“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)

[spoilers] I have to admit Edgar Allan Poe can be a chore for me and here is a sterling example. The action, such as it is, is molecular, the language is dense and requires parsing—practically every sentence in every brick-wall monolith paragraph. Not much in this story makes sense except perhaps as some fever dream of the afterlife. Editor David G. Hartwell in The Dark Descent anthology sees the story as a foundational transition from haunted castle to haunted house, but that’s splitting hairs pretty fine considering this house feels like a castle or at least a mansion. The Ushers live in it, a brother and sister. Maybe I should use the scare quotes, “live” in it. The narrator was college chums with the brother. The chum has come in response to a strange, unexpected, and urgent letter from him. The sister is dying of disease unspecified, and in fact dies while the narrator is there. The narrator and brother transfer the body to some room in the basement. This being a Poe story, it’s little surprise that she is not actually dead but buried prematurely. Furthermore, the brother kinda sorta knew it (parsing the murk) when he enlisted the help interring her. The brother and narrator otherwise appear to spend most of their time reading aloud to one another from great works of fantasy (in the name-checking paragraph I recognized one of them, and suspect they’re all real) or reciting poetry and singing songs while whaling on a guitar. I should have stuck with that Netflix series a little longer to see how they treated these scenes but I was already struggling with the TV gloss. The story itself erupts into a poem of six stanzas at one point. Then the sister escapes her entombment and shows up just in time to die with her brother. The narrator discreetly departs the premises, at which point the house cracks in half and sinks into the lake it was built on. This is all accompanied by extensive excerpts from a fictional Romance tale involving Ethelred the knight. It’s no wonder Hammer Films (and Netflix) felt like they could do whatever they wanted with some of these stories (“The Pit and the Pendulum” another great example). I might have liked “Usher” more on previous readings, but not lately. It’s ridiculously extravagant with the collapsing house. Nothing with the sister makes sense. We find out later they are twins but that is not particularly helpful. It’s not like one of them ate the other in the womb. Yes, it is admirably thick with a good mood of dread and gothic atmosphere but that is almost all it is. Trade-offs: it can also be boring and impossible to believe. The language takes considerable getting used to and was slow, slow going for me. I do get a kick out of Poe’s obsession with premature burial. It shows up a lot in his stuff, like Mr. Mxyzptlk in the Superman comics. Me, my policy is not to think about being buried alive. Not always easy, I must admit.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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“In Another Country” (1927)

After the longish “The Undefeated” in Ernest Hemingway’s second collection of stories, Men Without Women, most of the stories are short and even micro-sized. This one goes five pages. It’s a war story but set in a hospital, where our unnamed main character and first-person narrator is recovering from wounds. The war was obviously a horrific, traumatizing experience for Hemingway—in many ways these stories are about untreated PTSD. Perhaps hard to believe, but they are going on a century old and in many ways it shows. We just think of PTSD differently now—they didn’t think about it much then, with vaguely derisive terms for it like “shellshock.” Hemingway struggled with these mental and psychological problems in a time when people were not very sympathetic, considering them signs of weakness. He bought into that himself to some degree. Much of his work is marred by mawkish repressed self-pity. That said, this story is not one of the worst examples. I like the hospital scenes and the sense of both the war and the detachment from it in the hospital. First line, a good one: “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.” Perfect! However, the story, such as it is, involves another man getting treatment at the hospital. It turns out his wife died recently and unexpectedly. So it’s a heavy-handed irony. The husband survived a war wound but his wife died from pneumonia and/or the influenza pandemic no one ever seems to talk about in literature. The widower erupts randomly with the narrator, telling him he must never marry, and later apologizes for his outbursts. That’s when we learn about the death of the man’s wife. So, yes, losing a partner is a great tragedy—and often a good story. But it feels more like a device here and somewhat clumsy. The war is terrible and it’s not talked about particularly in those terms. The pandemic is terrible and not talked about at all. The wife’s death is understood as terrible but that’s only as far as it goes. No one is really dealing with anything here, which we are given to understand is the human condition. Maybe in 1927! Not now (I hope). In the past I liked this story more for its concision, and this “iceberg” sense there is much more under the surface than what we see. Now the repressed behavior annoys me more. At a certain point there is little to say about the tragedies of others. You can only witness them. But is that really what Hemingway is doing here?

