Cries & Whispers (1972)

Viskningar och rop, Sweden, 92 minutes

Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman

Photography: Sven Nykvist

Music: Frederic Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach

Editor: Siv Lundgren

Cast: Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin, Erland Josephson, Henning Moritzen, Georg Arlin, Ingrid Bergman

Cries & Whispers is the first movie I saw by director and writer Ingmar Bergman, largely on the strength of its Oscar win—I still believed in the Academy Awards then, even if this one was only for cinematographer Sven Nykvist (who deserved the accolades, of course). I was still a teenager, but aware of Bergman’s outsize reputation for art films. I didn’t like this one much. The heavy-handed extremes felt forced or showy and in general it was way too slow. I tried it a couple more times over the years but have never warmed to it much even as I fell in love with a bunch of Bergman’s other stuff: Fanny and Alexander, Persona, Scenes From a Marriage, The Virgin Spring, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, etc.

So I was prepared for something like an hour and a half of tedium, a study in formal miserablism, when I sat down to look at it again. It’s heavy on the red. Red furniture. Red wallpaper. Red drapes. Fade to red. Blood, of course, but that comes later. The story involves three 30something middle-class sisters, one of whom is dying. That’s Agnes (Harriet Andersson), attended by her sisters Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and the servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). Maybe I finally grew up enough, but for the first time this death of Agnes and all her suffering and agonies that precede it finally reached me and I started preparing myself to backtrack and praise the movie. Harriet Andersson is stunningly good.

The Heart of the Matter (1948)

I’ve read a few Graham Greene novels along the way and thought I knew what I was in for with this highly rated one. But it was a disappointment, a cheap, sour, and bleak romance. It reminded me too much of Ernest Hemingway and his eternal stoic stone face intended to represent some kind of nobility. I thought of two other writers much better at what I expected from Greene: Georges Simenon’s so-called “hard” novels (e.g., Tropic Moon and I want to get to more) and South African J.M. Coetzee, a master at compressed language and terrible developments. Greene is not high on colonialism as a general rule, but he is by comparison with Simenon and Coetzee. In The Heart of the Matter a middle-aged policeman at an African outpost is in a loveless marriage and, improbably enough, finds himself in a lousy affair with a widow more than 30 years younger. I suppose these things happen, and speak to some of the basic problems with colonialism. The sweltering weather is often noticed—even light caresses start the sweat going. Our guy’s wife is also having an affair, with a junior officer who hates him. “Syrians” are all over the place, lying, blackmailing, smuggling. Unclear where they are in the World War II setting. Not particularly with the Allies. Another detail I found annoying was Catholic religion, taken seriously by our (philandering) guy and his (philandering) wife. For example, it’s a major crisis for him when he does not confess everything in a confessional but still takes communion afterward. This is a grave problem for him. His girlfriend doesn’t get it and neither do I, frankly. And you really should get it for the ending to land as hard as I think Greene wants it to, and apparently does for others. I appreciate how meticulously structured it is to deliver maximum bleak, but you have to buy the whole Catholic thread more than I could. Also, as these people seem to be WASPy Brits, I assume it must mean something specific that they’re Roman Catholics and not Church of England, but I don’t know what that is and am not interested enough at the moment to try chasing it down. I’m not even convinced this is one of Greene’s best, let alone one of the best novels of the 20th century as per Modern Library.

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

“What Was It?” (1859)

Fitz-James O’Brien was among the earliest writers of horror stories but died in the US Civil War at the age of 34 and didn’t leave many stories behind. I found this one in The Dark Descent, where editor David G. Hartwell is typically effusive, calling O’Brien the heir apparent to Edgar Allan Poe. And it’s a pretty good story—I like O’Brien’s clean and straightforward language (for the 19th century). A couple problems, the first of which is foreshadowed in Hartwell’s intro, and that is that it is rotten with explanation. It’s also a typical early horror story in that it doesn’t try hard to scare and it does try hard to soothe. That is, merely mentioning strange supernatural details is considered sufficient to provoke anxiety. We are all generally more corrupted by now and need more effects to goose us up such as jump-scares. I thought the story’s most interesting point was the invisibility of the phenomenon, whether ghost or extra-dimensional creature or whatever. The idea was popular in the late 19th century, with Ambrose Bierce, Guy de Maupassant, and others chipping in their versions. As an effect, interest in it seemed to be done by the early 20th century, perhaps marked by H.G. Wells’s 1897 novel The Invisible Man (and the 1930s Universal movie based on it). As a kid, I ranked invisibility high among my desired superpowers, but the impulse was (and probably would be still) voyeuristic. As for encountering some invisible thing, yes, as described here, it would certainly be creepy and disturbing. But I can’t say it’s ever been the stuff of my nightmares, sleeping or waking. “What Was It?” covers most of its bases pretty well, but I thought O’Brien missed a trick by not using flour to make the thing more visible. Instead, they used the bedsheets to get a general idea of what they were dealing with, and later plaster for more specific details. I guess that works too. Hartwell also identifies O’Brien as a pioneer in science fiction at least as much as horror, and in many ways this story does feel closer to SF. My problem with taking it as horror is the whole invisibility thing. It’s just not something that seems very effective to me. In fact, the story reminds me a lot of Maupassant’s “Horla” stories, equally weak sauce or more so. “What Was It?” is probably the best of the invisibility-themed stories I’ve read so far—I still need to get to the Wells—and I think it may be the earliest of them all. Is invisibility as a horror idea all played out now or is that me? It’s hard to think of examples after about 1910. I don’t think H.P. Lovecraft even tried it.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024)

There are a number of things about On Becoming a Guinea Fowl that I’m not sure I understand, notably the title and some of the details in the opening scene. For me the picture falls into a genre of “film festival movies,” proved out by the awards it has won from Cannes, Chicago, London, and other film festivals. The opening scene is vividly, self-consciously visual: Shula (Susan Chardy) is returning home at night from a costume party. She wears a spangled helmet with dark glasses and an outfit that looks like inflated parachute fabric. She notices a body lying in the deserted and lonely highway. It is her Uncle Fred and he’s dead. Then Shula’s cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) shows up. She appears drunk, knocking at the window of Shula’s car, but Shula ignores her. Lots of activity and visuals here, but the point of the movie has little to do with how Uncle Fred died on that highway, something we never learn. Instead, what we learn is that Uncle Fred was a rapist who preyed on female members of his extended family, often when they were underage. Guinea Fowl affirms how universal this type of domestic abuse is, reaching into Zambia, Africa, in much the same way that Women Talking witnessed it in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. It’s not just Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in the US—it’s everywhere. Some of the reasons it continues are shown in Guinea Fowl. The women of the extended family, all the aunties, blame Uncle Fred’s widow because she would not cook for him. It makes no sense, but that’s their story and they’re sticking to it. Thus, director and writer Rungano Nyoni offers a panoramic view of these crimes and family responses. Shula knows better than the aunties that it is Uncle Fred who is responsible for what he has done and no one else. But she’s in the minority. As the movie goes along, more and more victims come forward with their stories. One of the girls, Bupe (Esther Sangini), tries to tell her mother in a video she records on her phone what Uncle Fred did to her, but her mother doesn’t want to hear it or believe it. For that generation, the sole tragedy here is that Uncle Fred has died. As for Bupe: “He’s dead now,” she says. “So it’s OK.” On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is marred slightly by distractions such as the opening scene that I don’t really see as necessary. But it has a familiar (and depressing) story to tell, it sticks close to the truths of sexual abuse, and the performances are great across the board, a winning ensemble. The picture won awards from film festivals because it deserves them even if it’s not the most artfully written screenplay. Check it out if it makes your local film festival. It’s also on HBO Max.

