Books: Bizarre art-by-the-pound stately pleasure dome.

About three-fourths of the way into Mat Johnson's new novel, Pym, we meet a hack landscape painter, unapologetically modeled on the master of mall art Thomas Kinkade, who, after adopting an apocalyptic millennial strain of Tea Party ideology, uses the massive profits from his schlock empire of oddly illuminated landscapes to create a self-contained biosphere hidden in the icy wastes of Antarctica. There he lives with his wife – a perpetually peeved housewife who secretly grows and smokes pot in the biodome as a tactic in a losing war against boredom and domestic disenchantment – trying to perfect the internal landscape of his arctic layer, quixotically wrestling with his purchased reality in an impossible effort to impose his saccharine aesthetic on the world around him. Eventually this artist will be required to take up arms to defend his bizarre art-by-the-pound stately pleasure dome against an invading army of abominable snowmen. And women. And children.

And that doesn't even rank as the weirdest thing in the book. In fact, I don't know that I would even put that up in the top ten.

The log line on Pym is simple. A recently canned African American lit prof finds the journal of Dirk Peters, a supporting character in Edgar Allan Poe's maddeningly eccentric novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which proves that (with some minor liberties) Poe's tale was essentially a true story. In Poe's work, there appears a tribe of black arctic natives (so black that even their teeth are black) that, the ex-professor reasons, must still exist: a black society never touched by the colonialism, slavery, and exploitation that has been the curse of the native African population and its diaspora. Though a series of unlikely connections, an all-African American exploratory crew, led by the professor and following Poe's novel and Peters' journal, sets out to find this lost world of blackness.

And it goes all to hell.

Poe's original Narrative is a grand mess of a book. Characters appear and disappear, the plot regularly flirts with incomprehensibility, and the ending of the book is so abrupt and provocatively illogical and unsatisfying that it is, perhaps justly, widely ignored by the reading public. Those that do read it are often compelled to impose a scrim of explanatory order on it. If you're Herman Melville, Jules Verne or H. P. Lovecraft, you basically rewrite the thing. Melville, who unlike Poe had actual experience with life at sea, stripped everything he thought was nonsense out of the book and recycled what was left into Moby-Dick. Verne and Lovecraft created works, The Sphinx of the Ice Field and "Mountains of Madness" respectively, that defused the work and placed it comfortably within the realm of their own creative endeavors (which is a fascinating case study in the anxiety of influence, as Verne's optimistic humanism and Lovecraft's darkly smoldering nihilism couldn't be further apart; it's as if both author's needed to complete Arthur Gordon Pym in a way that would make Poe their spiritual father, but ended up making two Poe's). Lesser readers often claim, erroneously, that the novel is unfinished. When I first read it, approximately a bazillion years ago, in a Penguin paperback edition – yellow color bar on the spine, Penguin's way of denoting "American literature," as opposed to red, green, or purple (English, Middle East and Asia, and "the Ancients," in order) – from the local library (long since plowed over to make way for an "urban center" of upscale markets and chain restaurants, I'm told), the back cover copy actually stated that the novel was Poe's great unfinished novel. It was more than a decade before I found out I'd read the ending wrong: it’s not an unfortunate cut off, but the most deliberate middle finger ever extended towards the reader in all American literature.

But I digress.

I bring up Verne and Lovecraft because this admittedly limited sample (and we could throw Melville in here too and the conclusion, which you have not yet read, will hold) shows that, in the game of being influenced by Poe's Narrative, the winner is the dude who goes the most afield from Poe's original work. Verne set out to write a work-specific sequel and his novel is rightly forgotten. "Mountains of Madness," on the other hand, requires no knowledge that it is basically a sequel to Poe's Narrative and is justly considered one of the key texts in Lovecraft's body of work.

Johnson gets the Pym Principle: You've got to betray the influence to make it work for you. With it's overly quirky cast, it's pulpy narrative drive, and it unembarrassed willingness to discuss it's own themes and make the subtext the text, Johnson's Pym doesn't resemble Poe, but rather Vonnegut. Pym's a burlesque horror/satire/adventure/pomo scramble that manages, somehow, to simultaneously never take itself to serious and never treat itself like a joke. The result is an examination of America's perennial obsession racial identity played as if it were a boy's adventure novel.

Well worth the price of admission.

Spiegel and Grau (if that means anything to ya') put up for this party. It's in hardback now and will set you back 24 Washgintons. You could wait for the trade paperback, but that's basically like announcing to the world, "Yeah, a vibrant literary culture of switched-on readers and authors that produce interesting work isn't worth ten bucks to me."

Mad science: Capturing the Imp of the Perverse.

In 1845, Poe published the short work "The Imp of the Perverse" in Graham's Magazine, the magazine that famously published Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and, later, infamously passed over the opportunity to publish "The Raven."