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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5. P.M. Dawn, Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience (1991)

[2006 review here]

The “utopian experience” on this studio-groove and sample-heavy debut album by P.M. Dawn (aka rapper Prince Be and producer DJ Minutemix) is suffused with an unmistakable melancholy, which makes it a strange and more personal trip. A brief intro yields to a faceful at full force in this laidback landscape, with “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine” setting the tone. It’s more about heartbreak and mourning a time when reality was better, but the double-jointed words lead to the alternate realities lead to the heavenly visions lead to the utopian experience. “Chase the blues away,” Prince Be raps gently. “Take your mind off reality and leave her alone.” Exalted but frequently sad, as the next track “Paper Doll” points up with its sample of “Angola, Louisiana” by Gil-Scott Heron & Brian Jackson and a deepening sadness. It is gorgeous, delivered in bruised purple tones of unknown, secret agony. It also made it to #28 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992 as a follow-on to the freak #1 “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” buried near the back of the album sequentially. “To Serenade a Rainbow,” with its whipcrack sample of Hugh Masakela, is more workmanlike than “Paper Doll,” which in this context may feel more upbeat (“Think I’m gonna fly away / I think I’m gonna fly away,” goes a refrain). It is still a declaration of love that somehow feels futile, and it is followed by “Comatose,” which takes some time getting up to speed and then proceeds like a slow-motion cartoon ambulance, with low-key samples of Sly & the Family Stone and Dr. John squawks and hollers. P.M. Dawn were connoisseurs of the vinyl crates for sure. The first half of this album resolves finally into the first single, “A Watcher’s Point of View (Don’t ‘Cha Think),” which embraces the Doobie Brothers. It goes like that all over this lovely set, occasionally escaping the gloom tinge but never getting too far from it. The biggest hit, of course, was “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” which made it to #1 for a glorious week, sampling Spandau Ballet’s “True” so boldly that it feels more like augmentation of the song than sample or cover. By this point in the album, track 9 of 13, we are deep inside the head of Prince Be and/or his fictional narrator. Our guy, in “Set Adrift,” is tripping exactly on hearing the Spandau Ballet song, which sets him spinning off on memory associations. I know how this goes—it’s a vivid experience that can still occur for me with pop music radio hits. Of the Heart, unwieldy long title and all, has always hit me as psychedelic, maybe just because the person at the center of it feels both real and disconnected from reality, set adrift in his own world. The lofty ambition of the title is absurd but sincere and thus affecting. The anguish is here but measured and precise, funneled into the flow of a larger utopian experience, which somehow feels all the more real for being so unreal, inside this guy’s head.

Terrifier (2016)

USA, 85 minutes

Director / writer / editor: Damien Leone

Photography: George Steuber

Music: Paul Wiley

Cast: David Howard Thornton, Jenna Kanell, Samantha Scaffidi, Catherine Corcoran, Pooya Mohseni, Matt McAllister

My lifelong general policy on sequels—don’t ever, ever bother with them—does not help very much with franchises nowadays, arguably including the whole 16 years and counting Marvel universe. The Terrifier franchise, a canny mix of bitterly sardonic humor and extreme violence, is a good example. It starts with a 20-minute short from 2011, also called Terrifier and also featuring Art the Clown (and also available in the 2013 All Hallows’ Eve anthology picture by director and writer Damien Leone). That short provides a good overture and stake in the ground for what’s to come. Or so I presume because, full disclosure, my gorge rose basically as far as I could stand with this one and I invoked my sequel rules out of fear of what I’ll find in Terrifier 2 (2022, which got good reviews from people who like it better) and Terrifier 3 (2024 and now playing in theaters).

