The House that Dripped Blood (1971)

Robert Bloch-scripted anthology film from the always excellent Amicus Productions centers around a sinister rental property and the misfortunes of those who reside there. In "Method for Murder," a thriller writer (Denholm Elliott) is literally pestered by his latest creation, a dastardly strangler named Dominic. He is believed only by Stephen King, who cribs the idea for his novel The Dark Half. Meanwhile, Peter Cushing obsesses over a "Waxworks" museum where one of the displays resembles a former paramour. That Salome was a real head case, turns out. In "Sweets to the Sweet," Christopher Lee plays a frosty widow/father who disallows his daughter any toys or even friendship with other children; her new tutor takes umbrage but soon learns about the voodoo she do. Finally, a prissy horror film actor (Jon Pertwee) searches a curio shop for suitable vampire attire for his next picture. But "The Cape" he purchases is a little too realistic, as his co-star already knows, beautiful bloodsucker that she is. Fun atmosphere, brisk storytelling, numerous genre in-jokes, including several swipes taken at contemporary critics who complained about Hammer's typical gore and violence; at one point while wandering the wax museum, Cushing strolls dismissively past a figure of his co-star Lee as Dracula. But it's Pertwee who gets the best stuff, at one point mulling a mantle portrait of himself in his Doctor Who garb. The framing device -- a Scotland Yard officer investigating the disappearance of Pertwee's character -- has a weak payoff, but the individual stories are what counts.

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

The first of Hammer's Frankenstein series (and the only to feature Christopher Lee as the semi-titular Monster, though Peter Cushing would recur as Victor Frankenstein) also marks the start of the studio's long run of horror classics, establishing production aesthetics that continue to influence filmmakers. Dodging Universal at every turn (lawsuits awaited if the new film in any way resembled their iconic versions), Sangster's screenplay cribbed much from Mary Shelley's novel which had been discarded by James Whale, focusing on Frankenstein's immoral studies, propensity to murder, and descent into Mad Science rather than on the monster he creates, a mere symptom of his true ills. Terence Fisher's film is a feast for the eyes, summoning a deeply Gothic atmosphere straight away. Phil Leakey's creature make-up veered considerably from Jack Pierce's famous Karloff applications; the Creature suffers a more stitched-up, gruesome visage. Tame by latter-day standards, this tale of dark deeds and harsh consequences was initially panned for violence and gore by critics missing the film's subtle nuances: Was the Monster a figment of murderous Frankenstein's imagination? Or is his former accomplice Paul Krempe simply getting the last laugh as the Baron is led to the scaffold, the place where he acquired so many of the parts that went into his work? A cornerstone of modern horror.

Evilspeak (1981)

Coopersmith (a suitably miserable-looking Clint Howard) is admitted to a private military academy as a kind of charity case following the deaths of his parents. This being the kind of military academy where the hoary personnel in charge slyly approve of cadets torturing the underachievers, Coopersmith has a rough time of it. For punishment duty (though his crimes, beyond clumsiness, and lateness to class attributable to his classmates stealing his alarm clock, are never disclosed) he is sent to the basement of the abbey to "clean up." The school custodian, an old drunkard named Sarge who happens to live in said basement, doesn't much like this, but what the hell, it leaves him more time for whiskey. Besides, Coopersmith is mostly out of sight, especially after discovering a sub-basement filled with books of black magic. He steals a Tandy TRS-80 from the computer lab, lugs it down to his newfound lair, finds an electrical outlet in a cave otherwise illuminated only by the light of black candles, and starts coding passages from those dusty old pentagram-decorated books into the mainframe. The computer answers! The earliest version of the Internet was a gateway to a Hellmouth, who knew? Some brand of Satan worship ensues, wax dummies spurt red syrup, and at some point a nude woman in a bathtub gets eaten by possessed pigs, I kid you not. A lot of bad data went into the screenplay; garbage in, garbage out.

The Road (2006)

There is a distinct branch of Science Fiction, what we might call the Office of Dystopia, which quietly began operations during the Industrial Revolution, late in the 19th Century. Earlier, in accordance with prevailing philosophies, speculative fiction tended towards more rose-tinted outlooks; people believed history was progressing and improving, the trend was upwards, Heavenwards, and the fortunes of Mankind were leading to if not Earthly Paradise then certainly to some graceful, affluent state. Many metaphorical tales for the Age of Exploration do in fact revolve around quests for "lost" civilizations, heretofore undiscovered countries inside the planet's crust or hidden at the poles, or accessible dream worlds -- all of which represent the kinds of beatific society assumed to be the ultimate fate of Earth's citizenry. Two definitive, if late, expressions of this school of thought appeared in 1933: James Hilton's Lost Horizon, a travel brochure for the Utopian hideaway of Shangri-La, and H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, a prophetic dispatch from a future society dedicated to the global promotion of science and the arts. (Neither of these novels is entirely Utopian in scope, each hinting at impending world war, and can thus be said to provide bridge material for the harder, more pragmatic brand of SF just around the corner....)

As the world entered first the Machine Age and ultimately the Atomic Age, the "scientific romances" popularized by Wells and Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs turned quaint, even gauche. Speculative fiction began directly siphoning the promises of applied sciences and engineering -- disciplines increasingly applied to military weapons development, bottom line being the cost of human lives during wartime -- and was thus forced to view Utopian dreamscapes through a harsher, more cautionary lens. (The more recent "steampunk" offshoot of SF retrofits 21st Century sensibilities into Victorian settings and tech, resulting in yarns dyed deeply with irony. See: Pynchon's Against the Day (2006) which by no accident contains, among many such plot threads, a futile search for Shambhala during the run-up to World War I, as though uncovering such an idyllic place might somehow save the world from impending doom.)

