Category Archives: Book

Hunted by the Past

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So when I first set up this blog, I created three main categories to go in the sidebar: Film Reviews, Theory, and Books.  And somehow one of these has gotten pretty well populated and the other two remain rather sparsely so.  I guess the thing is that everything takes time.  If I write about a film, I probably watch it once to enjoy it and then a second time to take notes and consider it before sitting down to write.  Depending on the length of the film, that’s about 4-6 hours of pre-writing prep.  But if it takes me a couple of weeks (or sometimes longer) to finish a book, it’s daunting to go back to the beginning and start all over again. Anyway, I just finished reading something. I really liked it. I hope you don’t mind that these are first impressions.

The Only Good Indians (2020) by Stephen Graham Jones

Assuming that, like myself, many readers here may see more horror films than read horror books, I’m going to try to be a bit more careful here about spoilers.  So the story largely follows four Blackfeet men who in their youth carried out a bad piece of hunting, going after a herd of elk in an area reserved for elders of the tribe and killing them en masse in a bad way, slaughtering more than they could ever actually use, cruelly and disrespectfully (It’s hard to imagine truly respectful killing, but this is the opposite).

Over the next ten years, they all find themselves haunted by the ghost of that day, both in an emotional/psychological manner and in a really quite literal sense.  Something has come back, something that longs to hunt them down and pick them off one by one, after ensuring that they each taste something of the terror and tragedy they had wrought so glibly as young men.

Yes, they are being haunted by an elk.

It doesn’t sound that scary, but the story is often unsettling and there are some turns that are absolutely brutal.  This avenging presence takes its time and really works its way under their skin. 

A large portion of the book is given over to following one of the four, Lewis, who has moved off the reservation, married a white woman, and gotten a job at the post office.  He has obviously taken steps to leave his past behind him, but it lingers. He is torn by ambivalence regarding his heritage, his past actions, and the people he’s walked away from.

Roughly ten years after the carnage of the inciting incident, which resulted in the four friends being banned from hunting on tribal lands and Lewis and one other deciding it was time to leave the reservation, he flashes back to that day and from then on, starts feeling like he is being watched, toyed with, that he can’t trust the people in his life.  I don’t think it is too much of a spoiler (I already said they were being haunted) to say that he’s right, but the way it plays out, it is easy to doubt. He really goes round the bend, descending into a self-destructive and violent paranoia. I mean, he is basically right about everything, but he is also, by the end of the first part of the book, quite mad, dangerously and tragically so.

Really – some of this gets pretty rough.

It is at this point that the worm turns and what had been merely a vengeful presence, a memory, a sadness becomes embodied—taking physical form and implacably seeking her revenge.  Here the book also takes a stylistic departure, shifting between a third person narration of the actions of Lewis, Ricky, Cassidy, and Gabriel and a second person, speaking directly to the elk-woman or Po’noka:

“What you do after you’ve made your hard way back into the world is stand on the side of the last road home, wrapped in a blanket torn from a wrecked truck, your cold feet not hard hooves anymore, your hands branching out into fingers you can feel creaking, they’re growing so fast now.  The family of four that picks you up is tense and silent, neither the father nor the mother nor the son saying anything with their mouths, only their eyes, the infant just sleeping.”

It is a striking turn and initially took some getting used to, but it has an interesting effect throughout the rest of the novel as, from one line to the next, the narrative may shift, situating the reader in the position of the killer, the aggrieved party seeking retribution, while still readily identifying with these four guys, all well drawn, each deeply flawed, but trying to do better—utterly human, and hence unforgivable, two legged, rifle carrying threats from the perspective of the elk.

I don’t want detail the events of the plot because there is effective suspense here, and the book is worth reading, but thematically it is interesting and rich. It may even be somewhat muddied, but maybe that’s good.  This exploration of guilt, native identity, nature, responsibility, respect and disrespect, historical violence, revenge, inconsolable pain that can’t be forgotten, a past like a millstone round the neck, and the question of a future freed from that weight is all the more rewarding for the fact that it is messy like life and not clear like a political tract.

