Here's a live clip of Jukebox the Ghost playing a nifty cover of "What's This?" from Tim Burton's animated musical Hallowistmas film The Nightmare Before Chirstmas.
While you watch, do thinking of joining in the fantabulous ANTSS "Tales from the Captcha" contest, won't you? It's your last day. After today, you'll be out of the running. Then, instead wonderful prizes, you'll have naught but your own bitter regrets snd the gall of self-recrimination to regift this season. Don't be that guy. Serious, you deserve more. You deserve to be in the ANTSS contest. Especially you!
Jukebox The Ghost - What's This? / Where Are All The Scientists Now? (Live at the Knitting Factory) from Ray Concepcion on Vimeo.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Movies: Put the "psycho" in psycho-plasmics.
Fun fact: Search for "brood" in IMDB and your first hit is not David Cronenberg's 1979 classic, but that long-suffering staple of latch-key kid entertainment The Brady Bunch. What's attracting IMDB's search engine to the story of a lovely lady who was bringing up three very lovely girls (though, only two very lovely girls, really) is the fact that the show's working title was The Brady Brood.I bring this up because, having found that quirk of the system and having recently re-watched The Brood, I've been replaying plots of The Brady Bunch in my head, but mixing in elements of The Brood. Like, say, everybody's on vacation in Hawaii and one of the boys has bad luck 'cause of a stolen Tiki idol. Only his luck gets so bad that Carol goes insane and starts playing a lethal game of cat and mouse with Mike using psycho-plasmic simulacrum Jans as proxy murderers.
They pretty much all end with "Carol goes insane and starts playing a lethal game of cat and mouse with Mike using psycho-plasmic simulacrum Jans as proxy murderers."
As much as I'd love to review those imaginary episodes of The Brady Brood, I think the blog-o-sphere will be much better served by me posting yet another review of David Cronenberg's film.
Having recently revisited Videodrome, I've been on a Cronenberg kick. Brood is the second film in Cronenberg's Body Horror Period, dating from 1975's Shivers to 1986's The Fly. With the exception of a drag racing pic (the perfectly functional but fairly forgettable Fast Company) and possibly The Dead Zone, the BHP flicks are sciffy influenced horror pics that together make up cinema's most extended riff on how completely gross the human body can be. For a little more than a decade, audiences could rely on Cronenberg's characters to get infected with bizarre diseases, sprout disturbingly sexualized orifices in their tummies, learn to breed through budding, vomit out acids, and otherwise be really really gross. It isn't even a matter of gore. Instead, it's grimly Rabelaisian – a riot of exuding, devouring, spurting, oozing, prolapsed humanity.
Eventually it is the H and not the B that fades from Cronenberg's work. Naked Lunch and Crash are as full of mutants and mauled forms as any Cronenberg fan could hope. What that aren't is straight up sciffy horror in the same way the BHP flicks are.
By the standards of other BHP flicks, Brood is remarkably restrained. The flick opens on a demonstration of "psycho-plasmics," an ill explained psychotherapy that, from what the viewer sees, involves a shrink – one Dr. Hal Raglan – holding conversations with the patient while acting out the role of some figure crucial to the patient's pathological history. Curiously, somebody mentions that Raglan's an M.D., which would mean that he's not actually a psychotherapist. But unorthodox credentials would be the least shady thing about Raglan's operation. There's something cultish about psycho-plasmics. Raglan, in becoming everybody who was ever important to you, becomes literally your all. The vague nature of psycho-plasmics gives it the aspect of a theological doctrine rather than a scientific theory. Finally, the patients and caregivers seem to be charged with an almost sinister anticipation, as is psycho-plasmics was a prophecy of something huge coming down the pipe.
Thrust into this snake pit is one Frank Carveth, played by Art Hindle with the affectless apathy that passed for "Method" in the 1970s. Frank's estranged wife, Nola (the last gasp of Samantha Eggers quality film career before becoming a familiar face in the floating cast of B-list guests in TV-land – her next role was on Fantasy Island), is a patient of Raglan. This has made divorcing her difficult as she spends all her time locked away on the doctor's isolated treatment campus. The need for a break is given extra urgency when Frank notices that Candice, their daughter, has returned home from a visit with mommy covered in bruises and bite marks. Frank appeals to his lawyer, but he's told that there crap all one can do to separate a child from its mom.
In the meantime, Frank investigates the mysterious Raglan and finds some graduates of his psycho-plasmics program have pronounced physical effects, most notably unusual forms of cancer. However, since no connection can be made between these ailments and Raglan's treatments, nobody can do anything.
Frank's frustration turns to fear when his mother-in-law is beaten to death with a meat-tenderizer by a pint-sized assailant. Frank's father-in-law meets with the same fate before Frank survives an attack and the police can recover the mini-murderer's body. A visit to a shockingly calm corner reveals that these sawed-off killers lack standard internal organs, have no reproductive capacity, and show no marks of having been produced in the standard "mommy and daddy's special grown up time" method. On a personal note, I love this scene for the remarkably mild interest all those in the coroner's office show in what is a completely new species of humanoid life. They know it is important, but mainly as an odd clue in an already odd case. Even the coroner, presumably the first to realize that something truly historical has happened, seems only mildly interested: "A new humanoid species of life. Nifty. I'll write it up tomorrow. I want to get home before 7 tonight. They're airing a very special Starsky and Hutch, with guest star Samantha Eggers."
