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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More Than Human (1953)

Theodore Sturgeon’s much celebrated novel is a kind of fix-up of three novellas. The first and third—“The Fabulous Idiot” and “Morality,” respectively—were written expressly for the novel. The centerpiece second part, “Baby Is Three,” was previously published and won awards of its own. The novel has followed a crooked path to its present status as one of the 100 best sci-fis. I didn’t know any of this when I went to read it, but I did notice that “Baby Is Three” was notably the best part. The other two were way too unnecessarily coy about letting us in on what’s going on. It’s a fantastic idea, this Homo Gestalt, the next evolutionary step from H. Sapiens. As readers, we need all the help we can get without some peekaboo routine of the determinedly slow reveal. But it’s a big and intriguing idea, this vision of human mutants. I got such a hit of X-Men at points that I wonder how well Stan Lee or whoever worked on the comic might have known this novel. The big ideas are there to be discovered (not without labor, alas, at least in my experience). Sturgeon is a name I knew way back when I was reading science fiction stories as a kid, along with Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. I don’t remember much about the Sturgeon stories, whereas stuff by Bradbury and Heinlein has stuck with me. I think most of Sturgeon’s greatest achievements are wrapped up in this novel. I wouldn’t know where to go next with him. The first part, “The Fabulous Idiot,” has some affinities structurally with William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and its baffling first part, which is also explicitly about “an idiot” (term of art in more benighted times). They are very different works, but I do wonder if Sturgeon was prone to literary pretension. Two-thirds of this book anyway suggest he might be, but I don’t know. He wrote a lot of stories that might be worth a look for a next stop. Kudos to the Library of America anthology, American Science Fiction, 1953-1956, for reminding me science fiction doesn’t have to be just space opera, which we see a lot of, of course. More Than Human is decidedly not space opera and has lots of interesting ideas about psychology and evolution, though it may not be necessarily done well overall—ambition, reach, grasp, all that. Read the first part to get to the second part. Third part optional. Another reminder of the problems with fix-ups.

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