“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955)

This long story by J.D. Salinger was packaged in 1963 with another long piece, “Seymour, an Introduction,” for the last book he published. With Franny and Zooey, from 1961, they were all Glass family stories, all as written by Buddy Glass. “Raise High” goes lighter on the spiritual / religious extracurricular activities and is essentially a very good wedding-day story. The groom, Seymour Glass, and his bride Muriel are entirely offstage. The wedding has been delayed or called off because of some crisis for Seymour. It’s 1942 and everyone is suddenly in the military. Buddy barely gets a pass to come home to New York City. When he arrives, it’s a sweltering day and wedding attendees are chaotically leaving for the reception. Buddy ends up in a full taxicab that includes the Matron of Honor. Then they are caught in traffic (a passing parade) but they are near Buddy’s and Seymour’s New York apartment, which is air-conditioned. Buddy invites them there, where they can cool off, make phone calls, and sort things out. The story is pleasantly random, full of the energy, strange ways, and grace of special days. It’s interesting to me how, across “Franny,” “Zooey,” and especially “Raise High,” Seymour is more and more manifestly unfit to survive, seemingly a simple soul in some ways. He is also, as a matter of the Glass family saga, given as a wise or even holy man. But a lot of the details here, Seymour’s gross naivete about love and relationships and practical matters, make him out at best as a holy fool. We also know what’s looming in the “Bananafish” story so there is also sadness at the bottom of this great jumble of joy and confusion and peevishness, with let’s call it an epiphany about the meaningfulness of this special day. The title comes from the sister Boo Boo, about whom we don’t know much from the extant Glass stories. It is a typically exuberant Glass / Salinger message written in soap on the bathroom mirror. Boo Boo had been staying there but recently shipped out, forced to miss the wedding. It is this absolute rapturous cheer that I may like most about Salinger in general. He is entirely up to special days—it’s the quotidian ones that tend to give him problems. Writes Boo Boo: “Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Love, Irving Sappho, formerly under contract to Elysium Studios Ltd. Please be happy happy happy with your beautiful Muriel. This is an order. I outrank everybody on this block.” So sweet I get a cavity—in the clinch, YMMV.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction
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Eephus (2024)

I recently recharged the love side of my love/hate relationship with the Seattle Mariners. Having followed them closely for weeks and months this past season, and finally suffering the perhaps inevitable result, a baseball movie struck me as just the thing for cheer. Eephus, however, is not a typical sports movie, which of course more often focuses on the escalating drama of a championship run, with lots of rousing and/or tender moments in the last third. See The Bad News Bears, Hoosiers, Rocky, Bull Durham. etc., etc. Eephus has its quotient of sentiment, focusing on the last ballgame played at a field slated for demolition, making way for a new school. It’s Massachusetts, it’s October, and only a handful of spectators are on hand. The players are obvious amateurs, mostly middle-aged and older guys not remotely in physical shape. The pitcher for one side drinks beers between innings and often falls down. The slapstick did not particularly work for me. IMDb classifies Eephus as both “drama” and “comedy,” which in this case feels like a hedge because it’s hard to know what this movie is. It reminded me a lot of pictures like director Wayne Wang’s 1995 Smoke, or director and writer Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 Coffee and Cigarettes, full of random characters saying wry, eccentric things to one another. One odd fellow in the dugout here, a relief pitcher, gives us the full lowdown on the “eephus,” a high-arcing curveball that falls into the strike zone and throws off a batter’s timing. The pitch is extremely slow, clocked under 60 mph, and not used often. I guess it’s a metaphor. But Eephus also has some interesting surprises, such as voiceover narration from master documentarian Frederick Wiseman and a cameo by Red Sox / Expos pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who pitches an inning. The game is barely tracked as such though we get enough information to understand it’s going into extra innings, which is where the heavy metaphors really start. They play on into the dark, then light the field with their car headlights and play on some more. I came away from Eephus more puzzled than anything, but it’s quite possible I would like it more with another look. It’s that kind of movie.

I Like to Watch (2019)

Emily Nussbaum won a Pulitzer in 2016 for her TV reviews in the New Yorker. This roundup of her stuff—including feature profiles and one or two previously unpublished essays—is at once an eccentric survey primer and an exploration of what has happened to TV so far in this century. She sets the tentpole starting markers at Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos, feeling called on to defend Buffy at every opportunity and noting that the accepted status of The Sopranos means no defense is necessary—in fact, some skepticism might be called for. She also takes nuanced feminist views into her analyses, which proved notably useful when Me Too rolled around in 2017. Most of these pieces appeared originally in New York magazine or the New Yorker but most of them were reworked at least a little for this excellent compendium. Three groups of reviews are organized by theme (“Girls Girls Girls,” “Breaking the Box,” and “In Praise of Sex and Violence”) and all the rest are essays and/or profile pieces, on subjects such as Tina Fey, Jenji Kohan, Ryan Murphy, and Joan Rivers. Issues of product placement are discussed alongside full-throated defenses of Buffy and Sex and the City. Perhaps the best piece here is a long meditation on Me Too and bad artists and good art and trying to split the difference. The fact that she is also a recovering Woody Allen fan made me like her even more. TV in the 21st century has become an overwhelmingly vast landscape, with which I am familiar only in relatively tiny parts. She talks about a lot of shows I’ve never heard of here (as do people all over social media, I’m kind of in the dark on a lot of this), many more I’ve maybe meant to get to and know a little, and some things I know well, like Lost and The Leftovers, the Damon Lindelof projects. If she prefers Law & Order SVU to the flagship series, which I don’t, her reasons are clear and not surprising. Ryan Murphy gets one of the biggest profiles at the very end, but he’s one I have tended to reflexively skip past—American Horror Story, Glee, Nip/Tuck, etc. I guess he got me with the OJ doc, which was brilliant. I’d say it makes me want to try more by him, except I already did with the first season of American Horror Story. I Like to Watch also promises to be useful because there’s a lot of TV here I hope I can track down.

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

Greetings From Timbuk3 (1986)

Timbuk3 was a husband and wife act straight outta Madison, Wisconsin—Pat and Barbara K. MacDonald—augmented by a drum machine for the pseudo-trio designation. Their instincts pointed them in rootsy directions, but they had a surprise top 20 hit in 1986 with “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.” It’s basically skinny tie and shades new wave, but the country blues inflections combined with the nuclear anxiety at high levels then (due to Chernobyl and Ronald Reagan joking about releasing bombs) produced something everyone wanted to hear for a few weeks. It was a pretty good joke too. The singer is in college, getting good grades, studying nuclear science. His teacher wears dark glasses, presumably for the intense flash of light that accompanies A-bomb detonation, and now the singer is wearing them too. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find coming back to this album—in memory the hit seemed more like a novelty and most of the rest of the album (except the closer) a lot of half-songs that never much cohered. But my memory was faulty—Greetings From Timbuk3 is way better than I expected. The songs are shaggy and shambolic but they are good. There’s a continuing theme of the brave young couple very much in love and facing down the cruel world together. With barrels of love. Many years later, after moving to Austin and releasing six more albums, they divorced. So it goes. It does not make them any less brave in 1986. Some cynical, vaguely lefty politics are involved too. “Hairstyles and Attitudes” sells the cynicism with homely wisdom and a brief screeching guitar. “Shame on You” is the longest song here at 5:04 and the only one where Barbara K. gets a writing credit. It’s a rap song, the rap is Barbara K.’s, and it’s not bad, with all due disclaimers. The secret gem to Greetings From Timbuk3 is the last song, “I Love You in the Strangest Way,” featuring more updates from the brave couple. But this song has always hit me in the strangest way, so to speak, it's one made for howling along with at night in various states of drunkenness and/or sadness. I wonder how they felt about it then and feel about it now. The whole album is worth checking out—and now, maybe, I will look into the rest of their catalog too.