The nearly plotless tale begins with a seemingly objective – but clearly first-person – description of the concept of the "Imp of the Perverse." The "imp" in question is a primitive, illogical, unproductive impulse that the narrator believes is innate to the human mind. From the tale:

Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse-elementary. It will be said, I am aware, that when we persist in acts because we feel we should not persist in them, our conduct is but a modification of that which ordinarily springs from the combativeness of phrenology. But a glance will show the fallacy of this idea. The phrenological combativeness has for its essence, the necessity of self-defence. It is our safeguard against injury. Its principle regards our well-being; and thus the desire to be well is excited simultaneously with its development. It follows, that the desire to be well must be excited simultaneously with any principle which shall be merely a modification of combativeness, but in the case of that something which I term perverseness, the desire to be well is not only not aroused, but a strongly antagonistical sentiment exists.

After quite a bit of similarly thick philosophy, Poe's narrator then explains how he is a victim of the "Imp" himself. The narrator confesses that he murdered a man (using a poisonous candle, like you do) and got away with the crime. However, the impulse to turn himself in to the cops nags at him and, eventually, compels him to work against his best interests and his sense of self-preservation. He confesses to the authorities, is tried, and relates this tale shortly before he's to be taken to the gallows.

The work's form is, in itself, a bit perverse. "The Imp" is an example of Poe's idiosyncratic mini-genre the "essay that turns into a fictional story." What makes these works (his "Premature Burial" is another example of the odd form) weird is that they are self-subverting. In "The Imp," the work seems to advance a theory and then provide exemplary anecdotal evidence in support of that theory. However, the evidence is faked up. The murder and confession are, we know, just an invention of Poe's. Does this mean the theory itself is also just a narrative contrivance? Are we supposed to understand that the first half of the tale presents a sincere observation of human nature or do we put it down as the self-justification of a killer who is trying to convince himself that anybody could commit murder if they'd just been put in his place?

Curiously, some have suggested that the whole thing is a weird justification for what literary historians now dub the "Longfellow War." As part of a larger New York versus Boston culture clash that shaped the direction of American letters in pre-Civil War America (and, as a bizarre side effect, definitely split clam chowder into Manhattan and New England styles – but that's another story), Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had a long-running and nasty public feud. At the time, Poe's star sank and Longfellow's rose partially due to Poe's repeated and seemingly inexplicable public attempts at career suicide, including near hysterical diatribes about imagined conspiracies of Boston literary culture and public readings in which he deliberately alienated his audience (most infamously, after promising a Boston audience a new poem, Poe read his interminable and absurdly obscure early work "Al Araaf," then declared that Boston audiences didn't deserve new works, and then stormed off stage). As a manifesto for flushing one's career down the tubes, "The Imp" more than suffices.

Regardless of the sincerity of Poe's concept and despite his statement that the Imp will not "admit of analysis," the NY Times reports that modern psychologists are attempting to capture the Imp. From the article:

“There are all kinds of pitfalls in social life, everywhere we look; not just errors but worst possible errors come to mind, and they come to mind easily,” said the paper’s author, Daniel M. Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard. “And having the worst thing come to mind, in some circumstances, might increase the likelihood that it will happen.”

The exploration of perverse urges has a rich history (how could it not?), running through the stories of Poe and the Marquis de Sade to Freud’s repressed desires and Darwin’s observation that many actions are performed “in direct opposition to our conscious will.” In the past decade, social psychologists have documented how common such contrary urges are — and when they are most likely to alter people’s behavior.

In a recent paper, Wegner proposes that the actions of the Imp, which the good doctor dubs "ironic errors," are a byproduct of the process of error and taboo avoidance:

At a fundamental level, functioning socially means mastering one’s impulses. The adult brain expends at least as much energy on inhibition as on action, some studies suggest, and mental health relies on abiding strategies to ignore or suppress deeply disturbing thoughts — of one’s own inevitable death, for example. These strategies are general, subconscious or semiconscious psychological programs that usually run on automatic pilot.

Perverse impulses seem to arise when people focus intensely on avoiding specific errors or taboos. The theory is straightforward: to avoid blurting out that a colleague is a raging hypocrite, the brain must first imagine just that; the very presence of that catastrophic insult, in turn, increases the odds that the brain will spit it out.

Interestingly enough, even when it isn't causing overt errors, the Imp can apparently distort our perceptions:

Efforts to be politically correct can be particularly treacherous. In one study, researchers at Northwestern and Lehigh Universities had 73 students read a vignette about a fictional peer, Donald, a black male. The students saw a picture of him and read a narrative about his visit to a mall with a friend.

In the crowded parking lot, Donald would not park in a handicap space, even though he was driving his grandmother’s car, which had a pass, but he did butt in front of another driver to snag a nonhandicap space. He snubbed a person collecting money for a heart fund, while his friend contributed some change. And so on. The story purposely portrayed the protagonist in an ambiguous way.

The researchers had about half the students try to suppress bad stereotypes of black males as they read and, later, judged Donald’s character on measures like honesty, hostility and laziness. These students rated Donald as significantly more hostile — but also more honest — than did students who were not trying to suppress stereotypes.

In short, the attempt to banish biased thoughts worked, to some extent. But the study also provided “a strong demonstration that stereotype suppression leads stereotypes to become hyperaccessible,” the authors concluded.

Photo credit: Jason.

Books: "This is Byronic bunk."