Eventually, the mutant midgets kidnap Candice from her school classroom, after murdering the teacher in plain sight of all the now utterly traumatized students. The audience puzzles it all together just a little ahead of Frank. These munchkins are doing the bidding of Nola. Frank dashes the psycho-plasmic research center. There he confronts Raglan only to learn that Nola spawn these things from herself. They are the physical manifestation of her emotional needs. Raglan proposes a plan to get Candice back, but it will require Frank and Raglan enter the brood's lair and confront the increasing unstable Nola.
Which goes just fine.
I'm kidding – all manner of chaos, some fair amount of death, and a nice sequence of Nola birthing a midget-pod bud from her tummy. It's a suitably grim and discomforting end.
Far more linear than Videodrome or post-BHP like Naked Lunch, The Brood is built along fairly conventional horror lines. There's even something a bit retro in its over-the-top misogyny. The admitted product of Cronenberg's own nasty divorce and custody battle, the women are portrayed, in order, as an abusive bad-mother figure who spawns mutant pod people out of her tummy, a sharp-tongued drunk rich diva type, and a witness to Frank's humiliation at the hands of Nola. Only the young girl, Candice, who is more of a prop than a full character, is unquestionably good. By contrast, all the men are schlubs, victims of their families, their wives, their unlucky fates, cancer, whatever. Even the sinister Raglan proves to have been attempting to contain and control Nola and her offspring. Despite this regrettable knuckle-dragging, The Brood is more successful than some of the later films in delivering reliable genre pleasures. By working within narrowing dramatic ambitions and focusing on an earnestly felt (if philosophical dubious) hatred, Cronenberg made a picture that is darker and more intense than some of the more experimental and intellectually naunced films that would follow. In this sense, The Brood may be a film that appeals more to the horror fan than the fan of Cronenberg.
Before we go, let's talk about Ollie.
Now generally, I'm not the cat to cult out over some now relatively discarded film star from the 1960s and 1970s. There are those who get swampy in their nether regions over the z-grade stars that dot the steaming pile of grindhouse cinema like flies repeatedly alighting on a particularly ripe cow patty. That's never really been my bag. I lack the imaginative faculties necessary to turn the dross of repeated incompetence into stylistic gold.
That said, even I've got my little obsessions. Regular readers know, for example, that I'll watch just about any picture that features an alligator or crocodile, super-sized or not, giving humans a lesson in the contextual specificity of food chain dominance. Why? No idea. It's just one of those things.
Here's another weird critical blind spot of mine: Oliver Reed. Yeah, Bill Sikes from Oliver. That guy. Menacing even when he's trying to be calming, charming, or thoughtful, the young Reed always seemed to me like he might, at any moment, whip out a weighted walking cane and beat the crap out of somebody. Eventually, age softened him a bit, but never enough that he did carry with him the hint of seething. Even his role as Proximo, in 2000s Gladiator, hinged on the fact that you had to genuinely believe Reed could intertwine a worldly paternalism with bloodthirsty self-interest. Reed was perfect for that role in that he probably couldn't have done worldly paternalism without giving some sinister undercurrent.
His casting as Raglan in this flick is brilliant as it exploits the fact that viewers will almost immediately distrust him. (In fact, it takes some suspension of belief to allow that any patients would ever trust him.) Even when he turns out to be "hero" of sorts, his complex motives are murkily communicated by Reed's though a strange stiltedness, as if Raglan has carefully thought through everything he's saying and is now simply recalling the edited and cleaned up results. Is he trying to end Nola's reign of terror, protect her, protect him and his method? Did he see this coming as the ultimate result of psycho-plasmics or is he realizing this is all out of his control? Reed gives the character more life than he needs to carry out some fairly simple narrative duties. Good stuff, Ollie.
Oh and don't forget: the Tales from the Captcha contest runs until Friday. Enter and win fabu prizes!
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Books: Glister in the sun.
Before we get on to the review proper, don't forget to enter the ANTSS Tales from the Captcha contest! A winner is picked on Friday, so get to enterin'.
It's easy and, if you win, your prize should arrive in plenty of time to re-gift it for your office secret Santa.
Won't Sandra in Accounts Payable just wet herself with joy when she receives the DVD of the entire first season of HBO's Tales from the Crypt? Won't Tony in the mailroom squeal with girlish delight when he sees that you given him Billy the Kid's Old Timey Oddities or The Cobbler's Monster? You bet they will.
But you got it be in it to win it, so do it! It's what Forrest J. Ackerman would have wanted.
Okay. On to today's review . . .
Here's a completely earnest theory about cultural evolution in the West.
Let's take it as given that prostitution is, in fact, the oldest profession in the world. That means that, in the primordial swamps of prehistory, anybody gainfully employed was a prostitute. Humans swapped sex for some small stash of non-perishable goods whose chief function was to buy more sex. It was an endless loop and all humans did was hump and starve and pray that somebody soon invented the career of farmer or hunter.
I'm going to posit that the second oldest profession is storyteller. First, the need to create narratives is a product of ancient hardwired routines in our grey matter and it's not a stretch to hypothesize that we were telling stories almost as soon as we were functionally human. Second, it's the only way to explain the "blurb": an artifact that could only have been produced by a culture that consisted almost entirely of storytellers and prostitutes.
Blurbs are essentially systematized favors: chits passed between writers, agents, and publishers in an endlessly rotating system of infinitely fungible loyalty and friendship that resembles the political intrigue surrounding a grade school BFF list update, only more petty and less rational. This is why every blurb pretty much sounds the same: like any currency in a free market, they tend towards efficient standardization.