The Piano Teacher (2001)

La pianiste, France / Austria / Germany, 131 minutes

Director: Michael Haneke

Writers: Michael Haneke, Elfriede Jelinek

Photography: Christian Berger

Music: Franz Schubert

Editors: Nadine Muse, Monika Willi

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, Benoit Magimel, Anna Sigalevitch, Susanne Lothar, Udo Samel

The Piano Teacher was something of a sensation at the time of its release. It won awards from Cannes and elsewhere, often highlighting the performances of Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut, the sexualized, delusional piano teacher, and Benoit Magimel as Walter Klemmer, her talented student and lover (if that’s the right word). Erika is nearing middle age and lives a kind of bohemian life, a gifted pianist in her own right, who particularly loves Schubert and gives lessons to get by, but with an unusual way of life. She still lives with her mother, but she has a compulsive, adventurous private life, where fantasy and reality bleed into one another. We see her visiting some kind of discreet, semi-classy porn store, where she gets a private stall to watch a selection of videos. She finds a used tissue in the trash and holds it to her nose while she watches. Presumably some previous patron shot his load into it.

There’s more. We see her cutting herself in the bathroom, hanging out at a drive-in theater to peep people having sex in their cars—she squats down to masturbate, is caught, and must hurry away. She puts broken glass into the coat pocket of a student who suffers intense anxiety. Why is she doing these things? It’s possible they are in the original novel by Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, also called The Piano Teacher in translation—I don’t know it. But they also fit with various extremities by director and cowriter Michael Haneke, who seems prone to them, or certainly did in about this period, bracketed by the two virtually identical versions of his curious creep show Funny Games, one from 1997 and the second from 2007. Enter Walter Klemmer, an exceptional young pianist but an arrogant, immature young man, who represents much that Erika thinks she wants.

“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (1943)

[spoilers] This Robert Bloch story, according to editor David G. Hartwell of the Dark Descent anthology, is arguably his best, which is a pretty big statement about someone who was so insanely prolific and also author of the literary property behind Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. I’m not arguing against it (I still need to read Psycho!), but only, as an ongoing Bloch skeptic (too much hackwork and not enough better than meh, he started early and lived long), raising an eyebrow to hear the argument. In fairness, it might be the best thing I’ve read by him, but “The Hungry House” from The Weird (edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer) at least rivals it. Bloch’s primary flaw is a broad vaudevillian tendency to crack glib and jokey, all puns and dad jokes welcome. That’s less of a problem here (though it persists) and my interest in the Jack the Ripper story gets me the rest of the way over the hump. I’m fascinated by the case and up for regular reviews of the details, which takes up a portion of this story. Bloch’s semi-vampiric premise is that Jack the Ripper is immortal, committing blood sacrifice to extend his life. He disappeared as Jack the Ripper, media celebrity, but continued to kill. An investigator, an Englishman, has been on the case for years when he approaches the first-person narrator, a Chicago psychiatrist, to enlist his aid, which involves attending a bizarre trendy bohemian loft type of party along with handfuls of Chicago references. The story’s twist is brazenly gimmicky but Bloch gets away with it somehow and the story is considered by many to be a stone classic. It’s fairly a surprise that the narrator, the Chicago psychiatrist, turns out to be himself Jack the Ripper. But you really can’t think about this too much or it all falls apart. The investigator’s interest in the psychiatrist is never really given. Chicago, not to mention the world, is a big place for such happenstance. And why, as the narrator, is he withholding from the reader who he is, other than for a short story effect? In the end this story doesn’t work so well for me. Bloch is interesting because he straddles two major strains of 20th-century horror, starting out as a teenage disciple of H.P. Lovecraft, and evolving into the straightforward dialogue-driven story with a surprise (and/or ironic) ending so popular at postwar midcentury. He is fully the latter here, by 1943. In many ways the story seems designed merely to spring its gotcha surprise, rather than offer any insight about Jack the Ripper or his legend.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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The Long Tomorrow (1955)

This novel from the Library of America ‘50s SF box is by Leigh Brackett. I barely know the name but I see she has a big reputation and, indeed, she is a good writer who can construct a novel (as opposed to all the fix-ups, more common than I knew). The Long Tomorrow features a postapocalyptic scene, set in the US after “the Destruction”—presumably an all-out nuclear war. The idea is summed up in the “30th Amendment” to the US Constitution, which outlaws cities and sets limits on density. The Amish have risen to prominence because they know better how to survive without a lot of the modern technology that has been lost. Religion has returned to prominence along with biblical public policy like stoning as a means of execution. Two boys from a small town (well, small towns is all we’ve got here) are curious about science and knowledge. They want to get to a perhaps mythical place called Barterstown, which honors knowledge according to the legends and rumors. I can’t help seeing a lot of this through the frame of now, and these religious anti-city anti-science folks in charge inevitably made me think of trumpism. The boys eventually escape and make the long journey to Barterstown, which of course isn’t at all what they thought it would be. I should probably shut up now, because I’ve already spoiled Brackett’s work to keep it uncertain in the first half whether Barterstown even really exists. The thing I like best about The Long Tomorrow is simply how well done it is. There are probably better dystopias involving religion, but this certainly merits a look if that’s your thing (Harlan Ellison, say, or Margaret Atwood). It’s not mine so much. My sympathies, here and elsewhere, straddle the religious and antireligious. In this day and age I would have to count myself, in a general sort of way, on Team Antireligious. The religious folks here are pigheaded and can be brutal but they’re not all bad, much as the Barterstown residents are sadly flawed too. Hard to know exactly where, between these two sides, that my sympathies would lie. The careful ambiguity counts as a good thing by my lights. The Long Tomorrow was good enough I’m inclined to track down some more by Brackett,

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

Rockabilly Boogie (1956-1957)

I was looking for a 1956 album called Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, listed in The MOJO Collection: The Greatest Albums of All Time. Instead, I ended up with this terrific 1989 Bear Family CD: 28 tracks, encompassing all 12 tracks from the original album and all 20 tracks from a 1993 CD release listed in Wikipedia, plus copious notes and scrupulous research you’ll need a magnifying glass to read. The sequencing is weirdly varied across all three. One of my favorites, for example (out of about 28 stellar favorites), is “Rock Therapy” (“I don’t need a doctor, I don’t need a pill”)—track 3 on this album, not appearing on the original LP, track 13 on the 1993 CD. In short, you’re probably best advised to get this Bear Family CD and play it loud and often. I don’t see it on my streaming service, though I might be able to cobble together a reasonable facsimile from tracks available. But why bother when I can just play this CD? I consulted the internet on Johnny Burnette, by searching on “best rockabilly artists.” Burnette, who died in 1964 at age 30 in a boating accident, seems to fall in the lower echelons of the top 10, preceded by names you would predict: Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Wanda Jackson, etc. More modern names also appear, such as the Stray Cats and Reverend Horton Heat. Johnny Burnette could thus well be a familiar name but still relatively unheard except by the most dedicated followers of rockabilly. I recommend you don’t skip Burnette. This stuff throbs with life, good screams, heavenly backup singers, barbed-wire guitar breaks, and deep thick grooves. On “Touch Me” Burnette even trills like a songbird inside the clatter. Most of the necessities are here: “Tear It Up,” “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” “Rockbilly Boogie,” “Lonesome Train (On a Lonesome Track).” “Butterfingers” is a goof, possibly playing on the candy bar’s popularity. “Eager Beaver Baby” might go too far—yes, I think it might. “Midnight Train” is a country jailhouse lament—Burnette obviously had a thing for trains. The last track, “Shattered Dreams,” is all show horns and no guitars as Burnette is called on to belt it out like Bobby Darin. It’s a novelty. Most of the rest is some of the purest rockabilly you may ever hear.

