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!

My Patreon will still be active while the A-List sleeps till January, so if you subscribe now you'll get tons of winter goodies. Plus, you can like the A-List on Facebook to hear what we're up to!

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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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 #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.

Book Club of Desolation #11: The Ferocious Fern and Other Stories (1943), by C.B. Pulman

One of the most indispensable sources of knowledge I've found in my quest to fill out the meetings of the Book Club of Desolation has been Chris Mikul's Biblio Curiosa, a zine dedicated to exposing the weird writings and weird lives of some of the forgotten writers of this world. I encourage you to look into it when you have a chance, if you're interested in seeing a good hard look at some unjustly--and sometimes justly--forgotten regions of literature. Through Biblio Curiosa I came across Clement Barker Pulman's The Ferocious Fern, a book apparently composed of plant-themed stories. I had no idea what to suspect when I found a copy, and suffice it to say that it delighted me. The Ferocious Fern is a lost minor classic, deserving a wider distribution than it ultimately obtained...I don't know if I can do the book justice in this review alone. In celebration of Bookvember I've decided to fill in the otherwise scanty information on this book for an Internet audience--I hope to be informative more than anything else!

Some brief notes before I talk about the individual stories, one at a time. The book does have something of a plant theme to it. Many of the stories have references to nature and natural themes, which ties in with its status as a regional work. I'm told the label of "regional literature" is kind of considered to be literary poison, and indeed, the thick Britishness that Pulman employs, along with the tedium he sometimes invokes in his lengthy description of rural English life, can be a bit of a deterrent. But Pulman's charm is intoxicating and you recognize quickly that he is a writer very much in charge of what he's writing. The regional/rural quality of his stories suggests a peace that he craves, in refuge from some of the horrors this world presents. To some degree, the book has some indescribable qualities, so perhaps it's best that I simply disclose my notes about the stories.

The titular story, "The Ferocious Fern," is an interesting choice for opening the collection. For readers unfamiliar with Pulman--i.e. everyone--it's a fantasy story, and as we'll learn, Pulman is good at genre fiction when he chooses to do it, and it's a shame that the rest of the stories in the collection aren't like this one. But it's also probably a bit of a good thing, since I found "Fern" to also be charmingly awkward from a writing perspective. My first thought was that Pulman was someone who read often but wrote rarely, probably a botanist or gardener. Later stories shot up that opinion because he really does show that he's someone who refined his craft, but "Fern" is a little clunky here and there. Plus, it doesn't have an entirely original premise: an unseemly fern turns out to be sentient and evil (or at least misguided), and kills a man. (Don't be mad that I spoil the ending, as Pulman himself does it on the inner flap and back of the book.) However, Pulman manages to have an interesting theme, one of conflict between magic and science. Two vague explanations are given for the fern's behavior, one being that chlorophyll and blood are not dissimilar (therefore allowing for predatory plants just as there are predatory animals), the other being that the plant figures into a 17th Century prophecy involving the Eve of St. John. The scene where the mysterious backwoods landlady talks about the prophecy explanation is effectively chilling, because Pulman suggests a secret, creepy world that exists far beyond the secure bubbles of our precious cities. It's very much like the quiet-but-real magic of The Witches' Mountain. I loved it.

"Murgatroyd has his Dinner" lacks horror or fantasy elements, but carries on the plant theme, and is one of his feel-good pieces to boot. Murgatroyd gets the wrong dish served to him at a restaurant, with unexpected results. Like many stories in the collection, it's more a scene or vignette than anything else, and thus really needs to be experienced for itself.

"The Speck" is a return to horror, albeit without paranormal elements. A man trapped on an island begins to hallucinate that the specks on his furniture are moving around. It was this story that made me realize why I was so quick to label Pulman as amateurish when I started the book: this is the sort of horror story I wrote when I was ten. When I first decided to be a writer, I was obsessed with deriving terror from subtle emotions. Being probably more bored than anything else, I had this habit of observing my emotions and my reactions to quiet observations, like looking at patterns in furniture. My conception of horror at the time was something "loud," or at least obviously horrific. The stories I could come up with for the patterns of my furniture and how I felt about them was sort of an untapped market, I felt. I think a lot of that must have been the fact that I was reading a lot of British literature at the time, which is usually "quieter" than what we see in America. To see that emotional obsessiveness put on paper by another writer was pretty awesome.

