Recently, Publisher's Weekly, casting about for good news in an increasingly bleak biz context, has taken notice of, get this, some sort of uptick in consumer interest for zombie books. I doubt that readers of this blog will be particularly surprised at this President-Garfield-still-dead grade reportage, though the story does show that, really, this publishing "movement" is basically two books: Brook's World War Z and the Austen mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The former's 200,000 copies sold puts it in the realm of genuine hit (20,000 is a solid performance while 1 million puts you in Harry Potter territory), while the latter's rep looks secured on the basis of printing data (600,000 copies, the book's in its 16th printing already), though actually sales data has yet to surface. No doubt the other titles mentioned fetch a pretty penny or two for their publishers, though the data provided suggests that we're looking at two huge redwood trees and a lot of otherwise undifferentiated ground clutter.
Furthermore, to put this new phenom into perspective, the last book in the Twilight series sold 1.3 million copies in its first day of release. Even if every single copy of P&P&Z printed sold – which is unlikely – that single YA vamp book would trounce the combined sales of both titles. For those curious, the sales for the entire series are just south of 30 million. Next time you see somebody bashing the vampire romance franchise, imagine Stephenie Meyers responding, "These jabs sting, but then I just rub some money on the wound and that seems to ease the pain."
Charges of coming late to the not-much-of-a-party aside, the article's author gets extra points for comprehensiveness – the article ranges from Image Comics' excellent Walking Dead series to teen tales like Never Slow Dance with a Zombie - and a gazillion extra points for name dropping the father of American zombies: William Buehler Seabrook.
A restless and often self-destructive man, William Seabrook became a journalist and travel writer known for his extreme tales of far-of lands, retold with lurid detail for the subscribers of Cosmo, Reader's Digest, and Vanity Fair. An uneven and disciplined writer, given over to deploying now embarrassingly simplistic cultural and ethnic stereotypes, much of Seabrook's literary legacy is justly forgotten. However, three major milestones in American literature remain his. In Asylum , Seabrook turned his stay in the Bloomingdale mental institution in New York into the first celebrity rehab memoir. In Jungle Ways Seabrook gave American literature is only extended description of the taste of human flesh produced by a professional writer: "It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable." Finally and most importantly, in The Magic Island, Seabrook's sensationalist account of his wanderings in Haiti, the author introduced American audiences to the zombie.
It is sometimes erroneously stated that Seabrook introduced the word to the English language, though evidence for the term stretches back to at least the mid-17th century. However, these earliest uses are often vague references to various aspects of Caribbean and South American religions or are now archaic reference to culturally specific phenomenon, such as the resurfaced corpses of the buried dead unearthed by seasonal flooding. What Seabrook did was link the term zombie specifically to the concept of a person raised from the dead, and presented this definition in such a lurid way as to kick off a craze for the reanimated corpses in pulp lit and film. Seabrook's Island hit the shelves in late 1929. By 1932, Lugosi was starring in White Zombie.
The Magic Island includes original illustrations by the mysterious Alexander King, a once prolific and now obscure artist whose bio is lurid as Seabrook's. An abrasive man who was, at times, a painter, a failed playwright, and late night television regular, he was briefly an art thief and was busted after boosting 50 prints from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
King's images, shown below, are the first images of the walking dead to reach American shores.
[UPDATE: The ever on top of things Zoe has found a link to an online edition of The Magic Island. Check the comments for the URL. Thanks Zoe!]
Though he was never popular enough to achieve the iconic status of Conan, pulp legend Robert E. Howard's grim vigilante Puritan Solomon Kane has managed a thoroughly respectable run in the comic medium. Through the 1970s and 80s, the lanky and dour anti-hero appeared in no fewer than eight different Marvel Comics titles, even doing battle with Marvel's Dracula in Dracula Lives!, the ironically short-lived follow-up to Marvel's popular Tomb of Dracula series. The property lay fallow for more than a decade. In 2006, Kane's copyright holder sealed a deal with Dark Horse to bring grim avenger back to the funny books. Dark Horse's first Kane story arc – an adaptation of an unfinished Howard story fragment called "The Castle of the Devil" – ran though 2008 and is now available in the trade.
