Book Club of Desolation #23: Powers of Darkness (1900-1901), by Valdimar Asmundsson and Bram Stoker (?)

In 2014, Icelandic scholar Hans Corneel de Roos was looking over a manuscript from the turn of the 20th Century that at first seemed to merely be an Icelandic translation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, penned by writer Valdimar Asmundsson. However, he started to notice that the manuscript, entitled Makt Myrkranna or Powers of Darkness, made some substantial deviations from Stoker's original text, and it didn't take long to realize that the book was something new entirely, although it was based on Dracula. The resultant text was made available in English with notes by both de Roos and Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker. Makt Myrkranna is simultaneously an awesome part of horror fiction history, a superior novel to Stoker's tale, and a suggestion of a possibility I've thought about for a long time: what if there are more books like this one, which serve as alternate versions of more famous works?

The story of Powers of Darkness roughly follows that of Dracula, but it bears repeating for the sake of this review. Jonathan--or excuse me, Thomas Harker is an English real estate agent called out to Transylvania by a mysterious noble named Count Dracula, who is interested in buying property in London. Harker is warned by everyone he encounters along the way that Dracula is pure evil, but he must carry on with his job. You see, Harker is kind of an idiot--even moreso than in Stoker's novel. Dracula is an amiable enough fellow but his castle looks like no one's lived in it properly for centuries. He also gets a hungry look in his eye when he sees Harker cut himself. Pretty standard Stoker stuff so far, but Stoker never mentioned Dracula's triumphant pride in the incestuous of his family, which produces short-lived, stumpy freaks. Nor did he mention Dracula's underground chamber where he and his gorilla-man army sacrifice villagers to Satan. Nor did he mention that Dracula and said gorilla-man army are in league with a conspiracy of noblemen who want to destroy the democratic processes of England to create a world where the serfs serve the nobles again! (I guess Dracula never heard of Wall Street, then.) Will Harker be able to escape Dracula's horrifying fortress to warn his beloved Wilma, or will he be food for Dracula's vampire brides?

"But wait!" you ask. "What about Holmwood and Quincy Morris and Lucy and van Helsing? What about, y'know, the other three-quarters of the novel?" Well, that's the thing about Powers of Darkness: most of the book is Harker trying to survive his weeks in Dracula's castle. There is a second part which features most of the same events as Dracula--the arrival of van Helsing, the vampirism and staking of Lucy/Lucia, the menace hanging over Mina/Wilma, and finally the battle against Dracula and his servants in the shadow of the vampire's castle. Where the end changes is that Dracula's castle crumbles upon his death, and then the nobles who allied themselves with him commit suicide or are murdered, ending his conspiracy. As the introduction and notes posit, this part was likely meant as an outline for what Asmundsson would write later, suggesting that Powers of Darkness in its complete form (assuming that we have today isn't the complete form) would have dwarfed Dracula in length and complexity. As it stands already, Asmundsson's text succeeds at being far scarier than Dracula, perhaps because of its choice to frontload.

Asmundsson understood the Harker parts had the best potential for horror. Dracula's wild, rambling structure gives it the feeling more of an adventure novel than a Gothic piece, which is awkward because it's told, as Powers of Darkness is, through letters and diary entries. It's weird to hear the tale of a frantic carriage chase recounted post-facto in a journal. But the bulk of Powers of Darkness reads like something someone found in Dracula's castle next to Thomas Harker's emaciated corpse--you never know which entry is going to be the last. This is broken only somewhat by the fact that, again, Harker is a massive idiot, as he pointedly does not try to leave the castle until it's nearly too late, even after witnessing Satanic rituals in progress! He is remarkably tolerant of many horrifying supernatural incidents. Sometimes, though, justifying logic breaks through. After all, it's probably more than Harker feels he can't leave the castle, as it's on a high rocky pass in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wolves and God knows what else. There's also the fact that he came here to do a job, and at least at the beginning, much of his response to the ghoulish things he encountered is a very natural sort of confusion--perhaps he's imagining things, or maybe this is some local custom he as a privileged Londoner doesn't understand. Even if he trusts his instincts when he is sure the supernatural is afoot, he can't exactly return to his boss in England emptyhanded and tell him, "Sorry, the client was a Satanic vampire with a gorilla-man army which he was gonna use to tear down the government, no sale."

Now, this book would not be complete without the introduction and notes it provides. Dacre Stoker's introduction was interesting in its argument that Makt Myrkranna was based on Bram Stoker's private notes, and that Stoker and Asmundsson collaborated in the latter's penning of Powers. He brings up the fact that it was popular for Victorian authors to travel to Iceland, as they admired Iceland's astonishing poetic tradition; he also points out that several details from Powers match with unused story bits from Stoker's notes, such as the "hidden red room" where Dracula performs his evil magic, and the blind-mute woman who serves the vampire. However, I would caution against assuming that works such as these are made with the collaboration of the original author, because certain tropes are universal, and there are such things as coincidences. Respect the fanfic, I guess is what I'm saying. On my first read-through of the introduction I was disappointed that Dacre Stoker generally abstained from praising Asmundsson's individual creativity in the parts of Powers that weren't seemingly based on his great-granduncle's work, but a closer look-through on my part shows the integrity of his investigation. Similarly, I found de Roos' footnotes to be cluttery and intrusive at times, but they form a log of the challenges he ran into in translating early 20th Century Icelandic into English. When I studied linguistics I found the bond between Icelandic and English one of the most fascinating my professors discussed: modern Icelandic and Old English are extremely similar. In fact one of my professors told me that if an Anglo-Saxon time-traveler from pre-Norman England landed in today's Iceland they'd probably be able to have a reasonable conversation with someone there.

Overall, this new edition of Makt Myrkranna is an awesome look at vampire fiction history, and one of what I hope will be many discoveries of other pseudo-classics cloned from books that history remembered better. And, similarly, it's better than the original Dracula. Horror fans can't afford to miss out.

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Book Club of Desolation #22: Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres (1971), by Paul Bera

Last year I took a look at the first of the French Frankenstein pulps. This year, I figured it would be nice to have the Book Club of Desolation return to similar waters--only this time, the book I read was untranslated. That's why I failed in my promise to have a monthly Book Club review up for January (on top of being sick as shit). It took me quite some time to read my way through Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres, the first of Paul Bera's six-volume series chronicling the eternal war between the avatars of cosmic forces known as Leonox and Lisa, but I found it a fulfilling experience, to say nothing of the wonders it did for restoring my knowledge of French. Even with the language barrier in place, Bera's prose reads smoothly and thrillingly, with enough pulp action and supernaturalism to make me seriously consider tracking down the rest of the series, before all the remaining rare copies are snatched up.

Our protagonist is Lacana, a ten-time serial killer constantly on the run from the police. While hiding out in Paris, he feels a compulsion to enter a building, which seemingly contains more on the inside than it does on the outside. This is the headquarters of the mysterious organization known as "Leonox and Co." headed by, as you may expect, a man named Leonox. But Leonox is less a man than he is a demon; he possesses supernatural powers, and is in fact the embittered slave of what may or may not be the cosmic embodiment of evil, known as "the Master" or "He Who Controls Leonox." In exchange for his service, Leonox offers Lacana a new identity, including a new face and set of fingerprints--he'll accomplish this by giving him a whole new body. The first of many catches in this deal is that in order to get this body, he has to share a coffin with it. The process is a success, however, and Lacana becomes instead Francis Dalvant, a famous journalist killed in Vietnam. As part of his operations, "Dalvant" next comes in contact with the mysterious Lisa, a young woman who claims to be able to see Lacana's soul in Dalvant's body. Lisa has frequent clashes with the police for her strange statements and behavior; they think she's a drug addict. Slowly, however, Lacana/Dalvant will learn that she is Leonox's spiritual opposite, a servant of a more benevolent cosmic force known as "He Who Controls Lisa." (It's worth noting that neither of these cosmic forces are truly good or evil, it's just that Lisa is beautiful and Leonox is monstrous, both in a variety of ways.) His encounters with Lisa "reunite" him with Dalvant's old friend, the Principal of Police Princex. In the end, Lisa and Princex reform Lacana, who ultimately takes on the mental traits of Dalvant, who was an intrinsically good man. He and Lisa go after Leonox and successfully kill him after he takes control of the body of Dr. Satelm, who has the power to unleash a world-destroying plague. Lisa takes the rap for the murder, claiming she was Satelm's jealous mistress, and goes to jail--but to Lacana/Dalvant's delight, she escapes, and he begins traveling the world in search of her.