"Nothing Much in the Post" is another psychological horror story, of another kind. What the story ends up coming down to is what is surely a firsthand account of the London Blitz. The descriptions of bombs dropping puts this story among some of the best war literature I've ever read, period, and if for nothing but the account of the Blitz contained in this story, this book should be remembered. This is also a platform for Pulman to examine some of his views on class. Most of the time it seems like he's one of the good guys--the poor are sympathized with more than the rich, usually.

Next is "The Sound of a Voice," a story where unfortunately Pulman loses a bit of his pace. It is a ghost story with some of the leftover regional creepiness of "Ferocious Fern," but it is also overwhelmed with a sort of Dickensian sentimentality that I feel has aged poorly. There are a lot of descriptions of men's choirs choosing the songs they want to sing, and they are all supposed to be old favorites to the reader, and yet modern readers are unlikely to recognize or know the words to most of them.

"The Maid Goes Out" is another story about classism, though it is more optimistic than "Nothing Much in the Post." One of those ones that you have to read to experience. Brace yourself for some cheese--but otherwise know that this is a good one.

"Audience for an Exile" is another feel-good piece, albeit a somewhat complicated one. The exile of the title is an Eastern European refugee named Vestrovic, who is a wizened master piano player. One of the locals of the English village he lives in asks him to play a piece that no one else in the village can--playing the piece causes Vestrovic to walk back through his life, including to visions of a concentration camp. I assume that Pulman was aware of the Holocaust and this is a reference to it. The finale has an air of victory to it, but it's a fascinating avenue to travel down. I want to reread this to make sure I get everything out of it.

"The Road" is less optimistic and less interesting. In essence, an old roadman is called to plow a mountainous road so a doctor can reach a sick man in time. As the roadman plows his path through the mountain, he reflects on how hard his life has been. I may have missed something, but I find that unlikely: this one is as tedious as plowing a mountain, which may have been Pulman's intention--but it doesn't make the story very good.

Regrettably, "Tale of an Idiot" is another one that doesn't hold up well to time, and it suffers from perspective issues. It centers around Daft Davie, a mentally handicapped man who ends up helping to save a burnt town due to apparently being able to talk to water and use divining rods to dig wells. The story's theme, in essence, is "mentally handicapped people are useful too!" but repeatedly referring to a disabled person as "daft," "mad," "crazy," "stupid," or "an idiot" will probably bring about some cringing. As I said, the perspective jumps around too much as well, making it difficult to make sense of the events. And the usual vagueness as far as the supernatural events is a weakness rather than a strength in this case: I was left wondering if Davie did have some sort of superhuman ability, but not in the way that I felt that Pulman knew the answer. The story felt hollow or unfinished.

Thankfully, we're on solid ground from here on out. "The Great Quiet" is the story of Hamlin, a tortured poet whose desire to work in silence leads him to the realization that the mortal realm will never be quiet enough for him. It has a first person narrator, which is a nice departure from the norm, and through this narrator we have some interesting subtexts here. The narrator is ostensibly Hamlin's butler in his spooky old house on the hill, but there is something beyond just a desire to serve in him. I seriously read the narrator and Hamlin as lovers, and I have a bias, being queer myself, but there's something about how the narrator reacts to being shoved out of Hamlin's life by his obsession that screams "jilted." And there's a mutual connection between them that's not entirely a boss-employee sort of thing. And no, the narrator is not Hamlin's maid, because Hamlin has a maid whose femininity is always put in a different context from that of Hamlin and the narrator.

