FICTION FOR LOVERS: Freshly Cut Tales of Flesh, Fear, Larvae, and Love
by Tony Burgess [ECW Press]
The Weird is not something to be taken lightly. Too many authors think that a string of surreal, disjointed images will somehow coalesce into a story. If not, then fuck it, it's art, man. It doesn't have to make sense. Ah, but it does. In order for the surreal weirdness to work there has to be some sort of internal logic, or at least some consistency to the weirdness. The weird has to serve the story, not the other way around. And you can't beat your readers over the head with the Weird -- too much weird and, well, the weird isn't weird anymore. It becomes commonplace; it loses its ability to shock or wrench. You have to be subtle.
I say all that because in this collection of short stories, Tony Burgess seems to lose sight of the fact that the weird must serve the story. Most of the stories ("Snow Rooms," "Worms," "Sir," "Bug Day," "Snow Rooms II") are literary stories slumming in the surreal. You know the type -- unhappy couple goes on trip; every gesture, every break in the conversation, every flick of a switch is pregnant with meaning; they shuffle around, miserable; they argue; end of story, and they're still unhappy. Burgess takes our unhappy couple (or alienated urban loner, or [insert alienated individual here]) and surrounds them with ghosts or bugs. I think Burgess' intentions are good. It seems like he was aiming for the marriage of high lit and low horror. Unfortunately, what he came up with is a hybrid that has all the tedium of mainstream LITERATURE with the heavy-handedness of sloppy horror.
I don't use the word "sloppy" lightly. In one story, "The Screaming Tunnel" (set in 1984), Burgess has one of the characters refer to Clive Barker's film CANDYMAN. Problem: The film wasn't made until the early nineties. Granted, it's the sort of thing that only horror fans will catch. But if an author is writing dark fiction / horror, it's the sort of thing that can blow the reader's suspension of disbelief.
It's not all bad; the stronger stories, "Arms" and "Nancy," despite suffering from some clumsy constructions, are excellent. In "Arms," the protagonist wakes up to discover that his wife has cut off his arms. Fighting through blood loss and the onset of shock, he tries to recount the events leading up to the amputation. The imagery is strong and the characters are well-drawn. "Nancy" is the story of a survivor of a disastrous river battle set during the war in 1812. It's difficult to go into any more detail without giving too much away, but again the imagery is strong and the writing is quite evocative.
More than anything, this collection is frustrating. "Arms," "Nancy," and to a lesser degree the story "Sir," all show a lot of potential. I should also mention that Burgess does an excellent job of capturing the feel of rural Ontario ("Snow Rooms," "The Screaming Tunnel," "Snow Rooms II") and the (relative) grit of the Toronto subway system ("Sir"). He needs to work on snythesizing his literary and genre influences. [n/a]
It all starts with a proposition: a large sum of money in order to marry a woman and act like her husband. Sounds like a basic plot, but there is one important twist: the man who is to become a bridegroom is gay. Enter part two of the bargain. Remain married to the woman but follow my instructions regarding the destruction of another woman's character. All done while living an extravangant, secretive homosexual live.
The basic introduction to Mishima's FORBIDDEN COLORS. The bargain struck just that. But, rather than remaining some tawdry frustrated love story the novel takes on philosophic arguments, becomes an examination of traditional Japanese society and the place (or lack thereof) for homosexuals. The undergrounds, the fleeting agreements, and the loneliness of having to live a secret live are all beautifully displayed. Shunsuke, the wealthy novelist, propositions Yuichi, an up and coming young man, and talks him into accepting the agreement. During the course of the novel, the marriage of two of the secondary characters is revealed to be a degrading, amoral two-person con game against the world. Most of the characters seem incapable of any kind of emotion other than self love. A rather bleak picture, but convincing nonetheless.
Ultimately, the novelist dies and leaves Yuichi his entire estate. This occurs while Yuichi was trying to return the original sum of money, a repayment acquired through more finagling and treachery. The retribution intended can never come to fruition. Now more in debt to the novelist than before, Yuichi loses any concern he may have had for his wife, young child, and all the lovers he had along the way. Yuichi is a portrait of self- concern, a portrait created in part by Shunshuke.
Yuichi is both a character in his own right and a creation of Shunshuke, the novelist. A good prt of the interest of this novel rises from that dual creation. Is a person really he product of his own actions and thoughts, as we usually think, or can someone truly be molded into the image created by another? [bc]
Another interesting zine, although not quite as "arty" as Marcel's (which, I suspect, is the difference between having publishing software and good printer equipment at your disposal on one hand and, ah, le Xerox on the other). Some of it's typed, other parts are handwritten, a couple of pages had to be renumbered (whoops!), very DIY, very human... but still plenty coherent. This is pretty much an indie music kind of zine that natters on about other stuff occasionally (like high school in this issue), and this issue covers the GO! CDs Indie Rock Flea Market in Arlington, VA; recounts the Lollapalooza experience; and hurls seven questions (hey, that should be the name of a band -- Seven Questions) at Jenny Toomey of Tsunami. She even answers them. What more could you want?