Superman (2025)

I heard a lot of good word of mouth about the latest Superman movie, directed and cowritten by James Gunn, who in 2022 was put in charge of a reboot of the DC Comics film franchise (his “cowriters” here are the original Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who died last century but, as with Bob Kane and the Batman movies, must have finally won an ironclad lawsuit). The word of mouth is warranted—the movie is well worth seeing for any fan of Superman and maybe even for those, like me, now good and sick and tired of superhero movies. Gunn has an intriguing resume. He is also responsible for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies and, back in 2010, Super, with Rainn Wilson and then-Ellen Page, which might be the greatest superhero comic book parody ever made. Gunn’s tongue is not as firmly in his cheek with Superman, but the picture is so lighthearted as to be perfectly refreshing, notably with its use of the super-dog Krypto, who is playful here like a dog but has those good old Kryptonian superpowers too. If this dog ever catches a car, woe to the car. Speaking of catching, this boy-scout Superman (David Corenswet) is also caught saving a squirrel in one throwaway scene. That’s how tender his heart is. Superheroes are referred to in this universe as “metahumans” and they are not always trusted, lifting a page from the mutants thing. Superman is set up by enemies as an alien invader and people start grumbling about him. Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) has a lot to do with it, appearing as a transparently Stephen Miller type, raving about alien immigrants. Pretty obvious, but OK, I will take it in this day and age. We also get a handful of extra superheroes, associated with a quasi-core to the Justice League calling themselves the ”Justice Gang”—the Green Lantern with a blond haircut like Moe’s from the Three Stooges (Nathan Fillion), a version of Hawk Girl (Isabela Merced), Mr. Terrific, new to me (Edi Gathegi), and Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan). At the very least it’s an odd but deeply informed view of the DC universe, such as it is. Another key twist on the usual is finding out early that Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) knows Clark Kent is Superman and they are basically boyfriend / girlfriend. There’s also a pretty good joke about Superman thinking he is authentically punk-rock. I dread whatever comes next because that usually means weighing down all the best stuff with unlikely explanations and doing the continuity dance for the sake of carping fans. Like the 1978 Superman, this one can be thoroughly enjoyed on its own terms and all sequels approached with caution. Better to look at this one more than once—it’s that good.

Radio Free Albemuth (1976)

So far I have not been able to make it through even the first novel in Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy. It’s partly that it’s not an easy read and partly my own bad attitude about the Christian-ness of it all and of Dick’s life in about the last 10 years of it. Radio Free Albemuth is Dick’s first cut at what would become VALIS, prompted by an event he took as a religious experience in March 1974. The manuscript was rejected by publishers without substantial revisions. It’s interesting to me that a writer of his stature—Dick was a pretty big deal in SF circles in 1976—would still face such editorial rejection and impositions. I agree Radio Free Albemuth is weak, or parts of it feel undeveloped, but the concepts, as always, can be heady. Nicholas Brady and his close friend Philip K. Dick are the two main characters. Brady is receiving messages from an entity or civilization that hails from the star Albemuth and has placed a satellite circling Earth, blending in with other satellites. It is beaming messages and instructions to people like Brady. They are sleeper agents, I think, though their mission is not malicious but supporting resistance to a fascist regime in the US. VALIS stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Reading this novel at this moment inevitably brings Donald Trump to mind as the fascist US president but Dick’s intended target in 1976 was, of course, Richard Nixon. Pray for us now and at the hour of our death, as Dick might put it. That may not be fair, but there is an unmistakable religious vibe wrapped into this. VALIS feels like God by another name, indeed the more Jesus-oriented Holy Trinity God of the Bible’s New Testament. The fascist regime is notably terrible, not just with violence and imprisonment, but with the kind of reality distortion capabilities seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (and the Trump regime, e.g., loudly braying there is less right-wing violence than so-called left-wing, or consistently arguing climate change is a hoax). It’s fair to call Radio Free Albemuth dystopic and it makes me curious to see how it works with the trilogy. As a first draft, this one lives in a gray zone between finished and unfinished. It probably does need more work—which it basically got with VALIS a couple of years later.

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

Touki Bouki (1973)

Senegal, 85 minutes

Director/writer: Djibril Diop Mambety

Photography: Georges Bracher

Music: Josephine Baker, Mado Robin

Editor: Siro Asteni

Cast: Magaye Niang, Myriam Niang, Christoph Colomb, Moustapha Toure, Aminata Fall, Ousseynou Diop

In Wolof, the language spoken in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa, “Touki Bouki” translates as “The Journey of the Hyena,” which helps to clarify things. The picture can roughly be described as a kind of Bonnie and Clyde story crossed with the classic Western story of dissatisfied young folks in the provinces—or, in this case, an African colony of France—trying to make it to the capital—not Dakar, note, but Paris. A lighthearted Josephine Baker song, “Paris Paris Paris,” underlines the point, coming up on the soundtrack whenever Mory (Magaye Niang) and Anta (Myriam Niang) feel the great city and European cultural capital is within their grasp.

Mory owns a motorcycle on which he has mounted a long-horned cow skull. Life in this remote region is mostly about cattle ranching and Mory gets by working as a cowherd. It’s not what he wants to do with his life—that’s more along the lines of being a bohemian. But early scenes in a slaughterhouse set the tone and foreshadow his more likely doom. Though not a large part of the movie, these scenes are almost the first thing we see. They are intensely disturbing, as we witness pathetic cattle as they realize the danger late and fight helplessly. There’s nothing they can do. Touki Bouki is a low-budget affair and these scenes are not simulations, showing actual livestock slaughterhouse deaths (decapitated and bled out) in a little too much detail for me. But it certainly establishes, however playful events shown here may become, that there is always a desperate deadly seriousness behind the impulse to get away.

“The Dead Smile” (1899)

F. Marion Crawford didn’t write even a dozen horror short stories, but they tend to be among the best from the fertile turn of the 20th century. This one features a corpse that keeps escaping from its coffin in the family mausoleum—beheaded, too, and the head self-mobile, harbinger of Crawford’s “Screaming Skull,” still to come just a few years later. “The Dead Smile” riffs on “rictus sardonicus,” a term not used in the story but an apt tag on the internet—an exaggerated involuntary grin. The condition generally comes of tetanus but can also suggest strychnine or hemlock poisoning. Ray Russell put it to good use in his 1961 story, “Sardonicus.” In this story, the unnerving grin is associated most with a bitter old man who harbors family secrets. “He smiled, stretching pale lips across discolored teeth in an expression of profound self-satisfaction, blended with the most unforgiving hatred and contempt.” What’s more, and probably the best effect here, whenever he flashes this grin everyone else in the room starts to grin the same way. It’s the source of the story’s title, with interesting multiple meanings. In the spooky family crypt most of the dead are wrapped in shrouds, except the one that climbs out of its coffin and is usually found leaning against a wall with its head rolled up at its feet. This is all great scene-setting, especially when everyone starts to grin in unison. It’s good, because the story can be unfortunately a little lame and obvious. The terrible old man with the big grin wants to forbid a marriage between his son and his niece but won’t say why (it’s not hard to guess as the story goes along). I note that the marriage of first cousins made me uneasy, but not anyone else here. “The Dead Smile” largely overcomes its flaws by its strange air and details. As it happens, the point of the story, its big revelation, doesn’t have much to do with either the escaping corpse or the rictus sardonicus. There’s also a banshee on hand (in Irish legend, a female spirit whose wailing warns of an impending death), equally beside the point and perhaps the least interesting element of the story. “The Dead Smile” may not be Crawford’s best, but it holds its own.

