All apologies to Grant Wood, but there's something almost paradoxical about the idea of an American gothic. Certainly, the lack of standard genre trappings and settings doesn't help: America's most famous castle is probably Disney's Snow White Castle. But, more importantly, it's the combination of a prevailing American fantasy of self-invention, our amnesiac's sense of history, and the vastness of the American landscape that all work against it. Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy both riffed off this idea in bits each did regarding the Amityville Horror flick. The former involved a man giving ever stupider justifications as to why he wouldn't move from a haunted house ("Sure, the kids turn into bats; but the value of the land alone . . .") and the latter was about how short the flick would have been if the comedian had been the one living in the house ("What a lovely old house." "Get out." "Too bad we can't stay though . . ."). Gags aside, both jokes speak to the same point: How could one get tangled in the web of associations and implication of the traditional gothic when you can always just move and start over? If Disney's fairy-tale castle is our most famous keep, it's telling that its "occupants" are predominantly tourists breezing through on their way to Tomorrowland.
Despite this seeming incongruity, there's a rich thread of dark romanticism in American lit. Poe got around the problem of the unsuitability of American soil by planting his tales in an imagined Europe. Hawthorne used the insular social world of New England as his isolated and sealed off environment (ironically, he was unable to keep his grim Puritan poker face when he moved the setting of his last novel to Europe, native home of the gothic). The haunting legacy of slavery and bloody defeat provided the sense of unavoidable accursedness necessary to fuel an entire school of Southern gothic works, from Faulkner to Wise Blood to Beloved. Though its now seen as slumming, there was a time when even the country's most urbane writers would craft the occasional gothic: James's Turn of the Screw and Wharton's Ethan Frome being the iconic examples. A coalition of often nameless, probably underpaid copy-engines kept a cottage industry of mass market paperback gothics on the shelves, reaching some sort of cultural highwater mark in the 1970s – when Rice became a perennial seller and Flowers in the Attic became a touchstone of illicit YA tween chick lit.
Still, the dominant features of America's mythical landscape tends to be open roads, not mist shrouded moors; bustling cities, not decaying manor houses; well-tended suburban lawns, not crumbling family cemeteries. This gives the whole goth tradition, despite its long history, something of a pulpy, not-quite-respectable appeal. Done well, a good gothic delivers serious literary quality and, somehow, still feels vaguely naughty. Imagine art-porn that was, impossibly, both good art and good porn – that's the kick of a good American gothic tale.
It's this kick readers can find in the tricky postmodernism of Castle, by J. Robert Lennon, and the aggressively retro-gothic A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick. The former is a clever update of some traditional gothic tropes while the latter is expertly-handled throwback, a richly imagined gothic that feel like it could have sat on shelves next to Wharton's famous book nearly a century ago (except for all the frank descriptions of semi-incestuous sex, of course).
The high-concept pitch for Castle - it's Deliverance by way of Kafka, with just a hint of Frankenstein for spice notes – promises boatloads of weirdness. Lennon delivers on this promise admirably. Eric Loesch, an Iraq War vet with a tangled family history and nasty scandal hanging over his military record, returns to his hometown in upstate New York. He purchases a secluded house out where he plans to live out his remaining days in hermit-like isolation. This plan hits a surreal snag when Loesch discovers that there a small castle, complete with turrets and everything, smack dab in the middle of his property. This bizarre turn of events takes on a more sinister aspect when it becomes clear that the castle and its mysterious occupant are connected to Eric's guilt-haunted past.
In the best gothic tradition, Lennon takes the metaphoric connections between people and places and manifests them. Just Poe made Usher's skull-shaped home literally reflect every stress, strain, and crack in the cranium of its unraveling owner, Lennon makes Loesch's story is almost too-nakedly allegorical: A man with a troubled and mysterious past must investigate a lock-up keep situated in the heart of his dark private forest. Not the most subtle extended metaphorical conceit committed to paper, granted; but the gothic tradition hasn't generally been big on subtlety. Strip away the contemporary trappings and Castle's set-up wouldn't feel out of place in a Shirley Jackson novel or one of Lovecraft's weird tales of twisted, doomed families.
