Here is a list of songs I like and how they make me feel. I hope you listen to these songs and they make you feel the same as they make me feel. It’s doubtful though, since you have your own experiences and preferences based on those experiences, but there may be one or two songs here that you can identify with.
This song feels like someone took every sound I heard at the age of 6 or 7 and combined them into one song.
2. Donnie & Joe Emerson — Baby
This song feels like a man crying in the middle of the street remembering all the events happening in this song.
3. Sade — The Sweetest Taboo
This song feels like a well-written romance novel by a Moroccan writer who only wears white and smokes bidis.
4. George Harrison — If Not For You
This song feels like a sad clown’s ode to big rubber shoes.
5. Ariel Pink — Life in L.A.
This song feels like sitting on a hot couch, coming down off an expensive drug, and watching “Fire Walk with Me” on a loop.
6. CAN — Sing Swan Song
This song feels like an enchanted mountain cave where men with large mustaches sit in hot mineral water and talk about what email will be like in the future.
7. China Crisis — Red Sails
This song feels like being 15 and crushing hard on the foreign exchange student who is tall and always smells like a forest.
8. Bob Dylan — Simple Twist of Fate
This song feels like lying in the back of a truck and seeing mini-malls over the lip of the bed.
9. Molly Nilsson — The Lonely
This song feels like being in your room alone with a headache, subscriptions to multiple porn sites, and something in the microwave.
10. Arthur Russell — A Little Lost
This song feels like a small pigeon feather floating at the edge of space.
11. John Maus — And the Rain…
This song feels like a church service where the pastor is preaching, “love people and party” in a solemn tone.
12. OMD — Extended Souvenir
This song feels like wearing shades and dancing with a girl named Bobby or Hunter at your best friend’s wedding.
13. Guided by Voices — My Valuable Hunting Knife
This song feels like a pair of old, mud-caked boots at the edge of a long porch.
14. Boy Friend — Lovedropper
This song feels like an orchestral choir freestyle rapping the same 16 bars while simultaneously crying so much the bottom of their robes are wet.
Selected Shorts, the radio program, is sometimes called “bedtime stories for adults,” but when seen live at Symphony Space, it seems closer to ritual, or incantation. The actor, spotlighted, stands alone on stage and reads; the darkened audience laughs and gasps and, sometimes, falls into a sober, brooding silence.
One of the program’s most popular stories is “White Angel” by Michael Cunningham, first read over twenty-five years ago. Cunningham’s breakout story, “White Angel” was published in The New Yorker and became the germinating seed of his first novel, A Home at the End of the World. It has all the crystalline urgency of a character telling the only story he has to tell. James Naughton, the actor who read Cunningham’s story, gives this urgency a sonorous gravitas. His pauses click with the meter of Cunningham’s words.
In a Turkish restaurant on West 100th street, after Selected Shorts’ 30th birthday celebration, I talked with Michael and James about avatars, Stella Adler, and the power of a hushed room. The two men were gracious and greatly admiring of each other’s work; the vibe between them was friendly and intimate. Selected Shorts, I realized, had made them co-collaborators.
Kyle McCarthy: Jim, I want to start by asking if you remember reading “White Angel” for the first time.
James Naughton: Very well. It was the first time I had ever read anything in Selected Shorts. When they called and said, we want you to read a short story to a live audience, I thought, people pay to come sit and be read to? What kind of audience is this? And then of course I went and did it and it was this incredible experience, and I‘ve been doing it ever since. After that experience, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I get it.’ It’s the purest form, the most ancient form, of entertainment. What’s wonderful is that the audience sits there and hears an incredible story, and they cast it, they do whatever the setting is in their mind, and it’s a really wonderful, creative experience for everybody.
KM: Are you doing that casting in your mind? When you read it?
JN: We all do.
KM: Do you see it?
JN: Yeah, that’s what we do. We put ourselves in a place. That’s the magic.
KM: Michael, do you remember, when you were writing this story, if you read it aloud to yourself as you were composing it?
Michael Cunningham: I read it to a couple of friends, which is one of the best bullshit detectors I know. It all looks kind of okay and kind of awful on the page, but then you read it to somebody, and you say, that line is alive, that line is dead. Cut the dead line. And you couldn’t see it, but the minute you hear it, pfft. (Soft whistle, like a sword swishing.)