65 Great Spine Chillers, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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Hyperion (1989)

The first in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos cycle of four novels won a Hugo and sits on many lists of best science fiction all-time. It did not entirely live up to the hype for me. I admit the structure is ambitious and even impressive. Lifting from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 15th-century Middle English Canterbury Tales (as noted often), it is about a group of pilgrims making a sojourn to the mysterious planet Hyperion on a specific mission. To pass the time on the long space voyage they take turns telling stories about their relations to Hyperion, whose features include the mostly unexplained but tantalizing and evocative “Time Tombs” as well as the god-like figure that appears to guard them, known as the Shrike. Along the way there is a lot of world-building about humanity in approximately the 28th century CE. Simmons has set himself a huge balancing act, between the states of technology and human politics against the background of a federation of hundreds of settled planets, on the one hand, along with many hundreds more designated for the “Outback,” i.e., not part of the so-called Hegemony, and, on the other hand, details about Hyperion and the pilgrims. The main story of the mission is barely here. The individual, novella-length stories of the pilgrims range from slightly better than humdrum all the way up to very good. Most reviewers seem to love the priest’s story best, and the scholar’s tale is also pretty good. Hyperion is stuffed with intriguing SF ideas, from time dilation to effects of faster-than-light travel to the Time Tombs and the Shrike. Little comes of the mission here, but I understand that’s covered in the next novel, The Fall of Hyperion. Some like it even more, but many others don’t, and no one seems to care much for the last two (Endymion and The Rise of Endymion). I am curious, however, to know what comes of the mission, so I may get to the second. I’ve read one of Simmons’s horror novels, Carrion Comfort, also from 1989 (he’s a bit of a prolific genre polyglot) and thought it was pretty good. Still, Hyperion came in as slightly disappointing for me—nicely done, but only half a job. This is part of my problem with series in general. Hyperion is not really finished in most ways, anticipating further novels. The setup is for a mission and we’re left hanging on that. The individual tales vary quite a bit in terms of quality. The people who say The Fall of Hyperion is good had better be right, that’s all I have to say.

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

It Follows (2014)

USA, 100 minutes

Director/writer: David Robert Mitchell

Photography: Mike Gioulakis

Music: Disasterpeace

Editor: Julio C. Perez IV

Cast: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Sovatto, Lili Sepe, Olivia Luccardi, Jake Weary, Bailey Spry

Strictly speaking, It Follows is not a horror show in the slasher mode. Supernatural elements abound. It’s set in Detroit, not some forest with a nearby campground. There is no final girl. Even the big bad knives that give the slasher subgenre its name go missing here. But It Follows is fully onboard with the idea that no teen sexual activity should ever go unpunished. The equation is simple: teen sexual activity leads to swift and brutal death, no exceptions. Or, as IMDb puts it in a pithy summary: “A young woman is followed by an unknown supernatural force after a sexual encounter.”

But there’s more than just that to this moody doomy premise. An additional wrinkle provides that the unknown supernatural force tracks you to your death. It might look like a stranger. It might look like someone you know. It moves slow but sure. You can run away from it but it never stops coming for you—unless you have sex with someone else, in which case it goes after that person. However, if it gets that person, murdering them in some suitably grotesque way, then it’s coming for you next. That’s all there is to it. You’re back where you started.

“The Black Cat” (1843)

[spoilers, content warnings] This Edgar Allan Poe story is an absolute classic on a few different levels. It has Poe’s claustrophobic neuroses on full display. Walling things up may have worked better in “The Cask of Amontillado” but it’s fine here too. Certain paranoid parallels are also obvious with another famous story of his from the same year, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” And layering on folk superstitions around black cats and/or their wicked supernatural powers basically makes it a wind-up-and-go winner. But my favorite part is the way those elements are not the greatest horror in this story. That belongs to the first-person narrator, an unrepentant abusing monster. He’s what’s most scary in this story, not the business with the cat and the revenge. Poe obviously knows what his narrator is and plays to it. The misdirection from the self-pitying narrator is chillingly easy to see through. That he cannot see it himself makes him even worse. He’s about to be put to death as he writes—and we know it’s the only thing that’s going to stop him. He is a drunkard as well, which exacerbates his abuse, which is shocking. He is married and though they had no children they were happy tending to a small menagerie: “birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.” But when our guy drinks he can get mean and in one such fit he tears one of the cat’s eyes out. It’s hard to express how shocking this is. The cat survives and stays with them, but now he's fearful and not so friendly. I know using pets in stories like this is blatantly manipulative and even a crutch for writers, but they can still work on me, and I think Poe knows what he’s doing here. It gets worse. Now our guy can’t stand the sight of the cat and in another fit solves that problem by hanging it from a tree limb. After which his house burns down and a mysterious scorch mark appears in the little that survived, a scorch mark that looks like a cat with a rope about its neck. Unbelievably, it continues. He murders his wife in yet another fit of rage and thinks he can get away with it by walling the corpse up next to the fireplace in the basement. However, in his haste, he walls up another cat in the household, which was black like the previous cat and showed up shortly after that demise of the first. Hmm. When police show up investigating his missing wife, the walled-up cat raises a ruckus and the corpse is soon discovered. Yes, there are lots of unlikely aspects here, but Poe’s overheated tone and the rapid-fire series of events get us past all questions, even if in a slightly numb state from some of the shocks. I went to ISFDB and rated it 10 out of 10.

65 Great Tales of Horror, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

I’m still not sure what to think of the fantasy subgenre that updates fairy tales with modern sensibilities, usually done in the horror mode. Other than Angela Carter’s exercises in this realm (her treatment of the Little Red Riding Hood tale is a near-perfect short story trilogy), I haven’t liked a lot of what I’ve seen, which admittedly is not much. This Norwegian-language swipe at Cinderella has a batch of surprise switch-ups to the original story and way too much body horror for my taste. I admit I like the idea of seeing fairy tales roughed up like this, but I was looking at The Ugly Stepsister through my fingers for minutes at a time. I like the way the story is approached here, basically offering up its twists in a prequel to the original. By the time one of these stepsisters has earned the name “Cinderella,” the prequel narrative had overturned most of my expectations. The nominal ugly stepsister, Elvira (Lee Myren), seems sympathetic at first. She never seemed ugly to me but most people in the movie think she is, starting with her mother, who subjects her to plastic surgery procedures such as they existed in the time and place of the movie, which I’m assuming is approximately Middle Ages Europe. It’s all about winning the prince at an upcoming ball. There’s a nose job involving precise work with a chisel, enhanced eyelashes (couldn’t watch it), and resizing her foot to fit a slipper. For the latter, I spoke aloud to my screen and begged her not to do it. There’s also some extraordinary business with a tapeworm. Elvira is such a punching bag of circumstances here that it starts to verge on comic, like her regular lusty screams of pain. I was kind of sorry this one decided to go jokey, but I also have to admit it was relief from a lot of the unpleasant action. Notwithstanding the unpleasant action, much here is lighthearted fun. At the ball where the prince will choose his lover, the whole thing is more like a variety show or beauty pageant. Elvira’s dance number is straight out of Busby Berkeley and/or Edgar Degas. The story stays focused on Elvira, even as, in the background, Cinderella wins the prince and presumably embarks on living happily ever after. What’s left for Elvira appears to be the opposite of living happily ever after. In the end the crows get the tapeworm and Elvira and her sister Alma flee.

“Franny” (1955)

It’s fair enough, I suppose, to call J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, published in 1961, a novel. Certainly the two narratives are related. But they were originally published two years apart. “Franny” is more like a short story, albeit a longish one at 40 pages. “Zooey” is four times that length, which makes it more like a short novel. “Franny” is an example of how good Salinger was getting, almost exponentially by the year. All his subtleties, however, worked against him a little this time. He is showing Franny Glass—yes, this is core to the Glass family tale—in the midst of a spiritual crisis of meaninglessness. She is meeting her shallow frat-boy boyfriend in some college town for a football game and party weekend. He is a Holden Caulfield version but one who can keep it together for college antics. Most readers, apparently, and there were a great many of them for the 1961 bestselling book, took the crisis to be one of pregnancy. I don’t know if I have ever read it that way, but now that you mention it I can see how people would. I never thought of pregnancy because as a teen I read the Raise High the Roof Beam book first (notably with “Seymour, an Introduction”), and knew all about the Eastern woo-woo it is marinated in. And/or that Salinger was. In many ways Franny is a stand-in for him, quivering in the face of meaninglessness and flailing for help. It’s sad, in a way, when you see Franny’s crisis as Salinger’s own. Franny has recently read a 19th-century Russian Christian devotional text (Eastern Orthodox the primary frame?) called The Way of the Pilgrim, which speaks of a technique called ceaseless prayer. At story’s end we see that Franny seems to be practicing it. It doesn’t exactly fit with the pregnancy idea, but doesn’t entirely undermine it either. Anyway, most of Salinger’s primary religious preoccupations, as I recall, are much further east—Buddhism and Taoism. The Way of the Pilgrim suggests much wider reading and implies, with the rest of the Glasses (chiefly Seymour and Buddy), a spiritual crisis of Salinger’s own, which in the most likely if pedestrian way is related to PTSD. The Glass family is decidedly middle-class with all the usual middle-class privileges. It’s unknown where Franny will go next, but she will always have a place to go. On to “Zooey.”