We have endless cycles of harm having been done – to the environment, to a people, to animals, and to individual humans who repent their misdeeds, who love the people in their lives and whose loss will, in turn, harm others.  And there is a sadness that lingers, a guilt.  Life on the reservation feels bleak, a dead end road for those who stay, but life off the reservation feels like abandonment, like erasure. Everyone has done wrong in one way or another and it is not clear if forgiveness is ever possible—of oneself or of others.

And that is life, right? We take things for our own need and others are harmed and we move on. Every minute of the day. But the book asks us to pause and dwell in that space for a moment, to consider repercussions, to have a moment of recognition for the horror another has experienced.

There’s a moving passage late in the book wherein the daughter of one of the four comes across the site of the initial hunt and comprehends it in a very personal way:

“But, that story being true, it also means—it means her dad really and truly did this, doesn’t it? Instead of being the one down in the encampment, bullets raining down all around, punching through the hide walls of the lodges like she knows happened to the Blackfeet, to Indians all over, her dad was the one slinging bullets, probably laughing from the craziness of it all, from how, this far out, they could do anything, it didn’t even matter.”

It’s a heart breaking moment of horrific realization. And it is only with that, it is only by reckoning with the crimes of the past, that there can be any hope of, if not resolution – perhaps that’s not possible—restitution neither—but some kind of forward movement, growth—life. And this is true regardless of whether we’re talking about an elk hunt gone wrong or any of the endless inherited traumas of human social life. Our history is full of horror and if we never open ourselves to it, endure it, build empathy out of it, and seek in whatever limited manner we can to heal from it, we will doom ourselves to carry it without end.

Anyway, it was a solid read. I recommend it strongly and am eager to check out something else by Stephen Graham Jones.  I understand his new book, “My Heart is a Chainsaw” is supposed to be worthwhile.  Perhaps I should add it to my basket.

The Imp of the Perverse

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It’s a busy time for me right now. I’ve started this blog and besides writing, I need to stay on top of self-promotion. I’m working on a new show and there are texts to write and learn, rehearsals to organize and run, and tentacles and monsters to stitch together (more on that in another post). And of course, I also have to work (preparing and giving classes and doing proofreading) and earn money to keep myself in bandwidth, liquid latex, and fake fur. And yet, the other night I watched four episodes of a TV show that I don’t even really like that much. Argh.  Why? Why would I do something so pointless?

I think good old Poe put his finger on it in his 1885 story, The Imp of the Perverse, which puts into words so clearly, a human tendency at the heart of so much of his writing, a tendency which may often go unconsidered. The overwhelming urge to perform an act precisely because it is the wrong thing to do:

“I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse — elementary.”

Perverseness

The story is an odd one, but I love it.  For the first half, it comes across as a treatise on this psychological element, its narrator (who I had first assumed to be Poe-as-essayist) expounding upon history’s failures to account for irrationality before describing and naming this drive and giving three familiar examples: the urge of a usually succinct and generally kind speaker to irritate his or her listener by blathering on in a circuitous manner (an urge which my wife could attest I sometimes indulge in—though, to be fair, I could never claim to be laconic to begin with), the temptation, when standing on a precipice, to take the plunge, and the penchant to put off till tomorrow that which we most want to do today.  His characterization of this procrastination is, perhaps, most striking in how true it rings.

“We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer…”

I can only assume based on my own experience of living, that this is a situation everyone has been in.  But maybe it’s just me and old Edgar…

Shortly after, the story takes a turn and becomes, well, a story.  The narrator is telling us all this to explain how he ended up in this cell, condemned to die.  Having committed a very well calculated and painstakingly carried out murder, which had gone off without a hitch, and after which, he had acquired a large inheritance and lived comfortably for years, the narrator had realized that the only way that he could ever be caught would be if he “were fool enough to confess.”  Following that epiphany, he could not stop thinking about it until he finally snapped and publicly declared his wrong doing.  Thus, it was this imp of the perverse that has led him to his doom.

