“Heavy Set” (1964)

This Ray Bradbury story, first printed in Playboy magazine under Ray Russell’s editorial regime, comes with a few surprises. It is recognizably Bradbury’s Midwestern sing-song voice, but the details are quite dark, not science fiction or wistful or elegiac at all, which I normally associate with him. “Heavy Set” works on subterranean levels, like Robert Aickman or Dennis Etchison. The main character Leonard is nearly 31 and living with his mother. He’s a bodybuilder, working out constantly with weights and such. He hangs around with high school kids who admire him and call him “Heavy Set.” The girls want to go out with him, but he always seems to have excuses to get out of it. It’s Halloween and he’s having a party, dressed up like an English schoolboy, “the mean little boy,” carrying a giant lollipop. It reminded me of Herbie Popnecker from ACG Comics in the ‘60s. The story is set in California and Leonard is also a surfer, by the way. He’s having the party at “the beach,” not at his mother’s place. It seems strange for Leonard to be having a party. Some interpretations of this story have him as intellectually disabled. It doesn’t read that way to me, although something about him is definitely not right. He’s sullen, withdrawn—not the type to throw a party. And it turns out to be a disaster. Not even half the people invited show up and Leonard is the only one in costume. The center of this story is the relationship between Leonard and his mother, which is not healthy. They seem to be all each other has. Whether it’s incestuous is not clear but my guess is sadly yes. It definitely radiates an aura of needy and creepy impulses. While Leonard is away at his party his mother worries he will never come back, without a word, that she will just never see or hear from him again. This story feels deeply unpleasant on multiple levels. It plays with us, teases us, then shanks us with the worst suggestions when Leonard comes home from the party upset. He talks to his mother about it, but he's still upset. He spends hours on the punching bag, until after 3 in the morning. Then he comes into the house and gets into bed with her. It seems to be something new but possibly it’s happened before. She pretends to be asleep. He’s still working out with hand grip strengtheners which squeak in the dark. The last line notes it’s still “a long time before dawn.” But this scene that tremors with terrible potentiality is just the capper. All the details here are increasingly weird and disturbing. Nothing seems real but it’s not a dream. The phone rings at strange times. It’s that kind of story and it’s amazing.

The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Ray Russell (out of print)
Read story online.

Perfect Blue (1997)

Director Satashi Kon’s first feature is old enough now (25 years!) that, in the story, the internet is still a novelty that must be explained to people. The story concerns a singer who is successful in a J-pop singing trio. She decides under influence of ambition to break away from the singing she has been trained for (against the advice of some in her management) and try her luck at an acting career. The movie is even too old to be about Destiny’s Child and Beyonce, let alone Lady Gaga, but it’s a classic story, with old roots and echoes of A Star Is Born. Or maybe Phantom of the Opera in a kind of sideways manner. Mima Kirigoe (voiced by Junko Iwao) is stalked by an obsessive fan, forced to do sexualized scenes as an actor, and haunted by an image of herself as a pop singer who shows up and taunts her. It’s a thin line, as the old song goes, between love and hate, but in this movie it’s also a thin line between reality and hallucination. Mima is breaking down in front of us but she has other problems as well. In addition, Kon has a strange way of telling a story, which would be more perfected in Paprika, from 2006, as well as a 2004 TV miniseries, Paranoia Agent. I didn’t get a lot out of the various backstage dramatics in Perfect Blue, which are never very original, nor out of the tensions of the stalking thread either, which is more merely pro forma. Kon’s strange narrative style, however—somewhat in the manner of manga, with surprising tactics and approaches—is both engaging and intriguing and keeps everything moving along at good pace. Perfect Blue is also geared to work at the level of horror, earning an R rating with surprisingly graphic scenes of violence and fetishy sexualizing of its main character in somewhat wanton and unpleasant ways. It all serves the story, little here feels gratuitous, but Mima’s hard life is never shrunk away from and not easy to watch, even if she is supposed to be a glamorous star of pop music and, later, TV and film. Perfect Blue flirts with cliché in any number of ways but has many hooks to counter that. It is always strange and interesting, if slightly underdone. Paprika and Paranoia Agent remain the go-to work in Kon’s sadly abbreviated career but Perfect Blue, with its connections to Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream and to Madonna’s “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” remains worth a look.