Art the Clown is not exactly a mime, but he never speaks. He is more like Charles Chaplin, using mincing gestures and exaggerated facial expressions to communicate—and, mostly, in his case, to terrify. Which he does quite effectively. He is terrifying and gross and powerful. His unsettling appearance pitches in to the melee with thick black lines of makeup and that stupid cockeyed hat. There is some uncertainty for most of this picture about whether he is just another fictional serial killer in the movies wearing a costume or something perhaps more supernatural. There is no uncertainty about his brutality. One particular scene here, more or less the centerpiece of the picture even though it occurs relatively early, really merits content warnings. Pay attention to them and to your limits because this movie can be very unpleasant.

“The Saint” (1981)

There is no way I don’t like this story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, published originally in 1981 and translated into English in 1993. Part of me wants to register the wannabe literary note that crops up among horror anthology editors. I found this story in a Year’s Best anthology for 1994, which means by the logic of these things stories published in ’93. It’s edited by the durable team of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. This particular story is a Windling pick. With that note registered, I must say with Windling (and Datlow too, no doubt) that Garcia Marquez is always a pure pleasure to read and I don’t know how this story doesn’t stand as horror or weird or fantasy at least, for which “magic realism” anyway might just be an alternate spelling. Setting aside the multiple frames and filters—that’s the literary part, of course—it’s about a guy who, because the cemetery is being moved, has to dig up the corpses of his wife, who died giving birth, and his daughter who died at age 7, 11 years earlier. He discovers his daughter’s body has not decomposed. His wife, by comparison, is “dust.” The flowers in his daughter’s hand that she was buried with are still alive and smell sweet. Also her body weighs nothing now. Lots of good details here. It is obviously a miracle, she deserves to be canonized as a saint, and, because the father has nothing else to live for, he packs it / her into a cello case and leaves Colombia for Rome to meet with the pope. The story is told by someone who met the Colombian in Rome while he (the narrator) was in film school—film school! In Rome! Everyone who sees the corpse of the daughter is impressed, but comically dozens of others are also in Rome seeking sainthood for their own non-decomposed corpses. As Garcia Marquez, or the film school narrator guy, describes it, most of the other corpses are more like mummified. This case—come on, the flowers are still alive. She weighs nothing. Go ahead, put her on a scale. The Colombian stays in Rome for 22 years, seeking audience with four different imaginary popes. The film school narrator guy left Rome long ago and is back for some reason and happens to run into the Colombian. The story is full of memories of Rome when they met, the strange case of the Colombian’s daughter, and just sort of all the wonder and pathos of life. Garcia Marquez is so good it’s no wonder horror editors want to claim him for fantasy literature. In many ways it is where he belongs, though his stories even more are about the sensory joys and mysteries of being alive and sentient.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Strange Pilgrims
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Furiosa is a worthy addition to the Mad Max franchise, which now also includes comic books and graphic novels, video games, and soundtrack albums. For me, it’s also where the franchise veers close to becoming an exercise strictly for continuity freaks, the people who insist not only on seeing all the Marvel or Star Wars or whatever movies, but also in a specific prescribed order. Furiosa, fifth in the franchise, is a prequel to the previous, 2015 installment, Mad Max: Fury Road. I feel like I already know much more than I want to about such geographical points of interest as the Citadel, Gastown, the Bullet Farm, and the mysterious Green Place. Don’t get me wrong. I may sound tired and cynical, but there are plenty of stunts and much glorious action in Furiosa. It pairs well with popcorn. Tom Holkenborg’s score is as moody-good as he gave us in Fury Road. Furiosa attracted stars such as Anya Taylor-Joy (The Queen’s Gambit, The VVitch, Last Night in Soho) and Chris Hemsworth (Thor movies, Avengers movies, etc.). Tom Burke gets the designated Mel Gibson role. Furiosa is a young girl living in the all-women (mostly women?) Green Place who is kidnapped while out in the desert. It was important to Green Place people to keep their location secret. This young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is captured and held for years by one Dementus (Hemsworth). Then she grows older and becomes the fierce and big-eyed Taylor-Joy. There are new vehicles here to enjoy and some impressive new stunts too, as I say. But it’s kind of the same old thing—racing down desert highways and fending off attacks. There’s usually a reason for going from one place to the other, but I kind of lost track of them here. The beauty of Fury Road is the simple clarity of it. Furiosa has complications that don’t bode well for the franchise. On the other hand, George Miller is the creator, director, and single indispensable figure in all this, and he's 79 now, even older than Donald Trump, so we’re not likely to get a lot more from him. It’s possible he will sell it off to Disney or something, but in that case probably only the continuity freaks will stick around for more. Here's my stack-ranking of the five Mad Max movies: 1) The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2, 1982), 2) Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), 3) Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), 4) Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), and 5) Mad Max (1979). Unusual franchise in that the first is the worst by far.