KM: And so, when you heard James reading your story, did you hear the same pauses and intonations that you had imagined?
MC: No, it was more revelatory than that. It was new. Here was this auditorium full of people who have come to hear short stories being read. And Jim, Jim was like an avatar. Jim was bigger, and handsomer, and had a more beautiful voice, and I thought, Wow. Wow wow wow. It’s like hands that could hold your entire head in their palms. I thought, this is some fantasy version of me, improved. On the stage. At Symphony Space. Just kicking ass out of that story. It was amazing. It was huge, a turning point for me. But also, as I was telling Jim, I am no James Naughton, and never will be, but that night, I started to learn how to read a story to people. When I read, I’m still kind of doing James Naughton, from that night, twenty-five years ago. I learned about pauses, about directness, about gravitas. I just picked up so much. There was the thrill, and there was the education of it.
KM: Exactly. I felt like I was getting the same kind of education yesterday, reading the story, and then listening to it. I was moved when I read it, and then when I listened to it, I was just on the floor. I found myself wondering, Jim, as you read it to yourself to prepare, how much did you know where the pauses were?
JN: No, I didn’t know anything. There were pauses all through, which came from what the material was, the way it moved forward. Stella Adler used to say that acting is reacting. And so what you’re reacting to, in this case, is the material. You’re the storyteller.
MC: I think something that a stage actor knows, and a writer can forget, is that this is a story that you’re telling to people. The writing thing gets very abstract. It’s a message in a bottle that you throw into the ocean and maybe somebody will pick it up some day. So it’s easy, when you’re alone in your room with your computer, to lose track of the fact that you’re writing a book for people who will rewrite the book in their own minds. It’s an exchange. You’re not just putting it out, you’re putting it out in order to get a reaction. You’re interacting with your readers.
JN: It’s so intimate.
MC: Yeah, Selected Shorts is a simulation of what happens more often, when a reader is alone with your book. But you can’t say, I’d like to watch you read my story. But at Selected Shorts, you can.
JN: It’s the communal factor.
MC: Yeah.
KM: Well, that’s what struck me. So many people listen to podcasts, and take in information through their ears, all alone. And even a writer, composing by herself or himself, is listening alone. It seems like a totally different beast to have someone reading aloud in a room full of people. You get immediate audience feedback. One of the places where I really felt that audience feedback was humor, and so I wanted to ask you guys if you knew how funny the story was before it was read aloud.
MC: I meant for it to be funny. Most stories are either fundamentally tragic or fundamentally comic, but every story, if it’s tragic, should have jokes, and if it’s comic, should be threaded with tragedy. Otherwise it feels like a partial worldview. So I put in as many jokes as I possibly could.
JN: Because if it’s just tragic, it’s just like, death by literature.
MC: This is the night’s pretentious moment. Well, maybe not the night’s only pretentious moment, but certainly the biggest one so far.
KM: Go for it.
MC: I wasn’t exactly conscious, when I went back and rewrote “White Angel,” that the first half is full of forebodings and foreshadowings, and death imagery, and then there’s not a moment of it in the second half.
KM: You fool us!
MC: There’s nothing about a casket, all the morbid imagery stops, and you go to the party.
JN: So there’s gravitas in the beginning, but then you take us for a roller coaster ride.
MC: There’s an element of, I don’t want to call it trickery, but you work it.
KM: Yeah, there’s those eight words, “Here is Carlton several months before his death.” You give us that signpost, and we think, “Oh.” All the foreboding resonates, and then we get swept away on this positivity: it’s a party to beat all parties, we’re going places, we’re leaving Ohio, the young and the old are meeting. There’s a surge of “Yeah, we’re going to make it.”
MC: Yeah, that’s one of the most basic tricks. Actually tell the reader what’s going to happen, and then you try to distract the reader, so that the reader forgets what’s going to happen, so that when it does happen, it feels not only like a surprise, but it doesn’t feel gratuitous. It doesn’t feel like it comes out of nowhere. It feels like, how could I forget about that? Oh right, he’s going to die. I lost track of that.