It's amazing how well Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres fits the formula of English pulp stories, and how well it pulls it off too. It's something of a random events plot, yes--now Lacana is poisoned with curare! Now Leonox is trying to unleash a plague!--but it also taps into the vein of worldbuilding which is so vital to pulp storytelling. So many ideas whiz past us at once. Just pages after revealing that our narrator-protagonist is a serial murderer, we are dragged into a world of the magical and inexplicable with the cosmic distortions of Leonox's headquarters. From there we have body-swapping, celestial war, and living burials. Oftentimes, the descriptions of the spiritual aspects of Leonox and Lisa come across as Lovecraft-lite, or Lovecraft processed through fairy-tales--sparkling and glittering, but also vast, unknowable, and perhaps most properly, incomprehensible. All of this is presented in a style which is both simple and compelling.

I really should say how grateful I am for the simplicity of the style. A lot of key points are repeated again and again, which helped me get through the plot in the case of my translations failing the first time around. (I'm still embarrassingly vulnerable to false cognates.) However, this style is also probably the book's greatest weakness--as compelling as it is, the tendency to repeat does get a little silly at times. "It was incredible that I, Lacana, ten-time killer, could be standing here in the presence of the police!" is a phrase that comes up over time and time again. Yeah, I imagine most serial killers would be shocked at rubbing elbows with the cops after making their faces known, but we don't need to be told that so often. Lacana also has a tendency to forget that he is now Francis Dalvant for too much of the book, and he keeps chanting that he has new fingerprints over and over again. These parts can be glazed over once you get the rhythm of things, though.

I keep thinking about how cool it is to have the main character of the book be a serial killer who slowly redeems himself as pieces of another man merge with his persona. I'm pretty sure that Dalvant's spirit is actually coming back and that's what's causing Lacana to take on his traits--eventually their reference to themselves as two people seems to transcend metaphor. Lacana/Dalvant is thus of dual nature, good and evil--though Dalvant wasn't purely good, nor was Lacana purely evil. Setting up this dichotomy furthers the book's themes of good and evil by making our lead(s?) into parallel(s?) of Leonox and Lisa, albeit with human drives that the reader can understand. Bera seems to believe that Good and Evil are important concepts to mankind, but they also have gray areas and spots where they blend--how very '70s of him! It's notable too that Christianity doesn't enter the picture at all; neither of the forces behind Leonox and Lisa are aligned with God or Satan in any way.

I say this is a book that reflects the '70s, but it's also French in a way that reminds me of why I love French media. It makes sense to title the series after Leonox, and to have the protagonist be a reforming serial killer, when this is a story coming from the same country that created not only the Grand Guignol, but Fantomas, the ultimate villain-pulp protagonist and grandpappy to Diabolik, Killing, Kriminal, and all those other groovy, creepy masked thieves and killers who spread through Europe and the Middle East throughout the middle of the 20th Century. France loves its villains, and Leonox was no exception...even if he's largely forgotten today.

The chronicles of Lisa and Leonox are practically begging for English translations, and I would eagerly snap those up if/when they ever came along. Despite some minor flaws, this was an awesome read and I would love to see what happened next to these characters. Longue vie à Leonox!

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Book Club of Desolation #21: Spiridon (1907), by Andre Laurie

And so it is that Bookvember 2017 comes to a close with another book about unusual ants. The Ant with the Human Soul was one of three ant-related texts which I knew would turn up on the site sooner or later; Spiridon is the second of them, and I'm sure that at some point in 2018 I'll be cracking open The Ants of Timothy Thummel as well. This will be part of my new initiative, which is to feature Book Clubs of Desolation every third week of the month. In the meantime, Spiridon is a fun way to close out the year--a strange ethical fable by a man famed for collaborating with Jules Verne.

Spiridon tells the story of Dr. Aristide Cordat, a young French med student who, with the aid of his Asian friend Baron Tasimoura, has brought new medical miracles to Europe. Surgeries that heal terrible illnesses in minutes, drugs that induce swift recovery--there seems to be no limit to the talent of the Cordat-Tasimoura team. We find out why Tasimoura seems to possess superhuman knowledge: he is superhuman. Specifically, he is actually Spiridon, the Emperor of a race of ants living in the ruins of an old Phoenician treasure-tower on an Italian island. After nearly ending up as one of Spiridon's vivisection victims while exploring the tower, Cordat discovered the various wonders of the ants and realized how valuable the giant ant's scientific knowledge could be. Finding that the curiosity was mutual, he helped Spiridon disguise himself as a human so he could become a student of human ways. Unfortunately, human and ant morality differs substantially, and it isn't long before Cordat and the rest of France realize that ants have no compunctions about murder.

Like the best sci-fi, Spiridon is surprisingly ahead of its time in a lot of ways. There are a lot of interesting ideas here that expose how people in the early part of the century were adapting to the still-fluid genre; for example, Spiridon's human-like size and intelligence are not customary to his species, but are instead chemically induced when the Ant Emperor ascends to the throne. The rest of the ants on his island are normal-sized, though they seem to have above-average intelligence, as they are capable of vivisecting Cordat intelligently (as intelligent as vivisection can get anyhow). There's something about the setup that recalls Plato's philosopher-king--the Ant Emperor is given his enhanced abilities so that he is better equipped to govern. It's a system of elitism but it also ensures that the governing elite is best equipped for leadership; Cordat's response to Spiridon's explanation is a wish that intelligence-enhancing drugs were given to human leaders as well, which is hard not to sympathize with.

The way in which the ants' ethics manifest, too, defies a lot of the expectations I had for a work of this time. This book is gory as hell! In fact, this may be one of the most violent books I've read in a long time. I knew I was hooked the instant Cordat woke up in the ant tower next to a goddamn eviscerated corpse--the eviscerated corpse of the brother of one of the main characters, at that! When Spiridon is kidnapped by Joel le Berquin, one of Cordat's friends who becomes jealous of him and wants his secret to success, his threats to vivisect the ant are turned on him when Spiridon escapes; Spiridon straps le Berquin to his own operating table and cuts out his organs. All of this is because Spiridon, while possessed of emotions, is ruled primarily by cold insect logic--he was threatened, so of course it makes sense to turn that same threat around on the threatener...and learn more about human anatomy, to boot! Spiridon manages to come across as a being ruled by an alien sense of ethics without being a Vulcan, which is better than a lot of Laurie's successor would do when writing characters controlled by logic rather than feeling. And indeed, logic was applied to the creation of the character, as Laurie demonstrates a knowledge of ants that helps him guide the plot. Specifically, he knows about the various chemicals used by ants to control their social order and extrapolates that into Spiridon's wonder drugs and paralyzing venom. It just makes sense for ants to be master chemists, because from a certain perspective they already are.

Now, this book does have some noticeable shortcomings. I am concerned sometimes that I talk about bigotry so often that my words have become meaningless after a time, but I honestly don't care, so let's talk about how this is another book where ant class divisions = race. There is a...sigh...charming passage where Laurie mentions that, just as there are divisions in ethics and logic between man and ant, there are also "real gaps of conscience between men of different races." Now, it's certainly undeniable that people of different races are going to be culturally different, but to call it "gaps of conscience" implies that some have better consciences than others, and that, just as the differences between Spiridon and his human compatriots are largely irreconcilable, so too are the differences between races. It read too much like the arguments white supremacists make all too often about "incompatible" cultures, wherein they automatically dismiss the idea that "gaps" between cultures can be accommodated without destroying, assimilating, or prioritizing one culture over another. And I know that's because this is a book from 1907, but the white supremacists of today are using the same lazy excuses people were back then.

The book struggles tonally, oftentimes unsure of whether this is all supposed to be fun and whimsical or dark and bleak. Characters will sometimes speak like they're in a comedy and act extremely aloof about the situation, but there are several instances of people being butchered alive, with their remains left to be found by their friends, family, and coworkers. There is also the character of Pia, whose brother Cordat finds at the beginning of the book, and who swears a vendetta against Spiridon as such. She loses her life trapping Spiridon in a burning building and her death is treated as a tragedy, but the book--spoiler alert--ends with Cordat using the ants' chemical secrets to bring Spiridon back from the dead. He completely invalidates the lives of an entire family who died horribly thanks to a creature who has killed and could kill again not only with a lack of compunction, but with a biological inability to generate compunction in the first place! Keep in mind--Pia and Cordat have romantic chemistry together! The ending admittedly reveals that Spiridon is effectively lobotomized as a result of his death and resurrection; still cognizant and intelligent for an ant, but with a broken will, and therefore unlikely to go around cutting people up again. But it's really unclear who's supposed to be the victor here. At this point our sympathy for Cordat has vanished, yet he dances away into the sunset clicking his heels over all the scientific secrets he's unlocked.