"The Apple Thief" is essentially a thriller, and it is a good one. Fate has constantly forced two men, Cawthron and Hemingway, to fight each other, ever since Cawthron stole an apple from Hemingway years ago. Hemingway is now the dictator of a small island called Tierra, while Cawthron has decided to pose as a socialist rabble-rouser to incite a rebellion and get Hemingway killed. I will not say anything further because this story is excellent and really shouldn't be ruined. Again, it is a testament to the fact that, at least for me, Pulman was better at genre fiction than he was at his literary vignettes, if anything because I feel like his conflict is better presented and more interesting when he tries something like a fantasy story or a thriller. But that's just me.

"Faltering Furrow" is another regional vignette but has more depth than some of the others we've seen so far. A farmer strives hard to cut straight furrows on his father's farmland so that he can prove to his father that he's worthy of inheriting the property. The twist to this one is almost cruel, and that's why it warrants attention.

"Wind Struck" ends up slipping a little again, because not only is it a love triangle story but it is a love triangle story that uses weather metaphors. It really doesn't help that the female love interest that the triangle sides fight over is presented in a flat, sexist fashion. Fortunately, the prose is some of the best that the book has, so it's worth checking out for that.

"The Square Watch" may well be the best in the collection, if anything because it shows how much imagination Pulman possessed. He was a good recorder of a life that probably doesn't exist anymore, save for in Britain's deepest depths, and "Ferocious Fern" showed that he could conjure up fantasy worlds, but this one takes the cake. As the title suggests, it may be a time-travel story. At its very least, it's a philosophical, pseudo-scientific reflection on the nature of time, written in a compelling and fascinating way. Professor Oughtershaw seeks the last of a set of thirteen Roman coins, because they may be the key to solving his model of time--and the personal stakes he has in it.

And finally, we have "Love and Mr. Portway." Dull, depressed Mr. Portway encounters his double, the robust, trophy-wife-marrying Mr. Forthergill, and relates to him the story of the only real excitement he's had in his life: an encounter with a beautiful young woman in the woods during a rainstorm. The twist at first is a comedic one, before a second twist unleashes the most hilariously depressing final sentence I've seen in a book in a looong time. It is a great way to end the collection and it's a great story in general.

I hope that provides some insight into a book that I hope reaches a wider audience. In fact--hm. I'll stay quiet for now.

If you have the chance to find this book, give it a shot. It's a tough thing to love, as you may have seen, but it doesn't disappoint.

Now, as you may expect, I've saved the best for last with Bookvember...the very best. The Ferocious Fern is a holy grail of sorts, but there's magic in our futures. Till next time...

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Image Source: Kearn's Rare Books

Book Club of Desolation #10: Operation H.A.T.E. (2012), by Richard Franklin

Well, this ought to be easy. I get to talk about Doctor Who again.

Welcome back to the Book Club of Desolation, as we continue to celebrate BOOKVEMBER! This week's book is Operation H.A.T.E., by actor Richard Franklin. Franklin famously played Captain Mike Yates of UNIT during the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee)'s era of Doctor Who in the 1970s, and Operation H.A.T.E. is essentially "official" Mike Yates fanfiction. I put quotes around "official" because, like a lot of the productions put together by BBV, the creators of Cyberon, Operation H.A.T.E. does not operate with an official BBC license (or licence, I suppose I should say). The book began life in 2002 as an audio book put out by BBV as one of their more controversial releases, as written and narrated by Franklin. The original story, called The Killing Stone, seemingly has almost no differences from Operation H.A.T.E. aside from a stronger emphasis on the Doctor Who elements. While BBV had acquired the licenses to aliens like the Krynoids and Sontarans, and characters like Liz Shaw and the Rani, they got in trouble for The Killing Stone as there was no way the BBC would have given BBV the licenses for the Doctor and the Master even if they'd asked. When Richard Franklin chose to release the text of the novel, he of course had to change the names to avoid copyright issues.

So that's the backstory. Did I mention this review is gonna be a lot of dry trivia? I do love a good dry trivia session but I realize it's not great reading. I do have some complicated feelings about this book and so I'll try to focus on those rather than simply annotating Doctor Who continuity references.