KM: Right! And so, Jim, in your reading, do you feel like you are holding all these elements in your mind?
JN: No.
KM: You’re just on the track of where the story is?
JN: Yes. What I mean is, when I was reading your story, I’d read it several times before, but I didn’t have a plan. There was no artifice. I was just trying to tell the story. And inhabit it. That’s basically my job. We take on the thing, and we try to play the characters. We react to each other, if we’re players, working together, and we react to the material, if you’re out there by yourself.
MC: It’s different from writing, but I don’t know how different because, with the first draft, you’re just like, I don’t know, I don’t know, but then later you think, oh yeah, move it here, move it there. The calculated parts come in draft number three. You don’t really know what you’re doing,
JN: But then you realize, that’s what I did.
MC: Right. It’s weird.
KM: It’s almost as if, when Selected Shorts is really working well, the actors embody, or recreate, that moment of writing, where you don’t really know what’s happening, and you’re just sort of there, in that moment –
MC: I wouldn’t want to embarrass James, but James has a rare ability to do the performance, and yet honor the story. You join the story, you’re presenting the story, but you and the story are a team, you know? I mean, I don’t want to get all icky, but –
KM: I was certainly feeling that in the final lines of the story. Your voice is so full of emotion.
JN: I was moved, you know? That’s what it is. It isn’t artifice.
MC: You can’t really fake this shit, you know?
JN: We get moved by stuff that we’re doing, you know? I’m sure the writer does, too. Everyone in the audience, in the house, was. Everyone’s holding their breath.
KM: Yeah, it felt like that in the final paragraph, the final line about, I can’t even say her name. It’s so moving.
MC: Thank you. But the The New Yorker sent it back. (Laughter) And said, you know, the ending sucks. It was a different ending then. And I was like, yeah, the ending does kind of suck. It just sort of stops. So I decided to see what I could come up with. And I tried it this way and that way, and it took a few weeks, and I thought, maybe it just lands on the girl.
KM: Which seems perfect, because it’s surprising.
MC: You kind of work your way to it. You try it all sorts of ways, and then you pull that peripheral character out.
JN: I thought it was a brilliant ending. ’Cause it’s like, what do you say? And that’s what the best writing does. Whether it’s fiction, nonfiction, novels, short stories, it’s that kind of intimate contact with the reader. Then we do this thing, in a communal way, and it adds another element.
KM: Because you’re together at Selected Shorts, you can’t put the book down, you can’t look away. You’re just all together in it.
JN: I’m amazed that people keep coming to this. I mean, they fill it up!
Although they say short story collections are impossible for emerging writers to sell, debut author Thomas Jeffrey “Tom” Hanks is bucking the trend. A few weeks after the previously unpublished author had his first short story appear in the New Yorker, Knopf has announced it will publish his debut story collection. Each story in the collection will be loosely based on photographs of old typewriters. “The stories are not about the typewriters themselves, but rather, the stories are something that might have been written on one of them,” Mr. Hanks, a sometimes actor, explained. The collection does not have a title or release date yet. However, you can read Mr. Hanks’s short story “Alan Bean Plus Four” in last month’s New Yorker.
Shelly Oria’s debut comes to us at, perhaps, the perfect moment. New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, a well-written story collection about sex, war, Israel, and Zionism seems today especially current, but — paradoxically — the weight of these topics lies precisely in that their currency goes back seventy years (and beyond). Shelly Oria’s book investigates the past, present, and future of these themes via a series of probing, inventive fictions, the best of which delight in both their language and construction, at once self-consciously literary creations and, at the same time, heartfelt examinations of character and loss.
Oria’s collection is a mix of longer, more fleshed out stories and shorter pieces that — in their intentional elusiveness — often have more in common with narrative prose poems than flash fiction. In just four blink-and-you’ll-miss-them pages, Oria gives ethereal suspense to the mundane — a cookbook release party in “That Night” (“That night, we counted countless things — the advantages of dairy, the siblings we never had”); and in the just-as short “We, The Women,” Oria pulls an about-face and journeys her reader to a fantasyland Upstate New York retreat for the sexy, challenged, challenging women of “the great American city” (“Our mentors, they tell us of a world where women scratch tomatoes with their nails and the fruit doesn’t bleed.”). If the short story is an exercise in the art of implication — as Tobias Wolff says it is — Oria stakes her claim as one of our most exciting new craftspersons, launching sentence-bombs into the air and leaving it for her readers to parse out where and how far the shrapnel aims and cuts.