I mentioned at the beginning that Andre Laurie (born Paschal Grousset) was a collaborator of Jules Verne's. When researching Laurie I was surprised to find out that one of the Jules Verne books from my childhood, The Begum's Millions, was written almost wholesale by Laurie! In fact, it's entirely possible that The Begum's Millions' relationship to Jules Verne was simply that the more famous author's name was stamped on the front cover by the authors' mutual editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, while Laurie was in political exile. Spiridon is often described as the work wherein Laurie broke away from Jules Verne's mold, and I take that to mean that maybe this book was something of a rebellion against Verne's scientific optimism. Neither Cordat nor Spiridon give science a good name, and I feel that almost has to be intentional. Maybe Cordat is supposed to be a colossal asshole, consumed, just as Spiridon is, with his own curiosity, rather than the human consequence that can arise from experimentation. It wouldn't be an unusual statement for a book at the time to make.

Then there's the detail that Spiridon spends most of the book in a wax mask and fake gloves. I know it's fiction, but unless Cordat's colleagues were 90% blind I can't imagine them mistaking wax prosthetics in 1907 for real human flesh. These people are goddamn doctors! They should know what a person looks like!

Problems aside, however, Spiridon is by-and-large an entertaining work, managing to avoid being boring despite some rather substantial deviations from the main plot thread at times. It is snappily written for a book from the dawn of the 20th Century, and Michael Shreve's translation-adaptation with Black Coat Press has a good flow to it. In fact, there's more drive to this than the usual Jules Verne novel. I just hope Timothy Thummel doesn't try to say that the ants represent race again.

Speaking of Black Coat Press, December sees the release of my short story "The Curse of Orlac" in Tales of the Shadowmen Vol. 14: Coup de Grace, which stars and references a number of fictional characters who have been mentioned before on this site. For next year's volume I have a story planned which involves Spiridon in some capacity.

In any case: this is kinda it for 2017, then. Man, what a shitty fucking year. But at least the movies were good, and the books were mostly good, right? I hope I've helped make your life a little more bearable in these trying times. I've been watching movies this whole time to get prepped for 2018, and I'll tell you now: it's gonna to be a fucking party. But I don't want to get too ahead of myself yet. We've still got a Top Ten Movie List to do, plus we have to crown Book of the Year!

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Book Club of Desolation #20: The Unholy Three (1917), by Tod Robbins

Now for something a bit closer to type. This year has seen me show off my love of Lon Chaney Sr., and while it is not strongly remembered today, one of Chaney's big hits was a movie called The Unholy Three. Well, technically two of his big hits were movies called The Unholy Three: Todd Browning directed a silent version in 1925, while a talkie remake was shot in 1930 by Jack Conway, both starring Chaney as the ventriloquist Professor Echo. The films were based off of a 1917 novel by Clarence Aaron "Tod" Robbins, who also wrote "Spurs," the short story which Todd Browning would adapt as Freaks. I found both versions of the movie to be an awesome showcase of Lon Chaney's talents, but the story always threw me. It's a confusing tale, not because of any particular complexity, but because the character's personal decisions are...weird. As it happens, it looks better on paper. The Unholy Three is a surprisingly good crime pulp with enough idiosyncrasies to it that it overcomes some of its notable flaws. It's a great book to continue our Bookvember reading experience with.

We open at a circus, where a performance is being held starring Tweedledee the midget, Hercules the strongman, and Echo the ventriloquist. Tweedledee is a genius but prone to a violent temper, and when he is insulted for his height too many times he attacks his heckler, and the three are forced to escape. Tiring of an existence as sideshow freaks, the three decide to pool their unique talents as Mind, Body, and Voice to take life by the horns and be free. This amounts to them opening a pet shop supposedly owned by Echo, who disguises himself as an old woman named Irene Blake. Tweedledee poses as her infant grandson Willie, but actually runs the show, while Hercules takes care of tasks around the shop as Cousin Harry. They make a small fortune selling cheap birds that seem to be talking parrots, thanks exclusively to Echo's ventriloquism. However, Tweedledee also has a practice of encouraging families to adopt him so that he can kill them and take their valuables. Such is what befalls the family and family-to-be of Hector McDonald, a young man who earns the Little Person's ire by blowing cigar smoke in his face. First he attacks Tommy, the nephew of Hector's fiance Dorothy Arlington; then, he frames Hector for the murder of his Uncle Tobias. In the end, Echo has had enough--this life of crime is not the adventure promised to him. He betrays his Master and calls upon the Voice of God Himself to save the day.

This is basically a Villain Pulp--see the Valley of the Zombies review for what I mean by that. We have our title characters, and they are evil, and the book sympathizes with them just as surely as it does with their victims. The Three are indeed very interesting. Tweedledee suffers from a rather stereotypical case of Little Man Syndrome, but at the same time he really does live up to his title of "the Mind." The film makes it clearer that the plot the trio undertake is eccentric primarily because such a scheme would be unbelievable in the eyes of the police; I suspect that's why Tweedledee chooses the modus operandi that he does in the book as well. He goes back and forth between a cold, philosophical predator and a manic storm of raw emotion--while his body is far from helpless, he is most unfettered in the mental realm. It's fascinating to me that he is the mastermind in the novel, while the two films place leadership of the trio on Echo's shoulders--probably because Echo was played by Lon Chaney, who is much more believable as a master villain than the high-pitched/German-accented Harry Earles. Echo is reduced to an almost child-like role as Tweedledee's servant, and he may be intended to be mentally disabled in some way. His ventriloquist dummy, "with legs like a goat and a face like an old man," apparently talks to him. (This may be one of the earliest "demonic" ventriloquist dolls I know of, as it predates Hugo from Dead of Night by almost thirty years; even if Echo's doll probably isn't really possessed.) The idea of a ventriloquist using their talents to impersonate God is a great idea and I'm disappointed I didn't think of it first. This is a pretty clever deus ex machina, in a rather literal sense. Book!Echo is also much more sympathetic than movie!Echo, who is much more sinister but still gets off easy. Really, a lot of the issues I had with the plots of the films come from the fusion of Tweedledee's character with Echo's. Hercules is the least fleshed-out of them, which is also a fact in the movies, but he presents some interesting enigmas. He's extremely loyal to Tweedledee almost to the point of seeming child-like, as Echo does, but he's also well-spoken. His idealism, the source of his loyalty to his Master, contradicts the brutal nature of his base strength. In some ways you can feel bad for him, because he's the one Tweedledee scams the most.

Unfortunately, the middle third of the book doesn't focus on its eponymous figures as much as we'd like, meaning that their confusing plan becomes even more random-seeming due to the fact that we see it from the perspective of their victims instead. It doesn't help that Hector, his uncle, and the Arlingtons are not particularly interesting characters compared to the Three. They also don't really possess any unique skill or trait that helps them overcome the Three--it takes Echo turning on Tweedledee to secure the victory of our "heroes." Fortunately, the entire book is very well-written. Robbins busts out the finest pulp purple prose to produce bombastic and memorable imagery. It gets a little cloying at times, much in the same way that you can get poisoned from too much Lovecraft, but it's hard to dislike the long description near the beginning of Tweedledee viewing his body as a grotesque cocoon, hoping that someday he will climb out of himself as a giant, with the strength to destroy his foes. We also get some pithiness through Echo's parrot-ventriloquism in a long bit which contains such gems as, "The worms are our fondest friends even when we are cold to them." Despite the complexity of his metaphors at times, Robbins leaves the plot very easy to follow, so it seems a little unnecessary that The Events Thus Far are summarized by Echo at the end.

There is racism in the book. There are a few descriptions of Jewish characters which might be antisemitic. In the early carnival scenes, too, the Wild Man of Borneo is described as a "half-wit Negro," which highlights the fact that these sorts of carnival shows were hugely exploitative. We need look no further than Nightmare Alley for this, but the low-budget nature of these shows meant they had to cut corners, which meant enslaving, abusing, or otherwise taking advantage of their performers. Hiram W. and Barney Davis, the two Little People who are the most famous historical examples of people exhibited as "Wild Men of Borneo," were mentally disabled--whether or not their act under P.T. Barnum and other show heads was exploitative is open to debate. In any case, the book's racial politics are uncomfortably dated, but there is nothing shriekingly hateful compared to what I've read recently.

The Unholy Three is definitely an imperfect book. It's a pulp, so I'd expect no different. But if you are a pulp fan and/or an enthusiast for extremely unusual crime thrillers, this will not let you down. Plus, you can probably get a kick out of the movies, as well, which differ substantially from the book. I'll return to this book somewhat when I finally get to Todd Browning's movie The Devil-Doll, as you'll see an echo of Professor Echo in that film's lead. This book once left powerful ripples in pop culture--maybe it's due for rediscovery.

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Book Club of Desolation #19: Left Behind (1995), by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

Disclaimer: If you are a person whose beliefs generally align with the views put forward in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series--i.e. you are a premillenialist dispensationalist Evangelical Christian--you probably will not want to read this review. If you are a fan of their prose I recommend similar caution. This is because whether you find such an action justifiable on my behalf or not, I am about to, as the expression sometimes goes, rip this book a new one.