Confessions of a Crap Artist (1959)

This is one of a reported dozen or so non-science-fiction novels Philip K. Dick wrote in the 1950s. It’s the only one published in his lifetime and that was not until 1975, though it was written in 1959. It showcases the deceptive simplicity and clarity of his SF and genre work. He was often writing in a rush before the late 1960s, but his prose style tends toward the lucid, if pedestrian. It’s part of what makes the mind-bending stuff work. If Confessions of a Crap Artist is any indication, stripping away the high concept unfortunately doesn’t leave us with much, at least not in this misogynistic story of Bay Area / Northern California life among the effete, feckless, and philandering. Dick dresses it up with some fancy literary conceits, shifting point of view as well as first-person and third-person modes from chapter to chapter. The crap artist of the title is Jack Isidore, who starts and finishes the telling. He is a connoisseur of conspiracy theories and falls in with a group of UFO maniacs. He’s not the main character, though—that’s his sister Fay, a “bitch” as they say it here, entitled, demanding, generally horrible. She goes around demolishing lives. She married a guy for his money and pursues a younger man and breaks up his marriage. Trying for a female point of view is Dick’s first and main mistake. It feels more like someone’s idea of a woman (say, Philip K. Dick’s idea) than like a real woman. How many times had Dick been married and divorced in 1959? Twice—I looked it up. In fact, in 1959 he was going through his second divorce (of five). So, sure, the hate and miserabilism come from a real place. And it is touching in a way to see how badly Dick wanted literary cred. I think it may well continue into the VALIS books, which I haven’t managed to get through yet (soon!). As I’ve said before, I like the playful goofy SF Dick more than any other. His jousts with reality can produce surprisingly powerful effects. This sour little novel seemed very small compared to the best of his science fiction. The Man in the High Castle is marred by its attempts at literary sophistication, which paradoxically may explain why it is at least close to his most popular. It has grounding elements. Whereas in what I would call his best (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, others) he just lets the weird and wild ideas fly. And don’t get me wrong. I like The Man in the High Castle too. Sadly, there is nothing weird or wild or even very good about Confessions of a Crap Artist.

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

An Angel at My Table (1990)

UK / Australia / New Zealand / USA, 158 minutes

Director: Jane Campion

Writers: Janet Frame, Laura Jones

Photography: Stuart Dryburth

Music: Don McGlashan

Editor: Veronika Jenet

Cast: Kerry Fox, Alexia Keogh, Karen Fergusson, Iris Churn, Kevin J. Wilson, Melina Bernecker, Glynis Angell, Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, Colin McColl, David Letch

I saw this picture when it was new in 1990 and loved it so much that I bought a one-volume of the Janet Frame memoirs on which it is based. Typically enough, I have been toting it around ever since and still haven’t read it. But the movie, directed by Jane Campion (The Piano, Holy Smoke, The Power of the Dog), still looked pretty darned good to me. It was created originally as a TV miniseries with three parts of about 50 minutes each, suitable for one-hour programming. The three parts, presented here as a “trilogy,” touch on Frame’s childhood, teenage, and adult years (from her memoirs, respectively, To the Is-Land, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy From Mirror City).