For more than a century, Poe has the poster boy for America's homegrown strain of Dark Romanticism and his biography was often spun to fit the image. Heroically gloomy, perfectly doomed, biographers wrote about Poe as if he were one his own fictions. (In fact, the conceit seems irresistible: numerous films, novels, short stories, and comic books have featured Poe as the main character in Poe-like tales of horror and mystery.)

On the bicentennial anniversary, Poe seems to be going through a major revision. Critics and biographers seem determined to exhume Poe from his own legend. Critics are stressing the variety and craft of his works. Others have tried to save him from being cast as an easily-recognizable, but shallow Goth teen icon. Other's have tried to historicize the seemingly otherworldly author.

The New Yorker joins the revision camp with a profile emphasizing Poe the working artists. Ignoring the long history of treating him as a melancholy isolated genius, the article discusses his naked and mercenary drive for success:

Poe didn’t write “The Raven” to answer the exacting demands of a philosophic Art, or not entirely, anyway. He wrote it for the same reason that he wrote tales like “The Gold-Bug”: to stave off starvation. For a long while, Poe lived on bread and molasses; weeks before “The Gold-Bug” was published, he was begging near-strangers on the street for fifty cents to buy something to eat. “ ‘The Raven’ has had a great ‘run,’ ” he wrote to a friend, “but I wrote it for the express purpose of running—just as I did the ‘Gold-Bug,’ you know. The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow.” The public that swallowed that bird and bug Poe strenuously resented. You love Poe or you don’t, but, either way, Poe doesn’t love you. A writer more condescending to more adoring readers would be hard to find. “The nose of a mob is its imagination,” he wrote. “By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.”

Aside from focusing on Poe's tireless hustling for dough (at his lowest point, Poe was "found starving" by one of his first editors), the essayist also suggests that acute megalomania drove the famed author and informed his work:

In 1841, he published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the story of a crime solved by a code-cracking French detective named C. Auguste Dupin. (The murderer turns out to be an orangutan.) Two more Dupin tales, the world’s first detective stories, followed. With Dupin, Poe channelled his desire to write above his readers—to dupe them—into a character much like himself, a man who had once been wealthy but who, “by a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it.” Dupin has a very Poe-ish intelligence; he is “fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural.” And, like Poe, he gloats about his superior powers of perception, boasting, “with a low chuckling laugh, that most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms.”

If Dupin sounds uncannily familiar, that’s because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, like every other author of detective fiction, not to mention the creators of a thousand TV crime shows, is incalculably in Poe’s debt. “The children of Poe” is what Stephen King calls the members of his guild, and with good reason. But horror stories predate Poe, and have many other sources. Not so the literary sleuth. All detective stories and police procedurals begin with the intellectually imperious C. Auguste Dupin: methodical, eccentric, calculating—and insulting. We, mere readers, are so many Watsons, Hastingses, and Goodwins. Poe is the only Holmes.

Stuff: All net finger roll Edgar Allan Poe off the pick.

So you're a fan of goofy word play, basketball, and Edgar Allan Poe – and you've been wondering when, oh dear God when, somebody would make a t-shirt that allowed you to simultaneously express all these facets of your character.

Your wait, my complicated friend, is over! Now wrap yourself if the pun-tastic Goth hoop madness of Brooklyn Industries new "Poe Dunk" tee.

Music: Hey, you got black death vomit in my party punch! Well you got party punch in my black death vomit!

The Handsome Furs video for their tune "I'm Confused" updates Poe's famous "Masque" with a mini-movie about a hipster house party that goes fatally pear-shaped when a man infected with some insanely contagious malady arrives and starts spreading the love.

Enjoy.


Handsome Furs "I'm Confused" from Sarah Marcus on Vimeo.

Books: Killing Poe in the classroom or "Some motherf*****s just have it comin'."

Good morning my little Screamers and Screamettes. I'm back at the keyboard. I hope the Blog-a-matic 3400 Mark 9 Content Creation System found some interesting material for you while I was gone.

Today, we're going to go a little upmarket and check in at The Smart Set, Drexel University's snark-besotted culture site, and see how they're commemorating the Bicentennial of Poe.

Here's the grabber for the article "Poe at 200":

There are lessons on the horror writer in every American school. And they are crap.

The author goes on:

2009 marks the bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe, arguably the most famed and influential writer in American history. Not only does his work entirely limn the culture, but he also created no fewer than two genres of popular fiction — mystery and modern horror — almost single-handedly. Virtually anyone in the U.S. can recite his poetry (a few lines here and there, at least). His personal life and ambitions inform the clichés of the starving writer in his garret and that of the mad genius. And it's nigh impossible for someone to graduate from an American high school without having read him.

Poe was also a player of hoaxes, a plagiarist, had a substance abuse problem, and couldn't keep a roof over his head. Poe was a proponent of slavery, the worst sort of would-be social climber, and married a 13-year-old girl in his cousin Virginia Clemm. None of this information is new, of course — these fun facts are probably the answers to a fill-in-the-blank quiz given each year in some sixth-grade classroom in Ohio. The problem is that Poe has been so completely taught that he is very rarely read with the eyes of a reader.