Propulsion being a by-product of detonation, rocket technologies did not generate only stories of travel through outer space; as the Cold War dawned across the 1950s and the geopolitical landscape divided into East and West, nuclear apocalypse mushroomed into a daily threat, an invisible cloud looming over the planet, likely to burst at any moment. Writers best equipped to scry the future saw grim patterns in the crystallizing mist; proposing improved futures fell to nostalgia for a better world that should-have-been but never came within reach -- the perpetual folly known as The Good Ol' Days. Tapping into underlying fears of the future, the sub-genre of post-apocalyptic SF was easily geared up and sent shambling over the literary landscape.

Whether dealt with via metaphor or more directly, post-apocalyptic narratives break down the business of survival in an environment rapidly coming to pieces, or already in pieces. The means of destruction may differ -- plague, unnatural depletion of resources, nuclear annihilation, brain-munching zombies -- but the response is every time identical: just like the song says, Hit the Road, Jack. It's never safe where you are, but there's a Promised Land just over the next hill, and you may as well die trying to reach it. (Notable exception, in which a cadre of characters dig in and band together: Frank Conroy's Alas Babylon (1959). Following a one-day nuclear war, citizens of a south Florida community coalesce so firmly that when the military finally arrives, offering to move them elsewhere, they refuse to go, steadfastly believing they can best rebuild where they already are. The novel is a dramatic study in the civil defense mindset of the Eisenhower Era, but is otherwise a statistical anomaly within the sub-genre.)

George Romero's zombie films trace their pathos to the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend (1954) in which prototypical last-man-on-earth Robert Neville is besieged by bloodthirsty creatures (humans transformed by a mutant virus) who swarm his suburban castle after sundown; like any good mid-century American citizen with a backyard bomb shelter and an instructional brochure on nuclear fallout, Neville pragmatically hunkers down to wait out the insane disaster. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) takes doomsday prepping to the next level, with a band of characters holing up in a shopping mall they convert into a fortified private compound, shutting out the undead hordes. While Romero satirizes consumer habits, the real truth unveiled is how quickly and terribly society deteriorates when under siege, and how safe places become hideous traps. To survive, keep moving -- the moving target is hardest to hit.

More than simply fleeing danger, Apocalyptic Wanderlust is fueled by the basic desire for human connection, for families and clans. Dystopian novels often feature characters beginning their journeys alone, then in slowly aggregating communities as the plots progress. In Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Australian survivors of a nuclear war await the arrival of drifting radioactive clouds. When a Morse Code distress signal from North America is picked up, the military dispatches a submarine to investigate; this quest for fellow survivors becomes a major plotline but the novel remains chiefly concerned with how people address their fates, how much quality and grace they carry into their final acts.

Two novels by Stephen King follow a more typical "travel narrative" pattern: The Stand (1978) and Cell (2006). In both books, overnight catastrophe wipes out the majority of the human race, leaving those unharmed by either flu-like plague or brain-frying microwave pulse to suffer dreams and visions which compel them to a common destination (in The Stand, it's Colorado; in Cell, central Maine). Staying alive is not a solitary endeavor, but a common one -- it's going to take a village to reconstruct civilization, after all. Anyone who has endured the calamitous, ongoing aftereffects of severe weather (hurricane, earthquake, tornado, take your pick) understands how important, how inherently logical, neighborly relations are. Permanently wrecked infrastructures of course means the disappearance of law enforcement, the rise of self-deputized vigilantes, not to mention armed highwaymen with a severe case of the Self Interest. Within this void, citizens necessarily become clan members -- continually protective, defensive, wary.

So, as characters strike out for the Unlikely Promised Land, they must also watch their backs. This is the underlying scenario of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), a novel that differs from the usual post-apocalyptic template in one important way: in most cases, whatever disrupted society remains part of the ongoing story, like the tribal struggles over gasoline in George Miller's film The Road Warrior (1981), or how in John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids (1951) deadly bio-engineered plants have usurped mankind's primary position on the food chain, with plot revolving around efforts to keep the creatures at bay while also seeking permanent sanctuary from them. But in The Road, the only real goal in sight for the unnamed father and his son, heading inexorably south to the coast during relentless nuclear winter, is daily survival. Killers and cannibals roam unchecked through the poisoned landscape, as if the ashen wastelands were not obstacle enough, but man and boy persist because that is all there is to do -- cling to each other and continue.

Like Rod Serling's classic Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" (itself an allegory of the Cold War-related Red Scare), the story is concerned only with what the characters do with the incomplete hands dealt to them -- whether they will act rationally or succumb to hysteria. In many ways, The Road echoes On the Beach, illustrating how disaster and death are not just inevitable, but ever-present -- we shouldn't need a global disaster to remind us how to live and love and take each day to our bosoms like rare treasure.

At the end of McCarthys' novel, there is no ultimate Better Place, only more of the same. While on one hand this contradicts the logic of setting out in the first place, it also underscores the intrinsic importance of believing in a Better Place. That a phoenix might arise from the ashes of the old world, and be waiting at the end of a hard journey, is reason enough. Even when faced with overwhelming odds, hope dies hard -- and that's exactly as it should be. More than youthful vanity or misplaced survival tactics, the drive to outlive an apocalypse -- atomic, viral, or zombified -- is what makes us fully human.

True Grit (1968)

It's a surreal joke, with a winding punchline worthy of Mark Twain: When is the South not the South? When it's the Old Southwest! This shifting literary borderland -- populated by mustache-twirling villains, inept but determined (and uncannily lucky) lawmen, saloon brawlers boasting how they could whup Sampson himself, misunderstood hookers with perfectly calibrated hearts of gold, not to mention Johnson Jones Hooper's infamous Captain Simon Suggs and Twain's own celebrated jumping frogs -- is nowhere funnier than where mapped by Charles Portis in his novel True Grit.

Portis hails from Arkansas, a state many would consider decidedly Southern, and his novel makes affectionate, specific use of the setting: main character Mattie Ross takes bold pride in repeatedly reminding others how things are accomplished in her native Yell County, just for starters. Still, several initial reviews of the book took care to point out the "Western" aspects, with Michael Cleary defining Portis as "one of the most inventively comic writers of western fiction" in Twentieth-Century Western Writers.

