"The Trapdoor" (1936)

There's not a lot I can tell you about C.D. Heriot, the author of this somewhat obscure story. Wikipedia is silent on him (at least I believe it's a him) and the invaluable Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) is sketchy: he was British and published three stories, including this one, which I found in Mary Danby's Realms of Darkness collection. Two are from the '30s and one from the '50s. It probably makes more sense to align him with ghost story writers like E.F. Benson, F. Marion Crawford, or M.R. James (I understand the penchant for initials is artifact of the disreputability of horror or, in some cases, like E. Nesbit, because they wanted to conceal they were women). But in a way "The Trapdoor" can also be likened to Italian giallo horror movies like Lucia Fulci's The Beyond. An H.P. Lovecraft story, "The Dreams in the Witch-House," has specific similarities too and could well have had some influence, even on the movie. Things happen in The Beyond, as in "The Trapdoor," that make no sense. They just happen. You can't figure it out. They are not there to be understood. In turn, in brief flashes, they can point to dread of widening-gyre chaos loosed upon the world. In either case, the plot breakdowns may equally be matters of ineptitude. But still they have their ways to get to you. In this story, for me, it's a few paragraphs in the middle, fleetingly. The premise and setup are otherwise lame and the payoff lamer. John Staines is under doctor's orders to rest on weekends and finds a place to stay he likes in a village in the country, an "isolated beer house." Almost immediately he finds himself in tense relations with the sour landlady, Mrs. Palethorpe. To be fair, Staines has developed a fixation on a trapdoor in the hall outside his room, which leads to a loft. Anyone in Mrs. Palethorpe's position would likely be annoyed. Think about the greater likelihood that Staines is wrong and there is nothing sinister. Mrs. Palethorpe tells him the loft is empty and unused. But Staines notices the trapdoor has been sabotaged to be difficult to open. Or, alternatively, it has rusted shut because no one uses it. Staines has many questions. One night he is awakened by a knocking from above. It can only be coming from the loft. For a few minutes in the utter silence of the middle of the night in a strange place in the country he's not sure whether he's imagining it, and neither are we. For this brief and very nice passage we are right there with him in every strange room we've stayed in ourselves as he tries to decide what's real and what's not, and can't. Then the story moves into its more florid Fulci-like paces and things happen or don't happen that can't happen in the world we understand. Like Fulci, it gets progressively more silly. In the end Staines realizes he's getting the opposite of the rest that was prescribed and he quits the premises forthwith. An explanatory letter of sorts from Mrs. Palethorpe follows some weeks later, sounding nothing like the character we met earlier. Now she is "Alice." But it's too late and altogether the wrong impulse for explanations. Still, it was good while it lasted.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)

Story not available online, but this piece by Tom Mullen, circa 2003, talks about it with a story by M.R. James and is worth a look. 

Dead Elvis (1991)

I circled back to this Greil Marcus cogitation because Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles reminded me of it. On the surface, both are similarly focused on key figures who came to an ending—Elvis died and the Beatles broke up—which amounted to little more than blips in their continuing careers. They only got bigger. Well, maybe—it's true enough on a certain level. Sheffield's book is much more recent, but more than 25 years later now it's easier to question the premise of Dead Elvis. Is Elvis finally dead now? Well, maybe—it's true enough on a certain level. In retrospect, after the rush to the 10-year anniversary of his death in 1987, Elvis mania was starting to peter out in about 1991. I'm someone who is always late to everything and thus, as evidence, I offer that I promoted my first book in 1993 by hiring two (2) Elvis Presley impersonators to accompany me to a book signing as bodyguards. I admit it was under influence of Dead Elvis. And Marcus still remains a lurking factor in the way I approach and think about cultural issues. His best work is usually about Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, or the Sex Pistols, whatever else he may formally be writing about (which is often simply them, as here). In a way, it feels like he somehow asserts critical propriety over certain artists—Lana Del Rey is shaping up to be his 21st-century project. Much of the heat I encountered my first time through Dead Elvis, when it was new, has cooled considerably. It seems more a product of its time, the late '80s, which may be approximately Peak Elvis. The book's visual exhibits all seem to come from 1988. As always Marcus's ideas are fun to grasp and toss around and he's always a good writer. If some of his insights are closer to weird, others are dead-on. This time I especially appreciated the attempt to take down Albert Goldman's biography. It was already a bestseller, but Marcus does a lot of heavy lifting for why Goldman's exercise is wrong in ways that are harmful to all of us, not just Elvis. Mostly Dead Elvis is a book about other books—on the music of Elvis, Marcus is still best in Mystery Train. But Dead Elvis can be a lot of fun too. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it feels a little more authoritative and thoughtful on Elvis than Dreaming the Beatles does on the Beatles. But they are two rather different projects after all.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Social Network (2010)