Well, whether you want it or not, there's also some reviews (a partial list should give you an idea of where Steve's head is "at" -- Mary Lou Lord, Heavens to Betsy, Velocity Girl, Tsunami, Superchunk, and Sinkhole... gee, I haven't heard a single one of these, I am BEHIND the times... either that or I spend too much time listening to Skullflower ("zzzzzdddkeekekeSSSSKRRREEEEsszz") and Zeni Geva ("DEAD SUN! RISING!") and the like -- oops, I'm rambling again), some addresses of cool record labels you would do well to investigate, and the mention of several zines worthy of your attention. Plus Steve has the good taste to say good things about L7 frequently... and his pal Pam Satterthwaite contributes a poem called "Quantum Mechanics" so unspeakably cool that I wanna smooch her now... she has a fan club and doesn't even know it!
All Steve wants for this passel o' goodness is one measly buck. You'll spend more than that on that nasty shake at McDonald's, you can afford this. Go for it. DEAD ANGEL likes Steve... he has good taste in music... he saw Miranda Sex Garden recently... he's a happening guy (even if he does understand calculus). Check out his zine. Ask him why the hell it's called FROG PRINCE while you're at it....
Oooo, look, a PRINT zine... with real pages and stuff... and PICTURES... i'm jealous now! I like FROG PRINCE because the issues just sort of ramble along until they're done, with a very personal/informal style. Much more fun to read that newsstand magazines where a company board dictates all the style and policy, down to the comma placement. This issue is entitled "Let's Regress!" and the theme is essentially the return to childhood, so there's a fairly interesting guide to children's literature, musings on teen movies (the only teen movie DEAD ANGEL still swears by, incidentally, is ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, mostly because the brainy but dateless girl was hot!... oh, and the Ramones are in it, too), an essay about Daniel Manus Pinkwater, a Pippi Longstocking page, and a crudely-drawn cartoon entitled "Obnoxious Children That I Have Known" that is so... so TRUE that it might as well have been handed down from the heavens on stone tablets. There's also reviews of books (literary stuff) a couple of band interviews (Tattle Tale, Tuscadero), a 7 Questions! column interviewing Tim Alborn of Harriet Records, record reviews, a page on "Why I Hate Forrest Gump" (YES! YES! Gump must DIE!), plus lots of amusing cartoon frivolity and ephemera lurking in the margins on just about every page. All of this wholesome goodness can be YOURS for just one measly dollar, which is a pretty good deal. Lots of fun and a welcome change from the usual paranoid rant school of thought that seems to have overtaken the zine arena lately.
THE FURIOUS COCK by Michael Muhammad Knight [self-published]
Took long enough to get around to this book, but it turns out to be worth the wait. It's self-published and a bit rough around the edges, but full of highly entertaining characters and bizarre, sordid behavior. It reminds me of Neal Stephenson's THE BIG U (still DEAD ANGEL's benchmark for benign literary weirdness), only as written by Henry Rollins, assuming Henry had spent his "years of struggle" in a classroom rather than a van. The writing is usally spare and compact, letting the characters do the heavy lifting to carry you from one page to the next. The narrative concerns the clueless Al Zurriyati and his journey through six years of university education, one eccentric character at a time. Mind-control enthusiasts, straight-edge punks, goofy hipsters-in-training, discussions about Pantera and other bands of the day, drunks, thugs, gullible girls, liars, hoodlums, and occasionally even students form the human ocean Zurriyati dog-paddles through in his nebulous quest for a degree, or a beer, or something. About as accurate a picture as you're ever likely to get of the late nineties indie college-rock dude experience. Imagine HIGH FIDELITY with more hoodlums and less of the boring romantic foolishness and you're stumbling into the right cesspool. The book was published in a limited run of 500 and is available in various bookstores and record stores in the Buffalo, NY area; you can also email Knight to see about getting a copy directly from him if you're interested.
GAME by Conrad Williams [Earthling Publications]
Conrad Williams is a British author with a pile of short stories, a limited-edition novella, and one novel (HEAD INJURIES) to his name. I believe that this novella is his first solo appearance in North America. (A collection of his short fiction, USE ONCE, THEN DESTROY, is due later this year from Night Shade Books.) If so, then GAME is one hell of an introduction. Williams deals in the blackest noir spiked with liberal doses of science fiction, fantasy, and surrealism.
GAME is the story of five people: Rache, Fi, Liam, Eachus, and Ness. Rache, Fi, and Liam had the misfortune of taking an afternoon drive and (literally) running into Eachus, a wannabe gangster. As a result of the accident, Eachus, who had just finished kicking the living shit out of some poor bastard, was nabbed by the police and sent down for six years. As the novel opens, Eachus is out and he is pissed. He's kidnapped Liam and hooked him up to an apparatus that will drain his blood, pint by pint, unless Rache and Fi kill three other people involved in the arrest. The blackmail / murder thing is an aside for Eachus, whose main deal is a scam that involves selling tainted meat to shady diners around London. That brings us to Ness, who is an arrester. Arresters are a subset of the population who have the ability to glimpse the future. Unfortunately for Ness, these visions generally involve brutal murders and / or suicides. What's worse is that every time Ness has a vision she (literally and figuratively) comes apart at the seams.