Where Lennon most clearly breaks with the gothic tradition is the telling is in the voice of Eric Loesch. Operatic emotions explored through explosions of overheated prose are a hallmark of the genre. But Loesch is a maddeningly different creature. Loesch's narrative voice is the Lennon's secret weapon. Emotionally dry (almost barren, really) and meticulous, bitterly defensive and self-assured, Loesch's narration is a hypnotic drone that lulls readers into a false sense of confidence. He seems like he doesn't belong in his own novel, like he walked in from some nature-writer's book or from a quiet domestic novel about the desperate and restrained lives of New England families. But, as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that he's not only an unreliable narrator, but that he's more damaged and insane than anybody in book (with the possible exception of our mystery castle-dweller).
Lennon expertly shifts between exacting detail and fantastic horror, giving his tale the crisp realism of a well-remembered nightmare. The end result is somewhat marred by an awkward attempt to create a metaphorical parallel to the prisoner torture scandals of the War on Terror, the results of which are neither insightful or illuminating. Still, aside from that one misstep, Lennon's curious thriller is a refreshingly odd slice of genre fiction and it is bound to please fans of "new weird" horror and genre bending mysteries. Castle is published by Greywolf Press and streets in April.
In contrast to The Castle's updated approach, Goolrick's A Reliable Wife is a full-on, unapologetic, old school gothic. Set in the first decade of the 20th Century, the novel focuses on the tangled lives of four characters: the aging but still powerful Ralph Truitt, wealthy and isolated founder of Truitt, Wisconsin; Catherine Lamb, his mail order bride with a tainted past and murderous intentions; Antonio, the illegitimate son of Truitt's first wife and a music teacher, a bitter libertine who has swoon revenge on Truitt; and, through her ghostly and suffocating absence, Truitt's ex-wife, the mad and decadent Emily. If the dramatis personae didn't tell you what kind of book we're talking about here, the locales – the opium dens, a seemingly perpetually snowed in farm house, and an abandoned European-style mansion built in the middle of nowhere – and plot – a murderous conspiracy, secret identities, guilty pasts, suggestions of sadomasochistic and incestuous relationships – evoke everything from Wuthering Heights and Rebecca to the works of de Sade and Poe.
In contrast to the tight-lipped narrator of The Castle, Goolrick's prose is intricate, elaborate, and intense. Reflecting the genre's pre-Freudian roots, the traditional gothic's purple prose is partially the result of the minute observation of extreme mental states without falling back on the medical shorthand of pathological labels. (Indeed, the ascension of therapy culture is, in some ways, partially responsible for the decay of the gothic tale's stature: forcing it into strictly supernatural byways or rendering it strangely quaint.) Goolrick recaptures this intensity in prose that feels vintage without feeling recycled or tired. His doomed, beautiful creations contain thunderous emotional storms, all of them described in pleasingly obsessive detail.
Goolrick's made a wonderful book about damaged people doing horrible things to one another. It's entertaining without feeling thin, dark without being draining, and twisted without being heartless. A Reliable Wife is going to have the Algonquin Books logo on its spine and will be available March 31st.
Now somebody's going to have to knit the prostate of Jason Voorhees
And you thought there wasn't anything scary about the Twilight franchise.
In what might be the weirdest display of fandom I've ever encountered, here's the womb of Twilight heroine Bella, complete with half-human/half-vampire mutant fetus, made out of felt.
Space rock
Regular readers know that I've got a handful of critical blindspots. No matter how discerning I may try to be, any work that falls in one of those blindspots is getting a more than a fair shake on this blog. These aesthetic Achilles heels include, but are not limited to:
1. giant alligators and/or crocodiles 2. lucha flicks 3. horror or sci-fi themed rock groups 4. anything in which the Creature from the Black Lagoon makes an appearance
The Spotnicks, Sweden's finest Space Age themed surf rock combo, belongs in category 3. Here's their "Rocket Man," performed in full-battle dress.
Cannibal holocaust?
According to CNN:
Five members of the [Amazonian] Kulina tribe are on the run after being accused of murdering, butchering and eating a farmer in a ritual act of cannibalism.
No arrest warrants have been issued because Brazilian authorities are legally restricted from entering Kulina tribal lands, near the Brazil/Peru border.
The victim was herding cattle when he met with a group of Indians who invited him back to their village.
"They knew each other and they sometimes helped one another. They invited him to their reservation three days ago and he was never seen again," Clementino [Village Chief of Staff for the Brazilian town of Envira - CRwM] said.