Frame was born in 1924 in New Zealand and grew up at a time and in a place where mental illness was poorly understood. She was withdrawn, introverted, and shy, lost in the fairy tales, poetry, and stories she started reading and writing from a young age. Eventually, as a young adult training to be a teacher, she had a breakdown when an inspector visited her classroom. One thing led to another and then she was diagnosed (incorrectly) as schizophrenic, given electroshock treatments into the 1950s when the treatment was not understood well but administered frequently, and spent some eight years in and out of institutions, often returning voluntarily. An Angel at My Table tells much the whole sad and alarming story (albeit one with a happy ending).

“In the Hills, the Cities” (1984)

[spoilers?] Full disclosure, I remain dubious about the Clive Barker project at large, but Stephen King’s clarion blurb, “I have seen the future of horror,” still resonates enough for a fulsome career by Barker, the painter, theatrical impresario, baker, chef, chief bottle washer, and short story writer. Or, at least, short story writer is how he started when he made it to horror lit, specifically with the six-volume Books of Blood collection, before going on to write a bunch of novels, series, screenplays, etc. The slightly cringy Books of Blood credo goes, “Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.” The general sense I struggle with is that I’m not sure Barker is a good short-story writer and I still believe short stories are the soul of horror literature. With some exceptions Barker’s stories tend to be uniformly long, minimum page count 30 and ranging up to near 100. No problem there—H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Aickman frequently went long too. But Barker’s stories are also just a little saggy. There’s a lot going on, including extreme violence (dubbed “splatterpunk”), but it tends to run monotonous for me. On the other hand, the things Barker dreams up are uniformly weird, unexpected, crazy, startling, and original. He’s not borrowing from old traditions, though he harks to them, sometime quite explicitly, but rather he is more shooting to create his own. This much-anthologized oddball from the first volume of the Books of Blood set is as good a place as any to start. It is set in the Soviet-era Yugoslavia—Serbia and Kosovo, I believe—and the two main characters, the “English gentlemen,” Mick and Judd, are a gay couple on a honeymoon type of road trip through central Europe. Barker is normalizing gays in this story, not sensationalizing them, or using them to add some element of horror, which is refreshing. They just are what they are—a couple who bickers passive-aggressively the way couples do on travels and then later enjoys makeup sex.

Eventually we arrive at the story’s main conceit, which is kind of hard to explain, let alone believe. Is it a spoiler to reveal the ideas? For centuries, two neighboring cities of “tens of thousands” have perfected a way of fighting in which they strap themselves together—men, women, and children, Barker emphasizes—into lumbering humanoid forms that do battle with each other in hand-to-hand (so to speak) combat, rock ‘em sock ‘em style. Useful illustrations can be found on the internet. Barker has someone explain: “Ropes to tie them all together, flawlessly. Sinews ... ligaments ... There was food in its belly ... there were pipes from the loins, to take away the waste. The best-sighted sat in the eye-sockets, the best-voiced in the mouth and throat. You wouldn’t believe the engineering.” He has that right. I don’t believe it. Yes, there are certain faint echoes of the movie The Wicker Man and of Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery.” But in general it seems beyond ridiculous to me and it’s just getting started. I was constantly distracted by the impossibility of it. The soles of the feet, consider, are made up of the biggest, heaviest men, who are smashed to pulp dead. Lots of people die even on the victorious side. Apparently it is considered an honor. Mick and Judd wander into this strange battle and find the remains of the defeated city with literally thousands of corpses. Barker is enthusiastic and gets carried away with the concept, piling on with detail (babies replicate teeth inside the mouth, stuff like that). But for me he is plainly overdrawing on his suspension of disbelief account. Good start, good middle, protracted from there—it’s no way to write a story (but what do you do anyway with ideas like this?). But you better not take my word for it. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer give “In the Hills, the Cities” their stamp of approval by including it in their estimable and valuable anthology The Weird. Barker himself picked it for Masters of Darkness, an anthology where that’s the concept, writers picking their own stories and explaining why. "In the Hills, the Cities" is all over the place. The implication is that it’s a masterpiece. My strained credulity could well be a minority view.