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
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Pre-Millennium Tension (1996)

Tricky intended his second album as a departure from the “trip hop” label with which he was not only associated, but indeed tagged as inventor, going back to his work with Massive Attack. His claim was that he wanted to draw closer to punk-rock. I don’t hear much of that here, which maybe lands closer to postpunk as he stalks through welters of spooky sound with his filtered Spiderman vocals. The album bears some of the biggest hits of his career: “Christiansands,” “Tricky Kid” (trite confessions of celebrity by some lights), and the almost wistful “Makes Me Wanna Die.” I don’t think I like Pre-Millenium Tension as much as his first album, Maxinquaye, but it benefits from some spillover effects of that mighty debut. I’m in agreement with rock critic Robert Christgau that key collaborator Martina Topley-Bird tends to get short shrift in the Tricky annals. She’s there on the first four Tricky albums, and then gone, never to return, after their personal relationship ended. Weirdly, Wikipedia offers no songwriting credits for this album, but, according to a Discogs listing, Topley-Bird had no hand in writing any of the songs on Pre-Millennium Tension, and the same is true per Wikipedia for Maxinquaye. But she still has a lot to do with what makes Tricky’s early albums work. Her vocals are a clarion counterpoint to Tricky’s more prowling style, bringing home points of these songs in ways that make them work uniquely. While Tricky rumbles and spews on the lower rungs of the mix in “Christiansands,” for example, Topley-Bird floats in along the higher registers, enlarging the track. And she does that a lot all over the album. I do think Maxinquaye is the better set—the songs are more fully imagined, with the trip hop production that sculpts phantasms into the mix. But I still find enough to like on the follow-up—restrained and understated, it can recede uneasily to the background, reaching out at random with its various hooks and a mood that entirely suffuses any room where it plays, at practically any volume. Lower it, and conversation may still be possible, with lights turned down low. Yet you are never entirely free of it under any circumstances where it plays.

“Casting the Runes” (1911)

This story by M.R. James is tagged in The Weird, the massive and essential anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, as James’s most famous. Indeed, one scene involving a slip of paper with runic symbols printed on it, a sudden wind, and a fire in a fireplace rang a few bells for me. Later I realized the story is the basis of the movie by director Jacques Tourneur, Night of the Demon (later edited and rereleased as Curse of the Demon), the source of my déjà vu. In a general way I have to admit I have some problems with the way James tells stories, drawing on semifictional documentary sources and slowly, slowly circling his points. Some themes work like time-release medicines. They hit you later. You’re generally required to do a lot of unpacking yourself, and later rereads are not a bad idea. In “Casting the Runes” we see the text of letters along with secondhand and even thirdhand details by way of conversation. It can be maddeningly indirect yet that is large part of the unease his tales can cause you. Most characters tend to deny the validity of the weird and ghostly stuff but at the same time are unnaturally interested in it. There’s a lot of busy business here—people urgently going from here to there to investigate. But it’s not hard to see what’s going on. A man with supernatural skills is hunting people for reasons of petty vengeance. The rules are complicated and a little mechanical, veering close to the unbelievable. The slip of paper, for example: you have to get someone to accept it freely as handed to them. These rules here are spelled out more clearly in the movie. If the paper is then consumed in flame it seals the curse. If, however, the person with the slip of paper can pass it to someone else, preferably the one who gave it to them in the first place, then that person is off the hook. Busy, busy—and perhaps too rational. But M.R. James establishes a reasonably good air of mystery and dread. The details here can be fleeting but they stick, living inside you in a way that insidiously provokes anxiety. A very strange advertisement in a bus, for example, has made me look at bus cards in whole new ways ever since.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
M.R. James, Complete Ghost Stories
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Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV (2005)

I was impressed with Erik Davis’s exegesis of the great Led Zeppelin album for the 33-1/3 series. It seems to me it’s a certain model of how these books should be done. It starts with a behemoth of not just rock or the ‘70s but of popular culture itself, and it meets the album on its own terms. And on ours as well—his treatment of the fatigue now associated with hearing “Stairway to Heaven” yet again is one of the best parts of his analysis of the iconic classic rock radio staple and of the book at large. Led Zeppelin IV came out while I was in high school and immediately changed the landscape. I paid little attention to the rumored strains of Aleister Crowley and J.R.R. Tolkien or any of that—I thought that was just part of the hype, if anything. Davis makes a strong and vaguely comical case for taking the various mystical vapors into account. He is often gently making fun of the band’s various Spinal Tap elements, even allowing that ultimately he still embraces it all. There is some kind of unholy allure to Led Zeppelin IV, we must admit. Davis consults born-again Christians gravely worried for souls lost to the band. Individual band members are an important part of this story too, of course. Davis gives them their full due. I had no idea, for example, how important John Paul Jones was beyond playing bass. I appreciated Davis’s fealty to John Bonham as one of the great drummers. For me, Jimmy Page has always been kind of a gnomic figure, both with Led Zeppelin and as a guitar player (not to mention producer). I need to get to more Zeppelin literature, but Davis clarified a lot for me about Page. And Robert Plant too, who I’ve always taken as the face of the band, even knowing he’s just the singer, gets fleshed out for me further here too. Davis doesn’t feel the need for a chapter on his personal experience, which is a bit refreshing for this series. He compresses his ardor into every line, although come to think of it he does open with a humorous personal anecdote. He’s funny too, matching Led Zeppelin’s cringiest gestures (e.g., the lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven”) with his own self-conscious credulousness. I see now that I missed a lot of the faerie leitmotifs. But I never changed the station when any of the eight songs on Led Zeppelin IV played on the radio, at least until about 1977, when my responses were more sporadic than automatic. I mean, sometimes I changed the station. Led Zeppelin IV still holds up, as I saw the other day playing it through for the first time in a long while. I’m talking about even “Stairway to Heaven,” which Davis describes as less a song or a track and more a spell. Correct! And it can still work, although, yes, it is often plagued by the fatigue. I will say I got a little tired of Davis’s insistence on referring to the title as the four unpronounceable glyphs. But it’s all in the spirit. By any other name, the glorious Led Zeppelin IV!

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

Red Headed Stranger (1975)

The story of Willie Nelson’s first album for the Columbia label is likely well-known by now. When he played the finished production for label heads, the story goes, they lost their minds. They assumed it was a demo and, when Nelson told them it was the album he wanted to release, they fought it but had no recourse. Nelson’s contract gave him full creative control. Lucky for them, as the album eventually went double-platinum or better, elevating Nelson’s status as a country artist and outlaw singer. The stripped-down production lets us focus on Nelson’s voice which has somehow always felt unusually pure. It also lets us get the strong bones of his songwriting more directly, with roots which run back to earliest country days of the American songbook. “Outlaw” has always struck me as the wrong word for Nelson and his work, even if he is a known consumer of marijuana. His voice is gentle and warm and his songs hit the same way, almost always instantly likable, simple and memorable. Of course, we’re also dealing with a concept album here, about a bitter man who slew his wife and her lover and has been on the run since. Like many concept albums I can’t always make out the narrative, but in this case I can feel it fine, a sad and dangerous man, wrecked, adrift. The album is short, under 35 minutes, with some calculated repetitions across the 15 tracks: “Time of the Preacher” makes three appearances, one of only 25 seconds, and “Red Headed Stranger” shows up twice. “Tale of the Red Headed Stranger,” written by Edith Lindeman Calisch and Carl Stutz, was originally recorded by Arthur Smith, more famous for “Guitar Boogie,” a popular candidate for first rock ‘n’ roll record ever. It’s also a handle Nelson likes to apply to himself. Red Headed Stranger also features standards by Fred Rose (“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”), Juventino Rosas (“O’er the Waves”), and others. The sing-song simplicity of the approach, picking out tunes on an acoustic guitar and serving up instrumentals as well, works well as cover for a real sense of complex poignancy. I’m not sure it’s the place to start with Willie Nelson, but certainly it’s essential across his amazing career. It goes down easy and it’s not hard to make a daily habit of it.