GAME is not a light read. The novella opens with Rache and Fi up to their elbows in a cop's chest, trying to remove his heart so they can get a .jpg of the organ to Eachus in time to keep Liam from losing a pint of blood. After this, things get real nasty real fast. It's a testament to Williams' skill as a writer that you want to keep going. He pulls each scene together with taut, controlled prose that draws you in and won't let go. Also, while no one in this book is what you'd call likeable, Williams throws in the odd detail here and there that allows you to empathize with these people. You want to know what will happen, and to me that's the mark of a great book. [n/a]
For a nation founded on a document whose first amendment includes "the right to free speech," this country sure has spent a great deal of its time mired in the tar pit of censorship. This book is a fairly exhaustive history of the struggle against literary censorship, from the attempt in 1901 to have Ira Craddock punished and declared insane for publishing two erotic books (THE WEDDING NIGHT and ADVICE TO A BRIDEGROOM) all the way up to the recent National Endowment for the Arts fiasco, in which four artists (Karen Finley and Holly Hughes among them) were denied grants due to the content of their performances. Along the way, the author elaborates on the censorship of such artists as James Joyce, Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, and even 2 Live Crew, and provides details on the politics behind the scenes that led to such harassment in the first place.
The author has a unique position of authority on the subject: this is the lawyer who defended most of the above artists while on trial, as well as Lenny Bruce. He has also done a ridiculously extensive amount of research on the subject; over a hundred pages of the book are taken up by the endnotes and index alone. This is the man who made it possible for us to read TROPIC OF CANCER and NAKED LUNCH, and to see I AM CURIOUS -- YELLOW, which gives him a cachet that other censorship scholars can't even begin to match.
He even has a sly sense of humor-- the chapter headings are pithy quotes lifted from the banned texts in question or equally amusing phrases connected to the trials. My favorite: the chapter entitled "I Was Getting Hard-Ons," taken from a quote from Allan Ginsberg in the same chapter describing his homosexuality before moving on to the more serious discussion of "Howl" and the trouble it caused for its author. And in discussing his trial strategy for the defense of NAKED LUNCH, he writes, "I had decided not to bring William Burroughs into the Boston proceedings as a witness to NAKED LUNCH's serious artistic and social motives because doing so would have given the attorney general's office an excuse to bother Burroughs with questions like: Have you ever taken illegal drugs? Been a heroin addict? Sodomized young boys? Killed your wife?" How much more droll can you get....
The book's big drawback: This was intended to be a scholarly reference text, and it often reads like it. DeGrazia's writing is lively enough, but his reporting is so exhausting, and the sheer amount of detail present to be absorbed, that your eyes will glaze over if you read it for long stretches at a time. It's also punctuated by numerous footnotes (perversely enough, the footnotes are often interesting enough to completely sidetrack you from the text itself) and references to the endnotes that will keep you flipping back and forth through the book until you're half-lost. In other words, you don't have to possess a degree in law or English to read this, but it certainly helps. If you can deal with that, though, this will prove to be most rewarding and well worth your time.
THE GREEN MILE (part 1): THE TWO DEAD GIRLS by Stephen King (Signet)
Here's an interesting (well, depends on your point of view, i suppose) twist on publishing: This is the first of six installments in a serial novel available only in paperback. Supposedly a tribute to the days when authors like Charles Dickens would release their novels piecemeal or something like that, at least in theory (i rather suspect that in practice, it's a great way to make twice as much $$$ from the same amount o' wordage). The story so far concerns the happenings at a maximum-security prison where they're apparently going to fry some big black guy in the mean old electric chair for having messily killed a couple of young girls (hence the title). The story itself is one of the better ones he's churned out in a while, although the slant so far is making me a bit nervous; so far he's avoided injecting the supernatural into it, but i have a feeling it's going to come in eventually, and it'll be irritating when it does, because the story doesn't need it -- the subject matter is strong enough without needing to drag in ghosts or werewolves or whatever. But it's his gig, so i guess he's gonna do what he's gonna do....
The big question is whether you should buy it all, given the economics of the situation. Here's the deal: Each part costs two bucks, for which you get about a hundred pages. At this rate, the entire set will cost $18 for about six hundred pages -- what you would usually pay half that amount for in one book. Uh, i smell a marketing scam in here somewhere.... And of course eventually the entire thing will probably be collected together in one portable volume... so... how desperately do you need to read it RIGHT NOW? The decision is up to YOU....
The serial continues! Oh boy! And it's not as bad as "advance word" was leading me to believe; it's actually not bad. The jolly guys on Death Row at Cold Mountain Penitentiary continue to deal with the troublemaker guard in their midst, carry out an execution, frolic more with the eerily- sentient mouse, and run into lots o' trouble with a new admission to the wing. Not exactly brilliant -- i have become more and more convinced in the last year or so that King's last moment of real brilliance was with THE DEAD ZONE, which was published, um, a long fucking time ago -- but it's not bad, either. But is it worth $2.99 for a 92-page installment? Ummmm, well, probably not....
The most interesting thing about the book, actually (aside from the genuinely slick cover art -- at this point i'm buying the series mostly for the covers, which probably sez something less than flattering about the whole thing, but he got my $$$ so what the fuck does King care why i bought it, right?), is the "coming soon" blurb in the back, where it announces that after the series ends, we'll be treated to a new King novel (DESPERATION), followed by a new Bachman book, THE REGULATORS. That's a pretty neat trick, since Bachman's supposed to be "dead." Did they find another trunk novel? I don't think so, since King described this book as one he'd just started working on when he was interviewed in WRITER'S DIGEST a couple of years ago (the same interview, incidentally, in which he claimed INSOMNIA couldn't be published because it was "broken"... hmmmm). So perhaps Bachman has returned from the dead....
And none of this tells us when he's ever going to get around to finishing the Dark Tower series either, but that's par for the course, eh?
Our fearless hero the jailer learns that big scary Coffey, one of the latest additions to his happy family on death row, can miraculously heal the sick (among other things) by laying hands on them, putting a new spin on the events leading to his imprisonment and impending death sentence. The bad guy Percy fucks up big, but not as big as he fucks up in the next installment, to be sure....