She’s adept in her longer pieces, too. In the title story — centered on a narrator in a polyamorous love affair — the writer is unafraid of language that in lesser hands might seem too direct: “We talked about Identity,” narrates the speaker (the winking capital letter Oria’s, not mine); and, later, “This is my metaphor for how people in Israel treat suicide bombings and bombings in general: the flu.” Oria dramatizes extreme Zionist tension in “The Disneyland of Albany,” and in “None the Wiser” creates with her narrator a pitch-perfect mimic of an old Jewish matriarch, complete with paragraph-ending aphorisms (“A man’s nature is not something you can change. Women who think otherwise end up divorced.”); but — as in the shorter pieces — she doesn’t shy away from fantasy, either, most notably in “Maybe in a Different Time,” a hilariously tragic piece about a man who gains fame for nonchalantly donating his own body parts. (Spoiler alert: at the end he decides to hang onto his penis.)
All of which is to say that, in this collection, Oria proves herself a master of double-, triple-, and quadruple-meaning, a producer of sentences as beautiful and jarring out of context as they are inside. “The fire eats away at my fantasies,” says one of her narrators, “and the smoke that it feeds back to the air feels sober” — a typical sentence typical of Oria in that it arrests the reader even with no set-up. It’s easy to muster enthusiasm for a collection so provocatively titled; the trick is sticking the landing, which Oria does in spades. Filled with stories and language at odds with the boring trappings of so much of today’s literary fiction, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 commands the attention necessary to acclimate the reader to its prose; to borrow from Oria’s narrator, “To conquer a language that’s not your own, you need to prioritize reading over sleeping.” Oria makes this an easy task.
[B]lessed is he who is not offended but believes that this occurred, is not offended because it does not now occur but believes that it occurred.
– Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity
I want to send history to the bright fires.
–William T. Vollmann, You Bright and Risen Angels
Historicism
I don’t know who brought the books into the house — a filthy three-bedroom in Gainesville, Florida that when she first laid eyes on it made my mother cry — but I remember the books themselves. There were several, all paperback, all beat up and well-thumbed: 13 Stories and 13 Epitaphs, Whores for Gloria, maybe The Atlas and definitely The Rainbow Stories, which is what I ended up starting with, probably because I liked the cover, or the thickness of it, or it had been recommended by someone in the know, quite possibly the person who had brought the books over in the first place, though the more I think about it the more inclined I find myself to believe that the books were in the house when we moved into it in the late summer of 2001, so that in terms of our tenure there — Kevin’s, Steve’s, mine, and, variously, Brandon’s, Rick’s, Bill’s, Melinda’s, Dave’s, Kyle and Anna’s, because we had front and back yards convenient for parking a van or pitching a tent, plus of course the living room couches — Vollmann was not brought in but rather was left behind.
(All the names above, for better or worse, have been changed, on the logic that people deserve to be protected, however flimsily, from their own pasts. Other names below have not been changed. It will probably be obvious which are which, but it hardly matters in an case.)
We got the place through Brandon, who ran a group called Student Peace Action even though he wasn’t a student. He was good friends with the previous occupants, a jam band, even though he was technically a punk, though there wasn’t much to his being a punk either since he mostly wore a blue mechanic’s jumpsuit and only really liked listening to heavy metal and old bluegrass. He was an ex-Communist, ex-Confederate Apologist, hardcore alcoholic and true-believing anarchist; Floridian by way of North Carolina; a wonderful impossible creature and one of the better guitarists I have ever known.
This Is Not an Epitaph
Brandon lives in Minnesota now, and though we’ve fallen out of touch I’ve been told through our mutual friends that he is a bike mechanic, has a few bands going, is doing basically okay. I think we’re Facebook friends.