First of all, it is a tasty bit of irony that our example here of the imp is not the drive that led him to kill, which had been fully rational, but rather, that which has led him to confess.  You might take for granted that a devil on the shoulder is more likely to needle someone into crime, into “sin,” but in Poe’s conception it is simpler and more broad.  Simply the wrong act.  The one for which there is no good reason, no motive.  The motive for the killing had been obvious—money. The motive for admission is not so clear—but it surely wasn’t guilt.

Broader application

In this, I think Poe captures a human truth which, to this day, can still go overlooked.  How often are characters in books, in films, on TV, written to be internally consistent, psychologically understood characters, driven by clear motivations.  We criticize the writing when that lapses. And yet, I don’t think that’s who we always are.  And it’s not merely a case of some kind of Freudian death drive, but that sometimes we act with no clear motivation at all. Sometimes we do something stupid, something cruel, something self-defeating, or just something odd or nonsensical simply because that is the thing that we do.

And this is not only a literary concern.  I remember circa 2010, reading an essay reflecting on the economic crisis at the time, which criticized modern economists’ continued reliance on an outdated and inaccurate figure from classical economic theory, Homo Economicus. First conceptualized by figures like John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, this theoretical economic agent “acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for him or herself given available information about opportunities and other constraints, both natural and institutional on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals.”  A great deal of economic models have been based on this notion that en masse, people act out of rational, informed self-interest.

While people may be essentially self-serving, I think it unrealistic to state that we are, as a rule, rational or informed. Thus, forecasts, economic or otherwise, based on such expectations seem doomed to inaccuracy.  To be fair, there are many competing theories and Homo Economicus was already being criticized in Mill’s day, but the idea persists. We still expect ourselves and each other to have reasons for doing what we do.

Horror

So what about horror? This is a horror blog, after all.

Beyond the fact that this qualifies as a horror story (murder, madness, and what not), I think that any time that horror (film, writing, etc.) falls into being too rational, it can ring false. Or at the very least, it can feel flat. But when a taste of mystery is sustained, when we can’t see the whole thing, when it feels that there are depths we cannot plumb, it is that much richer; it has a chance of delivering that delectable shudder of the uncanny.

I mean, of course, there should be motivations. I’m not saying that we should abandon all sense of psychological causality and lazily just offer up any old thing without thinking it through, but if at the end of the story, a killer can honestly and exactly state their motivation, whether it be revenge, money, fame, or love, it often underwhelms, not doing justice to the staggering inferences of a word like ‘horror.’ In counterpoint, think of the final moment of The Strangers when the killers, asked why they have done these horrible things, simply answer, “because you were home.”  Chilling.

Horror is best when there is an element of not just the unknown, but the unknowable. And that need not mean abstract, tentacled, ancient, evil gods from another dimension. Rather, if a work brings us into contact with that which is unknowable within the human heart and mind, it can be most effective.

I read too: Tales of Dungeons and Dragons (1986)

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So, for some time, I’ve been meaning to finally write a post to justify having a “Books” button on the sidebar.  Therefore, I’d like to present Tales of Dungeons and Dragons, an anthology of short stories edited by Peter Haining.

Now, with a title like this, one may imagine ‘dungeons’ or ‘dragons,’ or something originating from Gary Gygax,  or at least some degree of high fantasy, but really, this is more of a horror collection than anything else, with the cover being the only connection to that expectation.  Inside, you’ll find 30 stories, grouped into three parts: Part I – The Sealed Section: Tales of Horror; Part II – The Ghost Section: Tales of the Supernatural; and Part III – The Wonder Section: Tales of Fantasy. Among many others, it collects stories from such luminaries of the dark fantastic as Bram Stoker, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Bloch, Stephen King, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury.

The whole volume is solid and generally worth one’s time, if one is up for a certain earlier era of writing.  As it’s not feasible to delve into the whole book, I’d like to focus on three stand-out tales. Each of them in some way surprised me (a good way, a bad way, or an other way) and has lingered in the mind in some fashion. Let’s begin with the most fun.