... in which mean li'l shit Percy decides to have some "fun" with Edward by "forgetting" to soak the sponge in water before applying it to his head in the electrocution preparation process, with truly grotesque and repulsive results. Oh, and Paul the Friendly Jailer begins to hatch a plan to spring Coffey from prison for the purposes of healing a cancer-ridden pal. Ah, i believe i see where all this is heading, mon....
THE GREEN MILE (part 6): COFFEY ON THE MILE by Stephen King [Signet]
Well, it ends the only way it CAN end: They fry the big guy, even after discovering that's innocent, because they can't prove it and he (for reasons of his own) is ready to shuffle off this spinning toilet anyway. There are a few more surprises in store, though. Not bad. Not brilliant, either, but still.... (I notice, though, that in the afterword King confirms what I've suspected: the books WILL be collected into one volume now that the separate series is done. I should be scamming like this....)
GRIT BATH # 1 by Renee French (Fantagraphics)
The really grotesque adventures of a lot of people with heads like potatoes. You don't want to know just how perverse this is. The best one of the several short stories here is "Fistophobia," featuring a bunch of kids (including Carol Anne the Haireater) who gather at a clubhouse, where the oldest girl pulls off her panties and makes Carol Anne (who is apparently not entirely "there") put her li'l fist in a less-than-public place while the others watch. Wholesome family entertainment! In another short piece, an offstage commenter convinces vapid airhead Cyndie, while she's going on and on about her expensive engagement ring and how her finance loves her because she's so pretty, to use an industrial stapler ("It's an expensive eye beautifer") and... eeeew, how NASTY! The other stories are even more repulsive. Sick art at its finest.
This is interesting; a beautifully-printed zine that consists almost entirely of interviews (there's very little in the way of reviews, although this issue does include Alan Licht's Minimal Top Ten). Loren Mazzacane Connors is interviewed at length, Matthew Shipp provides ruminative excepts from his tour diary, and toward the end there is an appreciation of Harry Bertolia... but the real centerpiece of this issue is the exceptional and lenghty interview with LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela. The zine also includes a 7" with tracks by Connors on one side and Shipp on the other. Highly recommended.
A good thing gets even better. Long, exhaustive "interviews" (HALANA's preferred style is to let the artist do most of the talking with minimal interviewer input) with Keiji Haino, Patty Waters, William Parker, and Pauline Oliveros are only the appetizer for the main course: a long discourse from Tony Conrad and an equally lengthy discourse/interview from and with Alan Lamb. (yow!) This time the included goodie is a CD with tracks (all apparently unreleased) by all of the artists interviewed with the exception of Patty Waters. The highlights, needless to say, are "July 95" by Tony Conrad and Lamb's "Last Anzac." The rest are worthy of hearing as well. If subsequent issues are as good as the first two, this zine should be in business for quite a while....
Yah, another slab o' coolness from HALANA. Interesting stuff this time around includes a spooky story/memoir (?) from John Fahey, the text of a brief speech David Grubbs (Gastr del Sol) gave to an audience at Lounge Ax, Chicago in 1994 before "performing" by walking away without playing a thing, an actual interview (imagine that!) with Bernhard Gunter, and various other obscure goodies. Plus lots of reviews of stuff most of the known world has never heard of and, as always, a CD featuring lost/unreleased sonic goodies by the latest interviewees/contributors. Best ones this time around are from David Grubbs, Fahey, and Charlemagne Palestine. And all this can be YOURS for only $7.50. You know what to do next....
HANNIBAL by Thomas Harris [Delacorte Press]
Dr. Lecter returns... took him long enough, didn't it? Given the length of time between THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and this one (eleven years, for the curious), you'd think Harris chiseled the manuscript on stone letter by letter. Somebody buy this man a word processor so he can finish his books in a more timely fashion....
So of course you're wondering, is it as good as the last one? O my yes... in fact, it's actually better. This is by far the best of what most now think of as the Lecter trilogy (even though in the first, RED DRAGON, Lecter was very distinctly a minor character). In the first one, Lecter was essentially an enigma, given that he was on stage (so to speak) for so little time; in the second book, he was given much more shade and depth, but we still learned little about the man himself -- only about his gruesome actions. In this book, we not only learn a tremendous amount about Lecter himself and his ambitions, but we get a glimpse (albeit a brief one) into what helped shape him into the "monster" he is now. And yes, for those who have been wondering, Clarice Starling is around again... in fact, she's in the process of having her FBI career implode. Does she meet up with Lecter again? O my yes... although not in the way you'd expect. In fact, the best part of this book is that nothing is what you expect -- other than the good doctor himself, of course, and even he has a few surprises up his sleeve.
The basic plot (at least, as much as i can divulge without spoiling any surprises), is this: While Starling is dealing with the fallout of an FBI raid gone bad and fending off the (metaphorical) knives being aimed at her back courtesy of one of her bosses, corrupt meat-packing magnate Mason Verger, now scarred and forever bedridden thanks to an unfortunate encounter with Dr. Lecter, is planning his revenge. For years he has been breeding the perfect killing machines -- an exotic menagerie of wild pigs -- and waiting patiently, spending great sums of $$$ in the search for the good doctor, in hopes that he will soon have the chance to feed Dr. Lecter to the pigs feet first. Meanwhile, the good doctor (now living in Florence, Italy with a new face and new name) is dealing with his own problems, which have surfaced in the form of a policeman who has discovered his real identity and is in the process of selling him out to Verger. Eventually Verger lures Lecter back to the United States, and then... why then the real fun begins. Unexpected revelations occur every step of the way, and the book ends up in a conclusion that is by turns horrifying, blackly funny, and completely surreal. Without spoiling the surprise, i think i can safely say that making the movie (already in the works, supposedly) without garnering an NC-17 rating will be the devil's work indeed.
