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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