Location-challenged reviewers aside, the story is relatively high concept, and certainly familiar to readers of pulp westerns: the aforementioned Maddie seeks justice for the murder of her father by one of his hired farmhands, Tom Chaney, who has taken up with a band of outlaws led by the nefarious Lucky Ned Pepper. To apprehend (or kill, whichever) the dastardly Chaney, Mattie treks to Fort Smith for the purpose of hiring a lawman with "true grit," and finds near-enough in the figure of Federal Marshal Rooster Cogburn. Also on Chaney's trail is a Texas Ranger, name of La Boeuf; eventually -- and despite their differing motivations, which range from sheer revenge to simple cash reward -- these three ride out together in search of their quarry.

Though the novel could easily carry different genre labels (satire/humor, coming-of-age) at this later date it's no feat to look back and ascertain how True Grit came to be shelved as a Western rather than, say, a Southern (a decent tag which would fit many books, and that some have tried to make stick, though the adhesive apparently still needs work). The initial marketing of the book is not terribly at fault: the first edition jacket design features a simple illustration of a stern-looking young woman holding in one hand the reins of a horse and in the other the barrel of a rifle. While this iconography telegraphs "Western" for sure, it also merely reflects the essential elements of and suggests a time-frame for the tale resting between those covers. True Grit is Mattie's story, in both plot and tone (she's the first-person narrator, recounting her adventure some sixty years after the fact).

But almost unarguably the main reason: scarcely a year following publication, out from the Hollywood hills loped a popular film starring beloved "cowboy actor" John Wayne as Cogburn, a role which finally earned him an Academy Award. But John Wayne alone did not brand True Grit as a Western; the 1969 film takes many liberties with the novel, beginning, importantly, with the setting: the scrubby, mountainous landscape of Ouray County, Colorado, stands in for the Ozarks, and thus does the movie unavoidably "look" like a traditional Horse Opera. (Additionally, the screen version moves Cogburn to front and center, correspondingly muting Mattie's acerbic attitude and commentary -- an undeniable charm of the novel.) Interestingly, Vincent Canby, in his mainly positive review of the film for the July 4, 1969 edition of the New York Times, had this to say: "I couldn't quite understand what all the fuss was about when the Charles Portis novel hit the best-selling lists last year. The book was strictly freeze-dried nostalgia, which imitated the flavor of nineteenth-century American writing without ever making you believe it was as good as the real thing (Mark Twain, Bret Harte)."

Though contemporary full reviews of the novel are now scarce, Canby's comments seem to be at odds with those short blurbs and slug lines which do remain accessible, either printed on the front endpapers of the paperback editions or elsewhere. In the New York Times Book Review, Richard Rhodes called the book a "skillfully constructed ... comic tour de force," echoing the sentiments publisher Overlook reprints on their current edition, which also features an afterward by another Southern novelist, Donna Tartt -- who proclaims the book a "masterpiece" even as she notes how well it captures "the Wild West of the 1870s."

It is as though the film, despite its bold differences from the source material, has supplanted within what Carl Jung would pinpoint as our Collective Cultural Consciousness the true character of the novel. In that sense, at least, Mr. Canby has had his way -- despite the fact that Portis' novel sold millions of copies well into the 1970s and for a short while was taught in schools, when most people think of True Grit they are thinking of the film and not the novel, thus bringing to mind stereotypical Western iconography. Meaning: horses, shootouts, lawlessness, and of course John Wayne. (Doesn't help that the latest [2004] edition of the True Grit paperback features silhouetted saguaro cacti -- which grow only in the Sonoran Desert. Does everybody around here need a map?) Of course, American pop culture sensibilities are finer attuned to cinema than to the written word, at present. It could even be argued that many people, in remembering moments from their favorite books, are actually remembering details from the better (or at least most persistently referenced and shown) movies made from them. Motion pictures like To Kill a Mockingbird, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Maltese Falcon, and The Lord of the Rings have all come to be considered as powerful complements, if not outright equals, to their literary sources. (There are even cases -- Love Story, Jaws, even Dracula comes to mind -- where the film treatment might be preferred over the books.)

Assisting this perception, True Grit, despite its initial popularity, remained out-of-print for nearly twenty years. In an essay for Salon, Allen Barra writes: "True Grit's going in and out of print over the last four decades probably has more to do with a reluctance to take the western seriously as literature." Which is a fair point. By the mid-1970s, the Western had fallen out of favor; the dime novels and pulps and Saturday serials which had popularized the genre were long gone, Westerns rarely produced in Hollywood anymore, even the long-running TV series Gunsmoke reached the end of its run. And, in favor or not, "Western" is an easier tag to apply than "Southern." Particularly when only remaindered and hand-me-down copies of the novel were available, and the film version had free reign to establish itself in the cultural memory.

Not to put too much blame on the author, but another factor in this slightly askew labeling might well be the sparse, pigeon-hole proof output of Portis himself. His career as a novelist spans from the 1966 publication of Norwood to the 1991 appearance of Gringos; counting also the 2012 essay collection Escape Velocity, Portis has produced only six slender tomes over a five decade period. With topics ranging from ridiculous secret societies to bus-driving cuckolds to UFO hunters lost in Mexico, his novels have only one thing in common: a distinct comic sensibility. Given a one-line description of each, one might reasonably assume all five are the products of different individuals -- particularly since we readers are accustomed to authors tackling recurrent story structures, subjects, themes.