My only objection to the book -- which is nearly flawless -- is that someone really should have overruled Harris' contract stipulation regarding editing. Part of the deal for this book was that Delacorte had to publish it exactly as he submitted it, with no editing, and they apparently did so... much to his detriment in some places, because while Harris is brilliantly evocative and a master researcher, he also has a terrible habit of mixing his tenses, which is extremely annoying (not to mention distracting). It's not a minor deal, either; he does it so constantly that it frequently breaks the spell of reading the book, and it really got on my nerves after a while. Of course, it's entirely possible that readers without an English degree won't even notice this, and there's no question that the plot and characterization are without flaw....
HECATE'S FOUNTAIN by Kenneth Grant
Ever had an interest in the dark, the macabre, Evil, the Left Hand Path? Well, you might find it in the writings of Kenneth Grant, probably the most hated and controversial writer in Thelemic (followers of Aliester Crowley) circles. Hated, because for all of Crowley's rebellious theatrics and Satanic philosophy (try as they might to revise AC's history, it's hard to say that someone isn't a Satanist even after it's well known that they've penned hymns to Satan and Lucifer, as well as at one point run a Satanic Temple), most Thelemites are far more interested in the "Light" side of things. (Whatever that is, eh? After all, even Lucifer means "Light-Bearer"!)
But onto this book. It's partially an account of Kenneth Grant's experience with the New Isis Lodge, an occult group he ran in the late sixties to early seventies. At times, some of the many rituals the New Isis Lodge performed went wrong, at times to the point that the members went insane, died, or had just plain nasty stuff happen to them. For instance, one woman falls off into a giant quaballistic "Tree of Life" structure into a well below. Gigantic tentacles drag her under the water, and then spit her out moments later, and she died insane, her mind eaten. In another, a woman discovers that the Infernal Lord known as Carnatatoz (a demonic entity that looks like a cross between a squid and a bat0 has made an appearance in the ritual. Not to be unkind to him, she immediately crams his massive phallus into her mouth and goes to work. After that is all said and done, she later becomes a great dancer. Other, less colorful happenings occur, generally involving magical artifacts such as Voodoo spirit traps and Crowley's magical dagger. Some turn out for the best (like the Daemonic intercourse) while others ten to end leaning heavy to the bad side.
Now, as interesting as all this is, this isn't the main part of the book -- these episodes are normally about two pages long and are placed at the end of each chapter. This book is basically divided into two main sections -- the first a brief discussion on bizarre forms of Black Magic, for instance the Cult of the KU, which include menstrual-blood feeding vampires and brain-consuming entities.
The second section is even more bizarre -- Aleister Crowley's classic BOOK OF THE LAW interpreted from a NECRONOMICON-styled perspective. Passage by passage, phrase by phrase, Grant interprets every bit of the BOTL. It's interesting; however, Grant's endless discussions on how this entity is related to that entity and how that entity has a numerical value of 563 which when combined with that entity is 789, gets really confusing. Even more confusing is Grant's insistence to connect Set, the Egyptian God of Evil, with virtually every Diabolic figure under the sun. For instance, Cthulhu, that famous Lovecraftian God, is referred to several times by Grant as "Set-thulu." Grant also believes that somehow Satan and Shaitan are based on Set, and that Choronzon has a connection to Set. [tmu: Sounds like Grant had connections to real good acid....] He even claims that the "Yog" in Yog-Sothoth is Set! Why Grant has this bizarre Set fixation is hard to say.
Speaking of Devils, a whole host are present throughout this interpretation -- Grant mentions Set, Lucifer, Satan, Shaitan, Belial, Lilith, Hecate, Shugal, Choronzon, etc., in addition to all the Lovecraftian entities (Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, etc., etc.). Exactly how this is "useful" is somewhat difficult to say. In a way it's useful if you are quite interested in Lovecraftian ideology....
This is definitely the sort of thing you need to read a few times, to be honest. The third section is more Grant talking about things in and of itself as opposed to directly influenced by others (such as THE BOOK OF THE LAW). He does quote Michael Bertiaux from time to time, who is the head of the "OTO Antiquis" and the "Chorozon Club," as well as the writer of a big-ass, phone book-sized, and massively expensive ($500) tome entitled VOUDON GNOSTIC WORKBOOK. Various things discussed include space and the "Holy Guardian Angel," the latter of which is also discussed in a chapter entitled "Dark Angel." While written more clearly, and with less confusing Dark Quaballah terminology, it's still very difficult to understand what Grant's trying to say -- you can only really get a few underlying things: that somehow Crowleyian Thelema, Lovecraftian Mythos, UFOs, Diabolism, and Gnosticism aresome kind of super-religion. [tmu: Hell, it makes sense to me... but i already know about the Nazi Hell-Creatures That Live Beneath The Ice and their peculiar ideas about religion....] Minus the UFOs that could very well be, but good luck understanding any of it on the first read, unfortunately. Indeed, in some areas it would appear that Grant didn't break his back trying to make it more understandable -- for instance, the book is heavily footnoted (some taking up a third of the page), but most of the books he refers the reader to are hard to find, massively expensive, or out of print. For instance, all the photos of the magical artifacts are in his book OUTSIDE THE CIRCLES OF TIME -- a book twenty years old that runs about $250.