The Dualitists (1887) by Bram Stoker

Written ten years before Dracula, this story is honestly shocking.  Really. I don’t think I could duly prepare you for it without spoiling the tale entirely.  With an older film, I don’t worry about spoilers, expecting that a reader of this blog has had a pretty fair chance to have seen some much-discussed genre classic, but in this case, I expect few have read this so I want to tread carefully. Suffice it to say, it is suggested only for those with a particularly dark sense of humor.

Also, it is very much in the public domain, so here’s a link to check it out for yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I think this is a special one.  Written in a very literary, almost archaic style, its pretensions of class belie its wicked, impish desire to shock.  Here, with deepest irony, we follow the adventures of two ‘heroic’ young boys who set out to perfect their chosen art. This art just happens to be more than a bit destructive.  Perhaps the most fascinating feature here, besides a brutality you might not expect from a pre-twentieth century text not written by de Sade, is the way that its young heroes are always described in such shining, heightened terms.  Despite the extremity of their actions, Harry and Tommy are never characterized as anything other than brave, adventurous juveniles, engaged in an exciting and daring effort:

“The minds of these youths were of no common order, nor were their souls of such weak nature as to yield at the first summons of necessity. Like Nelson, they knew not fear; like Napoleon, they held ‘impossible’ to be the adjective of fools; and they reveled in the glorious truth that in the lexicon of youth is no such word as ‘fail’.”

And so, the effect is all the greater when you start to realize where they are going.  A dread grows as they move towards the apex of their artistry. And even though I could see the direction the story was taking, I was wholly unprepared for how totally it would go there.  The horror lands, but it does so with the unstifled guffaw of disbelief at its extremity.

I hope I’m not overselling it.  Anyway, maybe check this one out.  Maybe.  

The Eighty-Third (1916) by Katherine Fullerton Gerould

So whereas the first story was shocking in a very successful and enjoyable way, this next one brought a different manner of jolt.  And not a pleasant one.

First, it must be said that the writing here is effective and the story telling works.  A picture is clearly painted and the tension, fear, horror, and anger of the protagonist is stark and striking.  The narrative does suffer from a common pattern in horror fiction of situating its main character as a mere witness to horrors with little power to affect the course of events, but that lack of agency is part of the horror as well.  So I can say it is generally good, effective horror writing.

But ye gods, it is so very, very, very racist.

Just as Stoker’s piece was shocking in its extremity, this tale left my jaw on the floor in just how ugly its sentiment is.

Ok, so here’s the story and though a full text may be available out there, I don’t feel the need to link to it. Look it up if you like.

Published in 1916, this tale assumes that World War I would end one year later, but that the war to follow would be the one to really end human civilization. This story takes place during that next war. The narrator is a citizen of one of the few remaining neutral countries and is trying to work his way through war-torn lands to pass a border into temporary safety.  Along the way, he hears tell of some nightmare regiment called “the eighty-third.”  No one can agree about what it is and why it is so horrible, but it is generally known that it only travels by night, and that it is somehow wrong.

One night, taking shelter in a shack on the edge of a village, the narrator wakes to discover a local peasant woman hiding with him, driven there by the coming of the dreaded eighty-third.  She summarily faints in fear and he fearfully watches through a crack in the wall.

This gets ugly. Basically, the eighty-third consists of a multi-ethnic collection of disfigured soldiers who are carted from village to village by the conquering force to use rape as a weapon of war, such that “those who did not go the clean, cruel way of death should be defiled past hope.” The narrator observes these assaults being carried out in cold, calculated fashion, his gun pointed at the unconscious peasant woman should their location be discovered and he have to spare her the horror.

Finally, they pass and he continues on his way, sharing what he has seen and building to a multi-page diatribe about how the white man is an endangered species and bemoaning the end of all things.

Yeesh, right?