USA, 120 minutes

Director: David Fincher

Writers: Aaron Sorkin, Ben Mezrich

Photography: Jeff Cronenweth

Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross

Editors: Kirk Baxter, Angus Wall

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Rooney Mara, Rashida Jones, Aaron Sorkin

Speaking of nerd macho, sometimes I think The Social Network might have something to do with creating the Mark Zuckerberg we have come to know and loathe, the wound-up libertarian incel hero seething with grievance and resentment and here turned unfairly (and wrong-headedly) into a small figure we can pity. He may be brilliant and rich, but he can't get the chicks. No wonder he's pissed off. At the beginning of the picture a woman tells Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), "You're gonna go through life thinking girls don't like you because you're a nerd. I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole." At the end of it another woman, unrelated, tells him, "You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying to be." In between those two definitions, cowriter Aaron Sorkin seems to be suggesting, lies the truth. I'd feel a little hemmed in by popular perception too if I were Zuck.

What really had to hurt is that the movie is so darned good. Somehow I had forgotten that. You can't take your eyes off it. It's a dream collaboration between director David Fincher, Sorkin, and Eisenberg, powered by the fusillades of sparkling, cutting banter and confrontation that have made Sorkin famous. The Social Network is fast, barbed, hilarious, and utterly absorbing from its first minute. It lands punches over and over, not just on Zuckerberg. It has massive forward momentum, even though it's built out of biopic clichés, with a framing device of depositions in a law firm's tony conference room while pinballing flashbacks serve up the tech legendry raw in great meaty chunks. Bill Gates shows up at Harvard like Madonna french-kissing Britney Spears and all intentions are toward one goal: become a billionaire (because that's what's more "cool" than a millionaire).

Stranger Things, s3 (2019)

Did the pandemic end? This super-popular Netflix series, which I heard about from a number of uncommon sources, promised more of TV's blessed relief from the monotony of COVID-19 conditions. Alas, it did not much deliver for me. And COVID-19 conditions have only grown worse. The show, or the pandemic, is so humdrum it was hard to work myself up even to watch two episodes in a row, and that's no way to pandemic. Stranger Things is a nostalgia exercise set in the '80s with outlandish horror trappings driven by special effects. The most obvious sources are Ghostbusters and Back to the Future, both referenced directly. There's got to be some Steven Spielberg shout-outs on the way (or maybe they can't get the licensing done?) because Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. are even more the starting points of many conceits here. Stranger Things is also notably '80s and Spielbergian in its wanton use of product placement. Eggos is hammered the hardest but at least has some organic charm within the story. The rest are shoved in like Where's Waldo geared down for preliterates: Coca-Cola (as refreshment but also with a discussion of New Coke), Slurpee and 7-Eleven (the main character with the stylized nosebleed is named Eleven but I'm sure that's just a coincidence, though I look forward to her mixing it up sometime with Seven of Nine from Star Trek not to mention that Prisoner chap), Burger King, The Gap, Cadillac, Orange Julius (can I get some money just for mentioning them all in this review? I really like an Orange Julius!), and Marlboro cigarettes, among others. The pack of Marlboros almost made me gasp. I thought that was illegal with tobacco products! No doubt some of it, such as the cigarettes (and the smoking, with all due disclaimers at the start of each episode), can be written off as '80s parody, but talk about having your cake and eating it too. Well, but having its cake and eating it too is the whole broad stroke of this show. It's a little bit Nancy Drew, and a little bit John Carpenter's The Thing, with an ax to grind about nerds. Not nerd macho, the era we have lived in for some time now, but old-fashioned nerds, who can only dream of the dominations of nerd macho in the actual Stranger Things era. Winona Ryder plays it on one note while the kids in the basement are playing D'n'D, speaking of broad strokes. Is D'n'D a product placement or a nerd brand? Somehow, the absurd arc of this continuing narrative about Area 51-type secret government projects, extra-dimensional telepathic monsters, Russian agents operating under a mall in Indiana, and always time for a Coke the pause that refreshes, is actually driven by D'n'D, at least when it's convenient for the special effects crew, who seem to be the ones in charge here after the marketing department. The skills of these kids in math, science, and AV equipment are critically important too, of course. And plus they're all basically woke. What's not to like, if you like thuddingly obvious.