"The family decided to go into the reservation and that's when they saw his body quartered and his skull hanging on a tree. It was very tragic for the family," he said. "Who counts dead humans?"
While there's a lot of academic blah blah to wade through, there are more than a few gems worth discussing amongst fans of supernatural horror. Here's Khapaeva on the social context of Russian horror/fantasy:
The nightmare of post-Soviet fiction, which is full of macabre atrocities, consists not only in the triumph of supernatural forces over humans. It is also to be found in the absence of any plausible distinctions between good and evil, which results in the advocacy of narrow-minded selfishness. The main novelty of gothic morality consists in its attitude towards morality itself. Morality is considered something to be avoided, something that can influence the hero's life in the most negative way: "If this guy gave up his selfish wheeling and dealing, his life would certainly become worse. The more morality, the more misfortune", says the vampire-hero of Night Watch. True, such an attitude towards morality stems from a radical reconsideration of the place of humans in the general system of values. Morality as such is dismissed as an irrelevant atavism. Indeed, what moral norms could be applicable to monsters, to vampires – to non-humans?
Of course, the new attitudes towards morality revealed by the world of fantasy fiction are not reducible to the difference between "fiction" and "reality". A simple mental experiment helps to prove this statement. If we remove the vampires, werewolves and witches from these narratives and substitute them with cops, gangsters and their victims, if we parenthesize the witchcraft and the magic, the story would not differ much from a pale description of everyday Russian life.
Curiously, while American's like to frame horror and fantasy in terms of liberation – either in the form of a coded embrace of the other (monster in the closetism) or in the form of some tricked out post-Freudian model of suppressed desires (the turgid sexuality of neo-Victorian high horrorists) – Kaphaeva sees a very different dynamic at work in post-Soviet gothic works:
The main feature of gothic morality consists neither in a rejection of the old ethical system ("hypocritical Soviet morality"), nor in an embrace of a new ethical system (the "strict but fair" rules of the mafia). Gothic morality is a denial of any abstract system of values that could be considered equally pertinent for all members of a given community. Consequently, moral judgment becomes concrete, situational and totally subjective, a deictic gesture that assigns the predicate "good" or "bad" to this or that concrete practice taking place here and now. Power to make such a "moral judgment" is restricted to the boss – the head of the clan, the mafia godfather, the director of a company or rector of a university. The compromise reached by the different clans is also concrete and situational, and is justified not in terms of universal values but in terms of the personal relations between the heads of the clans.
The total denial of morality leads to a cult of force. Gothic morality considers murder an everyday routine – who counts (dead) humans? "Life against death, love against hate, and force against force, because force is above morality. It's that simple," concludes the hero of Night Watch.
She ultimately sees post-Soviet gothic horror and fantasy as creepy, nihilistic resurrection of a sort of cultural Stalinism:
Gothic society does not simply generate a social alternative to democracy: it profits from every loss of democracy. Gothic society has no respect for individuality or privacy, and openly contradicts the idea of human rights. Such social organization leaves no room for public politics and leads to the closing of the public sphere.
She ends with perhaps the bleakest description of Russian social dynamics I've ever read, evoking a system "zona": a form of political and criminal oppression that flourished in the Soviet Era gulag system.
The most important feature of gothic society is the way the zona, the particular form of Soviet camp, is converted into a founding principle of post-Soviet society. Since the inception of the Gulag, the Bolshevik policy was to mix criminals with political prisoners. Criminals were considered by the Soviet regime "socially proximal" and were allowed to impose criminal norms on the rest of the prisoners, thus helping the wardens to run the Gulag.
The zona permeates various aspects of social life and relations in Russia; its legacy is not limited to the post-Soviet prison and army. Aside from its most notorious and obvious manifestations – such as camp slang's transmogrification into the language of power and literature, the convergence of mafia and state; or the unbelievable degree of corruption – the rules of the zona are reproduced in the principles of social organization. The total absence of resistance to camp culture, the incapacity, due to the long tradition of their contamination under the Soviet regime, to distinguish clearly between the zona and "normal life", and the unwillingness to reflect on the history of the concentration camp make today's Russia especially vulnerable to a gothic path of development.
Even I, Lucas, attended the NYC Comic Con
Here's a little snappy snap of everybody's favorite Gill Man at the NYC Comic Con.