Dare Me (2012)

I liked this murder mystery thriller by Megan Abbott, which I randomly picked off a top 10 list of 2010s novels (at CrimeReads, here). Dare Me features cheerleaders who are mean girls and it has drawn comparisons to Fight Club, Heathers, and Lord of the Flies, mostly by blurbers but also by some reviewers. It’s better than Lord of the Flies, not a comedy black or otherwise like the movie Heathers, and barely related at all to the movie Fight Club, though I don’t know the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Dare Me harks in many ways to cheerleader-positive movies in the 2000s like Bring It On and its sequels. These cheerleaders are not providing pep rally entertainment in support of the boys’ teams, but instead vying for athletic honors in their own right. Abbott includes a lot of technical terms for their various stunts and maneuvers. I didn’t often know what they meant but they added credibility. It’s told first-person by Addy, who is sidekick or lieutenant to chief mean girl Beth. They are the two most gifted cheerleaders athletically. A new coach, called “Coach,” enters the scene to shake it up and provide the conflict and catalysts. Eventually there is a murder that must be solved. It’s really quite a tight and fast-moving read. I didn’t notice until I saw it in a review that Addy writes in the present tense. It didn’t bother me, as it does in less skillful hands, and added to the pervasive gnawing tension. It’s fair to call Dare Me a murder mystery but it’s much closer in tone to a noir—a lot of black hearts in this one, and multiple lambs to the slaughter. It did become more plot-driven in the second half—a real page-turner, in fact—but I think I liked the establishing mood of the first half more. Either way, it’s a lot of fun and has a satisfying finish. I noticed Abbott in an interview saying she came to like the character of Beth best, and in many ways that helped. It could have been very easy to make her merely villainous and I appreciate that she didn’t. On the other hand, first-person narrator Addy is a bit of a sideline character who the story may actually be about—a Nick Carraway type. She really is a protagonist undergoing catharsis, not Beth (or Coach, who wanders pretty close), but even Addy paints herself in the sidekick role. Stepping up finally at the book’s close is not quite enough, let alone soon enough. But these are quibbles. I enjoyed Dare Me as fast-paced mindless thriller with a few credible pretensions to being more. Abbott has novels that are even more acclaimed. Might have to look into them.

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

A Salty Dog (1969)

Avast! Welcome aboard to 40 minutes of high hippie experimentalism on the third album by that strange British ‘60s band, Procol Harum, featuring: an orchestra. And check the further musical credits, e.g., Gary Brooker: lead vocals, celeste, three-stringed guitar, bells, harmonica, wood recorder, and orchestral arrangements. Or Matthew Fisher: organ, lead vocals, marimba, rhythm and acoustic guitars, piano, recorder, and orchestral arrangements. They handed the sleigh tambourine to Robin Trower, whatever that is exactly—apparently a tambourine fitted out with sleigh bells? Trower is otherwise trying to drag the band into his own favored blues workups. He has the lead vocals on the bluesiest song here, “Crucifiction Lane,” and may or may not have disapproved of the rest. I know I was disappointed that “Pilgrim’s Progress” sounds too much like “Whiter Shade of Pale.” Put the pipe down and quit writing soundalikes, mateys! A Salty Dog somehow came to my attention well after its time, in the downloading era when I seemed to see it around a lot and finally grabbed it thinking it was going to be sea chanties, or maybe because rock critic Robert Christgau gave it an A+ (later amended to typo probably intended to be B+, which does sound like the right grade). Finally giving this album the attention in recent days that it more or less deserves, I realized it might have been one I would have liked playing back in the day along with Jethro Tull’s Benefit, the Beatles’ Hey Jude, and the Guess Who’s American Woman, if someone had similarly put it in my way. Aside from “Pilgrim’s Progress,” in fact, A Salty Dog is an interesting and reasonably entertaining batch of studio play even if there were tensions with Trower at the time. Better than the Moody Blues, I would have to say, freely admitting I have still never made my peace with the kings of college dorm orchestral mystifications. Still, if I can find room in my heart for Procol Harum (beyond “Whiter Shade of Pale,” which has always been essential) I may yet find room for the Moody Blues too (beyond “Tuesday Afternoon,” also essential). There is always hope. Meanwhile, listen up: “Boredom” features a flute, “Wreck of the Hesperus” an orchestra, and the whole Salty Dog project has a nice warm air—not necessarily of being at sea, but more like buoyed by long stoner afternoons of consecutive hours at playing albums.