And before I continue with this next entry in our Bookvember adventure, I want to give a secondary disclaimer to those of you who don't buy into the Left Behind mythos: I don't have anything against mainstream Christianity. While I have my own beliefs and I will confess that those beliefs sometimes rub up against Christianity, I recognize that typical Christian beliefs in the United States are relatively non-toxic. I write this with the recognition that there's no avoiding discomfort in a review such as this--but I really do have to share my opinions on this book, for the reaction it elicited in me.

Left Behind, for those of you unaware, is a series telling the tale of those "left behind" to face the Great Tribulation after the Rapture takes the forgiven to Heaven. In a general sense, the first book establishes the premise of the series while introducing our principle characters. There are the members of what will be called the Tribulation Force (a league of faithful Antichrist-fighters), and their allies: we focus primarily on adulterer pilot Rayford Steele and a reporter named Cam "Buck" Williams. There is a plot about how in the early days of the Rapture, an Israeli scientist named Chaim Rosenzweig figured out to fertilize desert sands without irrigation; for this, Israel suffered a massive assault from post-Soviet Russia, wherein not a single person was killed, apparently by the hand of God. In the wake of the Rapture the social order has developed further from this, moving towards a UN-led one-world government under the command of charismatic young Romanian politician Nicolae Carpathia. Carpathia--if you couldn't tell from the name--is the Antichrist, and our heroes of the Tribulation Force slowly uncover the conspiracy he's set in place to ensure the rise of his dominion.

Here's the thing about Left Behind: it is not an inherently bad idea. There is a lot of mileage to be gotten out of a Rapture story--perhaps because of the Left Behind series, there has been an embrace of the idea in pop culture, regardless of the degree of religious intent in its presentation. Both as a secular and religious idea, Left Behind has potential. If you want to tell a more secularized version of the story, you'd have your basic Post-Apocalyptic model, with some potential for fantasy exploration--you could pit your characters against demons, for example. You could keep it ambiguous if it's the Biblical End-of-the-World or just an event that resembles such. And if you wanted to tell it as a story meant to convert people to Christianity, that could work just as well! Christianity guiding principle is ostensibly salvation, and so even if it jiggles the rules on the Apocalypse a little bit--have a story where our heroes are saved by their actions in the face of their final test! Left Behind thinks it's telling the latter story (and I'm sure at least some of the heroes go to Heaven in the end), but like a lot of works by Evangelicals, where it chooses to put its focus is where it becomes a thing of malice rather than mercy.

The issue with any sort of Rapture story is that the idea of a Rapture is inherently exclusionary. Typically, the estimates on the total of souls allowed into God's Kingdom by Rapture-believers represent a distinct minority of the human race. This usually contrasts the pop culture depiction of the Rapture wherein enough people are gone that society as we know it has collapsed. That was what I was expecting in Left Behind--cities on fire, planes crashing to the ground, power outages, cats and dogs living together...mass hysteria. Instead, the basic economy stays intact, airlines stay open, there is comparatively little social strife en masse...almost implying that few people were taken to Heaven in the end. And we do get specifics on who was taken, and who wasn't.

To begin with, all fetuses are taken to Heaven. This is a prelude to the scene wherein we learn about the abortion clinics who encourage people to get pregnant and have abortions just so they can stay in business. And the people who get pregnant and abort just for fun. I've already opened enough Pandora's Boxes, so I'm not going to go much further with this thread, but if the authors actually believe these clinics and people exist, that is absolutely repugnant of them. At best, they are emotionally manipulative; and frankly, folks, I'm just tired of all this hand-wringing hate against women who just don't want or can't have children.

Then there is the telling passage where we are learning about how babies and children almost universally vanished. That is a bit more bearable to me because it's less emotionally manipulative; then they say "even a few teenagers" were Raptured. That's some pretty telling phrasing there. Whether it's the opinion of the character saying that or the voice of the authors speaking through them, someone in the equation believes all but a few teenagers are so corrupt that they deserve eternal torture. I could dig my grave even deeper by wondering why any of these people deserve eternal torture for things like adultery or looking at porn (or "magazines which fed my lust," as the milquetoast prose would have it), but the more I tried to avoid looking for stereotypical opinions in the book, the more I found them. Of course the two old white Evangelicals writing about the Apocalypse believe that once puberty hits you you're worthy of damnation. Why would adolescent mistakes be forgiven by an all-benevolent deity, amirite?

I also don't really need to say that the book is racist, but when you've got a whole lot of celebration over Jews converting to spread the word of Christ, it's a little hard to avoid. Similarly, a lot of attention is drawn to the fact that the Antichrist is Romanian. Fiction is a slippery thing, in that it doesn't always represent the heart and soul of the creator, but if you do something too many times it's going to seem like a telling statement. I don't entirely know why LaHaye and Jenkins think Eastern Europeans are so sinister but it gets draining quickly.

Really, that's my issue with Left Behind: I went into it expecting better. The series is probably the most famous line of distinctly-genred "Christian fiction" books I know, and consequently, I was expecting something milder, more optimistic. And more convincing, because if Christian fiction is truly Christian it won't merely be entertaining. This sort of fiction should be convincing people to join up with what the authors (think they) practice, but instead it frames such a choice as one motivated by fear and exclusion. What is more is that, like a lot of the movies we've seen hitting theaters recently, it attempts to preemptively dismiss those who disagree with its view. This is not inherently an unsound argument strategy--you can toss out an opposing argument before it's aired, but it depends on how much you strawman your opposition, and how expertly you expose the irrelevance of such opposition. Near the end, the characters dismiss moderate Christians and their refusal to focus on the real problems of judging drug-users, abortion-havers, and porn-readers simply because the authors make them dismiss such people. After all, people, this is the Antichrist on the line, people!

Let's talk about this Antichrist. Nicolae Carpathia. What frustrates me is that that name is almost genius. He sounds like a fucking Doc Savage villain, and in a melodramatic, over-the-top pulpy atmosphere a character with that name could be used brilliantly. But this is meant to instead be a "subtle" tip-off that the head of the UN is the Son of Satan himself. The more I read that name the more I felt like the authors thought I was an idiot--that I couldn't figure out this guy was the Antichrist unless his name was some equivalent of "Damien Draculaston." I suspect from a certain point of view they do view their readers as not overly clever; that's why we're informed that Carpathia's enemies are heroic (i.e. masculine) via the fact that they have names like Rayford Steele, Buck Williams, Dirk Burton, and of course, Steve Plank. Maybe it's, yknow, "Plawnck," like the scientist, but if they mean like a plank of wood then it sounds like something Mike and the Bots would have called Reb Brown during Space Mutiny. If I can carry this tangent further, I have to comment on the fact that Rayford Steele's loved ones call him not "Ray" but "Rafe." "Rayford" is bad enough, but what could compel a writer to pen a series featuring a man named "Rafe Steele" as the protagonist?

Returning, though, to Carpathia--no, his name was not the only beef I had with him. Repetitious padding is what comprises most of Left Behind, but you will get so tired of hearing how Carpathia is handsome, famous, charming, the Sexiest Man Alive (which gets played up a huge deal), and 33 years old. Yes, I get it, he's 33 because that's how old Jesus was when he died--now I officially never want to read the words "33 years old" ever again. Then, the authors describe him on several occasions as "blond Robert Redford." NO. That is dishonest writing. If your fallback for physically describing your character is to compare them to a celebrity, you need another draft at best. Carpathia is set up to be charismatic because, as per the Christian tradition, he is a honey-not-vinegar sort of Antichrist, so nice and likable and talented that no one ever criticizes him, which is definitely an accurate and realistic view of humanity. We totally have people and things in our culture which are never criticized by anybody, right? In choosing this approach for him as a character, the authors make him come across as obviously evil--literally too good to be true. We humans wouldn't react to a man like him with adoration: we'd ask what he's selling.

Of course, another (possibly) unintended effect is that the book seems to encourage suspicion of those who bring peace and innovation. People have applied the idea of a charismatic and likable Antichrist to real figures all throughout history--"Of course Obama created a health care system which benefited millions! Giving you what you want is how the Devil hooks yeh." The message seems to be that political allegiances between nations, like the UN, are steps towards an order which will be easy for the Antichrist to rule. Consequently, it also warns us of figures in power bearing messages of pacifism. Admittedly, there have been real dictators who have abused our desire for peace to unleash terrible war--whether it's tricking us into thinking a war will bring peace or lying about their intent until their power is secured. But I've seen that fear used as an excuse to fight vague threats--somehow the presence of a supposed Antichrist induces moral corruption, but the definition of "corruption" and how it manifests often seems as vague and nebulous as the present definition of "political correctness." You get people believing that literally every politician is the Spawn of Satan and then you get people voted in who are going to make sure there's no education system to tell them otherwise. But I digress.