Unlike Hawthorne, with whom he is often paired in criticism and in those awful "language arts" classes, Poe had little interest in portraying a true-to-life America or plumbing our historical discontents. Many of his stories take place in a world either fancifully sketched out or left purposefully ambiguous. In stories such as "The Tell-Tale Heart," the confession the narrator gives in order to prove his sanity occurs in a functional vacuum. The settings of "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Man of the Crowd," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" could be identified as Spain, Venice, London, and Paris, but the locations are more like panoramas made from magazine clippings than they are representations of the actual places. Poe even moved American stories, such as the true crime of the murder of Mary Rogers in Hoboken, New Jersey, to an explicitly parallel universe in which the murder finds its double in Paris: In "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" the Seine spells the Hudson River, and the Paris of the story is rather oddly New Jersey-shaped.

Poe's stories won't lead to ersatz history lessons about the Puritans or any of the moral instruction that too often accompanies the reading of literature in schools. They don't exist here, or anywhere else we could identify on a map as part of a dual language arts/social studies curriculum.

Later, in what I think is the most thought provoking part of the article, we get a rundown of Poe's amoral approach to horror – an approach the article's writer contrasts with other crypto-moralistic modes of "transgression":

Poe was one of the first authors of modern horror in that he was not interested in resolving the social trespasses his work depicted with pat morally correct endings or appeals to cosmic justice. In this way, he was also one of the only modern purveyors of dark fiction. The bloodiest slasher flicks often betray a Puritanical ideology, with only the virginal characters allowed to survive. Gangsta rappers love their mamas and write songs about them. Noir writers made sure their sleuths had a code of ethical conduct, even if it only consisted of a single line they would not cross but that the baddies they hunted would. Stephen King's novels summon up dark miracles that threaten families, towns, and occasionally civilization itself, but these evils are put down more often than not thanks to the power of friendship.

You can find "Two-Fisted Poe" and other wacky delights in Martin Kupperman's Snake 'n' Bacon's Cartoon Cabaret.

Stuff: "Art" is just the last three letters of "Holy moley! That dude's head is falling apart!"

Okay, okay. I'd feel a lit bit like Count Floyd trying to convince you that today's entry was scary.

'Cause, let's be honest, we're going to be talking about the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

That's right, boys and girls. The macabre Met. Very scary, kids.

Seriously though, they've currently got a couple of boss exhibits up for those with a soft spot for the spooky, so I thought I'd drop the dime and let y'all in on them. Besides, the price is right. All day, everyday, pay what you want.

First, head to the drawings and prints display on the second floor, just left of the main staircase.

In 1875, the French poet Mallarme managed to snag Édouard Manet as the illustrator for his translation of Poe's "The Raven," from which the above appears. If you're in NYC, you can currently see the original illustrations on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For those who can't make the trip, you can find the images posted up at the Poe Stories site.

While you're getting all culturified, also check out the Met's Raqib Shaw exhibit.

From the Met's catalog copy:

Raqib Shaw was born in Calcutta in 1974 but spent much of his youth in Kashmir, where he was indelibly influenced by the distinctive medley of Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian cultures. In 2001 he enrolled at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, where he now resides. In 2006 the Tate invited Shaw to create works in response to the exhibition "Holbein in England," and until this summer Hans Holbein the Younger (ca. 1497–1543) has ruled Shaw's imaginative world in which creatures both natural and fantastic romp amid architectural settings based on Holbein's designs for jewelry, stained glass, and book illustrations. Shaw also reinterpreted some of Holbein's portraits of English sitters, retaining their late medieval costumes but replacing their bodies with monsters.

Shaw's technique, a unique mixed media approach he adapted from silk-making methods (his family's money comes from silk import/exports), isn't easy to show in 2D pictures. He uses a mixture of inks, paints, and collage techniques, often with reflective, glassy materials, that gives his stuff a edge of creepy insane innocence – part art therapy exorcism, part teen-girl arts and crafts project. Not that there's anything amateur about it. It's odd mix of awkwardness and deliberate repulsiveness is pretty finely tuned. The child-like colors, shiny materials, and free flowing lines pull you in before you can focus on the often grim and gory subject matter.

Included in the Shaw exhibit are some of Holbein's "Dance of Death" engravings:

Holbein's fame throughout Europe was further spread by his set of forty-one miniature wood engravings, The Dance of Death (ca. 1526, published 1538). In these macabre vignettes, Holbein shows that no human being, no matter how exalted, can escape the grip of death. Holbein mocked the vanity of mortals, but the ever-present plague lent urgency to his message. The violence of Holbein's vision retains its ability to shock—a reminder that sensationalist imagery is not unique to our times.

You can find the whole cycle online at, oddly enough, Gode Cookery, your one stop shop for all your Dark Age ye olde cooking info and plague art needs.

There, wasn't that scary kids? ooooOOOOOooooo. Next week: 3D House of Stewardess

Link Proliferation: "Girls Priced to Sell!"

The Gutter Waits for Girls Like Me!

Over at the Alphabet Soup blog, designer Michael Doret reveals his pulp-tastic cover design (shown above) for Tashen monumental (336 pages of lurid goodness) True Crime Detective Magazines: 1924-1969.

In his blog entry, Doret discusses the thinking that went into his work and shows some of the source material he used as inspiration.

Systematic horrors

NME described London's Silvery as what would happen "if Damon Albarn spent the 90's taking acid."