Which brings us back to Mr. Cleary's assertion that Portis is "one of the most inventively comic writers of western fiction." In the final accounting, given his disparate if slight oeuvre, Portis can no more be counted among the writers of "western fiction" than can be Mark Twain, whom Mr. Canby thinks Portis is clumsily aping. At least Donna Tartt doesn't entirely miss the mark -- the final pages of True Grit do specifically satirize "Wild West" exaggerations, as Rooster is remembered as having become an actor in a travelling circus, cashing in on his rough-n-tumble lawman-of-the-frontier persona. He rode with Quantrill! the handbills for the Cole Younger/Frank James show say, He rode for Parker! -- a brief but snarky reference to the showmanship and commercialized myth-making which still colors popular American perceptions, far contrary to reality, of what the West was like in the last couple decades of the 19th Century. Looks like we all need maps, if not well-researched guidebooks.

Perhaps the grand irony here is, Portis was trying to disassemble the Western, not contribute to the canon. Though it would seem he's been largely misunderstood, given the prevailing comic sensibility of the novel, Portis probably still would argue his joke landed correctly -- squarely on the heads of his audience. Having scribed Mattie's own inflexible worldviews, Portis shows he understands both the folly and the comfort of unchanging perception. And if anyone appreciates the humor of a grapefruit being labeled as an orange, it would surely be Charles Portis.   

Inherent Vice (2009)

In all the commotion typically attending the appearance of a new title by Thomas Pynchon -- considered by many to be the poster boy for Postmodern Literature -- it is often forgotten that he began his career as a bestselling popular novelist. Mass market paperbacks of his first two books, V. and The Crying of Lot 49, had sold a combined three million copies prior to the 1973 publication of Gravity's Rainbow -- a novel for which, shortly after launch, Viking boasted orders of over seven hundred copies per hour. But during the seventeen-year silence leading into Vineland, Pynchon got racked into the category of "literary" (not to mention "difficult") rather than "popular" and while his next three novels made a great deal of additional noise over the publishing landscape, such prior sales numbers proved elusive.

The savvy Pynchon is apparently unwilling to fade into "literary cult author" status -- how else to explain this curious cross-breeding of a Maltese Falcon with a Pink Panther at a time when crime fiction is at a hip zenith? Inherent Vice is exactly what the dust jacket makes it looks like -- streamlined noir, gilded at the edges with a mellow, psychedelic glow. It is 1970 in the LA surf community of Gordita Beach. The Lakers are in the playoffs. The Manson Family is going to trial. And gumshoe (or, as he refers to himself, "gumsandal") Larry "Doc" Sportello is one evening visited by his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fey, transmitting bad vibes about her current dalliance, billionaire real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann -- who soon disappears, possibly murdered, leaving Sportello as the chief suspect, at least in the eyes of Sportello's perpetual shadow, LAPD detective Bigfoot Bjornsen.

Sportello (think Phillip Marlowe by way of the Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger) spends the rest of the novel trying to clear his name, or to at least keep from being ensnared by Bigfoot. Or something to that effect. Other ingredients include but are not necessarily limited to: a federally-thwarted plan to build domed houses for the poor and homeless; smugglers from Vietnam trafficking in counterfeit bills printed with Nixon's face; a multitude of wigged-out hippies and surfers, some capable of astral travel; an early version of the Internet which interests Doc only so much as it might help him score weed; a set of peculiar neckties, hand-painted with likenesses of nude women (one of whom is Shasta Fey); a cabal of sex-crazed dentists; and a mysterious schooner called the Golden Fang, whose shadowy operators just might be tied to everyone and everything involved.

Like fellow literary lion Cormac McCarthy, who some years back and with great commercial success began shedding a dense, idiomatic, description-centered prose style for leaner, plot-oriented narration, Pynchon here nixes his notoriously recursive and tangential approach(es) to storytelling. The omniscient intrusions and historical flashbacks which extend, deepen, and often contort his previous works are no longer in evidence -- vanished, apparently, into the ever-present smog surrounding Gordita, Pynchon's stand-in location for the Manhattan Beach of his own younger days (where he reportedly wrote a great deal of Gravity's Rainbow). One can almost imagine the author blissfully banging away at his typewriter, serving only the basic needs of his tale, freewheeling as it is -- Vice is nothing short of a classic potboiler (emphasis being on the pot.) It is also a bittersweet portrait of the American culture teetering between the joys of Sgt. Pepper and the grisly angst of Dark Side of the Moon -- and as some have pointed out, the particolored details are likely the closest the World of Letters will get to autobiographical reveals from the famously reclusive Mr. Pynchon.

For all its narrative brevity, speed, and hilarity -- and this might well be Pynchon's funniest book, which is no small statement -- there is a devious undertow at work. Pynchon sends up his own obsessions, elements from previous novels, and the expectations of a devoted readership, but retains his signature moral outrage against imbalances of power. Gravity's Rainbow underlines the weird moralities and opportunities "civilized" countries abuse during wartime -- whatever atrocities can be gotten away with under cover of larger violence; Inherent Vice takes the scarier tack of what can happen in the Homeland when citizens remain willfully unaware of what is happening under the auspices of keeping their streets safe: neighborhood watches suddenly comprised of neo-Nazi wannabe badasses, sub-contracted private firms looking to get into the paramilitary business, all sanctioned by local law enforcement by way of federal monies. It's not hard to imagine how Pynchon feels about Halliburton or the agents of Blackwater.

Against the backdrop of Fear as powered by the atrocities of the Manson Family, fear against the hippies and their Freak Power movement destroying society, Bigfoot constantly attempts to recruit Doc as an informer to aid in various shake-down schemes -- a path Doc dreads Coy Harlingen, the subject of one of his missing persons cases, has already stumbled down. Harlingen was a semi-famous session musician and saxophonist for a surf-rock band called the Boards (now apparently taken over by zombies). Coy's wife, the aptly named Hope, does not believe her husband overdosed on heroin, the official story, but that his death was faked and he is now a federal operative. Whatever the circumstances which led to Coy being taken from her, she doesn't care; she just wants her family back together. As things will turn, repairing this damage will become Doc's primary concern. When, that is, he's sober and straight enough to focus on the mosaic of clues.