(An Aside
For more about this house and my experience of it, the piqued reader is directed to my novel, The Gospel of Anarchy, which depicts that time and place to the best of my ability and the near-exhaustion of my interest, albeit in a form closer to phantasmagoria than bildungsroman. As William Vollmann has it in his note at the end of The Rainbow Stories: “In my scholarly edition of the Bible are footnotes explaining the Divine in terms of the merely meteorological. But it would seem no less admirable to explain the meteorological in terms of the Divine.” My novel was written in this spirit, though by the time I wrote it I had forgotten this line of Vollmann’s (he had been ejected from my personal canon in 2005, after I froze to death in the middle of an endless Russian passage of Europe Central) and so I never thought to include it as an epigraph. I might have saved myself — and my critics — many headaches had I only recalled it while reviewing page-proofs in 2010.)
The Rainbow Stories
I read The Rainbow Stories and I loved them. Loved their style: the short sections of prose each with its own title, and not infrequently too its own epigraph; the determined but reserved foregrounding of the author as witness and speaking voice and participant; the willingness to risk over-determination and earnestness, as evidenced by the provokingly ham-handed “color scheme” structure of the book (itself inspired by a line of that great ham Edgar Allan Poe’s), the sometimes stultifying repetition of motifs and images. I loved the pure sprawling flab of the collection, of the individual stories, paragraphs and sentences loping blackly across page after page.
The Rainbow Stories (Continued) And Some of What I Learned From Them
I read The Rainbow Stories quickly and I loved it, even the parts of it that I didn’t like very much (such as “The Yellow Sugar” and significant stretches of “The Blue Yonder” and certain parts of “Violet Hair” which, despite Vollmann’s having included a glossary of Heideggarian terminology, remained largely beyond my comprehension) and after I finished it I decided that I would write a book like his, and then I read a lot more of his books — You Bright and Risen Angels, The Ice-Shirt, Fathers & Crows, and The Atlas — over the next few months. At some point I read The Rainbow Stories again. After that the pace slowed, though I eventually got around to 13 Stories and Butterfly Stories and Whores for Gloria and The Rifles, which, if memory serves, was the first of his books that I started but didn’t finish.
Vollmann not only expanded my horizon of what literature was or could be, but he showed me a new way that I myself could write it. A literature that was radically inclusive but also unapologetically intellectual (the unparsable Heidegger, after all, was pressed into the service of a love story); that one need not accept the division of literature into binary categories like “realist/nonrealist” or “traditional/experimental” or even “fiction/nonfiction”; that literature is not a two-party system in which you must make the least bad choice. (In 2000, eighteen years old, I voted for Nader.) Vollmann was not squeamish about dereliction, or about anything, really, and his unassailable calm was itself a kind of revelation. Though I should say nearly unassailable for in “Ladies and Red Lights” it is written: “As for the other pimp, he cocked his finger. When the policewoman patted him down, he spread his arms, like a stylish bird wondering whether or not to fly. — ‘I got kids, too,’he said. — That was too much for me. When he said that, I hated him.”
Vollmann showed me that I could write about the gritty and the dirty and the weird and the awful but also about the regular, the everyday: the world I saw in front of me, and whatever I was willing to seek out. (“The White Knights”, still my favorite Rainbowstory, appears to be straight reportage, and concludes with the S.F. Skinz gang reacting — poorly — to a draft of the piece he’s written about them.)
Of course Vollmann did not invent or discover these concerns; neither were his methods of addressing them wholly original or unique. He was only the first writer to bring these issues to my attention in a way that resonated and seemed to be irresistible; ergo, he invented them for me.