Here's the steampunkish, darkly trippy video to their song "Horrors."



Exit plot, chased by bear

Though not horror focused, NYTimes has a short article on the work of David Kirkpatrick, one of the founders of MIT newest Media Lab project: the Center for Future Storytelling.

From the article:

The center is envisioned as a “labette,” a little laboratory, that will examine whether the old way of telling stories — particularly those delivered to the millions on screen, with a beginning, a middle and an end — is in serious trouble.

Starting in 2010, a handful of faculty members — “principal investigators,” the university calls them — will join graduate students, undergraduate interns and visitors from the film and book worlds in examining, among other things, how virtual actors and “morphable” projectors (which instantly change the appearance of physical scenes) might affect a storytelling process that has already been considerably democratized by digital delivery.

The lab will work alongside major film studios to try to re-teach the art of narrative to Hollywood.

But Mr. Kirkpatrick and company are not alone in their belief that Hollywood’s ability to tell a meaningful story has been nibbled at by text messages, interrupted by cellphone calls and supplanted by everything from Twitter to Guitar Hero.

“I even saw a plasma screen above a urinal,” said Peter Guber, the longtime film producer and former chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment who contends that traditional narrative — the kind with unexpected twists and satisfying conclusions — has been drowned out by noise and visual clutter.

A common gripe is that gamelike, open-ended series like “Pirates of the Caribbean” or “Spider-Man” have eroded filmmakers’ ability to wrap up their movies in the third act. Another is that a preference for proven, outside stories like the "Harry Potter" books is killing Hollywood’s appetite for original storytelling.

Dance, dance, execution

From the vaults, here's a 1922 short feature of the ballet, The Danse Macabre. Look for the nicely animated title sequence and the nifty Death-as-fiddler costume.



Dispatches from the Poe Wars

WHYY's Babbitt-blog It's Our City, sounds the alarm for Philly to get its crap together with regards to the on-going battle of what city gets to claim Poe as their own:

With the Bicentennial of Poe next year (he was born Jan 19, 1809) all the Poe cities-Bmore, Philly, NY, Richmond and Boston-are rolling out the red carpet for Poe tourists. Baltimore has two websites promoting its events. Last month, they held a press conference to promote the Bicentennial which is still making waves in newspapers and news sites online. Richmond has a website, as well. And now Boston, the city with the smallest of claims to Poe’s Legacy (his actress mother gave birth to him while passing through on a theatrical tour), is hosting a two day celebration and calling for their city to recognize Poe as own of their own.

Philadelphia has lots of events planned for the Bicentennial, or should I say, the Park Service and other groups have lots of events planned. There is no organized effort to reach out to the Poe tourists (and believe me, there are lots of them), bring them to Philly and show them why this is his true “literary” home. So far, all Philly has done is bring in Elvira for a couple Halloween events. Do they have any plans to promote the Bicentennial next year?

"The horned beasts of suck"

Speaking of literary feuds, perhaps the weirdest feud I've ever heard of is currently "raging" amongst fantasy authors of the YA-ish persuasion: zombies versus unicorns.

I kid not.

It apparently started when, in a discussion of Simon Pegg's hatred of running zombies, novelist and academic Justine Larbalestier dropped that she thought unicorns were "metaphorically as dead as the dodo."

The seemingly all-pervasive Io9 has the round up of shots fired in this crucial conflict.

Zombie unicorn mask (above) by flickr user MATTY™.

GAAAAAAAH!!

Speaking of zombies, I highlight this page of the upcoming Zombie Cop graphic novel – you see, he polices zombies, so he's zombie cop in the sense that he's the cop of zombies; but he also IS a zombie, so he's a zombie cop in the sense that he's, you know, a zombie cop, so it works on many levels – because of the sound the guy getting disarmed makes: "GAAAAAAAH!!"

Isn't the more the sound you make when you spill something on the couch, rather than when, say, a zombie – regardless of its connections to law enforcement, official or otherwise – rips off your freakin' arm?

Books: Out with the old and in with the New Horror.

Peter Straub's new horror short story anthology is so significant for the future of the genre that it comes with a title that features not one, but two colons: Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology. The middle section, with its definite article and vaguely lit-crit feel, is both the most eye-catching and confusing part of the title. The stories in this antho are "new" only in a loosest sense of the term. The oldest, Ramsey Campbell's excellent "Voice of the Beach," is now approaching thirty. Several other tales are more than twenty years old. And some of those that are only a couple years old have already appeared in several anthologies, notably Dan Chaon's superlative ghost story "The Bees" and Neil Gaiman's well-traveled "October in the Chair." Even the term "horror" should give pause. There's no shortage of ghosts, monsters, death, and madness in these pages. However, there's also several comedies, one almost Carver-esque slice of life tale that includes neither supernatural elements or scares of any sort, and one genuinely touching love story.

What, then, is "The New Horror"?