With the flimsy excuse that I am not the first person on the Internet to do, I am going to have spoilers in my synopsis. There will be helpful [brackets] along the way to explain the codes Franklin uses. Our protagonist is Captain Martin Bigglesworth [Mike Yates], and he has been discharged in the wake of his betrayal of the Special Terrestrial Operations Project Intelligence Taskforce, or STOPIT [UNIT]. He has retreated from public life to find himself as a person [as Yates did in Planet of the Spiders], and we learn that his betrayal involved helping an ecoterrorist plot [just like in Invasion of the Dinosaurs]. He reminisces about his STOPIT family, including an exiled two-hearted Guardian of Time named Professor Cosmos, or The Brain [The Doctor]; gruff STOPIT alien-buster General Hycock-Bottomley, aka "The Bum" [Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart/The Brig]; thick but charming WO Bloggs/"Smudge" [Sgt. Benton]; and The Brain's traveling companions, Joley "Dizzy" Darling [Jo Grant] and Mary-Ann "Sniffles" Peabody [Sarah Jane Smith]. Captain M, as Martin is sometimes called--making him one letter away from being the Game Master--is encouraged to take a long stay in Morocco. Along the way the text sees fit to give us many details about Richard FranklImean Captain M's life, including his hunting achievements, acting achievements, and knowledge of British geography.

While in Morocco, Martin has various adventures but eventually comes across a sinister snake charmer. The charmer reminds him of STOPIT's old enemy, another renegade Time Guardian whom STOPIT dubbed Moriarty [The Master], due to his role as the evil counterpart to The Brain's Holmes. As it happens, the snake charmer is Moriarty, and he has a non-lethal cobra spit in Martin's eye. When he awakes doctors inform him he has a gallstone. The gallstone, when extracted, resembles the amphora-shaped jug that Moriarty kept his cobras in. Upon returning from space, The Brain discovers that this gallstone is actually the Amphora Calculosa, a component which will enhance Moriarty's signature death-by-shrinking weapon, the Matter Mangler Gun, or MMG [The Master's TCE]. In a confrontation at a department store (far from the worst of the book's questionable choices), Martin outwits Moriarty and risks death to stop him. The Bum reveals that STOPIT was testing Martin's cool as an independent agent since they were interested in taking him back into the fold, with a promotion, to boot.

With a few lapses, I tried to keep that synopsis as objective as possible. By itself, Operation H.A.T.E. doesn't sound too bad. In fact, it sounds like a fun, if average, Classic Who serial. To be honest, my original interest in the story was piqued by several fan-nonsense things present in the uncensored Killing Stone version. For one thing, I'm a big fan of the Master. This story opens partway through Planet of the Spiders and ends after that serial has concluded, when the Third Doctor has returned from space. Given that that trip to space was what killed him and caused him to regenerate, the original story starts in the hands of the Third Doctor and ends with the Tom Baker incarnation. The Master, meanwhile, is portrayed as the bearded incarnation of the Third Doctor's era, played by Roger Delgado. Because Delgado tragically died in a car crash before the end of Three's era, the only versions of the Master that Baker's Doctor fought were the disfigured version played by Peter Pratt and Geoffrey Beevers, and the again-bearded incarnation played by Anthony Ainley. I love every incarnation of the Master, but to see Delgado's take go up against the Fourth Doctor is a fantasy I share with a lot of Whovians. More relevantly to the book, however: I am also a fan of Mike Yates. While I love all of the UNIT family companions, Yates presented a lot of depth to the UNIT era, clearly having a vivid life outside of work, uncommonly for early Who, having a set character arc. I don't know if Mike would be in my Top Ten or even Top Fifteen list for favorite companions, but he was a nice character to see.

And this brings me to a pressing issue I have with Operation H.A.T.E.: there is a reason why, typically, actors do not write their own scripts. While certainly there are many actors who write and direct with as much skill as they show in acting, this is usually because their acting training has informed them that there are limits you have to impose on yourself when it comes to writing the characters whom you portray. Before I go further, I just want to say: Richard, I love your work. I am gladdened by the fact that you still love the character of Captain Yates, and you are an awesome actor--at some point I plan on buying the audio stories you with Tom Baker and AudioGo because they sound excellent. This is not an attack on you, and I will never oppose anyone publishing any book they want. If it's true that everyone has a story, by all means, tell it.