This means, however, that their function as a medium of communication to the average consumer is pretty much negligible. In theory, I guess, the faith of the reading public props up this fiat money the way, in theory, our faith in the greenback keeps our folding money worth more than the cotton rag it's made out of. Though, in both cases, the system has really evolved beyond that. Its endurance is its own justification and I suspect that even if readers stopped paying attention to them, blurbs would continue until such time as we out-evolve our need for literature.
That said, I think there is a useful way to read blurbs. Call it the Oz Theory of Blurb Reading.
Blurbs are the prison currency of the mainstream publishing world. If blurbs indicate a swapped favor, then a collection of blurbs is record of debt transfers that reveals a social network. Russian gangsters have a term for this: "roof." Roof is an all-purpose power term meaning, at once, pull, juice, favor, protection, political alignment, responsibility, the shotgun marriage expediency of gangster capitalist loyalties, and moxie. You don't get a commercially published book without roof: the magic combo of chutzpah, access to a network of friendly agents, other authors who vouch for your performance in MFA programs, and editors ready to bank your stake. Authors are their roof. Blurbs are a snapshot of that roof.
Here's what you do. Don't read the copy; instead, make a mental web of the blurbbers names. You'll have a pretty good sense of where in the quality lit game an author exists.
If everybody dropping blurbs is some marquee name in a particular genre ghetto, then you know who you're dealing with. This cat stays in his corner of the lit biz exercise yard, surrounded by familiar faces. He never strays too far, never alienates his posse, and is probably going to come and go without ever making waves outside that corner. Maybe, by sheer dint of financial success and the will to survive, he'll develop King-grade roof and score some measure of mainstream success. But probably not. He doesn't have the roof to make the leap from the undercard to main event.
You pick up his book and you know what you're going to get: some clever, but essentially minor variation on the genre collective's central tenants, perhaps some new growth on one of the genre's various sub-branches. And that's fine. That's part of the reason people read genre lit, to watch the familiar patterns shift slightly and participate in the esoteric taxonomies that only the devoted can parse.
But if the roof is all over the place? Then you're dealing with some guy who pops up everywhere. He's all over the exercise yard, hangs in the infirmary scoring script off of trustees, and openly talks to the bulls. You've got to respect a guy like that. It takes a special kind of author to operate under such an idiosyncratic roof. But it also means that you're dealing with somebody who is unpredictable, who has dubious genre loyalties, who might not deliver on promises because he's had his own inscrutable agenda all along.
John Burnside, author of the upcoming genre mutant mystery/horror novel The Glister, has got wacky roof. His roof, as mapped on the cover of his latest, features horror stalwart Peter Straub, thinking man's airport lit writer Scott Smith, aging icon of freak-out transgressive lit Irvine Welsh, quality lit star and accidental atheist guru to the Jesus-freak set Jim Crace, fantasist Keith Donohue, and a slew of minor poets, social realists, and other strange bedfellows.
And, true to the Oz Theory of Blurb Reading, the book's a curious thing.
Featuring a cast of not so beautiful losers trying to make sense of a set of incomprehensible crimes in a post-industrial toxic wasteland of a declining company town, The Glister reaches towards being a murder mystery, a pulp thriller, a character study of small town angst, a social realist screed against the brutal costs of predatory big business, a serial killer thriller, or a neo-Lovecraftian tale of cosmic horror. But it isn't any of them, as Burnside undermines the genre conventions of each and every one of these familiar genres. It is something weirder.
On a namely stretch of U.K. coastline, stands a dying town split into three distinct regions. First, there's Outertown: a posh suburban community of isolate elites still fat of store built up in happier times. Further down the peninsula stands Innertown, a decaying and poisoned working-class ghetto ailing under financial woes and a Pandora's box-load of undiagnosable co-morbities that are the pension plan of the town's former industry: agricultural chemicals. Finally, at the town's dead core stands the sprawling wreck of factories and processing plants that were the town's livelihood: a ghost town of toxic spills and dangerously unstable industrial architectures. The setting isn't unfamiliar. We've seen these same cancerous and cash-strapped burgs in Langan's The Seeker and Harvey's The Town the Forgot How to Breath. Though it has a long way to go before they overtake semi-rural small towns as ground zero for our literary nightmares, these busted rustbelt Superfund sites are rapidly gaining.
We open on John Morrison, the local constable. Morrison is one of those sad sacks who, despite having every reason to self-shuffle from this mortal coil, keeps plugging along, more out of lack of imagination than will. His marriage is a wreck: His wife went from low-grade alcoholic to full-blown mental case on him. Her lucid moments are worse because that's when she can clearly see what a schlub Morrison is. As a cop, he's a bust. He mainly got there because Brian Smith, the corrupt financial and political center of this town, detected the right mix of incurious malleability in him. Because the biggest crime in the town – it's slow murder by industrial poisoning and subsequent malign neglect – is above Morrison's pay grade, he mostly gets by harassing the occasion kid and writing up the accidents and "natural" deaths. But there was one time when Morrison needed to stand up and play police – and he folded.
On Halloween night, a young boy named Mark wandered off into the woods around the abandoned factory complexes as part of a folk children's game meant to summon the Devil. He never returned. When Morrison found him, he was brutally murdered and hung up in a ritualistic satire of the crucifixion. Out of his league, Morrison called his boss. Smith, eager to avoid outside attention that might cast light on he's misused environmental clean-up and community aid funds, has Morrison cover it up. The boy's butchered body is disposed of. The disappearance is written up as a runaway. Officially, Mark left town looking for a better life.