From the pulp-tastic cover to the final bonus story, Solomon Kane: The Castle of the Devil is a solid product. Benefiting from a tight script; art that fuses traditional illustration with the new nervous line sketchiness of the South American invasion; and a plot full of werewolves, Satanist, and demons; Kane hits an admittedly tiny, but indubitably sweet spot. The comic adaptation, written by Scott Allie with art by Mario Guevara and color by Dave Stewart, not only finishes Howard's story in a satisfactory manner, but uses the medium's visual elements to strip away some of the awkward purpleness of Howard's prose. Lean and efficient, the comic adaptation gives the original a fresh narrative ruthlessness.
The story arc opens as all good pulp tales should: with a fight. A sleeping Kane is attacked by a trio of men. The taciturn wanderer dispatches them with all due gore. He continues his travels the next day. He encounters a young boy on a gibbet and cuts him free before the boy is choked to death. Shortly thereafter, he encounters a chatty bon vivant by the ironic name of John Silent, who quickly becomes Kane's traveling companion. After his encounter with the three would-be assassins and the nearly-hanged boy, Kane has decided to discuss a baron's traditional duties to properly maintain a civil atmosphere of order and peace with the local power: Baron von Staler. Kane and Silent travel to his castle, known in the region as "The Castle of the Devil," and are greeted with surprising warmth by the Baron and his exotic Arabian wife. Of course, this friendliness hides dark secrets buried in the past of the castle. Before long, Kane is clashing with dark magicians, werewolves, cultists, and a quartet of bat-winged demons.
Good times.
As chaotic as the story gets, Allie keeps things streamlined as a possible. Though the dialogue contains "Easter eggs" for fans of the original stories and novels, Allie wisely avoided the reoccurring cast of heroes and villains that filled the Howard's originals. He also stripped Kane of magical items and powers, something that Howard did not do but that I think actually work thematically with the simplicity of Kane's character. In a world of shapeshifters and complicated supernatural bargains, it fits with Kane's literally Puritanical persona that he would trust only his skills and his mundane tools to get his work done. Allie also deftly avoids the relentlessly purple Howardian prose that has sunk many would-be Howard adapter. By trusting the art to communicate Howard's descriptive passages, he can cut down on the more florid touches and focus on plotting and effective dialogue.
Mario Guevara's art is crisp and his character designs suitably distinguished. His cadaverous Kane is especially nice, showing a nice contrast to the hulking Conan for which Howard is more famous. Guevara gets great mileage out of simple page layouts, maximizing narrative clarity (until the end, when the action sometimes overwhelms him and he loses the narrative flow). Stewart's somber palate completes the package, giving the art a pleasingly craftsman-like feel.
The collection also includes a stand-alone Kane story, "The Nightcomers," and a collection of concept art early sketches. I'm not immersed enough in the minutiae of comic to be the right audience for the background materials, but I though the extra story - a ghost story that emphasizes mood over action - was a welcome inclusion.
With e-readers finally making the jump from curio to viable product, the woes of big-box giant Borders, the existence of entrenched sharing tech, and business snake oil gurus hawking a freeconomy (which, to be fair, is excellent timing as so few of us have any money anymore), the band of Cassandras that ritualistically sounds the alarm for the "death of the book" has grown surprisingly large. Though there are certainly those who hold that the material object we call "a book " is an archaic bit of tech that is going the way of the polyspastos; more often than not, what the doomsayers are actually talking about is the end of the book-industry as we know it.