However, I can't read about the adventures of "Captain M" without the names Mary Sue and Miles Gloriosus coming to mind. Operation H.A.T.E. not only endows Yates/Bigglesworth with superhuman skills, cunning, wisdom, and handsomeness, but it does so while also shoving down the rest of the cast...and while continuously reminding us of just how amazing he is, and how stupid everyone else is. Now, I absolutely believe that this was done with the best intentions in mind, even though the ad blurbs for the book, and endless passages about Mike's backstory that suddenly become much more detailed than anything else, really do show us that Captain M is supposed to be Franklin with Yates' career (which complicates things when you wonder if some of the book's more damning offenses are meant to be products of Yates' perspective rather than Franklin's writing, and that the book's faults are done on purpose). I do have to wonder if any of Franklin's fellow Who actors have read his interpretations of their characters next to the Mighty Yates. To put it bluntly, everyone but Yates is an imbecile, reduced to their very base traits. Some characters end up getting fairer treatment than others, with there being at least one scene that only just exaggerates the spittle between the Brig and the Doctor, and where Benton gets one of those moments where he's genuinely clever, in his own way. Jo and Sarah Jane don't get that; Jo is a ditz in the show, but here it's basically her only trait. Sarah Jane cries, yes, but here...it's basically her only trait. Women are generally described only by their prettiness, and I think there are other female characters beside the pre-established ones ported over from Who, but they don't last, instead being present largely for Yates to ogle at.

As with himself and Yates, Franklin binds attributes of actors to their characters. It is briefly mentioned that Jo is "blind as a bat," and apparently Katy Manning, who played Jo, did require a lot of help on the set as a result of poor eyesight. Fair enough. But then we see that the last UNIT has heard of the Master was that he died in an accident with his traveling machine, in Turkey...the same fate as Roger Delgado. To throw the real-life death of an actor whom one co-starred with into such a farcical story alongside something like an inside-joke regarding an actress' bad eyes is more than a little tasteless. Unfortunately, the presence of the Master also exposes the story's issues with race. Franklin is someone who is probably not fond of "political correctness" but there does seem to be some implicit belief that the reader thinks Arabs are evil, or at the very least, weird and mysterious. The Master is disguised as an Arab when he poses as the snake charmer, but even afterwards there are references to the darkness of his skin, at one point even making the point of contrasting Mike's whiteness to him as a symbol of good versus evil. True, Roger Delgado was usually typecast as an evil person of color (usually Hispanic or Arabic), so presumably this is another inside-joke gone wrong, but there is a taste of imperialism here.

I won't comment on the quality of the prose itself, simply because writing is not Franklin's chief profession. Though he makes some shoutouts to Sherlock Holmes and the Bigglesworth books (as well as implying that Mike got a PPK from Q Branch), Franklin commits something I've seen in other inexperienced writers: the sentence structure, and word choice, to an extent, resemble something you'd see in a kid's book. It is passable, and I've been mean enough.

You'll note that I've been referring to the characters generally by their Doctor Who names; unfortunately I don't believe that this one really works as an original novel. It seems to have been intended to simply be a Who novel under code. I won't condemn that--I have some complicated views on fanfiction and copyright, which is another story for another day. But even if you can follow the background elements, referencing what are ultimately Doctor Who episodes, you're left with a book that exists in a world uncannily similar to Doctor Who, with characters resembling ones from Doctor Who, by an author who had a regular role in Doctor Who. And that's going to mean a certain degree of continuity lockout for the average reader, but let's be fair here. I don't know if I would've found this if I was not a fan of the show, and I think that's typical. This is a book for the most intense of Captain Yates fans.