I debated writing about this one. I suppose I did because it is noteworthy how seemingly uncontroversial this text was. When published (in Harper’s Monthly, a reputable magazine), it was reportedly much lauded, one of the most popular short stories of the year.  One prominent critic called it “the most completely realized study of horror that American Literature has produced since The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Ok, but that was more than 100 years ago. This kind of material wouldn’t fly today, or at least wouldn’t go unremarked on, right?

Well, this collection was published in 1986. Only thirty five years ago. Now, it’s not that I’m necessarily appalled by its inclusion. As I’ve already written, it is a very successful horror story and probably of historical interest, an artifact of its time and place.  What blew me away is the fact that in the introduction to Gerould’s racist tract, its vile nature is entirely unengaged with. 

I’m not one to ‘cancel’ things, but I can’t imagine anthologizing this text without some kind of contextualization, simply presenting it rather, as one more great story.  Here’s a story about a vampire. Now, here’s one about a ghost. Now here’s one about the coming horde of non-white peoples who will defile all the white ladies.

I don’t recommend the story per se, but its existence, and it having been held in a place of some honor, is of some note.

The Lighthouse (unfinished/unpublished) by Edgar Allen Poe (sort of)

Having loved his 2015 film The VVitch, I was stoked to see Robert Eggers’s 2019 follow up, The Lighthouse, and it did not disappoint, leaving me giddy and delighted, with a sea shanty in my heart.  I’m bound to write about it at greater length in these pages before too long.

So, I was quite excited to discover that this odd collection contained Poe’s last, unfinished story, upon which the film had been based, but I had never read. Or at least, a posthumous collaboration between Poe and Robert Bloch who, 6 years before penning Psycho, was commissioned to finish Poe’s manuscript. It was an interesting and intriguing read, and I continually wondered at what point Bloch had taken over.

In summary, the story takes the form of diary entries by a man who has come to serve as a lighthouse keeper. Alone. Already it doesn’t seem like a great idea, but it is his most fervent wish to have time to himself to work on a piece of writing of some import.  It’s mentioned at one point that he’s supposed to be here for one year (which is hard to imagine), but by the end of the first week, he’s already going mad and by the end of the first month, our story has reached its end.

I first read this one during the first lockdown of the Coronavirus times and it was rather appropriate.  There are some things that seem relatively easy, even pleasant at first, that can quickly sour.  I particularly appreciate a passage where he writes of how hard it is to turn himself towards the book he’s meant to write.  He has all the time in the world, but he can’t do it.  I think that would ring true for many a creative type locked in their apartment for the last year:

“I seek to write – the book is bravely begun, but of late I can bring myself to do nothing constructive or creative – and in a moment, I fling aside my pen and rise to pace, to endlessly pace the narrow, circular confines of my tower of torment.”

Who hasn’t been there?

Finally, it builds towards a climax that I was certain could not have originated with Poe. I don’t want to give too much away, but the presence of a certain vampiric shark lady (who, sure, may have been a product of madness, but still…) materializing out of a storm before being fought off by the narrator’s faithful dog just seemed somehow less Poe-ish.

So then I worked my way back through the story, trying to determine where lay Poe’s final lines. I had some theories, but looked it up to check…

Out of a 14 page story, he had written the first 1.5.  Of course, Fantastic, the magazine where this version had first been published, made little mention of this fact when heralding “a new Edgar Allen Poe masterpiece.”

Basically, Poe wrote of the keeper coming to the lighthouse and being pretty happy to have some time to himself. The only hint of trouble was the final line of day three, in which he noted that the foundation of the building seemed to be made of chalk.  The next day’s entry was blank.

It’s unknown if this was to be continued as a short story, fleshed out to a novel, or if perhaps this was the whole piece, and that it just ends abruptly and enigmatically, suggesting that things will not go well. Either way, this was an interesting exercise. I think it might be fascinating to even have a whole anthology of different authors completing the text in their own way—doing justice to his suggestions, his style, but then branching off in their own directions.  That could be a book worth picking up.

Anyway, the building dread and madness are characteristically enjoyable and the fish lady was a real surprise.