But the other kids aren't satisfied with the official story, especially the wonderfully drawn character of Leonard, a bitter autodidact underachiever who mixes snark and Proust references with profound ignorance and unaware egomania in a way that only a small town boy who has read more than he's done can pull off. Reading Leonard's first person narration – with its unearned and lightly worn nihilism – is almost painful to me because I know I was exactly that sort of little jerkwad.
As the "missing" count mounts and claims Leonard's only true friend, the narrator joins up with a quasi-feral group of teenage grotesques whose idea of a good time is conducting semi-ritualized pack hunts for mutated fauna in a contaminated landfill near the old factories. Determined to stem these disappearances, Leonard and the gang decide to forcibly interrogate a local man – a isolated, possibly mentally retarded shut-in. Focusing their aimless hate and hopeless frustrations into a single brutal act of retribution, the gang's interrogation turns into a murder. In a rage, Leonard kicks the innocent man to death.
While this bloody miscarriage of justice plays out, the real murderer returns. A relentless presence with links to the town's poisoned past, and driven by a messianic vision of purifying Innertown that could have come out of the pages of Lovecraft, the real murderer wants Leonard next.
Mysteries without answers, supernatural links that may or may not exists, a town so tainted by its past that it might as well be haunted, Burnside evokes genre trappings just to leaves them tauntingly and tantalizing unfulfilled. Glister is a cruel joke, beautifully played. Burnside, a poet with some 11 collections to his credit, knows how to manipulate language to get the most out an image, but he knows the difference between a poetic turn of phrase and a poem. Glister often advances its plot through overlapping character portraits, but the reader never gets the sense that Burnside has lost sight of where his novel is headed or chased his own style down a rabbit hole. For all its genre sabotage, the author is determined to deliver the genre goods. And Glister does deliver the goods.
For readers on this side of the pond, Doubleday's American edition of The Glister has a March 10, '09 street date. Compared to juggernauts like Drood, The Glister is a slender little number: only 240 pages. It'll run you about 23 Washingtons, Canadians add $3 more.
It's easy and, if you win, your prize should arrive in plenty of time to re-gift it for your office secret Santa.
Won't Sandra in Accounts Payable just wet herself with joy when she receives the DVD of the entire first season of HBO's Tales from the Crypt? Won't Tony in the mailroom squeal with girlish delight when he sees that you given him Billy the Kid's Old Timey Oddities or The Cobbler's Monster? You bet they will.
But you got it be in it to win it, so do it! It's what Forrest J. Ackerman would have wanted.
Okay. On to today's review . . .
Here's a completely earnest theory about cultural evolution in the West.
Let's take it as given that prostitution is, in fact, the oldest profession in the world. That means that, in the primordial swamps of prehistory, anybody gainfully employed was a prostitute. Humans swapped sex for some small stash of non-perishable goods whose chief function was to buy more sex. It was an endless loop and all humans did was hump and starve and pray that somebody soon invented the career of farmer or hunter.
I'm going to posit that the second oldest profession is storyteller. First, the need to create narratives is a product of ancient hardwired routines in our grey matter and it's not a stretch to hypothesize that we were telling stories almost as soon as we were functionally human. Second, it's the only way to explain the "blurb": an artifact that could only have been produced by a culture that consisted almost entirely of storytellers and prostitutes.
Blurbs are essentially systematized favors: chits passed between writers, agents, and publishers in an endlessly rotating system of infinitely fungible loyalty and friendship that resembles the political intrigue surrounding a grade school BFF list update, only more petty and less rational. This is why every blurb pretty much sounds the same: like any currency in a free market, they tend towards efficient standardization.
This means, however, that their function as a medium of communication to the average consumer is pretty much negligible. In theory, I guess, the faith of the reading public props up this fiat money the way, in theory, our faith in the greenback keeps our folding money worth more than the cotton rag it's made out of. Though, in both cases, the system has really evolved beyond that. Its endurance is its own justification and I suspect that even if readers stopped paying attention to them, blurbs would continue until such time as we out-evolve our need for literature.
That said, I think there is a useful way to read blurbs. Call it the Oz Theory of Blurb Reading.
Blurbs are the prison currency of the mainstream publishing world. If blurbs indicate a swapped favor, then a collection of blurbs is record of debt transfers that reveals a social network. Russian gangsters have a term for this: "roof." Roof is an all-purpose power term meaning, at once, pull, juice, favor, protection, political alignment, responsibility, the shotgun marriage expediency of gangster capitalist loyalties, and moxie. You don't get a commercially published book without roof: the magic combo of chutzpah, access to a network of friendly agents, other authors who vouch for your performance in MFA programs, and editors ready to bank your stake. Authors are their roof. Blurbs are a snapshot of that roof.
Here's what you do. Don't read the copy; instead, make a mental web of the blurbbers names. You'll have a pretty good sense of where in the quality lit game an author exists.
If everybody dropping blurbs is some marquee name in a particular genre ghetto, then you know who you're dealing with. This cat stays in his corner of the lit biz exercise yard, surrounded by familiar faces. He never strays too far, never alienates his posse, and is probably going to come and go without ever making waves outside that corner. Maybe, by sheer dint of financial success and the will to survive, he'll develop King-grade roof and score some measure of mainstream success. But probably not. He doesn't have the roof to make the leap from the undercard to main event.