I'm not informed enough to make any sort of claim one way or another. However, I happily note that many of the same advances in production and distribution tech that are supposedly dooming the book are, currently, helping lower the cost of entry for small, niche publishers. I don't know if these odd, obsessive, quirky publishers may or may not be some sort of weather balloon for the coming era of the book-biz, but I do know that they please me to virtually no end.
Take, for example, Bazillion Points Books: purveyor of all things insanely metal. Whether you're looking for "the ultimate blow-by-blow account of Sweden’s legendary death metal underground" or the autobiography of Hanoi Rock's Andy McCoy ("My dad beat my mom, my mom beat my big brother, my big brother beat me, I beat my sister, my sister beat the dog, the dog beat the cat, the cat beat the hamster, and the hamster beat whatever bugs he could find. That was our family’s version of the natural order.") then Bazillion has your next new favorite book.
Even if you're not particularly into rock's lunatic fringe (I, for example, have a medical condition called "kinda being a big pussy" that prevents me from listening to metal's harshest offerings), there's plenty to dig. I know of more than one cult film fanatic who would be happy to receive Daniel Ekeroth's Swedish Exploitation Cinema: An Uncensored Guide to Sweden’s Clandestine Film History. The collected punk zine Touch and Go is pretty sweet too.
Finally, I don't know if it would ultimately bring you joy or grief, but Hellbent for Cooking: The Headbanger’s Kitchen, by Annick Giroux "The Morbid Chef" is fantastic beyond belief.
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.
I'm going to propose a hypothesis about Dracula movies. For any Dracula movie that contains a year in the title, the movie's quality is inversely proportional to the absolute value of difference between 1897 (the publication of Dracula) and the year in the title.
To test this hypothesis, we can look at the relative values of Hammer Studio's Dracula 1958, Alan Gibson's Dracula A.D. 1972 (a.k.a. Dracula Chases the Mini Girls, where "mini girls" means girls in short skirts and not, sadly, midget women) and Patrick Lussier's Dracula 2000. The hypothesis correctly predicts that the best of the lot is the stylish and inventive 1958 flick, which some feel represents the high point of Hammer's creative output. The once-trendy cheesiness of 1972 makes it at least fun to watch, giving it second place in our trio. The dour, clumsy, and stylistically inert 2000 performs the worst of all three test subjects.
I bring this up to provide a firm scientific context for my review of Dracula 3000: Infinite Darkness, the low-budget sci-fi/horror/actioner that takes the Dracula mythos and projects it 1,000 thousand years into the future, into a universe of intergalactic space travel, androids, and Coolio.
That's right. Coolio.
This context is important because, as I discuss the film, you might be tempted to think, "What an amazingly wacky flick, I should take pains to experience it for myself!" But don't be fooled. Remember the Dracula Title Year Hypothesis. It's science. You can't argue with it.
The film opens with Udo "anything for a buck" Kier as captain Varna of the spacefaring cargo ship the Demeter. In the first in series of video log entry interruptions that act as a running exposition, Varna explains that his cargo ship is on a return run from the planet Transylvania in the Carpathian system. He also complains of some sort illness has struck the crew.
Cut to 50 years later, and the intrepid crew of the salvage ship Mother (despite all the clamor George Clinton made over the Mother ship in the day, I must say that it's a little disappointing when you actually see it) it on their way to make a quick buck of the floating hulk of the Demeter. The salvage crew is led by Captain Abraham Van Helsing, played by Casper "the friendly ghost of a career" Van Dien. His crew includes the by-the-book second in command and love interest Aurora Ash, played by Baywatch alum Erika Eleniak. There's also the pot-addled 187, played by Coolio, natch. Tiny Lister provides the muscle in the form of the brutish Humvee, who never explains why his nickname means any more to his 31st century comrades than the nickname "Lectica" would mean to us. The brains of the operation is the wheelchair-bound brainiac Arthur Holmwood, whose allusive name is wasted because there's no Lucy Westernra analog. Nor it is explained why, after a century of tech development, the wheelchair apparently remains the best option for people who have lost the use of their legs. Finally, the crew is completed by the inept navigator-intern Mina Murry. Like Arthur's name, it is another wasted allusion.