Inherent Vice (a term from maritime law, applied to annul potential shipping damages -- i.e. eggs break in transit, reason being: they're eggs) is saturated with images of "the axes of space, now taken away into commotion and ruin." While this initially seems like yet another route into entropy (one of Pynchon's favorite concerns, going back to his eponymously-titled 1958 short story), in Vice that idea is taken a quantum step further. Natives of the coast wander their old neighborhoods, confused by the sudden construction craters where their houses used to be. But the old order isn't being supplanted by the expected chaos: coming to replace the old standalone businesses owned by locals are clean corporate franchises, lined up in strip malls. Pynchon pinpoints a moment in our culture when the detritus inevitably left behind by commercial efforts of change and progress started being packaged and sold: the experience of nostalgia as commodity. Doc, driving past a supermarket-sized record store, takes note of the customers visible just inside the sweeping glass front, each secluded in a soundproof booth; music -- the community glue of that era and an important motif in this novel -- is suddenly an individual rather than a collective experience. The Powers That Be have already begun to divide and conquer, using the easy wedges of simple market forces, supply and demand -- no greater conspiracy seeking control and subservience of a citizenship, such as those that have previously dominated Pynchon's novels, is necessary. If billionaire Mickey Wolfmann has no say in his own development projects, what chance do the rest of us (capable of being bought off with a chili dog, as one character points out in the novel's closing moments) have? Doc himself, no bumbling hippie innocent as might initially appear, eventually drifts into his own, essentially inevitable fog, only mirroring, if not actually following, the leads of those who have hired him or crossed his path.

In Gordita Beach, there's no screaming coming across the sky -- just the sound of the surf, the quiet, relentless surf, eating away at the edge of the continent. Pynchon's apocalypses have become less sweeping, more focused, smarter, meaner, personal. There's an old saying, essentially this: As goes the State of California, so goes the Nation. Inherent Vice is Pynchon's candy-coated warning: the Golden State and all the dreams it stands for, long-understood to be just one good earthquake away from slipping into the Pacific, is soon to be as lost to the rest of us as the mythical continent of Lemuria -- a set of final coordinates for that Golden Fang, perhaps.

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Tie-Dyed Noir" September 28 2009

Heat (1995)

Career detective Hanna (Al Pacino) is hot on the trail of career criminal McCauley (Robert De Niro), who is busy assembling a team for that proverbial Last Big Job. But then an extravagantly botched armed car robbery leaves three security officers dead and a stooge named Waingro on the lam, running not only from the cops but from a revenge-seeking McCauley himself. Waingro enlists a money-laundering banker, burned on a previous job, to take McCauley out of play. Meanwhile, Hanna's marriage disintegrates (stop me if you've heard this before, he's a cop obsessed with being a cop) even as McCauley falls for a bookstore clerk/graphic artist; gee-willikers, maybe they can escape together, to the Good Life... Michael Mann's thriller seems to have been built around two standout sequences: a ridiculously complicated midday shoot-out in downtown LA, and a hushed, tense conversation between McCauley and Hanna in a coffee shop. The rest is bloated static (including, critically, the final showdown on an airport runway). An all-star cast is generally wasted on zest-less characters, Dennis Haysbert in particular. Overrated, disposable exercise in by-the-numbers con-man fiction.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Doctors around London are being picked off one by one, the modes of death bizarre (rabid bats, grisly exsanguinations, a deadly head-crushing vice disguised as a frog mask, hungry locusts -- to name but four). Inspector Trout, assigned to the case, cannot help but think the same psychopath is behind them all. He's ridiculed for it throughout his department, but his hunch is correct -- all the expired doctors had a single case in common: they operated on the victim of a long-ago car crash, Victoria Phibes (B-queen Caroline Munro) who died during surgery. Trout's theory that her husband, Anton Phibes, is seeking revenge on the attending surgeons is marred by one simple fact: Phibes died in the accident, long before his wife got to the operating table.

Or did he? Vincent Price turns in one of his more outlandish performances (and all without moving his lips) as a demented cross between a mad scientist and a serial killer. In the years since his disfiguring accident, Phibes has been plotting his revenge, which follows (for no good reason, other than it provides for interesting murders) the Ten Plagues of Egypt. Trout gets hip to this after Phibes drops one of his pendant glyphs, used in the ritualistic killings, and has it interpreted by a Jewish scholar. Between strikes, Phibes hides in his creepy mansion, belting out show tunes on his pipe organ while his lovely but silent assistant Vulnavia looks on. Kind of a precursor to Seven (1995) when you think about it. Stunning psychedelic set dressing as well as a healthy dose of intentional humor (mainly involving the bumbling detectives) on the part of director Robert Fuest have made this a deserved camp classic.

Mr. Sebastian & the Negro Magician (2007)

It's an old storyteller's saw, of course (and rarely, these days, sharp enough to cut a woman in half): ye olde Deal with the Devil. Doctor Faustus, well-known metaphysician and seminal mad scientist, leads the way, providing motivations extant in a legion of fictional satanic pacts ranging from "The Devil and Daniel Webster" to Angel Heart (1987). It's always about getting drunk with some kind of power, influence, maybe a little immortality thrown in for good measure -- a lesser evil of the heart begetting a greater evil in the soul. And it never turns out very damned well.

Daniel Wallace, with the fantastic Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, subverts the Genre of Devilish Dealings by removing the aforementioned motivations. Our hero isn't a wrong-minded egomaniac looking for the secrets of the universe, but a mere boy, Henry Walker, lodged at a painful crossroads. It is the grainy depths of the Great Depression, his mother recently dead, his father fallen from Wall Street mogul to destitute hotel janitor, and his beloved, angelic sister Hannah has decided she loves a stray dog (which she names Joan Crawford) more than him.