You pick up his book and you know what you're going to get: some clever, but essentially minor variation on the genre collective's central tenants, perhaps some new growth on one of the genre's various sub-branches. And that's fine. That's part of the reason people read genre lit, to watch the familiar patterns shift slightly and participate in the esoteric taxonomies that only the devoted can parse.
But if the roof is all over the place? Then you're dealing with some guy who pops up everywhere. He's all over the exercise yard, hangs in the infirmary scoring script off of trustees, and openly talks to the bulls. You've got to respect a guy like that. It takes a special kind of author to operate under such an idiosyncratic roof. But it also means that you're dealing with somebody who is unpredictable, who has dubious genre loyalties, who might not deliver on promises because he's had his own inscrutable agenda all along.
John Burnside, author of the upcoming genre mutant mystery/horror novel The Glister, has got wacky roof. His roof, as mapped on the cover of his latest, features horror stalwart Peter Straub, thinking man's airport lit writer Scott Smith, aging icon of freak-out transgressive lit Irvine Welsh, quality lit star and accidental atheist guru to the Jesus-freak set Jim Crace, fantasist Keith Donohue, and a slew of minor poets, social realists, and other strange bedfellows.
And, true to the Oz Theory of Blurb Reading, the book's a curious thing.
Featuring a cast of not so beautiful losers trying to make sense of a set of incomprehensible crimes in a post-industrial toxic wasteland of a declining company town, The Glister reaches towards being a murder mystery, a pulp thriller, a character study of small town angst, a social realist screed against the brutal costs of predatory big business, a serial killer thriller, or a neo-Lovecraftian tale of cosmic horror. But it isn't any of them, as Burnside undermines the genre conventions of each and every one of these familiar genres. It is something weirder.
On a namely stretch of U.K. coastline, stands a dying town split into three distinct regions. First, there's Outertown: a posh suburban community of isolate elites still fat of store built up in happier times. Further down the peninsula stands Innertown, a decaying and poisoned working-class ghetto ailing under financial woes and a Pandora's box-load of undiagnosable co-morbities that are the pension plan of the town's former industry: agricultural chemicals. Finally, at the town's dead core stands the sprawling wreck of factories and processing plants that were the town's livelihood: a ghost town of toxic spills and dangerously unstable industrial architectures. The setting isn't unfamiliar. We've seen these same cancerous and cash-strapped burgs in Langan's The Seeker and Harvey's The Town the Forgot How to Breath. Though it has a long way to go before they overtake semi-rural small towns as ground zero for our literary nightmares, these busted rustbelt Superfund sites are rapidly gaining.
We open on John Morrison, the local constable. Morrison is one of those sad sacks who, despite having every reason to self-shuffle from this mortal coil, keeps plugging along, more out of lack of imagination than will. His marriage is a wreck: His wife went from low-grade alcoholic to full-blown mental case on him. Her lucid moments are worse because that's when she can clearly see what a schlub Morrison is. As a cop, he's a bust. He mainly got there because Brian Smith, the corrupt financial and political center of this town, detected the right mix of incurious malleability in him. Because the biggest crime in the town – it's slow murder by industrial poisoning and subsequent malign neglect – is above Morrison's pay grade, he mostly gets by harassing the occasion kid and writing up the accidents and "natural" deaths. But there was one time when Morrison needed to stand up and play police – and he folded.
On Halloween night, a young boy named Mark wandered off into the woods around the abandoned factory complexes as part of a folk children's game meant to summon the Devil. He never returned. When Morrison found him, he was brutally murdered and hung up in a ritualistic satire of the crucifixion. Out of his league, Morrison called his boss. Smith, eager to avoid outside attention that might cast light on he's misused environmental clean-up and community aid funds, has Morrison cover it up. The boy's butchered body is disposed of. The disappearance is written up as a runaway. Officially, Mark left town looking for a better life.
But the other kids aren't satisfied with the official story, especially the wonderfully drawn character of Leonard, a bitter autodidact underachiever who mixes snark and Proust references with profound ignorance and unaware egomania in a way that only a small town boy who has read more than he's done can pull off. Reading Leonard's first person narration – with its unearned and lightly worn nihilism – is almost painful to me because I know I was exactly that sort of little jerkwad.
As the "missing" count mounts and claims Leonard's only true friend, the narrator joins up with a quasi-feral group of teenage grotesques whose idea of a good time is conducting semi-ritualized pack hunts for mutated fauna in a contaminated landfill near the old factories. Determined to stem these disappearances, Leonard and the gang decide to forcibly interrogate a local man – a isolated, possibly mentally retarded shut-in. Focusing their aimless hate and hopeless frustrations into a single brutal act of retribution, the gang's interrogation turns into a murder. In a rage, Leonard kicks the innocent man to death.
While this bloody miscarriage of justice plays out, the real murderer returns. A relentless presence with links to the town's poisoned past, and driven by a messianic vision of purifying Innertown that could have come out of the pages of Lovecraft, the real murderer wants Leonard next.
Mysteries without answers, supernatural links that may or may not exists, a town so tainted by its past that it might as well be haunted, Burnside evokes genre trappings just to leaves them tauntingly and tantalizing unfulfilled. Glister is a cruel joke, beautifully played. Burnside, a poet with some 11 collections to his credit, knows how to manipulate language to get the most out an image, but he knows the difference between a poetic turn of phrase and a poem. Glister often advances its plot through overlapping character portraits, but the reader never gets the sense that Burnside has lost sight of where his novel is headed or chased his own style down a rabbit hole. For all its genre sabotage, the author is determined to deliver the genre goods. And Glister does deliver the goods.