The crew of Mother reaches the Demeter and, after scanning the ship and finding no signs of life, sends in Humvee and Mina to recon. After a false jump scare, the two test the oxygen in the ship using the traditional method of the sci-fi space explorer: they pop of their breathers and see whether or not exposure to toxic fumes or lack of oxygen kills them. Since they don't die, the ship is declared safe and the rest of the crew boards. Holmwood gets most of the Demeter's systems online while the rest of the team searches the ship. They find a small collection of coffins, the sole cargo of the ship, all filled with sand. They also stumble across the desiccated remains of Varda (what happened to the rest of the crew mentioned so many times by Varda in the video logs is unclear). The corpse of Varda is still clutching a crucifix, which baffles the salvage experts because religion was apparently outlawed decades ago. Whether or not this ban has anything to do with all the Soviet iconography around the ship – Did Soviet Communism experience a second wind and finally crush the West? And, if so, why then are these salvage guys so keen on the market value of the ships they find? – is never explained.
As pleasing as it might have been to watch Casper Van Dien and Tiny Lister debate the merits and shortfalls post-Soviet universal secularism in a universe that clearly allows for the existence of the supernatural, the salvage crew doesn't have time to ponder these abstractions. Almost as soon as the Demeter comes online, Mother "inexplicably" (read, Dracula) decouples and launches off into space. Trapped on the Demeter, the crew starts getting picked off by Dracula. Coolio goes first. Drac turns him into a spastic vampire and orders him to destroy the rest of the team. He attacks his former coworkers several times, eventually turning Mina into another bloodsucker.
During these hit and run attacks, Dracula corners Aurora and makes as if he's going to bite her. However, we find out that he never goes through with it because she turns out that she's an android narc sent by the galaxy police or whatever to keep an eye on Van Helsing's crew of disreputable scallywags. Instead of killing her, she claims Drac spilled his guts to her. He said that Transylvania was a planet of vampires, but Drac's now the last of his kind, the sole survivor from the now dead planet. He wants to get to Earth to get some grub.
Finally, in a fight scene that includes an unnecessarily extensive monologue in which twitchy vampire-Coolio describes masturbating to visions of the second-in-command, Coolio is dispatched by a pool queue through the heart. Sending him to . . .
Now fully convinced that their problems are vampirical in nature, the remaining team members do what anybody would: They google "vampires" to figure out what to do. At this point the viewer learns that the vampire stalking the Demeter is, in fact, the Dracula of Stoker's book fame (traveling under the alias Orlock). Further, we learn that Van Helsing is the great-great-great-and-so-on grandson of Stoker's original vampire hunter. Holmwood freaks out at this notion and suggests that what is really happening is little more than a revenge plot. Drac has waited more than a millennium to end the Van Helsings. Curiously, either his research is insufficient or he simply finds it a coincidence that his name and Mina's also appear in the original story, because those links don't bother him at all.
At this point, viewers can construct a backstory on their own and it goes something like this. Dracula was real. He came to England in the late 1800s and fought Van Helsing and the many suitors of Lucy. He was somehow not actually killed at the end of the conflict. He stayed out of the limelight for a few centuries, apparently having a low intensity conflict with the Van Helsing family. Whenever long distance space travel became feasible, he hopped on a ship went to a distant planet in another galaxy to set up, for some reason, an all-vampire world. Which, in retrospect, was a bad idea. Without something to feed on, the new Transylvania became a dead world. But, Drac couldn't just ditch the dead planet. Instead he waited until the year 3000, when the family he was fighting on Earth would come to him in far space. That way he could combine his vengeance with his move.