Pandora’s Box (1929)

Die Büchse der Pandora, Germany, 133 minutes

Director: G.W. Pabst

Writers: Frank Wedekind, Ladislaus Vajda, Joseph Fleisler, G.W. Pabst

Photography: Gunther Krampf

Music: An orchestra

Editor: Joseph Fleisler

Cast: Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Francis Lederer, Gustav Diessl, Carl Goetz, Krafft-Raschig, Daisy D’Ora, Alice Roberts

Pandora’s Box is one more movie classic that comes in many bewildering versions: just at a gross level based on running times, for example, Halliwell’s has it at 97 minutes, IMDb puts it at 109 minutes, and the one on the Criterion Channel goes 133 minutes. Then the soundtrack—for a picture of the silent era in the silent style, with intertitles—offers its own set of problems. Well, soundtracks for silent pictures always do, don’t they? Descriptions of the Criterion DVD, now out of print and going for circa $210 each, claim four separate soundtracks. But there is only one online, an orchestral version. I thought I recognized some of the themes as well-known, but that might have been only because they recurred regularly and became familiar across a long movie.

Though it failed in its time, the chief attractions of Pandora’s Box now are the star, Louise Brooks, a certain “it” girl of that era, and the director, G.W. Pabst, whose name I remember from film classes in college. Otherwise I don’t know his work well. The story is about a young woman, Lulu (Brooks), a flapper type of the 1920s with a bobbed haircut and super-sexualized air. She may have loose morals—she may even be a prostitute—but she exudes sex so much that women as well as men are attracted to her, struck dumb in her presence. Lulu has affairs with men in high positions and lives a carefree life but gets caught up in murder plots and intrigue. One thing follows another in tacked-on fashion, based on a pair of stage plays, as the picture builds a big head of steam for the second half.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843)

The thing to remember about Edgar Allan Poe is that he was both versatile and original. Arguably he invented the detective story and more than one category of horror, with time left over for poetry, and he was only 40 when he died. In this very short story, one of his most famous, Poe is working with a mysterious unnamed first-person narrator who is both unreliable and, like the narrator of F. Marion Crawford’s “Screaming Skull,” quite evidently a hysterical madman. Recognizing its classic qualities, the story’s language is slightly on the wrong side of archaic for me. It seems intended to be read aloud, and has been hundreds if not thousands of times. Possibly it’s the best way to experience the story. It lumbers a bit, but it doesn’t shrink from shock effects—notably the dismemberment of a body, but also shaming an old man’s filmy eye as grotesque enough to warrant death. And then the whole story turns and in tone it becomes closer to drawing-room tale, looking forward to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and focusing on a police interview, where basically our narrator jousts with them but can’t keep his existential cool. Famously, he believes he begins to hear the dismembered man’s heart still beating from its hiding place under the floorboards. And it’s getting louder. We can’t know for sure at first whether he is blowing it with the police, but it’s a riot going on in his head: “I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations, but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone?” The story may be itself pitched in too high of a key for me, but there is Raskolnikov believing he is a superman, not mad but superior, and that’s the main point here, the willfulness and confidence he is above it all. But it’s also a classic for Halloween, working the psychology of the unconscious sense of guilt that motivates behavior, looking forward to Freud as well as Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Good job! “The Tell-Tale Heart” is so influential you could practically reverse-engineer it out of a whole sector of stories and novels.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Laura (1942)