And, while we're on the subject of Comic Con, here's a boss Cobra Commander outfit somebody worked up.
Finally, though it was a great costume, this dude in the well-executed Blackhawk costume didn't seem to get much love in the post-Con costume pic collections. Perhaps the reference just doesn't snap with kids today. At ease, flyboy; ANTSS still digs you.
Shots at the Twilight film, and the YA novel series that spawned it, are now about as common on horror blogs as RSS feeds and follower lists. Not too long ago, I took a jab at the series, despite having never read any of the books or seen the film in question. That's pretty lousy of me, I reckon; though I can take some small measure of comfort in the fact that I'm far from alone. As of this writing, I've seen blogs that make unfavorable apples and oranges comparisons between the tween-oriented franchise and the mediocre soft-core vamp flicks that poured out of 1970s Europe and into the Gen X horror fan's consciousness like some polluting tanker spill of cinematic sludge. Other, perhaps less dubious projects, include efforts to detail crypto-Mormon propaganda hidden in the works and diatribes that suggest the books' sado-masochistic undertones program young women in assuming that abusive relationships are the norm. Capable of being both an anti-sex abstinence tract and perverse ode to violent eroticism, Twilight and its sibling tomes are apparently the critical equivalent of the shmoo: the most useful beast the critical world has ever known.
This is not to say that these criticism aren't all correct. (Well, excepting the one that claims that Twilight is less subversive than the fangs and boobies flicks of the Euro-trash cinema set – the latter being "subversive" only to the degree that selling she-flesh to audiences looking for cheap thrills, a multicentury tradition in Western culture and the key market strategy of the world's oldest profession, can be thought to be subversive. That criticism is just wrong.) Twilight may be all these vile things and more.
But still, it's nice to hear an opposing viewpoint.
The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.
About the steamy (not so steamy?) parts, with an interesting note on the important role the supernatural plays in the book's thematic scheme:
The erotic relationship between Bella and Edward is what makes this book—and the series—so riveting to its female readers. There is no question about the exact nature of the physical act that looms over them. Either they will do it or they won’t, and afterward everything will change for Bella, although not for Edward. Nor is the act one that might result in an equal giving and receiving of pleasure. If Edward fails—even once—in his great exercise in restraint, he will do what the boys in the old pregnancy-scare books did to their girlfriends: he will ruin her. More exactly, he will destroy her, ripping her away from the world of the living and bringing her into the realm of the undead. If a novel of today were to sound these chords so explicitly but in a nonsupernatural context, it would be seen (rightly) as a book about "abstinence," and it would be handed out with the tracts and bumper stickers at the kind of evangelical churches that advocate the practice as a reasonable solution to the age-old problem of horny young people. (Because it takes three and a half very long books before Edward and Bella get it on—during a vampiric frenzy in which she gets beaten to a pulp, and discovers her Total Woman—and because Edward has had so many decades to work on his moves, the books constitute a thousand-page treatise on the art of foreplay.) That the author is a practicing Mormon is a fact every reviewer has mentioned, although none knows what to do with it, and certainly none can relate it to the novel; even the supercreepy "compound" where the boring half of Big Love takes place doesn’t have any vampires. But the attitude toward female sexuality—and toward the role of marriage and childbearing—expressed in these novels is entirely consistent with the teachings of that church. In the course of the four books, Bella will be repeatedly tempted—to have sex outside of marriage, to have an abortion as a young married woman, to abandon the responsibilities of a good and faithful mother—and each time, she makes the "right" decision. The series does not deploy these themes didactically or even moralistically. Clearly Meyer was more concerned with questions of romance and supernatural beings than with instructing young readers how to lead their lives. What is interesting is how deeply fascinated young girls, some of them extremely bright and ambitious, are by the questions the book poses, and by the solutions their heroine chooses.
Connecting the novel's plot to classic gothic romances, notably Jane Eyre, Flanagan suggests that there's something primal about the story, even for today's readers.
The Twilight series is not based on a true story, of course, but within it is the true story, the original one. Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time. And it’s selling through the roof.