The salvage teams google search reveals that sunlight and stakes through the heart are the two ways to kill a vampire. At this point Officer Robot announces that there is no sunlight in the dark of space – an unfortunate mistake since ever freaking visible star is, in fact, a sun and, without atmospheric effects to disperse it, the light they give would be the very definition of direct sunlight – so they'll have to aim the ship at a double sun system and hope they can keep Drac and Vampire Mina of their backs until they get there.
The crew gets proactive and they find Mina sleeping in a coffin. They stake her, but have a harder time with Drac, who manages to vampate Holmwood and Van Helsing. Humvee manage to dispatch the newly minted bloodsuckers, but the worst they can do to Drac is lob of one of his arms when he gets it stuck in one of the ships massive steel doors. Trapped on the ship with a wounded, but still deadly Drac, Humvee and Aurora realize that they cannot prevent the Demeter from crashing into the sun.
Aurora announces that, prior to being upgraded to a cop bot, she was a pleasure droid. She suggests that they spend their last few hours have sex. Humvee picks up Aurora, throws her over his should like a sack of potatoes, and goes off to look for somewhere to have sex.
Their ship hits the sun and everybody dies.
The end.
I actually applaud the makers of this flick for its bizarro ending and their willingness to dispatch their Van Helsing character. Unfortunately, this little treats aren't enough to save the rest of the flick. Visually dull, crippled by a script that is neither scary nor funny, and carried by a cast that seems slightly embarrassed to be there, Dracula 3000 is strongest evidence yet for Dracula Title Year Hypothesis.
After various reports in the blog-twit ProAm that Jackson would be preserved like Lenin, embalmed like the Chinese prisoners of the traveling Bodies exhibit, or otherwise turned into a freakish display, the late entertainer is, somewhat anti-climactically, going to buried in Los Angeles's Forest Lawn cemetery.
But, it seems, the King of Pop will be shuffling off a few bits of his mortal coil prior to ending up in the cold, cold ground. Reports are that the LA corner's office will be keeping Mr. Jackson's brain topside.
Why? From the Mirror:
Los Angeles Coroner’s spokesman Craig Harvey confirmed that neuropathology tests will be carried out to see if it holds any clues to the exact cause of his death.
But the examination cannot begin until at least two weeks after the death when the brain has hardened sufficiently to slice it open.
Although this may seem unusual, the 'hardening' process is actually a standard part of any post-mortem examination where the brain is thought to be important in the cause of death, such as in suspected overdose.
It involves removing the brain from the skull and leaving it to soak in a diluted mixture of formaldehyde and water called formalin. This soaking process usually takes four weeks and the brain genuinely does harden.
A 'fresh' brain is a pinkish colour and has the consistency of jelly, gello or soft tofu meaning it is difficult to examine and the various internal structures are often hard to make out.
After soaking the brain, it has the consistency and colour of canned mushrooms making it easier to slice, examine and photograph. However, because the brain is so soft to start with, it can't just be dropped in a tank of fixing solution, because it will deform under its own weight.
To solve the problem it is usually suspended upside down in a large bucket of formalin by a piece of string which is tied to the basilar artery.
After it has 'hardened' or 'fixed' it is sliced to look for clear damage to either the tissue or the arteries. Small sections can also be kept to examine under the microscope.
On hopes the LA corner's office is taking the necessary security precautions to prevent brain-napping. The crime is not without precedence: in 1955, Dr. Thomas Harvey removed Albert Einstein's brain without the permission of Einstein's estate. Harvey sliced the brain into 240 individual sections, doling out a few sections to interested researchers, but keeping the majority in preserving jars at his home. In 1996, after years of negotiation and acrimony, Harvey surrendered the brain to Princeton Hospital in New Jersey.
After an auspicious debut and a sequel that actually improved on the original, the third book in Jeff Lindsay's Dexter series – the popular killer-kills-killers mystery series that inspired the Showtime TV series – was something of a debacle. While the novel contained some of the pleasingly black humor that is the series's hallmark and included a few important series-altering narrative developments, the third novel's unexpected foray into overt supernaturalism was widely considered a mistake and, for the most part, left fans groaning or scratching their heads. I know of more than one fan that swore off the series.