It's definitely interesting, quite intriguing on one hand, but on the other, it's quite exhausting and definitely confusing! That's all that can really be said. [FCW]
HELLFLAME zine # 7
This is a well-done and interesting zine from Italy, mainly dealing with black metal with a sprinkling of articles on occultism. (for instance, the popular White Order of Thule (a defunct NS/Satanic/pagan group) tract "Hail the Accuser" and "Wherefore Satan?"). The interviews are golden, with some in-depth ones of such underground bm extremists as Watain, Axis of Advance, a NSBM producer named Jasper, and so forth. I found the Axis of Advance interview to be especially interesting, as the fellow explains at length his beliefs on Satanism, yet he mixes it heavily with National Socialism, once even saying "66 = 88 -- Adolph Hitler, the Antichrist!" It also comes witha Necrovore poster. It looks like this will be the last issue of this zine as well, too bad. [FCW]
HOUSE OF LEAVES by Mark Z. Danielewski [Random House]
If you like the idea of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT -- the concept of horror as creepiness rather than mad slashers and gore -- but were put off by its low-budget, lowbrow approach (such as the "creative" use of the word "fuck" in, uhhhh, pretty much every sentence), then buddy, have i got a book for you. Yessir. This book is not only extremely literate (although it does have its lowbrow moments), it's an actual honest-to-God experimental novel (and you thought those went out of vogue when Pynchon went into hiding, didn't ya?), plus it's one creepy mother to boot. The only catch, of course, is that it's damn difficult to read... as with most books of the experimental genre, it eventually gets a tad carried away with its own cleverness and drifts into the territory of the nearly unreadable. Nevertheless, it's compelling enough (and ultimately so cleverly constructed) that it definitely warrants the time and energy it takes to decipher its admittedly arcane nature.
Here's the deal: it's like a series of Chinese boxes, all of which eventually reference and impact each other. The book opens as narrated by Johnny Truant, a breezy stoner dude who has been shaken to the core by the experience he is about to relate. It turns out that he and his equally laid-back, barhopping pal Lude, know a blind guy named Zampano who lives down the street and when Zampano dies, they take it upon themselves to break into his house and poke around (this, like chasing strippers and ingesting vast quantities of drugs, is what passes for entertainment to them). They get more than they bargained for, though, when Truant carts away a steamer trunk that contains the book Zampano has been working on endlessly -- an examination, complete with footnotes, of a film known as THE NAVIDSON RECORD. This is where the narrative starts to get complicated: if the first "box" is the story of Truant and Lude, then the second is Truant's study of Zampano's book (presented as the narrative), which in turn leads to a third box that is the extended description of the film, which is itself several boxes in its own right (the film is actually several films strung together, each with its own history). To make things even more complicated, Zampano's footnotes to the book are in turn interpreted and supplanted by Truant's own footnotes, which eventually turn into the narrative of the first box. So the first difficulty is just in figuring out what the hell is going on -- you have to really pay attention to keep track of what's what, a fact that is compounded by Truant's growing madness as the novel progresses and Zampano's book essentially takes over his entire life. At some point all the boxes merge into one endless black box determined to swallow Truant whole, just as it has already swallowed Zampano, Navidson, Navidson's family, and a whole host of others.
The film, as it happens, is about Navidson's house in on Ash Tree Lane in Virginia. Navidson, a famous photojournalist, has retired to the countryside with his wife and two children; for various reasons, he has decided to make a film about living a normal life far unlike the one he's led so far. This is all well and good, but he's picked the wrong house to live in -- as he subsequently discovers, the house has a peculiar quirk. It's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. In fact, as he and a team of explorers eventually discover, it's a lot bigger... maybe bigger than the entire world. Beginning with a door that appears out of nowhere, he discovers a series of hallways that are endless, leading out... and around... and up... and down. So what does he do? Why, he films it. He drags others in to explore it. And that, my friends, is where the shit hits the fan, because while exploring the house, Navidson and his explorers get lost -- horribly lost. What follows is remarkably similar to the paranoia and terror of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, only handled with far more finesse and a lot more background support (at one point Zampano's book launches into an apparently inexplicable study in physics, which he subsequently applies to demonstrate that the length of time a quarter takes to fall down a stairwell indicates that the stairwell is at least 27,273 miles deep -- exceeding the Earth's circumference by over two thousand miles). Between trying to wrap your head around the concept of a house that's apparently boundless and watching Truant's slo-mo implosion (as evidenced by gradually rambling footnotes and hallucinations and the increasingly disordered arrangement of text, which begins to resemble a labyrinth in print), the book's eventual effect is one of confusion and severe claustrophobia... not a bad trick for the printed word.
The book "ends" with an appendix filled with what, at first glance, appears to be unrelated materials and fragments... but what it actually is, in fact, is an assembling of items (poems, forms, and letters) demonstrating how Truant was probably severely disturbed to begin with and why the details of Navidson's film managed to widen the fissures in his mind that were already present. Some, like the series of letters from his mother (confined to a mental institution), even have to be decoded in order to understand their full impact. Needless to say, it's not an "easy read" by any stretch of the imagination -- but the book is so carefully and cleverly constructed, with so many points that dovetail and refer to each other, that it invites endless speculation and interpretation. Perfect fodder for endless bull sessions, in fact. Remember the endless debates that made the rounds after each new episode of TWIN PEAKS, with every viewer offering different views of "what it all meant" based on Lynch's cryptic and fragmentary clues? This books takes the same approach, making it a novel that never really ends... just like the house it describes.