Operation H.A.T.E. will never be one of the worst books I've read, but I can't say I was expecting the faults the book ultimately contained. It's a piece of Doctor Who obscura resurrected ten years after it's creation, for all the good and ill that that implies. There's certainly a fair share of fun moments...again, I won't pass up the fanwank fun of a Fourth Doctor/Delgado!Master meetup. But in the end, it is rather like your grandpa (a good and solid grandpa, not one who gets you Plug and Plays when you ask for XBox games) writing a sci-fi story for the very first time--clumsy and occasionally embarrassing.

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Image Source: Timelash.com

Book Club of Desolation #9: Weasels Ripped My Flesh! (2012), by Robert Deis et al.

Even if I was a man, I wouldn't get men. I didn't get men when I did feel like I was a man. That's why I turned out not to be one.

I don't claim to get women, either. I don't claim to get humans. That's why I'm a shitty writer. Well, ordinarily, I would say that. Apparently, there's not great necessity to understand human function to be a good writer. I mean, the business is chiefly based around lying, and I like to think that I'm decent at lying when I do have to say I know people. And that lying, I think, empowers me. And I like the fact that writing gives me infinite power. It gives me the chance to use my imagination and it's meant that exact thing to billions of humans throughout history.

It means that writing has a lot of variety to it. I respect that variety, deeply, and I've tried to read everything. I like a lot of "good" books, and also, as you know, a lot of weird shit. I recently discovered I like some Westerns. I had a chance to read this thing called Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires, which appears to be a political brochure talking about anxiety in Argentina in the '70s which turns into Fantomas fanfiction. The Book Club of Desolation has brought me to a lot of these books, and I started to plan out this month's event, to follow up on the conclusion of Spookyween. I propose thus to the reader a BOOKVEMBER, where the Book Club of Desolation will meet weekly for a month to discuss this great variety in literature. We need to get to something that I never would have checked out before now, because I have mixed feelings about it, even after reading a full volume of it. Get your deodorant ready, bros, because we're diving into the Armpit Slicks--Men's Adventure magazines.

Don't get me wrong, the Men's Adventure genre had pulled at me for sometime, because to be frank, I find that shit hilarious. I've had regrets about passing up 100 Mack Bolans for a dollar at a garage sale. Lord knows that would be a fun piece for this site. And I'll probably end up checking out that Donald Westlake pseudo-James Bond novel at some point. But I will say this, and this is the only time I say it: the lure here is purely an ironic one, or, in more/less pretentious terms, an anthropological one. Most of the content on this site that I appreciate I enjoy unironically. If I'm going to be reading Men's Adventure, though, it has to be because I want to poke fun. For some time, I've known about the original "Weasels Ripped My Flesh" story, which I learned about through the film of the same name. It was convenient of Robert Deis, Josh Alan Friedman, and Wyatt Doyle to entitle this book after that famous story, so that people like me could strike the motherlode with a good intro primer for the Men's Adventure genre. And despite what I may end up saying about this book, I owe all of those fine gentlemen much, because stories like these are valuable and worth preserving. The variety of literature and art is worth preserving if framed in the right context. And yet, also, hanging it out in the air to dry, as it is, for everyone to form their own interpretations--that's important to me too. I guess I should just present this book rather than pass judgment on it--though, incidentally, I will also pass judgment on it.

Usually when I do a short story collection I want to examine each story on its own to the best of my ability. However, there are a lot of stories in this book, and so in general I'll be talking about the book as a whole. There are some common threads between the stories, and the book in turn presents more than just the stories, so it in turn has to be looked at in layers. We'll start with the stories.

I was able to pin down about four basic categories for the stories contained in this book: Killer Creatures, Sociological Studies, Adventure, and Woman-Haters. All of these overlap and interact in some ways, so they're not hard definitions. Killer Creature stories are the namesake of the book and this one has some good ones. It's satisfying to read the original "Weasels" story (which would inspire Zappa who would inspire Schiff), and it's also nice to know that I live in the same universe as a formally published story called "Monkey Madness." These stories probably inspired the wave of animals-gone-berserk movies in the '70s and '80s, like (just off the top of my head) Frogs, Dogs, Strays, Slugs, Grizzly, and Squirm--to say nothing of Jaws. This was seen by some as an opportunity to resurrect the good ol' giant monster flick, leading to movies like Island Claws and Food of the Gods. I'll probably delve into those soon enough with a collection of cryptozoology-themed Men's Adventures put out by the same team. The Killer Creatures are a blast, and it's a good idea to open with one. It drew me even if later elements shoved me back out. Plus, the editors included a master list of all of the animals that have been featured in this kind of story: it included the obvious ones like ants, lions, crocodiles, tigers, sharks...but also anteaters, lemmings, newts, badgers, and iguanas. Excellent.

