwater Moonlight is full of absolute banging rockers, kicking off with the guided missile of “I Wanna Destroy You.” That, more than its psychedelic strains, is more likely the main reason it’s one of those albums that didn’t sell well but started a million bands. The head trips lie more in the words—Hitchcock was a student of Syd Barrett and loved him almost as much as I love Hitchcock. The tracks here resemble love songs, but the twists have been torqued nearly to breaking point—“I wanna destroy you” is also the psychic mission statement for the album. It’s followed by “Kingdom of Love,” where “You've been laying eggs under my skin / Now they're hatching out under my chin / Now there's tiny insects showing through / And all them tiny insects look like you.” You don’t need a lyric sheet to catch the main themes. Hitchcock enunciates them well and they are pushed way up in the mix. An unsettling element of sexual and/or reproductive urge is often bubbling under these proceedings in uncomfortable ways. Did I say bubbling under? The longest song on the album is “I Got the Hots for You” and the one song with songwriting credit for the whole band is “Old Pervert.” The thing is, these elements—the excellent 2 guitars bass drums rock band and the weird sex notes in the words—are perfectly balanced, so much so that when the set erupts at the two-thirds point with an instrumental, “You’ll Have to Go Sideways,” it’s an orgasmic blast of thrilling energy that defines the whole project. Or at least gives us a moment off from love songs like “Insanely Jealous,” about a stalker. It reminds me of what the Pretenders did on their first album (also 1980), five songs in with “Space Invader.” Sometimes an instrumental says it all, and so it is here as far as the primo band goes. “Sideways” is followed by “Old Pervert,” about a guy who lives under a bridge and whispers to girls passing by. Wrenching, to say the least. Underwater Moonlight is an odd and perverse mix but somehow it works quite well at blowing the mind. Kimberley Rew would eventually move on to Katrina & the Waves, which doesn’t have much to do with psychedelics but a lot to do with adjacent pop (sunshine). Hitchcock, solo, with bands he put together the Egyptians and Venus 3, and in collaboration with many others, would totter down his gnomic surreal pathways always, staying true thus to the psychedelic banner, and delivering of himself at least one more stone classic.

High Weirdness (2019)

Erik Davis, former rock critic and now full-time seeker, offers up a meditation with densely sourced notes on Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, as the subtitle of High Weirdness charts the path. Davis focuses, after a lengthy scene-setting introduction, on the McKenna brothers, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. I barely knew of the first two, and Dick I knew primarily for his work before 1974. High Weirdness focuses on Dick’s work after 1974, when a religious experience produced a frenzy that lasted the rest of his life, sprawling across some 8,000 handwritten pages known as The Exegesis. Extractions from it contributed heavily to his last and most difficult novels. As it turned out, I was more interested in the McKenna brothers, Terence and Dennis, who retreated to South American jungles in 1971 to experiment with very strong hallucinogens and contemplate the results, which are worth reading up on. Robert Anton Wilson, for his part, experimented with hallucinogens too but, under the influence of William Burroughs, seemed more interested in the pursuit of paranoid weird experience as such, recorded in unlikely places like the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, UFO reports, and Trilateral Commission discussions. The affectionately labeled RAW contributed to the prankster spirit of the ‘60s and ‘70s—the Yippies, the Fugs, the Church of the Subgenius, and like that. Dick had his brush with deep Christianity in 1974 and never stopped trying to figure it out. He did a moderate share of hallucinogens in the ‘60s but his drug of choice over time was amphetamines, which among other things gave him the stamina to write a huge number of revelatory science fiction novels and stories and arguably the psychosis to make them mind-bendingly weird. For better or worse, I remain suspicious of anything too connected to his Christian leanings—Episcopalian, to be specific. I’m not always sure what Davis is after in High Weirdness. It’s not the drugs and esoterica seemingly as much as the visionary experiences themselves, which leaves him a tricky balance between objectivity and credulity. He manages it well. If I wished for more on the drugs and esoterica, I was happy enough to settle for the visions. Davis cuts a wide swath of strange post-‘60s experience. I learned about a lot of things I didn’t know before—and I thought I was a pretty good student of the ‘60s—but there were many places Davis rushes through where I wish he would have lingered. With Dick’s Christian experience as a chief example, on the other hand, the places he did linger were those I was less interested in. Still, overall, a pretty interesting survey of bizarre ‘60s psychic fallout.