Hands down my vote for the book of the decade, even though the decade just got started.
Why does it seem lately that the creepiest, most startling shit is being written almost exclusively by women? First A. M. Homes (THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS, IN A COUNTRY OF MOTHERS), then Donna Taart (THE SECRET HISTORY), and now Heather Lewis, with her debut novel about a fucked-up (and repeatedly fucked) 15-year old girl in the horse racing business. The story starts when Lee, the 15-year old "heroine," gets tossed out of boarding school for holding a bag full o' pot when a party gets raided; rather than going back home -- where her main activity, it turns out, would be having her father stick his dick up her ass on a nightly basis, which is why she's not at home in the first place -- she scoots on down to Florida, where she returns to racing horses with the extended-family of sorts, Silas and Jeanie, for whom she's raced in the past. The fact that Lee can pass for twenty or older causes her plenty of problems, and when it becomes apparent that Silas is fading fast in the horse business, her newfound sweetie Tory convinces her to come work with her for Carl and Linda Rusker, who run a stable full of jumping horses. (There's a lot of equestrian terminology in the book, and even though Lewis explains it all along the way, it's real easy to get lost, so ignore the terms as they crop up here-- they are only incidental to the real plot anyway).
This turns out to be a bad, bad idea, because while she and Tory are busy getting it on all the time, it gradually dawns on her that she's surrounded herself with a lot of genuinely messed-up people. Linda, in particular, has this really unpleasant habit of sneaking about, shooting her full of dope, then doing really kinky, painful stuff to her. In fact, nearly everybody in the book sooner or later takes their turn at sexually abusing her, a scary thing made even scarier by the fact that she takes for granted that this is how people are supposed to behave. Things progress to the point where, by the end of the book, she and Tory are hopped up on junk all the time and she's being physically as well as sexually abused by everyone around her, until she finally wises up and decides she's had enough... but not before she learns a lot of really ugly stuff about the company she's keeping, especially one person's fondness for sexual mutilation.
Like A. M. Homes, Lewis is capable of being extremely blunt, even graphic, in describing the ugly extremes of human behavior. This is disturbing stuff, made even more unnerving by the lack of distance -- the story is told from Lee's point of view-- especially when it becomes evident that far from being utterly repulsed by this unnatural attention, she actually encourages it to a degree (if only because she's decided that even perverted attention is better than no attention at all, and sick intimacy is better than being alone). Where most stories revolving around sexual abuse wallow in the shame and horror of it all, Lee's matter-of-fact, even offhand, recounting of these recurring episodes is genuinely discomforting... and a lot more telling about the depth of total emotional shutdown brought about by such abuse.
This is probably the kind of fucked-up generational malaise that Bret Elliot Easton was trying to get across in LESS THAN ZERO; the difference here, though, is that Lewis can actually write well. Plus she always seems to be working toward an actual point (as opposed to Easton's usual style of just muddling along and wallowing in the filth for no apparent reason), which helps immensely, given how dark the subject matter is. She is also (again, like A. M. Homes, probably her closest "literary mate") capable of bringing moments of humor into the grim situation, although it's generally a kind of sick gallows humor....
In the end, even though the book's semi-hopeful ending is still fairly ambivalent -- we see that Lee is finally going to extricate herself from this particular mess, but we get no guarantee that she won't just float into another one equally as bad -- the fact that her spirit remains uncrushed by all this sick behavior is a small triumph in itself. That she manages to come across as totally believable all the way through the book, even in the most dire and surreal circumstances, points to Lewis' considerable talent and makes her next book something to look forward to.
HOWLING AT THE MOON by Walter Yetnikoff [Broadway Books]
Now this is a tell-all book. See young Walter getting slapped around by his weird immigrant daddy! See Walter get in all sorts of woman trouble! See Walter become a not-so-big deal lawyer and somehow end up at CBS Records! See Walter eventually running the place while Michael Jackson, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Barbara Streisand, Mick Jagger, and other big-deal CBS stars make his life miserable! See Walter terrorize them all, and his staff, and anyone within shouting range! See Walter screw lots of girls and do piles of blow! See Walter run with the weasels only to find himself staggering around with knives sticking out his back, going "What happened?" Oh, it's all here -- dirt on the stars, dirt on the label, dirt on other weasels at other labels, dirt on Walter, dirt on Walter's parents... it would be downright depressing if Walter weren't such a funny guy, even after sobering up. I don't know how much these kind of books can really tell you about the music business (other than it's full of lunatics, and frequently coked-up lunatics at that), but this one is certainly far more entertaining than most.
A. M. Homes may be the creepiest writer in America today -- forget the likes of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and the whole bunch of "horror" writers, THIS is the hard stuff, all right. With a morbid fascination for writing about people coming unglued as their lives spin inexorably out of control and a compelling eye for detail, her writing is both riveting and disturbing, and definitely far out in left field.