For readers on this side of the pond, Doubleday's American edition of The Glister has a March 10, '09 street date. Compared to juggernauts like Drood, The Glister is a slender little number: only 240 pages. It'll run you about 23 Washingtons, Canadians add $3 more.
Saturday, December 06, 2008
Contest: Tales from the Captcha.
Lately, I've been noticing a change in the captcha puzzles blogger throws up to try to weed you, my dear and sweet human readers – the very cream of the species – from the hordes of soulless auto-posting robo-spammers who would, if they had their druthers, turn my comments section into a wasteland of ads for knock-off watches, miracle weight loss teas, and promises of penile enlargement. It seems to me that the captcha puzzles have been, for lack of a better term, have been "approaching wordness."
A minor qualitative change in the randomized results of an automated spam blocker – what better reason to throw a ANTSS contest!
So here's the contest:
Leave a comment in this story. In the comment, leave the captcha "word" that blogger gives you, give us directions on how to pronounce this new word, and give us a definition. Finally, use it in a sentence.
Here's an example:
"Lects" – pronounced like "flecks" without the "F" – the verb for what a lector does. "When Pastor Bob is lector, he really lects the crap out of that Gospel."
First place winner will get the season 1 DVD collection of HBO's long-gone, but not forgotten, horror series Tales of the Crypt. Original case, all 6 original episodes, all yours. Free, for nuffin', I'll even swing postage for you.
Second place winner gets Eric Powell and Kyle Hotz's horror/actioner comic Billy the Kid's Old Timey Oddities. I reviewed it here in this very Web log you are currently reading. And I even liked it.
Third place winner gets The Cobbler's Monster - a graphic novel that fuses Frankenstein with Pinocchio. It's an Image title from the legal-firm-sounding team of Amano, Rousseau, Faucher, and Brusco. A nifty little prize for any Frankophile or anybody who digs seeing their innocent childhood memories turned all psycho and bloody.
Fourth place winners and and other also-rans get the solemn pride that comes only from taking part in a mighty contest of wits and knowing, even though you strove boldly into battle, the entire Internet is laughing at you.
'Cause I got to ship this stuff, I'm afraid I've got to limit this thing to readers in the U. S. of A. It ain't a jingoistic thing; it's a money thing. My apologies to any international readers.
Enter as often as you like. I'll pick winners on Friday.
Friday, December 05, 2008
Link Proliferation: The dead stay with us.
The Body Part Bakery
Here's some video footage of The Body Part Bakery, a Thai bakery that specializes in making baked goods in the shape of human body parts. It's what the Texas Chain Saw Massacre would have looked like if it'd been an anti-gluten screed instead of metaphor for the horrors of factory slaughter.
The Scary Body Parts Bakery - More bloopers are a click away
The amazing tale of the Ovitz clan
At the fabu Human Marvels site, there's the amazing story of the Ovitz family, a clan of Transylvanian Jewish midgets who became the "research subjects" of the infamous Dr. Mengele.
From the article:
The Ovitz family were Transylvanian Jews. Their patriarch, Shimshon Isaac Ovitz, was a respected Rabbi and dwarf. The majority of his children, Elizabeth included, inherited his pseudoachondroplasia dwarfism and upon his sudden death his widow reasoned that the seven stunted Ovitz siblings could secure a financially sound career as a traveling music troupe. In relatively short order, the siblings formed the 'Jazz Band of Lilliput' and began touring Central Europe.
By 1942, despite the unstable status of Central Europe of the march of the Nazi army, the Ovitz family managed to continue touring by concealing their Jewish identities. Elizabeth was able to marry in May of that same year to a young theatre manager named Yoshko Moskovitz. The couple was forced to split just ten days after their marriage when Yoshko was drafted into a labour battalion. For another two years, the Ovitz family continued to tour, unfortunately they were in Hungary in March of 1944 when German troops occupied the country. On May 17 the Ovitz family was captured, loaded into a boxcar and sent off to Auschwitz.
There the family fell into the clutches of the infamous Nazi doctor.
Mengele had previously tortured, experimented upon and dissected dozens of twin siblings for no reason other than to document the similarities of their internal organs and in the Ovitz family Mengele saw the ultimate test subjects. In fact, Elizabeth quoted Mengele as enthusiastically declaring: 'Now I will have work for the next twenty years; now science will have an interesting subject to consider.'
At Auschwitz Elizabeth and her family were segregated and subjected to all manner of frenetic experimentation. As Elizabeth would write:
'The most frightful experiments of all were the gynaecological experiments. They tied us to the table and the systematic torture began. They injected things into our uterus, extracted blood, dug into us, pierced us and removed samples. It is impossible to put into words the intolerable pain that we suffered, which continued for many days after the experiments ceased.'
The gynaecological experimentation was so severe that even the doctors assisting the procedures eventually refused to continue out of pity, whilst citing the very real possibility that the family would not be able to survive further invasive procedure. Mengele relented as he did not want to risk the lives of his favourite lab rats. Instead, he concocted and implemented new sadistic experiments.
'They extracted fluid from our spine. The hair extraction began again and when we were ready to collapse, they began painful tests on the brain, nose, mouth, and hand region. All stages were fully documented with illustrations. It may be noted, ironically, that we were among the only ones in the world whose torture was premeditated and "scientifically" documented for the sake of future generations.'