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

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Stairway to Heaven, UK, 104 minutes

Directors/writers: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Photography: Jack Cardiff

Music: Allan Gray

Editor: Reginald Mills

Cast: David Niven, Kim Hunter, Roger Livesey, Marius Goring, Raymond Massey, Robert Coote, Joan Maude, Abraham Sofaer

I must have been in a bad mood the first time I saw this war picture cum extravagant fantasy romance by the Archers, who are collaborating coproducers, codirectors, and cowriters Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I know I was put off by the romance they give us between Peter Carter (David Niven) and June (Kim Hunter)—rhymes with “moon” and “swoon,” no last name necessary because it’s obviously going to be “Carter” before they’re through (later she will go on to a career as a country singer). It’s wartime—4:11 p.m. London time, May 2, 1945, to be specific. Carter’s plane is going down over open ocean and his parachute has been destroyed. He spends his last minutes in radio contact with Boston babe June. He asks her if she’s pretty. “Not bad,” she blurts. This is approximately the moment they fall in love but, realistically, the whole experience has to be accounted a trauma, for both of them, and arguably the rest of the story is mutual PTSD. Carter jumps out of the burning plane and somehow survives. The story is based on an actual incident, so I don’t want to hear any complaints about suspension of disbelief.

I’ll take care of all that, though I must say I enjoyed the picture much more the second time around. A Matter of Life and Death (released as Stairway to Heaven in the US, which reportedly had an aversion to the word “death” so soon after the war) is a fantasy show, featuring a place they call heaven and a pouty French angel, “Conductor 71” (Marius Goring), who couldn’t find Carter at the appointed hour in the thick fog. That’s the explanation for Carter’s unlikely survival. Now the conductor is supposed to collect him, but for some reason Carter and June falling in love is a basis for arguing an extension of life. Ultimately the issue turns into a trial and a courtroom drama and I’m pretty sure you know where it’s headed. It’s by the numbers as a romance, but Powell and Pressburger are interesting moviemakers and they find a number of ways to save it and make the case for it as one of their greatest pictures, which is saying something from the team that gave us The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and many others.

“Duel” (1971)

This story by Richard Matheson is a classic that served as the source for a TV movie directed by Steven Spielberg early in his career, which itself is considered a kind of classic. And it is pretty much for the same reasons as the story, which is that it only tells you what you have to know, and all the action is concrete, visual or easily describable, and almost unbearably tense. It’s in anthologies all over the place. I read it in Foundations of Fear, edited by David G. Hartwell, whose preface to the story says, “Without a hint of science fiction or an overt whiff of the supernatural, ‘Duel’ manages to invoke both the science fiction tradition of the menace of the intelligent machine and the monster tradition of the horror genre. It is a psychological monster story, subtly shocking, compelling, fantastic.” ISFDB confirms in a general way, classifying the story into its “non-genre” basement, but three voters and I have combined to rate it an 8.25 of 10. That means it’s good. It’s also very scary and induces feelings of frustration and helplessness. You probably know the story: a guy is driving a two-lane highway west to San Francisco for an important meeting that afternoon. He encounters a semitruck tanker with a trailer whose driver evidently gets mad when our guy passes him. He begins to toy with him and even threaten his life using the truck. Whenever our guy pulls off to let the truck get some miles down the road, he always finds the truck parked on the shoulder a mile or two down, waiting for him. Lots of strong elements showing Matheson at his best. The facelessness and anonymity of the truck driver makes it all seem more effective. The fact that so many of us know road rage from both sides is used well here (even if 1971 somehow seems early for road rage). Hartwell is right that Matheson makes the truck itself a terrible thing to see, though I was always aware there was a driver and he was the aggravating factor. I see the problem in calling this story horror, yet I think you have to. It raises profound anxiety and dread. In many ways that’s what horror is—all it is. This story is a prime exhibit in that argument. The human cruelty is tempered and deliberate, rather than a moment’s impulse. That also makes this story insanely creepy. Have to look at the movie again.

Foundations of Fear, ed. David G. Hartwell
The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
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