Whether Lindsay also felt that the more blatantly supernatural route was a dead end or he was simply reacting to the overwhelming response from the fan base, the upcoming fourth Dexter novel, Dexter By Design (available in hardcover this September from Doubleday), happily strips the jarring otherworldly elements from the series and returns Miami's most prolific serial killer to the Florida Weird crime comedy he's best at.
For those more familiar with the show than with the books, I'll do a quick recap of the story so far and, hopefully, the differences between the two series will become clear enough.
Dexter Morgan is a Miami PD blood splatter expert. He's also a serial killer. Adopted by a police officer who recognized Dexter for what he was, Dexter was trained to become a rigorously meticulous vigilante, taking out his bloodlust on criminals too clever to be nabbed by conventional means. Dexter's sister, Deborah, is also a police detective. Though she was kept in the dark by both Dex and her now deceased father for most of her life, as the fourth novel opens, Deborah is aware of, but uncomfortable with, what Dexter is.
While working in the police department gives Dexter access to the info and resources he needs to carry on his gory campaign against Miami's criminal population, it also means that he's surrounded by the professionally suspicious. While Dexter's thin façade of bland likeability is enough to throw off most off his co-workers, there are a couple of suspicious cops keeping an eye on him. First and foremost is a former detective named Doakes. Once a formidable officer, Doakes ran afoul of one of Dexter's targets and was left horribly crippled (he's missing some major extremities and has to speak through a Stephen Hawkings-esque voice box). Though no longer a major player in police investigations, Doakes continues to watch Dexter, hoping for a screw up. In one particularly nice bit of characterization, we learn that Doakes has preprogrammed the phrase "I'm watching you, motherfucker" into his voice box to avoid having to type the whole thing out every time he has to say it.
Dexter is newly married to Rita, his long-time girlfriend, and has two children by way of that marriage: his stepdaughter Astor and his stepson Cody. Previously, Dexter recognized that both Astor and Cody exhibit the same barely suppressed homicidal urges that he himself showed as a child. Though the chronically unaware Rita seems oblivious to her children's nascent serial killer drives, Dexter makes it his task train them as his own father trained him.
The fourth novel opens with Dex and Rita on a Paris honeymoon. A quick appetizer before the main course, this short section serves to introduce Dex to new readers and suggest the theme of the new mystery in the form of a violent performance art piece Rita and Dex stumble across. Called Jennifer's Leg, the piece features a young woman – Jennifer, one assumes – removing her leg with a circular saw. Ah, Paris!
Safely back in the land of doughnuts, traffic jams, Cuban ex-pats, and loud Hawaiian print shirts, Dex quickly finds himself put on a case involving a visual artist who is leaving artfully mutilated corpses as part of campaign of civic terror. The investigation into the corpses goes awry when one of the suspects knifes Deb, putting her into a coma due to blood loss.
Dexter may be an emotionless sociopath, but even he understands that violence directed at one's kin demands some level of special attention. Dex does as Dex does and exacts a swift and gory revenge on the morbid installation artist. The end.
Only, for poor Dex, it ain't. Following Dex's swift retribution, he finds out, in rapid succession, that 1) the artist wasn't actually killing people because the bodies were swiped from a local morgue, 2) the artist was not working alone, 3) the artist's two collaborators caught Dexter's vengeance on video, and 4) decide, in the face of Dexter's violence, to escalate their own project to new homicidal heights.
As if that wasn't bad enough, Deb's new partner, a bloated oaf of a man whose outsized frame hides a surprising effective detective's mind, starts to suspect something is amiss with Dex. But he'll have to get in line. Deb's stabbing attracts IA's attention, which means the Internal Affairs is all up in Dex's grill – what with the main suspect in Deb's stabbing going missing and all and Dex's career being one long series of "just happened to be where all the shit went down" incidents. And, for good measure, Doakes uses the possibility that the corpse-installations are serial murders to point out Dexter to a sympathetic FBI agent from the branch office.