And later:
Think, for a moment, of the huge teen-girl books of the past decade. "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" is about female empowerment as it's currently defined by the kind of jaded, 40-something divorcées who wash ashore at day spas with their grizzled girlfriends and pollute the Quiet Room with their ceaseless cackling about the uselessness of men. They are women who have learned certain of life's lessons the hard way and think it kind to let young girls understand that the sooner they grasp the key to a happy life (which essentially boils down to a distaff version of "Bros before hos"), the better. In "Sisterhood," four close friends might scatter for the summer—encountering everything from ill-advised sex with a soccer coach to the unpleasant discovery that Dad's getting remarried—but the most important thing, the only really important thing, is that the four reunite and that the friendships endure the vicissitudes of boys and romance. Someday, after all, they will be in their 50s, and who will be there for them—really there for them—then? The boy who long ago kissed their bare shoulders, or the raspy-voiced best friend, bleating out hilarious comments about her puckered fanny from the next dressing room over at Eileen Fisher? "Gossip Girl," another marketing sensation, replaces girls' old-fashioned need for male love and tenderness—these chippies could make a crack whore look like Clara Barton—with that for shopping and brand names. Notoriously set in an Upper East Side girls school that seems to combine elements of Nightingale-Bamford with those of a women's correctional facility after lights-out, the book gives us a cast of young girls whose desire for luxury goods (from Kate Spade purses to Ivy League–college admissions) is so nakedly hollow that the displacement of their true needs is pathetic. "Prep"—a real novel, not the result of a sales-team brainstorm—derives much of its pathos from the fact that the main character is never sure whether the boy she loves so much, and has had so many sexual encounters with, might actually constitute that magical, bygone character: her "boyfriend." The effect of "Prep" on teenagers is reminiscent of that of "The Catcher in the Rye": both books describe that most rarefied of social worlds, the East Coast boarding school, and yet young readers of every socioeconomic level have hailed them for revealing the true nature of their inner life. In "Prep," the heroine wants something so fundamental to the emotional needs of girls that I find it almost heartbreaking: she wants to know that the boy she loves, and with whom she has shared her body, loves her and will put no other girl in her place.
Bella, despite all of her courage and competence, manages to end up in scrape after scrape: finding herself in the path of a runaway car, fainting at school, going shopping in a nearby city and getting cornered by a group of malevolent, taunting men. And over and over, out of nowhere, shoving the speeding car out of her way, or lifting her up in his arms, or scaring the bejesus out of the men who would harm her, is Edward. And at last, while she is recuperating from the near-rape, with a plate of ravioli in a café near the alley, he reveals all. Not since Maxim de Winter's shocking revelation—"You thought I loved Rebecca? … I hated her"—has a sweet young heroine received such startling and enrapturing news. As he gradually explains, Edward has been avoiding and scorning Bella not because he loathes her but because he is so carnally attracted to her that he cannot trust himself to be around her for even a moment. The mere scent of her hair is powerful enough that he is in a constant struggle to avoid taking—and thereby destroying—her. This is a vampire novel, so it is a novel about sex, but no writer, from Bram Stoker on, has captured so precisely what sex and longing really mean to a young girl.
Though I found Flanagan's defense of the series – fueled by both literary insight and personal anecdote – very persuasive, I still have some reservations. Being something of a bargain basement empiricist (by which I mean I'm one of those thick-headed yahoos who can't be told), I had to see how the book behaved outside the lab of lit theory.
Taking to heart the idea that this was something only a young girl could really understand, I found the supposed "perfect" reader of Twilight. Ruby is the only daughter of my neighbor's who live a few doors down. She's a voracious reader of novels and comics – she's also a novice on the piano and huge fan of Disney's unstoppable High School Musical franchise. Curiously, she's also a big David Bowie fan, but she's got no particular love for the Beatles – something her heartbroken parents, who feel Bowie is some avatar for a morally deadening post-60's hyperreal vacuity, confided in me.
Ruby has read the book Twilight and she was not impressed. She said it was boring. She enjoyed the action scenes and the scary parts, but she found the author's attention to the physical beauty of the male lead – the vampire lover Edward – tedious and, ultimately, a deal-breaker. She did not read past the first book. She saw the movie, but mostly out of a sense of social obligation: all her friends were going, it would be gauche to avoid it on something as inconsequential as objections over quality. Ruby enjoyed the movie better than the book. She felt that it was vast improvement just showing how pretty Edward was, instead of talking about it over and over.
I have no pets. I own several ties, but rarely have a reason to wear any of them. I sing in the shower but can never remember the words, so I make them up as I go along, and they always end up being songs about showering. I collect slang dictionaries.