House (1985)

There's a lot to like about this account of building a house—a specific house, in Amherst, Massachusetts, built from the ground up in six months in 1983. In one way it's like a million conversations we've all had about buying and dealing with real estate, but it goes to another level beyond mortgages and home improvement when the house is built from scratch. Tracy Kidder's great stroke is to focus on something so ordinary we almost take it for granted—the enormous complexity (even in 1983 when technology was simpler) of building a house for a nuclear family of four or so. Anyone who has ever purchased a house knows how insanely complicated it is with negotiation and managing details and cost. Designing and building one is magnitudes more complex and expensive. Kidder traipses along with the architect, owners, and builders for a look at how one house comes together. It's enjoyable to read and became famous as a type of journalism that flourished in the '70s and '80s, led by figures such as John McPhee. It has a friendly personal style, yet is researched and written with rigor, perhaps branching off from New Journalism. It was popular in reading groups. House does feel a little dated these three decades later. The real estate market has changed, though maybe not as much at this level. The people building this house are affluent, educated, and professional—they are still the people building houses today. And the builders, though arguably a dying breed of craftsman, certainly at mass levels, may still be around too, but I suspect in fewer numbers with these aesthetic ambitions. No doubt the difficulty of building a house is at least as imposing. It's a matter of degree. All the problems documented here are likely worse now—perhaps even enough that what we see here is vanishingly rare, and relatively easy. As the blurbers point out, the need for shelter is one of the most common and profound needs we share, even in the somewhat pedestrian context of modern life. Maybe what I'm missing is the element of climate change, which seems so pervasive in everything now and was mostly unknown in 1983 (as with cyberattacks and pandemics). True confession, I find swapping or listening to stories about real estate mostly tiresome. It dragged things down a bit for me here. You may feel differently. But the details of building a house, including the business side, are amply documented in House and often fascinating. It's a good example of this type of journalism, modest yet impressively done.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)

UK, 87 minutes, documentary

Director: Banksy

Music: Geoff Barrow, Richard Hawley

Editors: Banksy, Tom Fulford, Chris King

With: Rhys Ifans, Thierry Guetta (aka Mr. Brainwash), Banksy, Invader, Shepard Fairey, Neckface, Swoon

It's not easy to pin down what this entertaining little picture is, exactly, though all the main problems are caught in the basic question, documentary or mockumentary? It's directed by the notorious street graffiti artist / vandal / political activist / prankster / what-have-you Banksy, still his only feature-length picture. Banksy appears in it sitting for interview with his face hidden and voice distorted. Street artist / etc. Shepard Fairey—most famous now for the iconic Barack Obama "Hope" poster from 2008—also has a role in it, and a very big one, according to the people who believe it is all an elaborate put-on. Exit Through the Gift Shop is working on the story of street art as it was inevitably coopted (if that's what you want to call it) by the privileged art world.

This object lesson is made in the person of Thierry Guetta, a French émigré to Los Angeles. Guetta's biography is that first he was the proprietor of a popular (and expensive) LA vintage clothing store, and then an obsessive with a video camera documenting street art around the world. Eventually, as we see practically real-time, he reinvents himself as an Andy Warhol knockoff pop artist, calling himself MBW, for Mr. Brainwash. He appears to be a genuine person as far as I can tell by internet sources, has seen financial windfalls from his work, and is still working. Madonna really commissioned him to do the cover of her album Celebration. As a pop artist he works in the industrial production style Warhol came to use, hiring graphic designers and other artists to execute his ideas. There is an obvious pop inspiration to Guetta's work but a nagging feeling he may be mediocre and we may be dupes. As a somewhat exasperated Banksy puts it, "His art looks quite a bit like everyone else's."

At the Mountains of Madness (1931)