Henry stumbles from grace via a chance meeting with "Mr. Sebastian" (if that is his real name), a peculiar pasty-skinned gentleman who offers to teach Henry some nifty magic tricks, most of them to do with a deck of ordinary cards -- but Henry must vow to never reveal the source of his artistry, which turns out to be shockingly powerful, if not borderline sinister: along with the preternatural sleight-of-hand technique comes powers of telekinesis, teleportation, and conjuring. Henry can just as easily make a full-course meal appear from thin air as he can commune with the newly dead. By the pricking of their thumbs and the mingling of their blood, Henry's fate entwines with the murky wishes of Mr. Sebastian -- who then vanishes into the aether, with Hannah in tow. Henry will spend the rest of his life searching for her, in one way or another.

This tragic story is told in a series of secondhand flashbacks by Henry's former fellow sideshow performers, who knew him at the end of his career as a hysterically inept magician barely managing, thanks only to the color of his skin, to find work. Like a giddy mash-up of The Canterbury Tales and Carnivale, we meet Rudy, the "Strongest Man in the World" (who actually is far from it), Jenny the Ossified Girl (who, as a woman passively rejected by Henry, is best able to tell the doomed tale of his One True Love), JJ the Barker (who seems to confuse his own childhood memories -- specifically his feelings about his father -- with those of Henry), and Jeremiah Mosgrove, the proprietor of Mosgrove's Chinese Circus (which is in no way Chinese), as well as a few other figures who emerge from Henry's past, both real and imagined. Each of these characters is privy only to a particular part of Henry's life story, parts which eventually connect even as they contradict each other. Depending on who is doing the telling, Henry is depicted by turns as a miracle worker, a broken-down con artist, a heartsick lover, or a lost soul in perpetual mourning over his departed family, still seeking revenge against the man who took it all away from him. Or all of the above.

The stunning centerpiece of the novel concerns Henry's love for his stage assistant, the willowy, troubled Marianne La Fleur, a creature ever fluttering on the border between Life and Death. Henry conceives a magic show -- part trickery, part séance -- around an eerie aspect of their relationship that has his audiences gasping simultaneously in admiration and utter horror. Henry ultimately defines himself by his losses; his signature card trick involves the Three of Hearts: one heart each for his departed mother, his vanished sister, and his unattainable Marianne. And being the performer, knowing the foul secrets of his magic disallows Henry the gifts of wonder and hope and laughter he is able to bestow upon his audiences. Believing in nothing, he is shrouded in his own lies and illusions.

It won't be until he encounters a trio of hoodlum hecklers that Henry at last remembers magic isn't about the trick, believing isn't always about the truth, and that his illusions don't have to be as real as he's made them. The Devil, as it turns out, really isn't in the details -- those small, beautiful, ordinary moments of our lives. It's the fact that we take such moments for granted that is a true evil. "Only love can take us to the darkest places," a character eventually remarks, underlining the double-edged, tragic-comic nature both of this story and of the approach Wallace takes in telling it.

Following three works of, essentially, shorter fiction, with Mr. Sebastian Wallace inherits the storied mantle in American Letters previously shouldered by Ray Bradbury, master of simultaneously sentimental and wicked observation -- a delicate and bittersweet trick indeed, one capable of revealing the innermost chambers of the human heart. (This book, in fact, makes a fitting companion to Bradbury’s equally wonderstruck carnival tale Something Wicked This Way Comes.) We might allow magicians to trick us, but it's love that will ultimately make fools of us all.

Meanwhile, the sideshow parade only seems familiar to the Wallace canon -- circus freaks peopled the Big Fish movie, but the citizenry of the novel was more mythical in nature; this is an illusion/allusion that Wallace, perhaps, fully intended -- here using freaks and misfits to mis-remember, mis-tell, and just plain mistake the true story of Henry Walker, and carry it into the realm of lofty folklore, reminding us how ordinary lives fit into the larger pattern of human history. The tale, as such, flows like an unexpectedly long string of particolored handkerchiefs from the pocket of a skilled and charming prestidigitator, one who always keeps a knowing eyebrow lifted towards his audience, luring them with a recognizable trick, only to unleash an unexpected but heartbreakingly appropriate flourish at the end -- a tale that is transcendently amusing in its variety, startling in its unregulated humor, bewitching in its final originality. This is, simply enough, one of the best, most captivating books of the year. And it's impossible not to wonder what tricks Daniel Wallace yet has hidden up his sleeve.

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Bigger Fish Swim in Wallace's Latest," Aug 19 2007

The Host [Gwoemul] (2006)

Following a formaldehyde dump into the Han River, a dinosaur-creature emerges from the depths, hungry for man-flesh. Was it activated by the toxic waste, or created by it? Does it matter? This vintage monster-movie formula is an excellent mix of comedy and dysfunctional family pathos as, after snacking on several full-size humans, the monster drags young schoolgirl Hyun-seo underwater, presumably as a treat for later. Trapped in the creature's lair, deep in the, uh, bowels of the city sewer system, Hyun-seo finds a cellphone and manages to alert her waste-case father, Gang-du, to the fact that she's alive and could need a little rescue -- though naturally the signal breaks up, the phone goes dead, just before she can reveal her location. Another hurdle: any contact with the creature means you're the carrier of a deadly, contagious virus -- and Gang-du got up-close and personal with the beast during its initial riverbank rampage. Agents in hazmat uniforms track him down, isolate him, instigate a series of torturous tests ... while Hyun-seo, awaiting rescue from her sewer hidey-hole, can't escape the snapping jaws of the hungry beast forever ... Perfect drive-in fodder. The formula satisfies and never strains beneath its own weight, or takes itself too seriously, even when offering pointed social commentary (the formaldehyde dumping and Agent Orange allusions are well grounded in actual events) -- just enough originality and genuine jump-scares to keep the proceedings fresh. Compare this to the wretched Godzilla (1998) for a good lesson in the right and wrong ways to make a latter-day Creature Feature.