Eos, bring the dawn; Athena, heal my brain. Left Behind was disappointingly paranoid, misogynist, and boring. If you love reading books where the same details are repeated until they become meaningless, this may be your book. Christians deserve better fiction than this, in terms of both theme and writing quality. Dodge it like it'll burn you--and don't let yourself settle for this!

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Image Source: Wikipedia

Book Club of Desolation #18: Benighted (1927), by J.B. Priestley

Spookyween has come and gone, but Bookvember rises anew! We've gone fairly light on books this year, but this month we'll be making four stops to the Book Club of Desolation. Starting off our celebration of bizarre literature is Benighted. It was from Benighted that we got the 1932 film The Old Dark House, which everyone likes for reasons I'll never understand. The Old Dark House is, despite being the Trope Namer, a late addition to the Old Dark House subgenre; though the form would persist into and through the 1940s, the ODH film's peak was really in the late '20s. This year has seen me take a liking to these creaky old mysteries, and as such, I wanted to dip into the literary origins of this cinematic cluster; Benighted was one of those which was still available and which was actually readable. Mary Roberts Rinehart, I'm sure I will get to you at some point--but for now, let's just get the crap out of the way.

Indeed, Benighted is very crappy. That may be due to the fact that it bears a very close resemblance to The Old Dark House, only it manages to be less funny, more boring, and most damningly, it lacks Boris Karloff. But it was, however, readable, in a way that the original 1925 stage play of The Gorilla (for example) simply wasn't.* Our principle characters are Philip and Margaret Waverton, two travelers who are joined in their voyage through rural Wales by young Roger Penderel. The trio end up going through a heavy rainstorm, finding the sole shelter for miles in the form of mysterious old Femm Manor, ruled over by the bombastic, unbalanced Horace Femm and his religious fanatic sister Rebecca. The travelers are eventually joined by two other travelers whose names I can't remember. I do know that one of them is named Gladys, and she ends up as Penderel's love interest for all the jack diddly it ends up meaning in the end. For the rest of the book, the travelers endure the strangeness of the Femms and their disfigured alcoholic butler Morgan until events reach their violent pitch.

The primary issue which readers may run into concerning Benighted thankfully manifests itself right at the start. Simply put, the book is dull, with the opening driving scene which takes our three heroes to Femm Manor reaching Manos levels of absurd length.** Trust me, it makes you wonder about the literary audience of the late '20s when the first chunk of the book is just Priestley finding new ways of saying "It's raining." And this sets the pattern for the rest of the book in another way: too much of the material printed is wasted on re-summarizing what a ghastly storm this is. I would argue that most of the book is spent describing the weather or having characters talk about the weather. And when they talk--dear God.

This is yet another book which I have spent my precious reading time on this year which features a Party of Roving Twits. You probably know the kind, even if you haven't read any of the abominable thrillers of the '20s and '30s which feature the archetype (and which I keep reading because I'm an idiot with high hopes). Everyone who isn't a pretentious asshat is foppish and disengaged to the point of inducing aneurysm. I tried to find conversations between the protagonists that were both interesting and relevant, and was completely without luck. I hate books where all the women do is scream and all the men do is make faux-Wilde pithy observations on everything. Especially when both insist on using such unbearably Caucasian similes as "strange as a mandarin."

Which is sad, because there is at least some good stuff here. Our ostensible villains, the Femms plus Morgan the butler, are the ancestors of the Sawyers of Texas, the Merryes from Spider Baby, and all the other degenerate families living in isolation spread out over 90 years of horror fiction. There's a great part where we learn that Rebecca's religious obsessions may stem from the fact that when she was young she would witness her father and brother bring women home to conduct orgies! I guess I can hardly blame her after that. But too little time is spent with these folk, and this creates a sizable schism in the text. Really, it's almost like Priestley wrote two books--one, a spooky Gothic horror-thriller, and the other, a soppy romantic drama about idiots--and fused them together in layers like an Oreo mishap. Characters will engage in pointless dialogue...then be trapped in a flooding room...then, more pointless foppishness...then, Morgan attacks somebody...like I said above, I shouldn't have hoped for much when The Old Dark House was such a fitfully boring film.

If you distrust my opinion and want to read overlong accounts of people drinking gin, Benighted may be for you. But honestly you really should run away from it fast. I haven't entirely given up on the books and plays which inspired the ODH thrillers, but damn if this doesn't make me want to.

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* For those of you who mourn the loss of the first two adaptations of The Gorilla which predated the 1939 Bela Lugosi/Ritz Brothers travesty, don't. The original play's primary form of humor outside of the usual "cowardice is funny" shtick is making fun of black people. It was a repugnant read and I'm sure both the 1927 and 1930 versions preserved this rubbish, if I know anything about the films of the late '20s/early '30s.

** Quick! Someone remake Manos: The Hands of Fate as an old-time Old Dark House movie! You can add the gorilla from House of Mystery! It'll be great!

Image Source: Valancourt Books 

Book Club of Desolation #17: Jason X: Death Moon (2005), by Alex S. Johnson

I've been trying to finish this book for over five years. I still didn't finish it in time for this review.

But even though I did not read every single page of it, I think I get the general gist of things in Jason X: Death Moon. I heard of this long, long ago on TV Tropes, which listed it on its So Bad It's Horrible / Literature page. It is almost certainly the worst of the Jason X tie-in novels, which I can't imagine being stellar to begin with. It is also one of the most self-assuredly delirious novels I've read, and for perspective, my current reading is Tristram Shandy. I guess I have my limits--there is such a thing as excessive absurdity. While I can give Jason X: Death Moon points for trying something I've always dreamed of doing, I do have to condemn the book for being an overall waste of time, a Jodorowsky film in prose--an eager start, followed by a thoroughly pretentious and obnoxious string of disappointments.

Let's start with the plot. Jason Voorhees is still a superhuman cyborg in the mid 25th Century, as seen in the "classic" film Jason X. A bunch of scientists who may worship him/be sexually fascinated by him (?) resurrect him and send him to the Moon (?) just in time for a bunch of horny, drug-crazed teenagers to arrive in time for their summer at Moon Camp Americana, whose awful, awful name is written out way too many times. Then, Jason kills a bunch of them, before being defeated (?).

That's it.

I am told by other reviews that the conclusion features Jason being sent back in time to fight his past self, or something similar to that, but having skimmed the last few pages as much as my brain will allow doesn't indicate that, plus, there are other books in this series that are still set in the future. The plot details are unimportant, and the author makes it clear that we don't have to pay attention to them because we meet a new set of characters every few pages. The novel was seemingly written in blocks, usually following one vague "plot" motion before jumping into a chunk of rambling nonsense, then jumping into our next "plot" bit, which has almost nothing to do with what we've already seen. This patches up any sort of leaving-behind I'd surely ordinarily experience as a result of not having seen Jason X. This is a standalone work!

Now, I need to clarify my reference to "rambling nonsense," because that is essentially what this book is all about. I could turn to literally any page in this and pull out a quote which defines the entire thing. Here, I'll demonstrate:

At first he thought it was a routine hard-drive swipe--an archaic, lo-fi term the Tribes still used to refer to cerebellar cleaning. That was when they took your brain, dumped its contents into the core of an artificial person; blew your brains out out in some dark alley. That's what happened sometimes if you lurked on Cityofdiss.com, as JJ was doing. Fucking head cleaners will pay for this, thought JJ, a little edge of anger pushing his usual poise to the edge of chaos. But JJ held it steady. If they wanted a firefight, he would give 'em a firefight. The mother of all flame wars.

Note that almost none of this is explained. The setting of this book is some sort of cyberpunk anarchist dystopia, where Internet technology can not only manipulate reality to some extent, but there are no regulations on the power of such, and everyone lives a sort of pseudo-illegal libertine existence in a desperate desire to end boredom. Like if everyone in Neuromancer was a Tessier-Ashpool and Earth was basically Gallifrey from Doctor Who in terms of technological achievement. I don't really know how much this clinches with the world we see in Jason X, but most of that film is set on a spaceship bound for an Earth colony, so anything's possible.

The point around which I gave up involved a tangent several dozen pages long about, I think, a mad scientist trying to use advanced video manipulation to make Bride of Frankenstein into Elsa Lanchester porn. I considered quoting from this part, too, but it's not worth it.