This very long H.P. Lovecraft story, arguably his masterpiece, bears interest for a number of reasons. The sweeping vision it presents counts as horror, if only because it's creepy and gets squishy, but Theodore Sturgeon reportedly called it "first-water, true-blue science fiction." It works perhaps best as an impressive example of the "lost world" story, like Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, the King Kong movie, or Wakanda. It was written when it was possible to entertain features like an undiscovered mountain range in the Antarctic whose peaks (plural) put "Everest out of the running." It was rejected for publication for five years as too long (indignities of the overlooked genius). Last but not least, it's nearly perfect Lovecraft, grinding away at its premises until they are well fixed in the brain and provide context for adventure, confrontation, and characters losing their minds due to excessive boggling. Strains of Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, and the usual sinister documentation are heard as well. Lovecraft kept up with the science of his day (not to mention the pulp fiction), so his descriptions of this strange land in the Antarctic are informed by a sense of the Earth's history in terms of geology and a scope that breaches epochs. What he describes his small party of two encountering is hundreds of thousands and millions of years old, even as much as a billion, and he knows enough about the theories of planetary development to make it credible enough to fool a rube like me. He's all over plate tectonics, for example. The preservation of the architecture and structure of his massive dead city is another matter but apparently the dry and cold conditions in this Antarctic accommodate that. So, uh, OK, I'll buy that. Never mind the high winds. It's not perfectly preserved. In general, as so often, it's just better to agree to believe. So we get Lovecraft's usual infinitely detailed description done up in scientific drag and dipped in a sauce of art history pseudo-erudition—the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich is name-checked repeatedly in this one—and it's good as always to enter with a modicum of patience. Give him an inch and he will blow your mind a mile, but it's not always an easy inch. The plot, even such as it is, tends toward the busy and a little beside the point, also as usual, with various Antarctic expeditions and two or three alien races and/or supernatural forces, plus some giant friendly penguins. The Cyclopean horrors that drive men mad happen in a big rush at the end, almost too fast. "Too fast" is a strange thing to say about Lovecraft. I estimate At the Mountains of Madness as 85% scene-setting and description and 15% plot execution, which is all right when you remember that the 85% part is what he's best at doing. He always kept a foot planted in the Sherlock Holmes style of first-person investigation too, which brings some odd comfort of familiarity to his tales. I do admire his ability to imagine. At the Mountains of Madness is heady stuff, one of his best, and not a bad place to start on him. If you're really ambitious, read it with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, its spiritual cousin.

H.P. Lovecraft, Tales (Library of America)

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An Anonymous Story (1893)

The title of this long story by Anton Chekhov seems to be translated more often as "The Story of an Unknown Man," but I'm sticking with Constance Garnett, who has it this way, "An Anonymous Story." Her work is also why I keep pushing the Delphi kindle product, as I haven't seen any better translations, but perhaps because her versions of Chekhov are in the public domain now they are less available. This is a really great story—pure Chekhov in certain ways, an almost Dostoevskian departure in others, with an unusual premise that brings an element of exotic intrigue. The narrator is a spy of some kind, who takes work as a footman with a cynical and worldly minor government bureaucrat. The narrator's mission, never really made clear, has something to do with this functionary's father, a much more powerful political figure. The narrator describes his footman duties and the household in detail. The bureaucrat, Orlov, is a dedicated bachelor, and has three close friends who gather on Thursdays to snigger at the world and play cards. All four are great characters, odd and callous eccentrics, drawn well. Then, one day, one of Orlov's mistresses appears, announcing she has left her husband and is moving in. She appears to be genuinely smitten with Orlov. For Orlov and his friends she is an impossible problem. The friends' only counsel to Orlov is to end it and the sooner the better. Orlov cannot confront her, however, and instead starts to tell her he is going on business trips when he is really staying in town with one of his friends. Orlov cannot even stand to be around her at all before long. Meanwhile, our footman narrator's mysterious mission comes to an end and he prepares to bug out. But first he must unburden himself of all his contempt for Orlov in a letter. The letter is a very Dostoevskian passage, and almost infects the story from that point on, as the narrator also feels he must unburden himself and come clean with the mistress about her situation, Orlov's deceptions, and his (the narrator's) part in all of it. Then the mistress, finally convinced of the truth, declares she wants to be part of the narrator's revolutionary movement. The narrator is all for that but really what he wants—in a perfect Chekhov twist—is for the mistress to fall in love with him. But she doesn't. She is fond of him, and nurses him when he is sick with pleurisy, but she's there for the revolution. Complications, tragic and perhaps inevitable, ensue. For all its zigs and zags this story has a wrenching yet gratifying finish. Really good one.

Delphi Complete Works of Anton Chekhov

Blue Valentine (2010)

USA, 112 minutes

Director: Derek Cianfrance

Writers: Derek Cianfrance, Joey Curtis, Cami Delavigne

Photography: Andrij Parekh

Music: Grizzly Bear, Penny & the Quarters

Editors: Jim Helton, Ron Patane

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, Faith Wladyka, John Doman, Mike Vogel, Maryann Plunkett, Ben Shenkman

I remembered Blue Valentine earlier this year when I was looking at Marriage Story. They're both heartbreaking tales of 30something splits, with young kid, they're both set in New York City—I had forgotten that about Blue Valentine—and they're both honest to a fault on relationships breaking down. The biggest difference may be in the class positions of their principals. Marriage Story takes place in Manhattan (and Los Angeles) and features a MacArthur Fellowship recipient whereas Blue Valentine is set in Brooklyn, and not really the trendy gentrified Brooklyn of the past 15 years, but a deeper layer, where alcoholism and domestic violence are hardly uncommon and not everybody finishes high school but can always get by at day labor.