I’m starting the two-volume collection of “suspense novels” by women crime writers from the 1940s and 1950s, published by Library of America. Vera Caspary’s Laura is the first. It was serialized in 1942, published as this short novel in 1943, and then served in 1944 as the basis for Otto Preminger’s first movie, of the same name, with Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Vincent Price, and Clifton Webb. It’s a pretty nifty picture but as usual the book is better. Like a lot of midcentury crime fiction, it came under some modern literary influences, with light touches of experimentation. The formal POV in Laura shifts from section to section. The most effective is Laura herself, who finally speaks up in the second half. Waldo Lydecker, Laura’s mentor and wannabe lover, shows up first. He is an obese man in the novel, but I kept seeing the svelte Webb who plays him in the movie. One very short section is a transcript of a police interview. For all this fancy dancing, the murder mystery is fairly humdrum and conventional. The most interesting aspect of Laura is once again Laura herself, a de facto feminist and successful advertising woman. Gene Tierney is perfect for the part in the movie—beautiful, smart, and wary of men. Of course, there are still midcentury values all over it, so naturally she falls for and ends up with the competent detective working the case. It doesn’t feel that satisfying for all the formal huffing. The next most interesting detail is the woman’s point of view Caspary can and does bring, though she seems to be at least as constrained as Laura by rigid gender roles. I do think the cross-gender problem in writing cuts both ways—women are generally better at writing men than vice versa (lord knows), but Caspary’s male lead, the detective, has virtually no interior life. Lydecker works better—as presented, he feels possibly more gay than straight, but more than anything he is vindictive and grasping and that comes through well. Vincent Price plays a lothario type Laura almost marries before the cop comes along. Lydecker wants her too. In the end she chooses the cop, which at least feels tidy. But if the great strength of Laura is her independence maybe she could have continued on that way. I don’t expect her to start sexualizing her power the way a lot of men do but conventional romance doesn’t seem right either. It all comes out about even—I like the experimental spirit of the novel and Laura may have seemed more independent at that time than she may now. The characters in Laura have some interesting angles even if the mystery feels slightly forced. The surprises in the middle, and there are a few, including a big one after the first part, likely speak to the novel’s origins as a serial. Interesting short mystery novel of the time.

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

“Big Surprise” (1959)

[spoilers] This Richard Matheson story turned out to be a big surprise indeed for me. I hadn’t known he wrote the story (or the screenplay that came of it) for a Night Gallery episode that first ran in November 1971 and scared me silly. Not everyone had the same reaction, but it worked very well on me. As usual “scary” is at once the most personal and the most subjective element of all in horror. Anything that has scared anyone badly enough is sure to be weak sauce to someone else. Still, the way the phrase “big surprise” was used in that Night Gallery piece (of maybe 11 minutes) is so memorable I thought of it when I first saw this story title all these years later, before I knew it was the source story. In a way it’s not surprising because even by 1971 I knew and treated Matheson’s name with respect as someone whose stories would get to me—scare me, disturb me, worry me over their ideas and images long after reading. Matheson had also by then been working for some time with Rod Serling, dating back to The Twilight Zone and some of its most famous episodes, such as “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” I was interested to find out this story was published originally as a “riddle story” contest in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, under the title “What Was in the Box,” with $25 awarded to the reader with the best solution for the open-ended finish. It makes me wonder—is this ending, which so unnerved me on TV, a contribution from some reader?

It’s a really simple story, deceptively so. There’s a scary old man in the neighborhood. All the neighborhood boys are afraid of him. One day he beckons one of them to come over and talk to him. He tells him if he digs in a certain spot—10 paces from an oak tree facing the church steeple—he will find a “big surprise.” The surprise turns out to be the old man himself, looming up out of a box uncovered by the digging. He is laughing and says, “Surprise!” I looked it up online a few months ago, found it on Vimeo, and watched it again (unfortunately it’s no longer there and the show appears to be mostly unavailable at this time). It’s John Carradine playing the old man, a notably good casting call in the early ‘70s. The screenplay, not surprisingly, is faithful to the story. It doesn’t work on me the same way anymore, of course, but I appreciate the craft of how it’s done. Night Gallery remains generally underrated as a TV show capable of great scares. One interesting difference between story and show is that the boy is told to dig 10 feet down in the story but only four in the show, which is actually more plausible and helps the setup. In the story you know you are really in deep but there are distracting details about cutting in steps and such. (I myself have failed in my life to ever dig a hole even four feet deep—too much work.) It’s hard for me to know how I would take this story without my experience with the TV version. I mean it really scared me—how was this thing I was seeing even possible at all? I even swore off Night Gallery awhile as a result. Now I would like to know more about the details of the original publication and the reader endings. As it is, the ending of “Big Surprise” is just the very best I could ever think of, perfect in its way—so unlikely, and somehow so terrifying.