This charming fable begins with Jody, a film student who's cracking at the edges and therefore takes up a new round of visits to the friendly therapist Claire. Unfortunately for her, Claire is not too tightly wrapped herself, and soon becomes utterly convinced that Jody is the grown daughter that she gave up for adoption two decades earlier. Jody gets physically sick, Claire gets obsessed, Jody gets obsessed in return, and everything spirals down into the black hole of paranoia and deceit, until everything ends in a unexpected (and fairly unpleasant) fashion. Along the way, Jody has to endure a flaky mother, weird sex-obsessed friends, a "boyfriend" whose idea of a good evening is something that probably falls within the parameters of date rape, and equally sex-obsessed filmmakers.
This is urban Southern Gothic for the Nineties (and never mind that the action actually takes place in California and New England), written with a sense of style and clarity that more well-known fringe artists like Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Jamowitz have yet to even approach. Why she remains largely unknown when Ellis, who is one of the dullest writers in the world, is apparently a big deal, is totally beyond my comprehension. Buy many, many, copies of this book and change the picture and make her rich so she can afford to write books like this more often.
More amazing stuff that nobody in even the most delusional state could even BEGIN to imagine ever existed... and much arcane stuff that only exists at all courtesy of some people who WERE in a delusional state when it came time to record and/or release some exquisitely deranged piece of work. As with all of Re/Search's books, this is huge -- we're talking big enough to beat people to death with and sturdy enough to still be readable afterwards, assuming you didn't get too much blood on it -- and CRAMMED with pictures that will strip the gears of your mind and leave your cerebral cortex a smoking, jagged husk, much like a blown vacuum tube.
Interviewees this time around include Jello Biafra (ex-DK shouter, founder of Alternative Tentacles), Rusty Warren (one of the first real "blue" standup comediennes), Ken Nordine (creator of "word jazz"), Yma Sumac (inspiration to the likes of Diamanda Galas, Nina Hagen, and Kate Pierson, among others), Robert Moog (guess what he built...), the creators of the FORBIDDEN PLANET soundtrack, and the currently-hip Esquivel, plus many others much more obscure but every bit as entertaining. They call it kitsch and this may be the FINAL FRONTIER... i certainly can't imagine anything much kitschier than MARCELLA, THE CHICKEN WHO SANG OPERA, can you? Unless it's WHERE THERE WALKS A LOGGER, THERE WALKS A MAN... featuring... yes... singing lumberjacks....
As with the first volume, most of the "finds" here fall into 4 categories: bizarre albums created hastily to meet some preconceived need or fad (such as the rash of "stereophonic" LPs featuring steel machines at work or worse, given birth for the owners of newly-created stereo turntables to actually listen to); sleazy exploitation albums (blue comedy, evangelical warnings against LSD, and AN EVENING WITH JAYNE MANSFIELD, a string-arrangement easy listening album with the soon-to-be-headless one on the cover but NOT in the grooves); "regular" albums now noteworthy because of their sheer age, novelty, or plain badness; and albums that, in a saner world, would NEVER have been released (mostly self-released "oddities" such as the albums of Dora Hall, heiress to the Solo paper cup fortune who spent all her $$$ trying to become, as Jello Biafra puts it, "the Pia Zadora of the 60's" -- a plan doomed to failure because, ach, she just COULDN'T SING). Just reading about these albums is a sociopolitical education all in itself; there's no telling how transformed one could be by actually LISTENING to them (look at what it did to Jello Biafra!)....
There are more women interviewed in this one, which is good; if I remember right, the first one only interviewed two or three (Poison Ivy of the Cramps and two record collectors). Candi Strecker (of the Church of the SubGenius, if I'm not mistaken) shows up as a collector, and the interviews with burlesque comedy queen Rusty Warren, exotic singers Yma Sumac and Elisabeth Waldo, and electronic-noise pioneer Bebe Barron (one half of the husband-and-wife team responsible for the FORBIDDEN PLANET soundtrack) are among the most interesting in the book; Warren's, in fact, is one of the most revealing regarding the workings of the music business of the previous decades.
Now if I could FIND all these deranged treasures... and could AFFORD them if and when i did.... one shudders to think of how much more warped i could eventually become....
My, but this is depressing. Incredibly well-drawn and imaginative, but... depressing. In one episode, Jimmy (after assaulting a chicken on the farm and splitting its head open with a rock) conks a man over the head and drags him home to brainwash him into being the new dad to replace the one who left long ago; in the next one, he dies as an old man and goes to heaven, where St. Peter (dressed like a superhero) gives him a hard time about being such a pussy in life.... In another, after a day of mundane nothingness, he shoots himself in the head and lives, so he just goes to work the next day. The others are more of the same... yeek! The best one, though, is the one where he builds a tiny rocketship, then shrinks himself to fit in it, and lands in his neighbor's house; along the way he gets beheaded and grows a new one (while the head grows a new body, resulting in two editions of Jimmy)... it's very surreal, a lot more intriguing than the rest of the "look how doomed we are" gig....
This is a slender Danish wench, i mean zine, that showed up in my mailbox one fine day recently. It has cool art deco drawings of mutilated cartoon people! Plus type in readable fonts! IN ENGLISH! Will wonders never cease! Other goodies include lots of reviews of tiny European bands you've never heard of, some fiction that i didn't read because the type was too tiny for my achin' eyes, interviews with Envy, Bonescratch, and Stanlingrad... and an "interview" with K. K. Null that, for various reasons (Null was too tired and cranky to actually talk, ha), is actually cobbled together from a number of previously published sources, including the DEAD ANGEL interview from the very first issue. Heh. I am amused.... The zine is well worth seeing, look around to see if it's in store near you.