Michelle Williams as Cindy and Ryan Gosling as Dean are the real strength of Blue Valentine—it's literally their vehicle as they've even got skin in among the phalanx of executive producers. They're much more accomplished and simply better than Scarlett Johansson (who is nonetheless very good in Marriage Story) and Adam Driver. Blue Valentine director and cowriter Derek Gianfrance may not have the resume or filmmaking skills of Marriage Story director Noah Baumbach but he can stay out of the way of his formidable stars. Baumbach may have made a better film, as such, but Gianfrance has made the more memorable one, taking pages out of the John Cassavettes style, with actors so deeply committed to their roles that therapy seems a likely result of the trauma of making the picture. Blue Valentine has little nudity or violence but is so intensely bleak it earned an NC-17 rating the first time around.

"The Listener" (1907)

I tend to think of Algernon Blackwood more as savant of the ineffably extra-dimensional beyond our ken (see "The Willows," see "The Winnebago Wendigo," etc.), but this story and many others demonstrate how good he could be even at the ghost story, that root basic unit of horror. "The Listener" takes on the form of diary entries, a classic not to say overplayed device, and then in many ways proceeds as vividly as Hanns Heinz Ewers's "The Spider." Blackwood's anonymous urban creature is more of a Londoner, as opposed to Ewers's Parisian. He's a freelance writer who finds rooms that are dirt-cheap and close to the newspaper offices where he pitches stories. You can guess the reason those rooms are cheap, though Blackwood's typical light touch slips it by. He's remarkably good at working variations on the conventions. It's always a ghost that's bothering our freelancer, though the one clumsy element of the story is a visit our man pays to a lecture about death that basically explains fine points of the story's conceit, a good old ghost bit that runs from Sheridan Le Fanu's "The Familiar" to the Paranormal Activity movie franchise, with a ghost attaching itself to an individual. The way the plot point is inserted via the public lecture is what's clumsy, not the concept or the language: Suicides, he learns, "cannot shirk their responsibilities so easily. They must return to take up life exactly where they laid it so violently down, but with the added pain and punishment of their weakness. Many of them wander the earth in unspeakable misery till they can reclothe themselves in the body of someone else—generally a lunatic, or weak-minded person, who cannot resist the hideous obsession. This is their only means of escape."

A freelance writer is clearly an example of a lunatic or weak-minded person, so we quickly grasp the sense of his danger. He also mentions in his diary that he has had problems with sleepwalking in the past—not good! He is obviously ripe for a reclothing exercise on the part of some suicide still residing in the Phantom Zone of his rooms. Blackwood inserts passing examples of our man's mind being preyed on even as he is writing out his diary entries in real-time, such as one where he is talking about his exasperation with the housemaid who cleans his rooms and misplaces his things: "Sometimes I feel inclined to throw the inkstand at her, just to bring an expression into her watery eyes and a squeak from those colorless lips. Dear me! What violent expressions I am making use of! How very foolish of me!" One obvious point in such stream of (double) consciousness foreshadowing is how much H.P. Lovecraft was influenced by Blackwood, whose best is better than anything Lovecraft touched for all his considerable influence himself. Even the misplaced things is done insidiously well here—it could be the help, it could be the addled freelancer, or it could be the ghost, which systematically works on him on different sensual levels: sounds and smells long before sight of anything, and at one point he feels the arm of another person in a dark room. "Like small doses of morphine often repeated," he writes, "she has finally a cumulative effect." But we know it's not the housemaid.

When the ghost is finally named, as "the Listener," it brings sharp focus to the strange events and perceptions swirling around our man and/or merely in his mind. He is plainly haunted now, by something that feels more and more predatory: "Last night I was again troubled by most oppressive dreams. Someone seemed to be moving in the night up and down my room, sometimes passing into the front room, and then returning to stand beside the bed and stare intently down upon me. I was being watched by this person all night long. I never actually awoke, though I was often very near it." The lines between annoyance and dread and danger are passed successively in order but almost imperceptibly. Blackwood always works well at his peak operatic moments. Part of his skill is the way he raises the temperature so high even as we barely notice. Suddenly things are dire and how did we get here? The final payoff and explanations are a bit pat and a lot antiquated and insensitive, but certainly grotesque so (on one level) why not? The least you can say about Blackwood is that he's a certifiable master of horror.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos

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