Much of this book tries very much to cash in on the things that make Cool Hipster Books Cool and Hipstery. To be more specific, it tries to be controversial. Egregious cursing, sex, porn, drugs, gore, and video games are set hand-in-hand with Hemingway and philosophically-reworked Marx Brothers quotes, plus a plethora of flowery adjectives that even the Romantics would have turned from in disgust. It is the last thing you'd expect to see in a book based on a movie where Jason Voorhees kills people on a future spaceship. But for that, I sort of low-key love this book? Sure, it may not function in terms of a conventional novel, but one thing I've always wanted to do is write a tie-in novel that completely fucks with the thing it ties in with. A surreal, postmodern Star Wars novel; a Dune novel that has a secret code in it; a Warcraft novel that's incomprehensible unless you've read the complete works of Jane Austen. I think that writing a bizarro Friday the 13th novel shows I'm not alone in having that impulse. I wonder if Alex Johnson laughed the whole time writing this. If he wasn't laughing I get the impression it was because his mouth was being used for bong hits instead. (I joke. It looks like Mr. Johnson has found a reasonably successful career as a bizarro writer, and I'm actually thinking of grabbing a couple of his other titles, if anything for the sake of the Book Club of Desolation. After all, it would be entirely against my ethics to ignore a book called Doom Hippies.)

While I didn't necessarily enjoy reading Jason X: Death Moon, I'm glad it exists for its status as an artifact. And, before I read it, I could not make this shit up. Now I can, in fact, make this shit up. Reader beware!

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Book Club of Desolation #16: Gretta (1955), by Erskine Caldwell

I loved Gretta the Movie so much that I had to check out Gretta the Book. And to speak very succinctly, it is beyond my wildest dreams, for the simple reason that it enhances the experience of watching Gretta the Movie exponentially. The movie has nothing to do with this book. There's a Gretta, sure. Both stories have a Glen. But otherwise, they are completely different beasts. For Gretta the Movie to audaciously stamp writer Caldwell's name on the title card is probably the most hilarious thing I've seen in a while, because after getting through Gretta's 144 pages I found not one plot point, not one in the whole book, that it shared with the movie, aside from the fact that people have a lot of sex.

Gretta is a young woman who seems eager to meet as many men as possible. She wants love, but she knows that sex is a very quick path to love for some men. We follow her through her erotic adventures until she meets Dr. Glen Kenworthy, with whom she strikes up what is a nearly perfect relationship. Then one of the men from her past comes back, Dr. Royd Fillmore, who engages in lengthy creepy near-rape scenes with her throughout the book's middle. When she rejects him totally, he kills himself, and this brings scandal to the Kenworthys' marriage. The hospital director calls Glen into his office to basically call his wife a whore to his face; consequentially, Glen finds himself liking Gretta less and less. This is even after he finds out that Gretta's lustful ways and desire to find true love are an attempt to patch a hole in her heart after a molestation incident at the age of ten.

I would have never heard of Erskine Caldwell if it wasn't for Gretta the Movie, but my copy of Gretta the Book says the Faulkner himself included Caldwell in his top five writer's list. I laugh at that because this book has more sex in it than some of the smut paperbacks I've done in the past for the Book Club of Desolation...and it's a good deal sexier than those, too. The book is actually pretty well written, being above the usual romance paperback fare. Sure, there are people blushing and gushing and fainting, but we're a long way from Danielle Steele, especially since as far as I know Danielle Steele doesn't really put pedophilia flashbacks into her works. The prose never gets tiresome and for a relatively soapy Valley of the Dolls-style potboiler it held my attention surprisingly well. In fact, I'd be interested in checking out some of Caldwell's other works, as I feel like there are some writing tricks I could pick up from him.

It was really fun, until I reached about the halfway mark, to try to see if the book was going to diverge into a narrative about people with past experiences with death who give themselves near-death experiences on purpose out of nostalgia. Or when Gretta was going to become a transgender piano player named Charlie White. As I said above, none of this happens, and indeed, it's baffling at times to consider where John Carr could have gotten even the faintest inkling for what would become Gretta the Movie from this novel. The two Grettas are similar to a point, though Film!Gretta gets paid for her sex work while Novel!Gretta considers that to be whoring; the two Glens are not similar at all, because Novel!Glen lacks Film!Glen's dedication to Gretta. Royd Fillmore is kind of like George Youngmeyer, in that he's kind of an evil bastard, but again, once you progress past the most basic of details the two become distinct and separate. Gretta the Movie is really just a fucked-up, all-original gem, and in its own way, so is this book--albeit to a lesser extent in my mind. But that's just because Gretta the Movie is tough to top.

Things get even more complicated when you recall that Gretta the Movie was cut into one of several incoherent short pieces in the utterly batshit anthology film Night Train to Terror, which I will definitely have to talk about at some point. When I rewatch that flick for my inevitable review, I'll have to see if they credit Erskine Caldwell as a writer. That would be astonishing indeed. I wonder if Caldwell ever saw either film based off of his work.

If you like realistic paperbacks or romance novels, I think you'll find Gretta to be one of the better examples of a literary-inclined drama. If you want some great amusement, though, read the book in conjunction with watching the film. The stark contrast is a comedic marvel in and of itself.

Book Club of Desolation #15: Jaws: The Revenge (1987), by Hank Searls

If you know anything about this book, you know the one reason why I'm reviewing it.

Follows the plot of the movie, really. Ellen Brody is the widow of Sheriff Martin Brody, who has ostensibly died of a heart attack after fighting a couple of different sharks off Amity Island. Their son Michael has also previously had shark trouble, and he's retired to the Caribbean to work on some marine research. Now it's Sean Brody's time to face the shark...an encounter he does not survive. A grief-stricken Ellen is starting to believe, perhaps rightfully so, that sharks have a thing for her family specifically, and so she goes south to join Michael and get away from Amity. She ends up meeting Hoagy Carmichael (who is immediately recognizable as Michael Caine's character even to people who haven't seen the movie), a pilot who will prove instrumental in her defeating the shark. And, inevitably, the shark is defeated. This is a simple paperback tale of good versus evil, so there's relatively little nuance to the plot presented.

With one exception.

There is a significant deviation from the film version of Jaws: The Revenge, aside from the addition of a Haitian cocaine-smuggling subplot which I don't remember going anywhere beyond filling pages. We finally learn why the Brody family has been beset by so many sharks: VOODOO, MOTHERFUCKER. Yep! Years ago, before the events of Jaws, Martin Brody threw a voodoo charm belonging to a houngan named Papa Jacques into the ocean, pissing Papa Jacques off enough to put a curse on Martin and his whole family. Every shark that has attacked Amity Island thus far has been a spirit-shark pulled from Papa Jacques' soul. I can't make this up, nor can I envision the writing process. It must have been agony for Searls, having to turn the worst Jaws movie into a 300+ page novel...adding the cocaine subplot ought to have been enough but there was still something missing. In a postmodern moment his mind must have chanced upon deconstructing the whole thing and asking why there were four sharks haunting a specific family on the East Coast over a twelve year period. Really, a curse does seem to be the only way to explain the bad luck of the Brodys. You can almost overlook the fact that this plot explanation is born of the fact that Jaws shouldn't have had sequels in the first place. If there had just been one shark attack, or hell, even just two, it wouldn't have been suspicious. But Jaws 3D and Jaws: The Revenge bumped up the shark vengeance count on the Brodys to four, and then you do sort of need a reason. Not like anyone would care.

Unifying the four Jaws films like this raises a particular problem. Papa Jacques is now the main villain of the Jaws series, and Hank Searls must make that a believable thing. He doesn't. Papa Jacques barely gets dialogue--he just lurks around being sinister-looking. (There's a lot of racist dialogue focusing on his black skin, usually with the apparent intent being that makes him more sinister-looking.) It's hard to get menace out of a character who is responsible for a number of deaths because he had his magic charm thrown in the water; even if he does possess real mystical powers, that's such a petty grudge that it undercuts any menace he could present as a powerful wizard type. If Jacques was a charismatic character, with a large following and presence a la Thulsa Doom from the Schwarzenegger Conan, then I could suspend my disbelief, but that would still change Jaws: The Revenge into a different story entirely--either a Mansonsploitation-style thriller, or some kind of fantasy story. If you take this novel as canon, you now have to believe that magic exists in the Jawsverse. Indeed, it is the entire impetus for the plot of all the movies.

In case you didn't click that TV Tropes link above, this book is the Trope Namer for the Voodoo Shark: when a plot hole is "patched" by an even bigger plothole, like, say, casually revealing that magic exists in the setting of Jaws. This is the one thing that keeps this book memorable at all. Otherwise, it is the sort of book that I really hate reading, which is the airport novel. This is the sort of thing I could get for four bucks off the "bookshelf" at the local grocery store. I'm getting too snobby for my own good here, but this is an overly dry book that is "realistic" because it uses a lot of technical terms. Ooh, you know what the different parts of a boat are called. That makes your story so much more compelling, and it totally makes me forget your characters are planks of wood.

Read this book, if you must, for the same reason I did, which is voodoo sharks. Otherwise, you'll probably just be lost in a sea of endless do-nothing subplots while a shark creeps around semi-ominously.