In his introduction, Straub the this anthology is somewhat of a follow-up to his landmark volume for Conjunctions: The New Wave Fabulists. (TNWF is, by the way, a pretty awesome anthology and anybody interested in the more innovative fringes of pop genre lit will be well rewarded for searching it out.) The authors in this edition, he explains, have "far more in common with one another and perpetual wild cards like John Crowley and Jonathan Carroll than they did with those writers who were supposed to epitomize their fields. They were literary writers and genre writers at the same time." Straub goes on to state that, on the edge of the genre, in critically and popularly ignored journals, at small presses, and slightly off-market anthos (like this one, I suppose) a quiet borderland insurgency has been going on. The soldiers of this revolution mix the traditions and familiar concepts of horror with a sprightly, self-aware literary sensibility. By lending his cred to such anthologies, and including genre stalwarts like the inevitable Stephen King, it is Straub's unstated hope is that this unrest reaches the capital and pulls off a full-scale coup. (Though, to push the metaphor as far as I can possibly push it, this will be a palace coup, something that ushers in the new while leaving folks like King and Straub, two men who are as close to being "the Man" in horror terms as anybody could be, enjoying their new-found status as friends of the revolution.)

Given the diversity of stories in the collection, its is temping to use Justice Stewart's famed Casablanca Test and simply say that you'll know New Horror when you see it. But, generalizing somewhat, I think you can tease out at least two common elements.

1. Use of the supernatural:

A clear majority of the stories in Poe's Children involve supernatural elements. Ghosts are especially popular, but various mythological figures and indescribable Lovecraftian things-from-beyond make several appearances. New Horror isn't big on your more fleshy horrors; vampires and zombies, despite their perennial popularity in masscult horror flicks and books, make nary an appearance here. Instead, New Horror likes to tease out the possibilities of undefined, uncanny (in the original sense of the "un-home," the unfamiliar familiar), and weird. This includes the comedic, as well as the horrific, possibilities. "Lousia's Ghost," by the shamelessly talented Kelly Link (she writes, co-runs a small press, and makes the neatest swag for public events), is possibly one of the single best takes on the uncanny (from vertigo inducing doubles, mistaken identies, the mechanical/organic binary, and a ghost that is never stable enough to be described) in modern literature and it is genuinely sad and funny, rather than horrifying.

2. Overtly "meta" narrative

While nothing in the book quite approaches the Ouroboros-like self-awareness of such genre in-jokes as Scream, literary allusions and a constant self-awareness is typical of many of these stories. One of the stories lifts it's title from, of all places, The Wind and the Willows, another borrows the title of Erasmus's most famous work, another alludes to a Marianne Moore poem, and yet another features the poet Lord Byron as its chief protagonist. Allusions to Greek mythology pop up in several stories. Five feature writers (some horror, some not) in a central role. One is actually entitled "Notes on the Writing of a Horror Story" and another, which features a character who actually begins acting under the assumption that he is a character in a story, is titled "Plot Twist."

Despite any aspirations to artifice, it is interesting to note that few of the stories contained in PC engage in any modernist play with their plotting. Straub's own contribution, the wonderfully odd Little Red's Tango, uses multiple styles and radical breaks in continuity to great effect. Thomas Ligotti successfully employs a radical amount of ironic detachment from his story and the husband and wife team of Steve Rasnic and Melanie Tem bring shifting and unreliable narrators into play in their "The Man on the Ceiling." Such experimentation, however, is relatively rare. The other stories are almost traditional in the linearity of their plots and the stability of their narrative points of view. Given that some of the most interesting and innovative horror novels of the nearly 30-year period cover by PC - House of Leaves, Raw Shark Texts, Demon Theory, Sharp Teeth - played fairly extreme games with the very form of the novel, it is somewhat surprising that so little of that experimental vibe has carried over to a project like this.

Other than those two threads (and even those loose rules have exceptions in the book), the work is too diverse to pin down. This does undermine the books role as a guide to the new vanguard. Like the indescribable horrors so many of these story feature, the concept of "New Horror" is more metaphor, potential, mood, and suggestion than an actual subgenre. But if the collection fails as call to a genre regime change, this failure is entirely to the benefit of the literary value of what's within. Ignore Straub's claim that he's charting some new shift in the literary world and what you've got is a handpicked selection of stories that appealed to the mind of a genre master. Of the twenty-four stories in anthology, only one of them seemed like a dud to me. That sort of signal to noise ratio is rare. All the stories here are interesting, almost every one of them is good, and a few are destined to become classics. What higher praise can one give an anthology?

Poe's Children is out in hardback next month. It's from Doubleday and it will set you back about $27.

Movies: Lordie be-Gordie.

Alright, Screamers and Screamettes, the lovely and talented Heather Santrous, the long-time ANTSS fave (see sidebar) and insanely prolific horror blogger behind Mermaid Heather, has posted another in her on-going series of tributes to modern horror icons. Today's fright-meister: director Stuart Gordon.

And, this time, there's a twist. Heather's made this a joint effort. That's right! Mighty Marvel Team-Up style, this tribute brings together the relentless awesomeness that is Heather Santrous with the completely unobjectionable acceptability of CRwM in one outstanding tribute.

Below, I'll include my complete review of The Black Cat, written for Heather's latest tribute. When you're done, click on over to find more biographical details on Gordon, commentary from both Heather and I on his style and career, and links to five other reviews we've done of Gordon films.