The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Story not available online.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

I heard so many intriguing and contradictory things on social media for so long about this one that I finally broke down and paid the $6 for a look. A running time over two hours and certainly the title already speak to heady ambitions. A frantic pace creates the context for a premise centering unfathomable multitudes of multiverses (every decision point in every person’s life creates a new one) and that alone bears up to the hype, more or less. It’s dizzying to contemplate and much of the editing emphasizes dizzying, with flashing cuts so fast at some points I’m surprised there weren’t seizure warnings. The durable badass Michelle Yeoh (Tomorrow Never Dies; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Police Story 3: Supercop) admirably, as always, carries much of the load here, amply supported by a cast of feel-good hey-that-guys: Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis, all having a ball. Note that “having a ball” does not preclude rampant scenery-chewing but this movie is so full of excess that even overacting can represent something of a break from the frenzy. My favorite parts were the fights, as among other things this is a loving parody of Hong Kong action pictures from the ‘80s and ‘90s. The martial arts come by the barrel loads, with many flavors on display from Bruce Lee kung fu forward, plus also a few instances of American-style WWE mayhem, Matrix-style turns, and even one or two Street Fighter combats. Of the opinions I saw, I’d say a bare majority perhaps was generally over the moon about EEAAO as pure adrenalized entertainment. The complainers mostly seemed to be bothered by the assault, which indeed is so relentless that eventually it verged very slightly on monotony for me. There’s a lot of high-flying concept to absorb with the bewildering multiverse setup, but it’s reasonably lucid and further fortified with TV-style family dramas embedded deep in the action. The essential narrative conflicts in this nonstop welter are between Evelyn (Yeoh) and her husband, her father, and her daughter. It’s crazy stuff but there’s plenty of room for family feels. I think that puts it more middlebrow than anything else but I also suspect EEAAO may be one someone could acquire and get in the habit of looking at often.

Crash (1973)

I struggled some with this J.G. Ballard novel, which doesn’t have much in terms of characters or story. It earns any outrageous reputation it may have for its premise, conflating sex and auto accidents, actively repulsive in its wanton fetish breeding. I thought I might have detected echoes of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Crowd,” which is similarly unnaturally fixated on auto accidents. Like the David Cronenberg movie that came of Ballard’s novel in 1996 (not to be confused with a 2004 movie of the same name), Crash the novel is weird and unsettling. But it is also now unfortunately dated in a couple ways. First the OPEC oil embargo circa 1973 changed a lot of attitudes about car culture. Then climate change has made these kinds of fetishes more taboo. When Ballard was writing he was exaggerating but it felt more in the realm of possibility. It’s much less the case now. Crash feels to me inert, wallowing in depravities and extremes of masochism, e.g., wounds are equated to sexual apertures. Male organs and the cum are flying. I’m not sure which was harder to deal with, the lugubrious pace or the endless coarse sexualizing. It feels closer in spirit to Tom Wolfe’s celebration of customized cars in the ‘60s than SF. But I do appreciate the single-mindedness here. Ballard takes his meditation on cars and sex a good distance down the road. Another nice detail is setting it in and around the airport section of London. The architecture of the setting does much to get at the themes even better than all the weird sex. It’s pavement and roadways and curling bridges and vehicles on land and in the air, all screaming machinery and petroleum. The novel is mercifully short, just over 200 pages. My copy had an introduction written by Ballard in 1974 which has some good points but also feels a little empty on science fiction. Is Crash even science fiction? It’s not much like anything else I’ve ever seen, save only perhaps the 2021 movie Titane, which is more clearly science fiction and should not be missed btw. Ballard’s near future is very near, or was in 1973, and the speculative elements are more about currents in perversion. But let’s not oversimplify trying to escape the implications. At base it’s a novel about the relationship of humans and the machines they build, intended not just as tools but literally as extensions of ourselves. Sexuality just comes along for the ride. It’s a good idea and Ballard attacks it and grinds it to dust as he goes. I never caught much momentum to the narrative, which made it sloggy. But there are some pretty big ideas in here at the same time. Don’t read this when you’re going through a breakup. That’s probably my best advice.

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