Against the Day (2006)

James Thurber once said, "There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures." There is also a middle ground, a Twilight Zone between these two qualities: contre-jour, "against daylight," a photographic term for backlighting, that moment when the glare and the glow meet, and the outer edges of foreground subjects begin to disappear into the light beyond them.

It is in exactly just such an area that Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day takes place. As though assembled from those split seconds occurring between the flash of the bulb and the chemical alchemy of the silver nitrate that will eventually form a frozen image, Pynchon delivers a sprawling photomosaic of the World That Was in the decades prior to WWI -- itself heralded by a mysterious, supernatural "heavenwide blast of light" in the wastes of Siberia on June 30th, 1908 -- over a century distant from the present time, yet perhaps an event that still illuminates, if not irradiates, this familiar world.

The novel begins in pure innocence as the Chums of Chance (five young, bickering zeppelin pilots who, along with their literate dog Pugnax, happen to be the heroes of a series of adolescent adventure novels) descend upon the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. But it isn't long before the narrative focuses instead on a temporary passenger assigned to the Chums, the hapless Lew Basnight, a proto-noir private detective who has committed an unspeakable crime unknown to himself but that nevertheless has alienated him from society ... before switching to the power schemes of railroad tycoon Scarsdale Vibe, a kind of cross between John D. Rockefeller and Snidely Whiplash ... then on to photographer and amateur chemist Merle Rideout and his daughter Dally, as they cross the American heartland, into Colorado where they fall in with anarchist dynamiter Webb Traverse ... Wait! What happened to those Chums?

They'll be back in a few hundred pages. Pynchon wouldn't be Pynchon without a little sleight of hand, a few red herrings wiggling upstream. After all, the Chums exist in a kind of fictional universe, parallel to the universe where the rest of the characters exist ... just as that universe, in turn, is parallel to our own, a place of suburban trains never meant to arrive at any destination on the rail map -- as if, to be brought to any shelter, one would first have to step across into some region of grace hitherto undefined.

The yarn of Against the Day is spun mainly from the lifelines of the Traverse family, beginning with kooky anarchist/domestic terrorist Webb and continuing to his four children -- sons Reef, Frank, and Kit, and daughter Lake -- who scatter to the respective winds following their father's murder at the hands of a hired gun, Deuce Kindred. Reef tries marriage but is more at home as a swindler and dynamite handler, like his old man -- shifty employ that keeps him tuned to the underground, just in case he should ever find the will to act upon his weak desire for revenge against Deuce. It is Frank, meanwhile, disappearing into the desert landscape and eventually becoming a cog in the Mexican Revolution, who learns that blood spilled in retribution will not necessarily equal redemption. Kit tries to break family ties by attending engineering school in Europe -- but his scholarship comes by way of Scarsdale Vibe, the man who likely paid to have Webb killed for blowing up his railroad lines. It is Lake who binds herself most closely to a sense of disastrous familial legacy and fate, by marrying Deuce -- knowing full well his role in her father's death. (The Traverse family tree, incidentally, ultimately branches all the way into Vineland.)

While the Traverse children are the tesseract cornerstone of the novel, their numerous associates receive if not equal then certainly quality time. Along with Basnight, the Rideouts, the Vibes, and the Chums, there is Professor Vanderjuice, a kind of mad scientist, studying the aether and delving into time travel; Yashmeen Halfcourt, a gorgeous "polymorphous prodigy" and schoolmate of Kit who is capable of warping space through sheer mathematical computation; the Zombini family, traveling magicians who create doppelgangers of their stage volunteers by using mirrors made of the refracting calcite Iceland Spar; an enclave of pseudo-spiritualists known as T.W.I.T. (True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys); and Cyprian Latewood, a fop who seems to have been teleported in from an Evelyn Waugh novel, most likely The Loved One. It's a cavalcade often bordering on being a parade of names, only a few of which will morph into full characters. Pynchon favors characteristics over characterizations; it is his forte, and the subjects in Against the Day are every bit as lifelike and as valid as Prince Florizel and company in Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights, or for that matter the legion of wacky servicemen in Heller's Catch-22. By abdicating any deep psychological qualities not relevant to the matters as hand, Pynchon frees himself to render a world that refracts through his characters.

And it is an eerie, doomed world, indeed. Though the principals never articulate it, they clearly feel the boom being lowered, as the century turns and the War approaches, as from a dark cloud bristling with lightning. Pynchon treks into the metaphorical sci-fi terrain most frequented by Ray Bradbury, and retrofits history in the same fashion that Area 51 scientists supposedly reverse-engineer crashed UFO parts into our own, less advanced aircraft. Characters meet shadows of themselves: Trespassers, they are called -- ghosts from the future who have come to warn, or perhaps mourning time travelers who want to revisit what is to be lost; it is never made sure. Meanwhile, among comical Star Trek and Doctor Who allusions, a military search is underway to locate the fabled land of Shambhala, to secure a backup paradise before the greater world is lost. And finally a device is invented that extrapolates information from photographs, allowing views into either the past or the future, moments beyond the shutter click -- suggesting that all of history is only some kind of false memory, anyway. A trick of the light.

Pynchon's first five novels -- from the paranoid quiltwork of V. to the giddy, melancholy divisionism of Mason & Dixon -- are all stories of wrong-minded, impossible, disrupted quests. Against the Day breaks this tradition, and Pynchon, late in his career, boldly sets off in a new direction -- a move that seems to have disoriented some critics. Ironically, it is his esteemed Gravity's Rainbow that is often described as a plotless, unstructured beast. That novel actually has a definite though deliberately incomplete structure -- the book even ends in mid-sentence to point this out. Here at last, Pynchon has turned in the novel he has been accused of for thirty-five years: there is no plot device outside the simple passage of time.