Seriously, it's like it isn't even worth being a serial killer some times.
Credulity straining plots and overly elaborate serial killings are par for the series. I can't prove it, but I suspect the number of fans who read the Dexter books as mysteries can be counted on a single hand. Like may post-hardboiled mystery books, plotting takes the place of detection and who the villain is seems less important than how the hero gets to them. For example, in this particular "case" Dexter and Deb's first real lead pays off in just a couple chapters. The series's real draw has always been its bracingly amoral, yet charming narrator – Dexter, himself – and the cognitive dissonance of his bemused detachment from the carnage he witnesses and causes. Unlike the television series, which has made Dexter a more tortured character who is less emotionless than simply profoundly emotionally damaged (a good choice for the show's episodic, soap-ish format), the book's Dexter is a more blithely inhuman creature. There's a degree to which Lindsay is incapable of preventing some humanizing emoting; the task of creating a truly sociopathic character would be impossible for anybody except, I imagine, a sociopath. Emotions are simply too central to everything we understand about characterization and motivation. That said, Lindsay's original Dexter is a far creepier and in some ways a more interesting character. When Lindsay's writing him well, Dexter possesses a sort of internal bright-eyed innocence. Incapable of horror or moral discernment, he grasps ethics and morals the way others attempt to grasp the finer points of good manners: There's a code and Dexter tries to follow it for the sake of easing necessary social interaction, but none of it makes much sense and it all seems kind of silly. (Perhaps the finest example of this occurs in the second book, where Dexter finds himself in the clutches of a torture specialist turned serial dismemberer. Instead of fight-or-flight panic or stoic courage in the face of definitive discomfort, Dexter is simply curious about the techniques that he suspects will be used on him. This light and almost boyish curiosity is made even more grisly by the fact that he's thinking these thoughts while Doakes is getting chopped up in front of him.) Happily, for die-hard loyalists and those fans that may have declared the series dead, this pleasingly twisted Dexter is back in fighting form.
An excellent return to the core values that made the books work so well, Dexter By Design is a welcome addition to the series.
Today's link is flagrantly, flamboyantly NSFW – in the truest and most sincere meaning of the acronym.
The Gigwise music site presents a slideshow of 20 disgusting album covers, including the infamously short-lived "butcher cover" of the Beatles' in1966 US only Yesterday and Today LP shown above. This is actually one of the less repulsive covers in the lot. The site's commentary informs us, to nobody's surprise, that it was "John Lennon who pushed for the photo to be used." We didn't think it was Ringo's idea.
Given the tiny sample size, it's a little presumptuous to make generalizations . . . but, hell, I say, let's do it, let's be presumptuous.
Among "genres" of foul ideas, violence – usually depicted as potential or in its aftermath – makes up the largest proportion of the covers. But, curiously, second place goes to poop. Word hounds Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea have pointed out that the English language, "tongue of Shakespeare, Bryon, and Mellville" contains "a puzzling number of words that mean 'to spray with shit.'" This cultural obsession with human waste seems to have carried over into the American cultural innovation of rock and roll. Defecation – human, animal, and human-from-an-animal (deathgrind unit Cattle Decapitation's oh so tasteful Humanure album cover) – is an oddly popular topic for album covers.
Also, there's not one, but two covers (and the commentary mentions a third) featuring the taboo of bestiality. How this subject, which is hardly a major theme of rock, ends up on even a single cover is mystery best answered by minds smarter (or more twisted) than my own.
I have no pets. I own several ties, but rarely have a reason to wear any of them. I sing in the shower but can never remember the words, so I make them up as I go along, and they always end up being songs about showering. I collect slang dictionaries.