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 1 kindle)
Masters of Darkness, ed. Dennis Etchison
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
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6. Primal Scream, Screamadelica (1991)

[2022 review here]

Hey, I am on vacation! (figuratively speaking)! But I wrote the long piece linked above just two years ago and it has approximately all I have to say about the classic, delectable psychedelic album by Primal Scream. See you next time for the start of the top 5! Yowza wowza, so on so forth.

“It Will Be Here Soon” (1979)

[spoilers] I’m still not sure what to make of Dennis Etchison. I can’t say I like all his stories a lot, but I can’t say I don’t like them either. I like the sense I get of a very careful writer, but he may be just too restrained, or subtle, for me. After what the movies did to horror in the ‘70s and ‘80s—including shifting the emphasis from short stories to novels, and never spare the gore—I certainly understand the impulse and maybe even the necessity for keeping the work quiet, emphasizing suggestion over excruciating detail. I like the title of this story, the sweeping blank affect of passive voice a certain trademark of Etchison’s. Compare “We Have All Been Here Before” and “You Can Go Now.” According to ISFDB, this story is part of a Jack Martin series—the first, in fact, so not many worries here about continuity issues. Jack is a grown man, in his 20s or 30s, visiting his quasi-estranged father. Jack feels guilty about neglecting him. It’s a familiar situation between parents and grown children. His father has developed an interest (and/or obsession) with listening closely to blank recording tape, thinking he finds strange voices and messages there. For Jack it’s something he didn’t know about his father, but in many ways it only makes him think the old man is a bit of deluded fool. On that point Jack seems likely to be right. The story seems to be mostly about the alienation between parents and children. In the end Jack is seen recording whispered nonsense syllables for his father to find—an act of kindness, on one level, perhaps, but obviously on another level belittling, manipulative, a cruel deception. The best-case scenario is that his father will think he has found something to support his strange ideas. He will be happy but he will be conned. I don’t see it very much as an act of kindness. His father and stepmother—really, the whole situation—reminded me some of the documentary 51 Birch Street, which is also about parents and grown children and even has a stepmother too, though a much happier person than the one here. That might be more about Jack’s attitude. I didn’t think this was one of Etchison’s better stories, but I’m also not sure I’m the person to judge.

Dennis Etchison, Talking in the Dark
Story not available online.

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

I Saw the TV Glow works in a slow and dreamy David Lynch key, heavy on the soundtrack and with music videos shoved in all part of the package. There are sinister horror undercurrents aplenty in this story of two fans of a ‘90s TV show called The Pink Opaque. We see scenes and hear plot points about the show, which is a little bit X-Files and a little bit Pete and Pete, with jolts of aimless meaninglessness for effect. The setup seems to be two girls on psychic adventures with monsters. In 1996, two youngsters, 7th-grader Owen (Ian Foreman and then Justice Smith) and 9th-grader Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) bond over the show, which runs on a USA Network-like cable channel on Saturday nights at 10:30 p.m. Owen has a home situation that makes it hard for him to look at it—there is a sad arc to his family over the years but we never get very much information, especially about his strict stepfather. Owen sneaks over to Maddy’s when he can to look at the show with Maddy and Maddy’s friend Amanda. Later Maddy makes videotapes of the show for Owen. It’s their favorite TV show ever. When both are in high school, Maddy wants to run away and she wants Owen to come with her, but he hangs back. Then Maddy disappears—police investigation, presumed dead. We don’t get much information about this either, but it sounds serious. When Maddy shows up eight years later Owen can’t believe it and begs her to tell him what happened, where she has been. She appears reluctant to say but finally admits it has something to do with the show. She has been living inside it or something. It seems unlikely but ever more unhinged plot developments suggest otherwise. It’s also possible she’s insane. I’m not sure it all adds up but I’m not sure that matters. I was interested in the first place because I’d found an earlier movie intriguing by director and writer Jane Schoenbrun, 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. It’s fully steeped in the self-proclaimed dark corners of the internet such as “analog horror,” the topic of numerous youtube channels, and plays to them well. I Saw the TV Glow is attempting something similar with ‘90s cable entertainment shows and VHS swap-abouts, but with much more ambition than mere parody or mimicry. I’m not sure it’s such a fruitful direction, but I found at least this one to be engaging, mysterious, even cosmic and awe-inspiring in a way that is only slightly ironic.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