“The Last Feast of Harlequin” (1990)

This long story by Thomas Ligotti is his Cthulhu story, more or less, and a very good one, with humor and unsettling details and setting. The mysterious town of Mirocaw (which keeps sounding in my head like a derangement of “miracle”), somewhere in the Midwest, holds an annual winter solstice event. Our first-person narrator is an academic whose specialty is the anthropology of clowns. Much of the humor here depends on his fascination with clowns. Not only does he study them but he dresses up as one every chance he gets. “The Last Feast of Harlequin” is not only dedicated to “the memory of H.P. Lovecraft” but also looks to a Lovecraft story for inspiration, “The Festival,” which also takes place at the winter solstice and mirrors other details found here. Our guy is mindful, of course, that the winter solstice is also the Christmas season. The contrast is one of the things that makes this story work so well. The town is all decked out in decorations, but they are slightly off. All the festive lights, for example, are only green. It’s a chaotic party scene on the streets, like a Mardi Gras, with strange parades and most people dressed in costumes and masks. Some of the costumes suggest social divisions in the town. One, usually coming from the poor side of town, look like the figure in the painting by Edvard Munch, The Scream. Our guy can’t really get anyone to talk to him and explain what’s going on. He decides to dress like the Scream folks and go mix and mingle. There’s an ongoing parade with floats and a marching band. As he wanders about, he notices a pickup truck cruising along collecting the Scream revelers. It stops for him and he climbs in back with the rest. I really wanted to tell him not to do this. What follows is, again, much like Lovecraft’s “Festival” story, but Ligotti folds in more layers of meaning. There’s a professor who was highly influential on our guy, and it’s surprising and ominous to find him there, not least because he disappeared many years earlier and now seems to be running the show here. The story is not perfect, not without flaws, but it grabs on and never lets you go. The narrator is always interesting and makes suspension of disbelief easy, which is good because this story gets to some intense and crazy places.

Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
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The Happening (2008)

Here’s a picture by director and writer M. Night Shyamalan I might have liked more if I’d caught up with it during the pandemic. It’s not necessarily a virus in this movie that is ravaging humanity along the US northeastern seaboard, but eventually they get to it as a theory (before gaily passing it by). The first theory is terrorism, which is soon discarded first for a virus and then, very strangely, in favor of an idea that plants and the wind have organized a strange attack. Who could have possibly anticipated?! What it looks like: people grow confused in public, stop moving and stand in place, and then commit suicide in various grotesque ways. Watch out for the guy who sets a riding mower to run over him. Usually it’s more like shots to the head, in one case with a shared gun. Much of it is tastefully left offscreen but the picture still got an R rating. A virus makes much more sense to me than the plants-and-wind thing, and it particularly would have in the context of the actual pandemic, which is why I should have caught up with it five years ago, right? I’m just working with what we’re given. The Happening is a tidy 90 minutes, a point in its favor. But people generally don’t seem to like it that much—224,000 on IMDb gave it an aggregate rating of 5.0 (note: on a 1-10 scale, not a 1-5). I guess I’m inclined to agree. Various points about the picture are effectively unnerving and even shocking, notably the suicides, but ultimately it hit me more as lame than anything. Mark Wahlberg is science teacher Elliot Moore and spends most of the picture walking around in an empty-headed brain fog, trying to keep people calm. Zooey Deschanel is his wife Alma, who may or may not be an intriguing character, but she’s drawn so poorly by Shyamalan’s script that she’s just exasperatingly out of focus. Something is off about her. That’s about all we get. Other elements, such as a mood ring that is represented as important, or semi-abandoned houses encountered on walking journeys fleeing across the countryside, are so nonsensical there’s a temptation to believe that Shyamalan is just playing us for reactions. Well, I mean, yeah, that’s what he’s usually doing. That’s what most filmmakers are usually doing. But usually he and they are doing it better. The Happening is eminently skippable.

The Village of Stepanchikovo (1859)

The Friend of the Family
My version of this short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky was unfortunately a reminder that these massive kindle products with everything an author ever wrote (Delphi, in this case) can also come with flaws. Besides an unusually heavy rash of OCR typos (e.g., “He110!”) which are now and then impossible to parse, one long passage was duplicated, possibly obliterating other text. It’s hard to guess what’s not there, or even whether anything indeed is not there (it’s always hard to know what you don’t know), but I think I got the gist and anyway it seemed to be a relatively minor episode. I think this might also be a place to register the general complaints about Russian novels. The names—they are confusing and it gets worse when, as here, there are numerous characters. Between last names, formal constructions of a first name with (I think?) a “patronymic,” and familiar forms of first names, sometimes I think there are two or more characters when actually there is just one. The Village of Stepanchikovo is another lampoon of a buffoonish upper class, focusing on the betters in a small village and a uniquely manipulative character named Foma Fomitch. He is enraging and a reminder of how well and how viscerally Dostoevsky can do hateful characters. One scene in particular, Foma’s first, lengthy appearance, practically made me murderous. All attempts to thwart him inevitably fail. Although the novel is relatively minor, as much as anything part of Dostoevsky’s literary rehabilitation after 10 years in Siberia, it has plenty of the hallmarks of his best stuff. The characters are real and so is much of the psychology. Foma Fomitch is basically a con man getting away with it right in front of our eyes. His superiors have no control of him, partly because they are too genteel and partly, and most significantly, because he has the matriarch of the village upper class entirely snowed. She is twice widowed and steadfastly blinkered about Foma. An approximation of the dynamic can be found in the 1936 movie My Man Godfrey in the murky relationship between the matriarch of a very rich family and her protégé, or something, Carlo, who entertains them with impressions of an ape. The Village of Stepanchikovo is another farcical, acidic critique of manners, courtship, and wealth. There are probably too many characters and too many red herrings with all their ridiculous names. But the narrator, his uncle, and Foma Fomitch are all vivid, believable portraits. Dostoevsky’s voice, as always, sings.

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

“Thanksgiving” (1993)

Here is another effective pile-on by Joyce Carol Oates—perhaps it piles on too much. It’s certainly not restrained. Calling Oates’s brand of horror here hysterical might be insulting, but it’s not my intent. Her stories can take place at a very high pitch, let’s put it that way. The setting in this one seems to be the impoverished white trash South, white trash being one of her specialties. A father suddenly wants to take his 13-year-old daughter shopping for Thanksgiving. He tells her that her mother needs the break. The mother usually does the shopping, but this year she’s not. No explanation—in fact, we never see her at all. The father keeps referring to her as if she’s alive, but she could be dead. The scene at the grocery store is incredible, Oates in high nightmare / dream mode. From the descriptions, it appears the store has been bombed from the air. In one aisle part of the floor is gone with a hole that drops into the basement. It’s chaos everywhere. The lights are low and flickering—there has been a power outage too. There’s lots of spoiled food all over, really disgusting stuff. Yet the place is crowded with shoppers and, while it’s impossible to ignore the inconvenience, no one seems to remark anything about it being unusual. There’s a kind of shared grim determination to get what they need there and get out. It feels like a society rotting out in front of our eyes. In some ways the story feels pro forma—take something comforting like the Thanksgiving holiday and turn it inside out, because there’s no such thing as comfort in this world. The story is built around dysfunctional family dynamics. For at least half of it I was sure it had to be about the mother but it’s actually more about a world in pure collapse. Yes, it goes too far. There are cockroaches, the meat is bad, and they are often up to their ankles in unexplained standing water. Yet everyone acts as if it’s normal. That’s when it feels most like a nightmare. The bland acceptance of this chaos and degradation is what comes to seem the worst. The story has few answers. It leaves us with only more questions. Literally the only thing that seems to matter now is consuming. But what about the bombs? What about the mother? The story works, but it might be overdone. But it works.

Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
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Talking Heads: 77 (2003)

I was attracted to John Domini’s first novel by its faithful reproduction of the title of the first Talking Heads album, preserving the eccentric punctuation intact—one colon, no apostrophe. It turns out to be a story about the alternative press in Boston in the late 1970s. There’s some talk about Talking Heads and that album, but not much. I know Jerry Harrison went to Harvard and played with the original Modern Lovers, which is maybe as close to Boston as he got. Punk-rock is a continuing theme in this novel, though not particularly a main one and, for that matter, and not to split rock critic hairs, but Talking Heads is closer to new wave and/or postpunk than to punk-rock. “Talking heads” as a media style also gets its allusions here. There is even the cardinal sin of attaching the definite article to the band’s name—“the” Talking Heads. The name of this band is Talking Heads, as one of their album titles spells out so clearly. I have some interest in Domini’s era of alternative press, as I worked it myself for much of the 1980s. The story here involves a hapless editor and investigative reporter who is looking into corruption in the Massachusetts prison system and trying to keep his paper going at the same time. There are many references to the 1977 movie Between the Lines, which features an alternative newsweekly with Jeff Goldblum as its rock critic. There is also a kinda sorta rock critic on the staff of the paper here. She talks a lot about punk-rock and “the scene” but never makes much sense. She is the daughter of the paper’s money man so maybe she’s meant to be “nepo” and not much good as a writer. When I looked this novel up on Goodreads I saw it has a lot of five-star rankings and reviews. I thought it was a terrible mess and a slog to get through—two stars. It had very little about Talking Heads or their album, and what there was seemed only dimly aware of them. Domini seems more to be talking about an album that exists as some kind of idea in his head, and not the actual album. I appreciated the effort to do the alternative press, especially in the era it focuses on, but Domini doesn’t make much of a job of it. You’re better off tracking down Between the Lines, which I don’t remember as great but certainly it’s more entertaining than this trying-too-hard exercise. I hope Domini got better, but I would need more encouragement from somewhere to look into it myself.

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

“The Forbidden” (1985)

This long story by Clive Barker is the source for the movie Candyman. As usual with Barker, it’s longer than it has to be, and it’s full of good ideas as well as overdone ideas. I like the ways Barker signals he is working within a tradition. The term “sweets to the sweet” recurs here, likely a reference to a famous story of that name by Robert Bloch. Interestingly, while there is a “Candyman” in this story, the name only shows up late and there is no business here about saying his name five times into a mirror. But much of the rest is Barker: the bees (more overplayed in the movie), the setting of a failing housing project, the academic research. I like making the main character a graduate student who is studying graffiti. It was plausible in 1985, in 1992, and it seems likely to remain so still, except in the 2021 movie the place has been gentrified, which I suppose makes sense after 30 years. The story of course goes off the rails and over the top with grotesque murders. There’s an uncertainty about the reality of these crimes that I like—it’s possible they are somehow just urban legends. Another classic source Barker draws on here is the campfire chestnut about the killer on lovers lane with a hook for a hand. Thus, “The Forbidden”—campfire ghost story, or urban legend? You decide. People living in the project talk about crimes for which there are no records in newspapers or police files. There’s a sense there’s no record of these crimes because no one particularly cares. It’s hard to tell, murky, and that’s a good tone. Helen Buchanan’s thesis is titled “Graffiti: The Semiotics of Urban Despair.” Now we’re talking, with faint suggestions of the ridiculousness of academic work, even as that “Urban Despair” lands hard. Candyman, however much of a spirit of retribution he may be, taking revenge on a world that spurned him, is a bit ridiculous himself, with that name and an epic image of him in graffiti painted on a doorway (and somewhat hard for me to imagine). He is clown-like, reminiscent of Stephen King’s Pennywise from It, which came out a year later. That’s especially true when you throw in the “Candyman” chant. In both movies and in the story too. All have flaws as well as strengths, though they are not necessarily the same.

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 5 kindle)
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“Teddy” (1953)

When J.D. Salinger was working on this story he knew it would be the last in the Nine Stories collection, and he wrote it deliberately as a kind of symmetrical balance to the first story in the collection, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” It works that way—notably the endings are echoes and reflections of one another. However, this might be a point where I’m thinking of getting off the boat with Salinger. This kid, Teddy, is just too special. He’s 10 and he’s psychically gifted. He wants to make people understand reincarnation, Zen enlightenment, and stuff like that. What are his powers? We see that he can predict the future and/or has extraordinary insight into others. He’s vastly more evolved than his parents. His dad says things like, “I’ll exquisite day you, buddy.” The family of four—dad, mom, Teddy, and sister Booper—are on an ocean cruise of some kind, maybe a transatlantic crossing. Mysterious sidelong intimations suggest scientific and religious groups have interest in studying him. For further elucidation—but not really enough—Salinger inserts some kind of journalist or young man interested party on the boat who buttonholes Teddy and asks a lot of questions for the sake of readers. We see Salinger really going headlong into the mystical stuff of Eastern flavor here. It’s the kind of thing that would specifically get developed with the Glass stories to come. “Bananafish” very much presages the Glass drama. “Teddy” fits them in terms of themes and elements but no one here, as far as I know, has anything to do with the Glasses. I’m not sure what to think of this story. I’ll be looking into that next with Salinger’s late novellas and only other published material, outside of the novel The Catcher in the Rye and some scattered stories. I’ve been checking the internet semiregularly since Salinger’s death in 2010. I understand he left a lot of manuscripts and that they are on the way. I look forward to that if they ever get here. I don’t even need to know more—are they Glass family stories? novels? or both? or something else? “Teddy” suggests I may see more limitations than I did when I read Salinger so avidly as a high school teen.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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“Within the Walls of Tyre” (1978)

This story by Michael Bishop has its points, notably the treatment of ‘70s/’80s shopping malls and life, charting part of the US journey in the last century from cities to suburbs and exurbs. But starting with the title, it more like delivers an assault of intellectual pretension that annoyed me when it didn’t depress me. The internet tells me Tyre is “one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.... one of the earliest Phoenician metropolises and the legendary birthplace of Europa ... and Carthage's founder Dido (Elissa).” But the venerable ancient city figures in this story only metaphorically. More: the story basically turns on another strange word likely unfamiliar to most readers: “lithopedion.” I looked it up for you (to be fair, it’s also explained in the story): “a rare phenomenon which occurs most commonly when a fetus dies during an abdominal pregnancy, is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, and calcifies.” It’s also called a stone baby and again it’s very rare—even the woman in this story carrying one mentions how rare and unusual it is. But it’s certainly grotesque and could very well reach people as a type of body horror, although it seemed more strained to me than anything, or even just cheap shock, which wasn’t helped by the necessity of follow-up research. Between Tyre and lithopedion it felt like some preening on the part of Bishop, and cringy. But the story is good on its 1978 time and place, with both shopping malls and casual sex done well. The story is set at Christmastime but Bishop seems to have missed the oppressive omnipresence in shopping malls of seasonal music. But that’s just picking nits on my part. Bishop’s mall here is otherwise good in the way director and writer George A. Romero’s is in Dawn of the Dead (something in the air in 1978). The sex scene reminded me of the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood,” except in this case the lover man does not crawl off to sleep in the bath (and remember, it was really the ‘70s more than the ‘60s that memorialized the fine points of casual sex pre-AIDS). “Within the Walls of Tyre” devolves down to an unpleasant revenge tale, only made more lame by all the intellectual tarting-up. A rare misfire from editor David G. Hartwell’s otherwise extremely useful phonebook-sized anthology The Dark Descent.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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