Would that were true, Elizabeth.
When the death camp was liberated in 1945, Elizabeth and her family were freed. They continued to tour and perform for several years. Before the decade was out, Elizabeth immigrated to Israel, where she died in 1992. She outlived Mengele by nearly two decades: the Nazi butcher escaped to Brazil where he lived, free and un-prosecuted for his crimes, until 1979.
Crazy revenge wackiness, cubed
The fine folks over at Cubeecraft, mayhaps in protest over the proposed "not a" remake, have made an Oldboy cubee figure.
Park life
Here's Does It Offend You, Yeah's bizarre video for their tune "Weird Science." Though the special effects are pretty cheesy, there is a couple with a fused face and a decided non-surgical separation procedure which leads to a fair amount of blood. NSFW? You'll have to make the call. I refuse to play bad cop here. You're an adult and you can make these decisions on your own.
Another minute off the Countdown to Skynet Clock
Mad science marches on!
Scientific American has some footage of Israel's new intelligence-gathering, armament-capable robot soldier.
The thing actually has the Cobra-worthy name of Versatile Intelligent Portable Robot or VIPeR.
How our brains make ghosts
Those mad science experts as Scientific American are at it again. This time, an article in the mag discusses grief hallucinations: vivid multi-sensory hallucinations of the recently departed that are, apparently, not that uncommon.
From the article:
The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement but are rarely discussed, because people fear they might be considered insane or mentally destabilised by their loss. As a society we tend to associate hallucinations with things like drugs and mental illness, but we now know that hallucinations are common in sober healthy people and that they are more likely during times of stress.
Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception. One study, by the researcher Agneta Grimby at the University of Goteborg, found that over 80 percent of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month after bereavement, as if their perception had yet to catch up with the knowledge of their beloved's passing. As a marker of how vivid such visions can seem, almost a third of the people reported that they spoke in response to their experiences. In other words, these weren't just peripheral illusions: they could evoke the very essence of the deceased.
More:
Occasionally, these hallucinations are heart-rending. A 2002 case report by German researchers described how a middle aged woman, grieving her daughter’s death from a heroin overdose, regularly saw the young girl and sometimes heard her say "Mamma, Mamma!" and "It's so cold." Thankfully, these distressing experiences tend to be rare, and most people who experience hallucinations during bereavement find them comforting, as if they were re-connecting with something of the positive from the person’s life. Perhaps this reconnecting is reflected in the fact that the intensity of grief has been found to predict the number of pleasant hallucinations, as has the happiness of the marriage to the person who passed away.
There are hints that the type of grief hallucinations might also differ across cultures. Anthropologists have told us a great deal about how the ceremonies, beliefs and the social rituals of death differ greatly across the world, but we have few clues about how these different approaches affect how people experience the dead after they have gone. Carlos Sluzki, the owner of the shadow cat and a cross-cultural researcher at George Mason University, suggests that in cultures of non-European origin the distinction between "in here" and "out there" experiences is less strictly defined, and so grief hallucinations may not be considered so personally worrying. In a recent article, he discussed the case of an elderly Hispanic lady who was frequently "visited" by two of her children who died in adulthood and were a comforting and valued part of her social network.
(Admittedly vaguely related pic awesomeness is my favorite photo from Diane Arbus)
Here's some video footage of The Body Part Bakery, a Thai bakery that specializes in making baked goods in the shape of human body parts. It's what the Texas Chain Saw Massacre would have looked like if it'd been an anti-gluten screed instead of metaphor for the horrors of factory slaughter.
The Scary Body Parts Bakery - More bloopers are a click away
The amazing tale of the Ovitz clan
At the fabu Human Marvels site, there's the amazing story of the Ovitz family, a clan of Transylvanian Jewish midgets who became the "research subjects" of the infamous Dr. Mengele.
From the article:
The Ovitz family were Transylvanian Jews. Their patriarch, Shimshon Isaac Ovitz, was a respected Rabbi and dwarf. The majority of his children, Elizabeth included, inherited his pseudoachondroplasia dwarfism and upon his sudden death his widow reasoned that the seven stunted Ovitz siblings could secure a financially sound career as a traveling music troupe. In relatively short order, the siblings formed the 'Jazz Band of Lilliput' and began touring Central Europe.
By 1942, despite the unstable status of Central Europe of the march of the Nazi army, the Ovitz family managed to continue touring by concealing their Jewish identities. Elizabeth was able to marry in May of that same year to a young theatre manager named Yoshko Moskovitz. The couple was forced to split just ten days after their marriage when Yoshko was drafted into a labour battalion. For another two years, the Ovitz family continued to tour, unfortunately they were in Hungary in March of 1944 when German troops occupied the country. On May 17 the Ovitz family was captured, loaded into a boxcar and sent off to Auschwitz.
There the family fell into the clutches of the infamous Nazi doctor.
Mengele had previously tortured, experimented upon and dissected dozens of twin siblings for no reason other than to document the similarities of their internal organs and in the Ovitz family Mengele saw the ultimate test subjects. In fact, Elizabeth quoted Mengele as enthusiastically declaring: 'Now I will have work for the next twenty years; now science will have an interesting subject to consider.'