This long novel by W. Somerset Maugham is generally considered his masterpiece and it is indeed very good—as good as I remembered from first reading it over 40 years ago. It’s autobiographical but not really autobiography. Most people, including me, remember it as the story of the tragic, absurd relationship between first-person narrator Philip Carey and a waitress in a teashop named Mildred. The 1934 movie version, for example, stars Bette Davis and focuses exactly on that (Davis is perfect and the picture is worth seeing). I noticed, however, that Mildred does not show up until page 268 of a 607-page edition. It’s easy to see why she is so memorable—she is as terrible a person as you would ever care to meet. The first 267 pages are devoted to Philip’s life from the age of 9, when his mother dies and he is orphaned (his father died years earlier). This is true to Maugham’s life, as is being sent to live with his clergyman uncle and aunt. Philip has a clubfoot that makes him a target of ridicule for other kids growing up and even into adulthood. Maugham had a stutter that produced similar experiences. Philip tries first to become an accountant. Then he wants to be an artist and moves to Paris for two years to study. Ultimately he decides he doesn’t have the talent and gives it up. His uncle never approved of the artist plan and by the time Philip is 21 he is fed up with Philip’s inability to commit to a career. He wanted Philip to work in the church but by this point Philip has given up all faith in God and is an atheist. The magic here is Maugham’s ability to make it all so interesting. It is a strangely compulsively readable novel and pure pleasure all the way. There is somehow pleasure even in the agonies of Mildred. Most of us, men and women too, have likely had relationships like it, though perhaps not as abysmally intense. You may like to know now that he gets shut of Mildred and finds his way to a happy and satisfying end. Maugham actually was a doctor like Philip becomes, but he was also a prolific writer with a shelf-full or so of novels, plays, stories, and essays to his credit, which I understand are often nearly as enjoyable. I’m still not ready to take on The Razor’s Edge due to the terrible Bill Murray movie adaptation, though word of mouth claims the novel is actually good. I’ve got my eye on The Magician, which is about Aleister Crowley, or The Summing Up, which is about writing. But Of Human Bondage is the natural place to start with Maugham. It’s fair to call it a masterpiece. If anything, I liked it even more the second time.

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

“The Werewolf” (1979)

[spoilers] In the Angela Carter collection The Bloody Chamber, this very short story is the first of three meditations on Little Red Riding Hood to finish the book. It might be the best—short and keeping the details blunt. The “good child” has no name, no red garments. The fairy tale comes to mind only because it involves a girl, a wolf, and the girl’s grandmother. The grandmother has been feeling under the weather and the girl is dispatched to bring her oatcakes and honey. On the way there she is attacked by a wolf, which she fends off with a knife like a badass. “Here, take your father’s hunting knife, you know how to use it.” That’s a voice in her head, no doubt her mother’s. She faces the wolf head-on, drops her things, squares up, and takes the knife. “[S]he made a great swipe at it ... and slashed off its right forepaw.” The wolf goes “lolloping off disconsolately.... The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolf’s paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes and went on toward her grandmother’s house.” The spoiler alert goes right here because the ending surprised me, although you may have already guessed it. The grandmother seems to be sicker than ever. She is burning with fever. The girl takes the cloth with the wolf’s paw to make a cold compress for Grandmother’s forehead. But the paw is now a human hand. And soon the girl discovers that Grandmother is now missing a hand. Grandmother is the werewolf! The girl calls for help, the neighbors show, recognize her for a witch, and “drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, out into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones until she fell down dead.” And that’s the end of the story, except for one last paragraph: “Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered.” Amazingly savage, amazingly straightforward about it, and all matter-of-fact. I just didn’t see any of these plot developments coming and it took my breath away.

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
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