P.S. Expect Peter Benchley's original Jaws novel on the site at some point, too. I've heard it's--how to phrase this nicely--kind of a turd. Marvelous!

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Image Source: Amazon

Book Club of Desolation #14: The Ant with the Human Soul (1932)/Night of the Trolls (1963), by Bob Olsen and Keith Laumer

There was no way I was passing up a book with a cover like that.

I don't read as much straight sci-fi as I should outside of comic books, and I've meant to change that all my life. Fortunately, the Book Club of Desolation may be my chance to get on the right track. I recognized in my childhood that I always leaned towards the softer side of the Sci-Fi Hardness Scale, and a lot of the big names in classic sci-fi--Asimov, Anderson, Heinlein, Hubbard He Who Shall Not Be Named--had the bulk of their work on the harder side of things. Because they seemed to comprise so much of the iceberg, I dodged the genre except when it was scientifically "easy." I have other reasons for not enjoying these authors, which I won't bother to go into here, but I'm an older person and frankly, I'm becoming bored with the limits of my comfort zone. So maybe it's time to delve back into the things I didn't like as a kid and see what surprises await me.

But this really is all just incidental. I really did buy The Ant with the Human Soul exclusively for that cover.

Bob Olsen's '30s pulp adventure tells the story of Kenneth Williams, who is suicidal after his college experiences have made him doubt his Christianity. He is rescued from a drowning attempt by the sinister-seeming scientist Dr. De Villa, who suggests that perhaps an uncommon experience will help remind Williams of the beauty of life. And by "uncommon experience," he means "having his brain transferred into the body of an ant." How, you ask? Why, for that matter? Well, De Villa has perfected a ray which can cause ants to grow to the size of people. From there, it's simplicity itself to splice Kenneth's "memory center" into the ant's brain, while Kenneth's body is kept in suspended animation. The ant containing his brain-chunk will then be shrunk back down and returned to its colony, and Kenneth will record all of the ant's experiences as his own, all for the purpose of solving the secrets of ant colony behavior.

Kenneth ends up undertaking more than one lesson in ant-hropology, though one has to wonder how many times a single person can have their brain chopped up and transplanted in a week. In his first expedition, he is sent to a colony of common garden ants, where he sees that ant society is uncannily similar to that of humans, albeit with ant-like twists. Sure, it's a rigid caste society where automaton-like drones constantly search for and carry food to and around the colony, there are also bars, dances, and funerals. Next, he is sent to a more violent type of ant, one which spends a lot of its time drinking liquor and holding wrestling matches. Finally, he is sent to a colony of farmer ants, where he learns the joys and hardships of raising bug "cattle." And, following this adventure, the book decides to stop, so he gets a happy ending with his girlfriend.

The Ant with the Human Soul starts really strong and slowly declines. As the frontispiece for the book states, Bob Olsen was noted in his prime for his lighthearted approach to sci-fi prose. That shows itself quickly, because even in the face of depression and suicide, there's a pluckiness to the book, where everyone, even the mad scientist, behaves in a sort of golly-gee-gosh manner. This helps the audience forgive the stunning weakness of the book's attempts at hard science explanations, which admittedly may have been something Olsen intended. Olsen is skilled enough at using this tone that when the book's theme starts emerging it doesn't seem to come out of nowhere. Unfortunately, the themes of Ant are where the book kinda shits the bed. After the second ant encounter, it becomes clear that the different species of ants are supposed to represent different social circles of humans. The first ants represent an example of the middle class's conception of a stable society, while the second represents the criminal element. But then, when Dr. De Villa starts describing the farmer ants in the setup for the third incident, Olsen makes it overwhelmingly clear that it's not morality he's meaning to examine, it's race. He says that the criminal ants of the second incident are basically ant black people, while presumably the first group of well-behaved ants are the white ones. Meanwhile, this third group represents the "semi-primitive nomadic races." Bleccchhhh. The fact that the ending tries to claim this whole thing was about the evils of atheism makes it even lamer. While there's plenty of great stuff in the beginning with the improbable science, and the suggestion that Dr. De Villa is, y'know, Satan, it's all discarded in the end in favor of something that makes it all feel like a waste of time.

There's also something that really started bugging me, but in that way that makes me laugh. Dr. De Villa puts a lot of stock into how his exposure of ant behavior will secure him his place in history, but the man already has inter-species brain transplants and a growth and shrink ray. How, in any way, could discovering the secrets of ant social structures add to the scale and possibility implied by inventing things like those? The neurological medicine that could be derived from De Villa's understanding of the brain, to say nothing of how space-altering rays would affect the struggle for resources, is way, way more important than figuring out if ants put their dead in caskets or not. Again, this annoyed me, but the more I thought about it, the more hilarious it became. I guess I don't get it because I'm not a scientist. Anyway: this probably won't be the last ant-related book I feature on here, because I also own a copy of Spiridon, a French philosophical novel about a human-intelligence'd ant, and something called The Ants of Timothy Thummel, which appears to be the Bible, but with ants. Huh.

Armchair Fiction was also kind enough to include a second story in their publication of The Ant with the Human Soul. Keith Laumer's Night of the Trolls is the first novella of his Bolo series, which centered around a series of super-scientific tanks. An astronaut named Jackson awakes from suspended animation to find the world destroyed in a holocaust. He learns of his wife's death, and believes that his son and astronaut unit have also perished. He learns that some of those folk are still alive: one of his fellow astronauts, Toby Mallon, has set himself up as "the Baron," the mysterious dictator of the land that was once Jackson's home city. Mallon has ruled the land so ruthlessly that people have fallen back into superstitions, believing the colossal Bolo tanks he controls are Trolls. (This also lands Mallon the title of "the Trollmaster," which is pretty fucking cool.) It will take all of Jackson's wit to get his hands on one of the Bolos and stop the Baron before he can conquer what's left of civilization.

This was a good one, and not simply good for trash purposes. Night of the Trolls has a punchy and quick pace that's so efficient and effective that it makes one realize how stodgy Ant with the Human Soul really was. In about 70 pages, Laumer is able to bringing an engaging and straightforward plot that actually has some good character scenes. The Bolos themselves, and how they fit into the world Jackson left behind, are interesting enough to merit the sequels the story got. I don't know if I'd feature any other Bolo books on the site, but I will almost certainly be reading them.

Hey, look, you can tell it's good because the review is short and relatively free of spoilers. A lot of the trash material I talk about I talk about rather freely because, well, if this blog is meant to chronicle the unique feelings that stuff gives me, skimping on details is counter-productive. I give spoilers because I'm a bad person. The only out I've given myself on that is that a lot of these are absurdly hard to track down, and so if people want to know what actually fucking happens in them, they can know for themselves. While I'm fine with spoiling some details of The Ant with the Human Soul because I don't really if it's worth your time, I will leave the read of Night of the Trolls to your own discretion. It's not a deep or complex work of fiction, but...check it out. Tackle Ant if you consider yourself a trash-lit master.

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Image Source: Armchair Fiction

Book Club of Desolation #13: Frankenstein's Tower (1957), by Jean-Claude Carriere

OKAY AFTER THIS I PROMISE I WILL STOP TALKING ABOUT FRANKENSTEIN

I'd heard about Jean-Claude Carriere's Frankenstein series about ten years ago--before I was published a couple times by Black Coat Press, I read the entirety of their sister site, Cool French Comics, to stay up to date on all the remarkably neat characters dreamed up by the European pulp market. I learned of "Gouroull," Carriere's name for the Monster, and how Gouroull was much more violent than Shelley's depiction, or Universal's, or even Hammer's. Needless to say I was always fascinated by this, but English translations were only available as of last year! It's taken sixty years for Carriere's pulp series to reach our shores, and as of this writing, the reprints aren't even done yet! And while Frankenstein's Tower is not as fantastic or trashy a work as I hoped, it is still a book worthy of interest and a good hook for the start of a series.


Helen Coostle is a young woman traveling out to the Irish countryside town of Kanderley to holiday with her grandmother. She is a curious girl, but is nonetheless a Victorian lady, and thus is not that much of a femme fatale badass. While she is fascinated by the thrilling story's of Kanderley's old tower, which once belonged to Dr. Victor Frankenstein (now decades dead in the Arctic), her amusement turns to dread when an old vagabond takes her to the abandoned museum he lives in, revealing that one of the museum's lost exhibits was a glass casket containing the Monster of Frankenstein himself! Though she's assured that the Monster can't awaken as long as he's in the casket, he begins to haunt her nightmares, especially when she hears the sinister muttering of the word "Gouroull": the guttural sound which seems to be the name the Monster has taken for himself. Of course it isn't long before someone breaks into the museum and shatters Gouroull's coffin. Once more the Tower of Frankenstein has a resident, and it won't be long before Helen joins him...perhaps as permanent company...