The Sociological Studies are what they sound like--reports or inside stories about scandalous topics. They vary in quality and, as you may expect have not aged well. Stories about the horrors of Beat culture will be amusing--racism-laden tales bashing Calypso music won't be. I can't properly gauge the lesbian expose stories, of which there are several. These are the literary equivalents of Mondo movies. They are tedious, offensive, and have aged badly, albeit not as badly as some of the other pieces. Have I mentioned this book doesn't support modern values yet...?

The Adventure stories I found to be somewhat boring, though there was a story that was done pretty professionally by Harlan Ellison, shriveled prick through he was. I should say here that if you can imagine the narration from a Something Weird B&W release, you can imagine the prose style of most of the stories in this book. Hardboiled into oblivion. Throw in war stories played straight and you've got me snoozing, and throw in racism and you've got me mad. I don't know what else to say about these ones.

And then we come at last to the Woman Haters. Man, these were a hard sit, but in the trainwreck sort of way. I really had difficulty putting these down even though they were some of the most monstrous stories of the collection--I blame my immunization to such things on having watched so many exploitation movies. Some of these really do give you insight into the sick fucks who were behind a lot of this. I got excited for "Grisly Rites of Hitler's Flesh Stripper" only to be disappointed (when I shouldn't have been) that it was merely an excuse for a nameless, faceless sexy lady to be repeatedly raped and mutilated by a Nazi for x number of pages. While these stories are offensive to basically everyone, sexism is their most prominent issue. And yet there's always something that's compelled me to look into the sick side of our culture, and I know it's not a unique trait. In this case, I don't think I have an explanation for it. I am probably a bad person in my own right.

But, to defend myself somewhat, I do want to step away from the layer of the stories and instead look at the book itself. The editors feature introductions to many of the stories, along with several introductions to the book as a whole--this is also seeded with interviews from some of the guys responsible for the big content of this market, including Mario Puzo. All of this is loaded with a rich history of the genre, showing how fast-moving of a market it was. It's easy for a modern reader to view this material as the Kindle porn market or clickbait "news" sites of the time. And like any sort of "bottom barrel" market, it's an important part of history, because people aren't reading "art," they're reading this stuff. Of course, that won't stop us from writing "art," as well as also writing "this stuff" to pay the bills. Such is the life. Take Mario Puzo for instance: he wrote trash, and yet an adaptation of one of his novels is considered by some to be the best film ever. I'll always walk on the artsy idealistic side of things, but man, do those cynical, realist, "economist-type" writers get the big breaks...

So naturally, the editorial stuff is going to be great for history lovers. The third layer, then, is the art: the team has lovingly reproduced hundreds of vintage covers, pages, and ads from several decades' worth of magazines. This is pure eye candy for fans of the hilarious. Thrill to the things that made your grandparents and great-grandparents hot on the forehead! It's nearly impossible to believe that these images were once printed and sold, and yet more importantly it makes one wonder what will be considered trash-treasure in the future, which we take for granted today?

This is a book where the actual content would fall apart without context. The book itself is so well put together that it's worth getting for the notes and images. It creates a historicity for a genre that we can't take straight anymore--even if the values live on (we need look no further than to our modern politics for that). Deis, Friedman, and Doyle deserve recognition for their work, and to top it all off, Mr. Deis himself signed my copy. If you can survive the horrors of Wanton Witch, you can make it with this one. Try it out if it's your speed. All I can say for now is that I'm hyped for this cryptozoology book.

Bookvember continues next time with a look at English sci-fi...of a very particular brand.

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Image Source: New Texture