Without overselling it, I think it is safe to say that this is the single greatest team-up since hydrogen and oxygen got together for that whole water thing. Enjoy.

When Mermaid Heather dropped the idea that I should cobble together a guest review of Stuart Gordon’s The Black Cat, his 2007 contribution to the second season of Showtime’s Masters Of Horror series, I actually got pretty excited. First, I’m a sucker for Gordon’s Lovecraft adaptions. Even his minor works in that limited field are, for my money, solidly built entertainment. I have a theory (well more like an intellectual prejudice, based on limited personal experience) that Gordon is at his best, when he starts from a firm foundation in strong source material. If Lovecraft can serve as this foundation, certainly Poe can as well.

Second, "The Black Cat" remains the only Poe story that genuinely unnerves me. It isn’t merely gothic or classically spooky, it actually creeps me out. The first time I read it, I panicked, and was overcome with the need to call my then girlfriend and ask if she was okay. Even now, re-reading it, I get a sinking sensation in my stomach. Previous adaptations of the story (and there have been more than ten, including the classic 1934 Edgar G. Ulmer flick starring both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff) can be charitably described as loose. Most of them are completely new and unrelated stories, with the hopefully crowd-drawing Poe title tacked on. A majority of them at least include a nod to the title and feature a black cat that gets a bit of screen time in some capacity, though not all of them bother with such a minor detail. From what I’d heard and read of Gordon’s adaptation, it clearly took liberties with the source material, but it is widely considered to be the closest anybody has come to a straight up adaptation.

For those unfamiliar with the Poe story, "The Black Cat" is a story related by a nameless narrator on the eve of his execution. He tells the reader that, from childhood, he’s always been "noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition." He’s also always had a soft spot for animals. He and his wife, a similarly soft-hearted soul, turn their house into a veritable zoo. "We had birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat." The cat is named Pluto and it is the narrator’s favorite. More the shame then when the narrator, in the grips of one of his increasingly common alcoholic rages, comes across Pluto one night. "One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fiber of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!" Ouch.

The cat recovers, but never trusts the narrator again. The guilt over his violent act encourages the narrator to drink even more. Eventually, the narrator grows contemptuous of the wounded beast, and in a spasm of perversity, hangs the cat from a tree near his home. What happens next isn’t fully explained: somehow the narrator’s home burns down. Strangely, the image of the cat, still hanging in the noose, is burned like a shadow into the plaster of a wall, otherwise spared by the flames.

The narrator and his wife move into a new home and, as Poe does love his doubles, the couple adopts a stray cat that looks almost exactly like Pluto. It is even missing one eye. In fact, the only visual difference between Pluto and this new cat is a curious patch of white fur that resembles a gallows. The narrator’s fear, guilt, and anger regarding this new Pluto builds, until one day, he attempts to take an axe to it. His wife intervenes, and still blind with rage, the narrator takes an axe to her. In order to hide the evidence of his crime, he bricks his wife into the wall in their basement. After he’s done, he turns his attention to killing the cat, but he can no longer find it.

Four days after the murder, some police officers come calling on the narrator, looking for his wife. They search the house, and finding no evidence, are about to leave. In an ill-timed spasm of perverse bravado, the narrator begins to remark on the sturdy construction of the basement walls, and to emphasize his point, smacks the hiding place of his wife’s corpse with his hand. From behind the wall comes an inhuman wailing. "Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!"

The end.

Of all of Poe’s stories, this remains my favorite. It lacks the distancing exoticism of his typically pseudo-European settings (think the fantasy kingdom of "Red Death" or the Inquisition Era setting "Pit and the Pendulum"); or the isolated "closed set" feel of things like "Tell-Tale Heart" (with its unexplained relationship between the narrator and his victim); or the crumbling, otherworldy mansion of the Ushers. The horror unfolds in a normal domestic unit, with a fairly standard dysfunction: the hubby is a boozer. In a way some of Poe’s more famous and gothic creations don’t, "The Black Cat" hits home, literally.

Poe also plays around with the less naturalistic elements of the story. Whether the second cat is some inexplicable avenging spirit, or whether it is just a normal cat transformed to monstrous significance by the guilt of the narrator, is a question that is never definitively settled. We get attempts at "rational" explanations for the cat-shadow image, but they don’t satisfy. And why does the wife not notice or find it odd that a second one-eyed cat has come into their lives, but this one has a patch of hair resembling a gallows on it (an oversight that’s especially odd since the narrator mentioned his wife was prone to occasional flights of superstition)? Horror fans still debate the role of supernatural/naturalistic elements in horror, and the brilliance of "The Black Cat" is that it can comfortably walk in both camps, while giving itself fully over to neither.

So how does Gordon’s adaptation stack up to the original? Gordon’s produced a very odd film, in that it is fairly true to the details and plot of the original (certainly more so than most adaptations), while at the same time quite overt about not being a strict adaptation in any real sense. Instead, Gordon’s taken the plot of "The Black Cat" and used it as an opportunity to create a great big mash note to the man who probably best deserves the title "Master of Horror."