Frankenstein's Tower is interesting because it shows to me that there is some parallel between trash cinema and "trash literature," for all that means: I would assume that a violent pulp series about the Frankenstein's Monster would be considered "lowbrow" enough to be considered such, even though how lowbrow it is is debatable. Frankenstein's Tower is arguably what I would think a pulp novel by Jess Franco or Jean Rollin would read like: sleazy, yes, but also patiently paced and "artsy" (read: light) in its scares, relying chiefly on atmosphere. And probably a little crazy, too. It is a full translation of Eurotrash onto the page, for all the good and bad that represents. For a lot of its length it's not particularly interesting, but when it heats up, it's worth it. Like the madman-in-the-police-station scene from The Awful Dr. Orlof, or EVERYTHING in SS Girls, the trashier elements help counterbalance the negative backflow of the High Brow. For example, there's a long sequence where Helen is kept in suspense over whether or not Gouroull is going to rape her. Sleazy and disturbing: yes. After this suspense is the book's ending, however, where the police decide to flood the tower with deadly snakes in an attempt to kill Gouroull--surprise, it fucking backfires and nearly gets Helen and everyone else killed.

It is a very quick read, and that's because it's written with a pulpy directness that I envy. The downside is that "pulp professional" has always reminded me too much of Ian Fleming: in case you didn't notice, I like my weird books eccentric and energetic, not dignified and...manly. Since the start of the pulp era, male pulp and paperback writers have toiled under the delusion that the masculinity of their writing will be increased if everything is portrayed as flatly and technically and dryly as possible. Normally this goes hand-in-hand with implicit and/or overt sexism which is why these books are repulsive to me. While he has a commercial staccato going for him prose-wise, Carriere avoids the sexism of his '50s highbrow peers, because Helen is a likable and believable protagonist. She spends a lot of the book as a damsel in distress, and being full of fear, but dude, it's the fucking Frankenstein's Monster. He tears people's arms off. I'd probably be screaming too.

To flesh out my cracks about highbrow stuff, though: the English edition comes with fore- and postwords written by Carriere. I don't really know what to make of 'em, to be honest. The man seems to take himself a bit too seriously, but he is one of the Great French Filmmakers apparently so maybe he has some entitlement to that. I feel like a super-artsy take on Frankenstein would be interesting, though this isn't it. It's interesting that he tries to do a thematic dissection of Frankenstein before launching into a book which is a straightforward thriller about the Monster, which doesn't really study the Monster in any depth.

But like I said, I'll probably check out the other books in the series. I've never seen the original French editions but these are good translations. They flow as naturally as any book written in English, and you could probably plow through one of these in a few hours. A fascinating read if you like pulps, European horror, and Frankenstein, with a few of the good old Weird Plot Decisions spliced in.

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Image Source: Amazon

Book Club of Desolation #12: The Pepsi-Cola Addict (1982), by June Gibbons

My process for this site is pretty simple. I look for movies or books I think I might like, and if I like them enough, or find them notable enough, I review them. To my knowledge, that's just the general critical process for a site like this. A natural aspect of this process is the Holy Grail Development Event. When you know what you like, you know what you'll probably love. There's always just one more thing out there, one more score, that will bring you critical artistic bliss. The perfect movie. The perfect book. And it's a tricky thing, the Holy Grail Development Event, which, in all honesty, could probably stand with a better name. The Internet is a thing now. Unless it's like The Weird Ones or something and every print was destroyed in a huge fire, or it's some penny dreadful published back in the Victorian period, you can find basically anything if you're willing to dig deep, risk viruses, and take a blow to your wallet.

The Pepsi-Cola Addict is basically the reason why I ended up doing the Book Club of Desolation. Yes, The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman was the first hint I had that these books existed. Yes, Harry Stephen Keeler showed me I'd have enough material for it. But when I began my research I knew that this was what I would build to. And now that I've gotten it done less than a year...what do I do for an encore? Well, something that makes me feel less guilty. This is one of those books where a lot of the meat of it is in the story behind it, so without further ado...

You may have heard the story of June and Jennifer Gibbons. Known as the "Silent Twins," the pair refused to talk to anyone but each other, and people who listened in on them heard them speak a language of their own creation. They were hugely dedicated to each other and, in essence, had a death pact of some variety. The twins were separated and placed in a mental health facility after they went on a crime spree which included committing arson. Eventually they determined that of them must "sacrifice" themselves in order to "be free," and in 1993 Jennifer died of unclear complications possibly related to other health problems brought on by her antipsychotics. Afterwards, June became much more expressive, and has gone on to live an apparently average life.

Before their crime spree, however, the girls wanted to be writers. Jennifer produced The Pugilist, Discomania, and The Taxi-Driver's Son, along with a play and some short stories, while June wrote The Pepsi-Cola Addict. Their work appears to have been published by New Horizons, a vanity print-on-demand press in their native Wales. Only Pepsi-Cola Addict is known to survive--because they were print-on-demand titles the amount of extant copies would be based on the number of copies that sold. Consequently, if Jennifer's books never sold, or only sold a copy or two, they may be gone for good. But Pepsi-Cola Addict exists, floating around as a bootleg. And sure enough, my copy is a bootleg, because I don't have access to the British Library (for geographical reasons exclusively, of course). I can say that it is one of the most incredible books I've ever read, and the fact that it has an astonishing story of authorship makes it all the better. That's saying nothing of the age of the writer. Pepsi-Cola Addict is a rush of pornographic comic book action, featuring some truly odd plot decisions pulled off with a remarkable skill. It is a true lost gem.

Preston Wildey King is a young teenager in love. However, he is also an addict. Preston loves Peggy and yet cannot quit his fixation with Pepsi cola. He steals it and steals to buy more, and often fantasizes about drinking huge quantities of the stuff. At times, he channels both Burroughs and Cleland as his Pepsi addiction resembles that of heroin, while also taking on sexual dimensions. Preston is also joined in his ennui by his friend Ryan. His best friend. His...best...friend. Ryan wants to rob a store but he also wants to bang Preston. This is not a hinted thing--there is oral sex in this book, and it is not of the hetero variety. There is a long and detailed series of events, all extremely delirious and laden with snappy Bogartesque dialogue. (Casablanca is maybe just a little influence here?) The inevitable happens. Preston bangs his lusty 30-something teacher. Then, he goes to jail as the robbery catches up with him. And we sink into nihilism, as a handful of pills washed down with Pepsi carries sweet Preston from this world.

I've glazed over a lot but that's because, like Don't Go in the Woods, the book's sheer oddity is hard to summarize. Every sentence is crafted with an odd precision, stumbling over amateurish metaphors while also evoking actual drama and pathos for our characters. The weird magical awkwardness of early teenagerhood, better in memory than in real life, comes back to you while reading, even if you didn't run into quite as crazy of shit when you were fourteen. Think the experimental passages of "Adams Farr" combined with a hatred for living a la Nathan Schiff. And while there are some stumblings, Gibbons keeps things moving, and shows that she has a remarkable intelligence alongside being well-read. It supports the notion that there is a connection between intelligence and mental illness, and that this is literature (convincing literature) about mental illness adds a certain layer to it all.

Of course, that sounds exploitative, but I prefer to look at the Gibbonses from the perspective of a fellow mentally ill person. I wish to celebrate their work as triumph with or over their illness as well; it's an expression of what mental illness does to a person. It's pretty clear that it affected Pepsi-Cola Addict and we can't get away from that. As a person with anxiety and depression (with some stuff probably stretching deeper than that), I am fascinated by what other mentally ill people produce. Even something like this, which many would decry as wallowing trash, is part of our voice. It shouldn't be ignored.

Plus, it's an important artifact of writing from a teenage author. My criticisms of "Canon" from my Don't Go in the Woods review apply here--literature written by youth always needs a closer eye, so that more of them may be considered classics. The work that young people do astounds me, much in the same way (though not the exact same way) that first-time work by very old people does. I hope I'll get to do Old People Goofing Off sometime soon as well. (This isn't really "Goofing Off," of course. But it's Kids Doing Great Things and that's what counts.)

I do hope there is a new edition of Pepsi-Cola put out at some point, and I hope Jennifer's works are rediscovered as well. Of course, I won't accept anything that doesn't benefit June Gibbons, or whomever or whatever she wants the new editions to benefit. But this should not be a book condemned to bootlegs, bless those bootlegs all the same. If you can find this, read it. I have built hype and yet I have faith the book can own up to it. It must be read to be believed. Track it down.

Thank you for stopping by for Bookvember! We'll see you again soon in the Book Club of Desolation...for now, get ready for December, when we'll take a look back on some moments from the life of Herschell Gordon Lewis.