At Auschwitz Elizabeth and her family were segregated and subjected to all manner of frenetic experimentation. As Elizabeth would write:
'The most frightful experiments of all were the gynaecological experiments. They tied us to the table and the systematic torture began. They injected things into our uterus, extracted blood, dug into us, pierced us and removed samples. It is impossible to put into words the intolerable pain that we suffered, which continued for many days after the experiments ceased.'
The gynaecological experimentation was so severe that even the doctors assisting the procedures eventually refused to continue out of pity, whilst citing the very real possibility that the family would not be able to survive further invasive procedure. Mengele relented as he did not want to risk the lives of his favourite lab rats. Instead, he concocted and implemented new sadistic experiments.
'They extracted fluid from our spine. The hair extraction began again and when we were ready to collapse, they began painful tests on the brain, nose, mouth, and hand region. All stages were fully documented with illustrations. It may be noted, ironically, that we were among the only ones in the world whose torture was premeditated and "scientifically" documented for the sake of future generations.'
Would that were true, Elizabeth.
When the death camp was liberated in 1945, Elizabeth and her family were freed. They continued to tour and perform for several years. Before the decade was out, Elizabeth immigrated to Israel, where she died in 1992. She outlived Mengele by nearly two decades: the Nazi butcher escaped to Brazil where he lived, free and un-prosecuted for his crimes, until 1979.
Crazy revenge wackiness, cubed
The fine folks over at Cubeecraft, mayhaps in protest over the proposed "not a" remake, have made an Oldboy cubee figure.
Park life
Here's Does It Offend You, Yeah's bizarre video for their tune "Weird Science." Though the special effects are pretty cheesy, there is a couple with a fused face and a decided non-surgical separation procedure which leads to a fair amount of blood. NSFW? You'll have to make the call. I refuse to play bad cop here. You're an adult and you can make these decisions on your own.
Another minute off the Countdown to Skynet Clock
Mad science marches on!
Scientific American has some footage of Israel's new intelligence-gathering, armament-capable robot soldier.
The thing actually has the Cobra-worthy name of Versatile Intelligent Portable Robot or VIPeR.
How our brains make ghosts
Those mad science experts as Scientific American are at it again. This time, an article in the mag discusses grief hallucinations: vivid multi-sensory hallucinations of the recently departed that are, apparently, not that uncommon.
From the article:
The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement but are rarely discussed, because people fear they might be considered insane or mentally destabilised by their loss. As a society we tend to associate hallucinations with things like drugs and mental illness, but we now know that hallucinations are common in sober healthy people and that they are more likely during times of stress.
Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception. One study, by the researcher Agneta Grimby at the University of Goteborg, found that over 80 percent of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month after bereavement, as if their perception had yet to catch up with the knowledge of their beloved's passing. As a marker of how vivid such visions can seem, almost a third of the people reported that they spoke in response to their experiences. In other words, these weren't just peripheral illusions: they could evoke the very essence of the deceased.
More:
Occasionally, these hallucinations are heart-rending. A 2002 case report by German researchers described how a middle aged woman, grieving her daughter’s death from a heroin overdose, regularly saw the young girl and sometimes heard her say "Mamma, Mamma!" and "It's so cold." Thankfully, these distressing experiences tend to be rare, and most people who experience hallucinations during bereavement find them comforting, as if they were re-connecting with something of the positive from the person’s life. Perhaps this reconnecting is reflected in the fact that the intensity of grief has been found to predict the number of pleasant hallucinations, as has the happiness of the marriage to the person who passed away.
There are hints that the type of grief hallucinations might also differ across cultures. Anthropologists have told us a great deal about how the ceremonies, beliefs and the social rituals of death differ greatly across the world, but we have few clues about how these different approaches affect how people experience the dead after they have gone. Carlos Sluzki, the owner of the shadow cat and a cross-cultural researcher at George Mason University, suggests that in cultures of non-European origin the distinction between "in here" and "out there" experiences is less strictly defined, and so grief hallucinations may not be considered so personally worrying. In a recent article, he discussed the case of an elderly Hispanic lady who was frequently "visited" by two of her children who died in adulthood and were a comforting and valued part of her social network.
(Admittedly vaguely related pic awesomeness is my favorite photo from Diane Arbus)
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Music: "The Old Man and the Sea Monster," plus "Enter the Laggin'""
With its puppetry and disarmingly low-fi effects, the video for Feist's melancholy "Honey Honey" is a grim fairy tale that recalls the somber folk tales of Northern Europe. Plus, it's got a sea monster. That's pretty awesome.
On a lighter note . . .
Though perhaps not very horror related, this Old 97's video has some geek cred. Thrill to the fightastic action as one somewhat out of shape, asthmatic, BSG-lovin', World of Warcraft guildin' dofus opens up an economy-sized can of whoop-ass on a nightclub full of bouncer thugs!
I actually like the Walter Mitty-ish end. Furnishes the thing with a nice little comedic barb on its tail.
On a lighter note . . .
Though perhaps not very horror related, this Old 97's video has some geek cred. Thrill to the fightastic action as one somewhat out of shape, asthmatic, BSG-lovin', World of Warcraft guildin' dofus opens up an economy-sized can of whoop-ass on a nightclub full of bouncer thugs!
I actually like the Walter Mitty-ish end. Furnishes the thing with a nice little comedic barb on its tail.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
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
'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
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Books: Don't you know that it's different for girls?
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.
Over at the Atlantic, writer Caitlin Flanagan looks at the Twilight books to figure out what they can tell us about, and I quote, "the complexities of female adolescent desire."
From the article:
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.
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