As such, the novel runs like, well, like clockwork. Exactly like clockwork, actually -- gears clicking, cogs a-spin, cuckoos and all, chiming at intervals dictated by a kernel mechanism just out of sight. Though some might say the trouble with clocks is that they measure something you're never going to get to the end of, the pacing is ingenious: the multiple storylines alternate for exact amounts of time -- just long enough to introduce some new tantalizing thread, or provide symbolic echo for one of the other episodes. Like Potocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa, I suspect it would be possible to read the stories separate from each other, that Against the Day -- like the split beams of light that comprise the novel's controlling metaphor -- would come apart just as easily as Pynchon has put it together.Though there may be no tangible plot, don't be fooled -- this by no means signals a dearth of story. In fact, Pynchon throws away more story elements than most novelists employ in a full career. Through 1,085 pages of slapstick encounters, thwarted intentions, and sinister conspiracies both explicit and alluded to, he still only skims the surface of the world he's imagining. This is no shaggy dog narrative -- the narrative is the shaggy dog, a tail-wagging catalog of visions of the unexpected, breaches in the Creation where something else had had a chance to be luminously glimpsed. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of day, not a full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance encounters with details of God's unseen world.

Long discussed as our one living writer capable of inheriting the literary mantle of Melville, Pynchon is actually shooting for the throne of Cervantes, here. And with this much story afoot, this many characters, this much mischief, Pynchon exhibits an astonishing restraint. Absent are the massive, brain-crushing narrative monologues, the characteristically arcane and cryptic ramblings; his tangents are now controlled, precise. What once took entire passages is now often done in a few words -- a remarkable, heartbreaking economy, redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals. This is lightning that strikes right out of the bottle.

Yes, Pynchon still has his fastball, after demonstrating a deceptive curveball (Vineland) and wicked slider (Mason & Dixon). His style is again historically (not to mention hysterically) affected -- this time it's chiefly an era-appropriate turn-of-the-20th-Century idiom; think Arthur Conan Doyle on mescal. (I'm quick to imagine a hypothetical audio book, read by a smirking Orson Welles.) What's too often forgotten in the discussions of Pynchon's word games and conceptual puzzles is that the man can flat-out write. In his dreamlike prose, all described action takes on the thrust of greater import, of movement toward revelation. Descriptions of social conditions, mathematical theories, even just passing landscapes turn into roaring visual sweeps, the royal thunder of genius coming over the mountain -- a sound not heard since the publication of Gravity's Rainbow. The resulting reading experience is both luxurious and unsettling, very like a moment of post-lunch midday drowsing that results in vibrant, unlooked for flashes from the deepest parts of the brain.

Against the Day is, ultimately, that kind of book, demanding to be read on its own time, for a reader to pay attention, to actually read, a simple thing we sometimes forget to do in an age when books are too often expected to behave like television shows and merely distract us. Distraction is, after all, the last thing Pynchon is after. How else to explain the fierce moment he brings the proceedings to a halt, some 150 pages in, to describe a terrible tragedy in a city that must be Manhattan -- Fire and blood were about to roll like fate upon the complacent multitudes ... but with only dwindling moments of normal history remaining, where could any of them have found refuge in time?

Using history both real and imagined, Pynchon creates a world that floats off the page, into our own, and beyond. People see the world differently -- which must necessarily mean, according to the logic of Against the Day, there are different worlds to see. Parallel universes have long been Pynchon’s main concern -- on landscapes divided between the Haves and the Have Nots, he ever takes the side of those forgotten by history: the Passed Over, the Preterites, the Thanatoids. And now, the Trespassers, lost somewhere between a real doomed world and a paradise that probably never existed, not even in memory. Where does the truth lie? Was there a moment, now unreachable, where things took a terrible turn, and the world split, leaving us in the Bad one, while the Good one goes on spinning right next to us, but always out of reach?

Well, to paraphrase one of Against the Day's many characters, the "truth" is never as important as what lessons you might learn from the events themselves, however distorted they may appear to be. But ultimately Pynchon leaves us to our own devices, we Constant Readers, lost, ourselves -- for in the end, we are the Trespassers into the world of Against the Day. And the fractured reality we see within is only a reflection of our own.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, May 13 2007

The Illustrated Man (1969)

Rod Steiger chews his own tattooed scenery as "Carl," a wandering sideshow freak cursed with body art capable of weird telepathic tricks, soothsaying, show tunes, the works. The three tales originally penned by Ray Bradbury depicted are: "The Veldt" (two children imagine a world where lions eat their parents); "The Long Rain" (astronauts seek shelter on a rain-soaked Venus); and "The Last Night of the World" (The End is Nigh, but everybody sticks to their workaday routines). The source anthology contains thirteen more stories, nearly all of which would have been better suited to cinematic drama, starting with the flight of fancy provided by "The Rocket," all the way to the spacewreck nightmare of "Kaleidoscope." Uninspired production is reminiscent of an unsold television pilot. Absolutely no help: Steiger carves ham with a bizarre hick accent and grumpy, alienating demeanor. Better to have let the tattoos do the talking. The original promotional tagline was "Don't stare at the illustrated man." Good advice.

Vanishing Point (1971)

Kowalski (Barry Newman), a cop-turned-race-car-driver, is tasked to deliver a white Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco. It's Friday night, he has until Monday -- all kinds of time -- but then he goes and makes a bet with his speed dealer, he can do the deed in half the time. Translation: It's On. Kowalski, fueled by uppers and insomnia, zooms his supercharged vehicle through gauntlet after gauntlet of cops, still to be dogged by other drivers, roadside bandits, roadblocks, &c. The chase eventually leaves the road, enters the blistering sands of the Sonora Desert, Kowalski egged on by a blind, perhaps psychic disc jockey, Super Soul (Cleavon Little), a Greek chorus of gospel R&B records and cryptic rants. And what's that mysterious black sedan reappearing around every corner, no matter how hard Kowalski jams the pedal to the metal? Quintessential grindhouse fare. Sublime desert cinematography. Insanely gratuitous nudity. And no hot rod dies harder on the silver screen (except for the Barricuda in the Phantasm movies -- that's a heartbreaker).