The key change Gordon makes is casting Edgar A. Poe (Poe’s preferred rendering of his name, he kept the "Allan" – the last name of his adoptive parents – notably abridged) as the nameless narrator of his own story. He surrounds the tale with a loose framework of details from Poe’s own biography: making the setting Philadelphia, where the Poes lived for a portion of their tragically shortened married lives, and casting Virginia Poe in the role of the unnamed wife. In Gordon’s telling, Poe is in dire economic straits. He takes on a writing assignment to produce a lurid and thrilling tale, in the vein of "The Tell-Tale Heart." Unfortunately for Poe, pressure drives him to the bottle, and when Poe drinks, he can’t write. To make things worse, while playing the family piano for a man interested in purchasing it, a blood vessel in Virginia Poe’s neck ruptures, which is a gory sign of her worsening consumption.

After that set up, Gordon begins to weave in the plot of the Poe story. Under the tri-part burden of alcoholism, domestic illness, and poverty, Poe eventually snaps and attacks Pluto, the family cat. He graphically removes the cat’s eye and is discovered by his ailing wife. The gruesome discovery is too much of a shock for her and she faints to her death.

After the funeral (held, as was the custom of the time, at the home), Poe goes mad with remorse and rage. He hangs Pluto from the rafters of the home, and then sets fire to the house, with the intention of burning up along with his wife’s corpse. Miraculously, his wife suddenly gasps for air! She is not dead! Honestly, as far as twists go, this is quite the stretch. It is only forgivable here because the concept of being mistaken for dead was such a prominent theme in Poe’s own work, that it feels like an homage or an in-joke, rather than a narrative cop-out. Poe, stunned, manages to escape the home with his revived Virginia.

Installed in their new home, Poe promises Virginia that he’ll avoid the demon rum, and things look like they just might turn around. But, as anybody who ever went to summer camp can tell you, the cat always comes back. A one-eyed black cat enters the Poe residence through the window of the bedroom. Virginia swears it is Pluto, not knowing that Pluto couldn’t have escaped the fire, because Poe killed him before starting the fire. Poe swears it can’t be the old black cat. The mysterious new(?) cat has a white mark around its neck, Gordon’s equivalent of the mysterious noose-shaped patch.

Poe’s promises of sobriety aren’t worth much, and before you know it, he’s at the bottle again. In a booze-fueled fit, Poe decides that he’s had enough of cats, and goes after Pluto 2.0. He goes to axe it and his wife intervenes. Furious, Poe buries the axe in Virginia’s head. They rest you know. He stashes the corpse behind the wall, almost fools the cops, and is given away by the wailing of the cat that was walled in with his wife.

Here Gordon closes out the biographical frame, by essentially pulling an "it was all a dream" stunt. Poe concocted the whole thing as part of the writing assignment he took at the beginning of the film, and the episode closes on Poe finishing "The Black Cat."

Visually, The Black Cat might be the most accomplished episode of the series. It has the high-gloss look of a classic horror film. The film is shot in muted near-grays, that occasionally give way to shocking splashes of red, yellow, and green. This is used most spectacularly in the scenes of gore, which you will find either clash distractingly with the surrounding tone or reverent classicism, or you’ll welcome as signature Gordanisms (violence in Gordon’s films always verges on the absurd, even when it isn’t meant to be comical), depending on how you roll with your fandom.

The screen time is dominated by two characters, Poe and Virginia, both of whom are handled ably. Jeffrey Combs, a native Southerner himself, unleashes his drawl and eats up scenery with an almost operatic zest. His enjoyable bombastic performance is greatly enhanced by an excellent make-up job, including a tremendous fake nose, that makes him look remarkably like Poe. In contrast, Elyse Levesque does an admirable job with a fairly thankless role. Built to contrast Poe’s dramatic gloom, Virginia comes off as a lovely, placid, and mostly uninteresting, angel. Levesque gamely makes do with what she’s got, but she’s not given a lot to work with.

With a full measure of on-screen and behind the camera talent, and a well-rehearsed and cleverly meta script, The Black Cat succeeds in communicating Gordon’s love of Poe and his tale. What it isn’t though, is scary. By using Poe as the main character, we know from the get go that the murder plot is going to be undone and rectified. The tension is undercut by our knowledge that Poe didn’t axe his wife or get executed for murder. Ironically, by weaving historical facts into his narrative, he distances us from the story, going against the terrifyingly mundane setting of Poe’s original. And, to be honest, I’m not sure that Gordon was all that concerned with creating a horror film that recreated the terror of the original. I think Gordon’s Lovecraft adaptations show that he understands that such work demands a sort of loving betrayal of the original. Instead, I suspect he wanted to make a cinematic monument to his hero. What we have here is less a scary story than a worshipful love letter from one artist to a giant in their field. As such, it’s a well made film that is, curiously, more about horror than it is horrifying.

In the tradition of Mermaid Heather’s rating system, I’m going to give The Black Cat three PETA complaints out of five.

R.I.P.: Nameless here for evermore.

On this day, in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore, Maryland.

By way of tribute: here's John Astin reciting Poe's "The Raven."



And here's the bizarre beginning of Roger Corman's extremely loose adaptation of "The Raven," starring Vincent Price and the voice of Peter Lorre.



Finally, the greatest of adaptations: the Simpsons do "The Raven."