Historicism (Continued)
I had tried — was at that time still trying — to learn a lot of these same lessons from the Beats, but Vollmann — another San Franciscan, for whatever that’s worth to you — became my teacher in a way that Kerouac et al. didn’t, couldn’t. It might even be true that I had picked up Vollmann myself, unencouraged, for no better reason than that a jacket blurb compared him to Burroughs at a time when I was still trying to force myself to be a Burroughs guy. But it also might have been Bill, another homeless alcoholic who lived with us sometimes — he slept on the couch but he pissed himself at night, so we kicked him out, but if we didn’t lock all the doors and windows he’d sneak back in after we went to sleep. He was a kind and intelligent and gentle man, an ex-Mormon with long tangled leonine hair and beard and the sweetest pale eyes, usually wearing a too-small tee shirt and flip-flops and a pair of men’s bathing trunks (easier to hand-wash after he pissed himself); he’d go to the grocery store about 11 AM and steal a case of beer and spend the rest of the day drinking it while reading Kierkegaard; I remember him imploring me to tackle Either/Or, and how I never did, though years later when I was writing my Gospel I became obsessed with Fear and Trembling and Training In Christianity, and thought of Bill often, and he is represented in the novel by the novel’s own treatment of Kierkegaard as its Holy Spirit, so to speak. And so it might have been Bill who championed Vollmann, though again it might have been Rick, who loved freight trains.
It might be that Vollmann showed me what the Beats couldn’t because the life I was living then looked more like Vollmann’s than like Kerouac’s et al. (The previous sentence is an extraordinary overstatement, and indulges a relativism that verges on the outright disingenuous, but there is a kernel of emotional truth there, and in any case I’ve happily impeached myself, so I beg you allow me this indulgence and let us move on.) Like Vollmann, I stood on the fringes of a lot of things. I glimpsed strange sad and profound lives and worlds. I spent time with people whose choices I could neither fathom nor endorse, but by and large held my tongue or else encouraged them, and broke bread and raised glasses with them and they were my friends. I got talked into doing things I shouldn’t or wouldn’t have done and saw things I couldn’t have ever otherwise seen. On the strength of loving The Rainbow Stories I wrote a bad college book that was naive and callow and wanted to be about Everything Important In The World, etc.; a book I was probably bound to write with or without Vollmann, but because I wrote it with him (in his spirit, practically in his name) I cannot think of it simply as my bad college book but must consider it with particular reference to him. The form the book took was a novel about four short-story writers who were all friends (and they were based, pace Vollmann, on my friends, though my friends were mostly poets, and also I didn’t understand then that not everyone to whom Vollmann was friendly was actually his friend). The fictional fiction-writers’fictions were also included, so within the frame of the novel was an entire collection of short stories in a variety of styles, for Vollmann had showed me that sprawl itself was form and he gifted me with the fact of his own audacity at having written the books he had, the wild size and scope and number of them, and so I was diligent and wild and ate handfuls of ephedrine capsules (which in that innocent era were still legal, you bought them at the gas station) and banged away at my computer keyboard (thinking no doubt of the narrator of You Bright And Risen Angels who hides beneath his desk at work to use the computer to write at night after the bosses go home, though I myself was sitting drunk and alert in my own bedroom, and owned my computer, and had no boss) and produced this stillborn book which, to my credit, I knew almost immediately for what it was and so the only two people who ever saw it were my independent study advisor (who I doubt got halfway through it, though she gallantly awarded me three course credits for the exertion) and my friend Friedel (who I’m sure read with bottomless sympathy and reported back kind words that I’ve long since forgotten or blocked) and I never tried to write another novel like William Vollmann again, though I did imitate his voice once for an essay I wrote for the literary magazine Rain Taxi, which is the same trick I’m pulling here — obviously — which is perhaps my way of admitting that all attempts to historicize my interest and affection notwithstanding, the man can still get deep under my skin.
Two Bits of Trivia in Partial Illustration of the Previous Point
My public email address, to this day, is a phrase drawn from a line in You Bright and Risen Angels: “I want to send history to the bright fires”, though of course this is a question of convenience as much as anything else. Also, there is a character in my novel named Parker — a revered but absent figure, who some of the other characters come to worship as an anarchist messiah — named not, as some have guessed, for the protagonist of Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back” (sublime and pitiless masterpiece though it is) but rather for the failed revolutionary in You Bright And Risen Angels, who is turned into a terrorist by traumatic experiences at summer camp, and dies when his heart is eaten by a giant bug.
(Another Aside
You might say that, for me, Vollmann played a role in my reading and writing life not unlike the roles that Thomas Pynchon and/or David Foster Wallace seem to have played for so many of my elders and peers. But I have never been able to care much for either of those men and their bodies of work — I must be missing a chromosome, and as a result surely suffer from an undiagnosed literary-affective disorder — and so have had to make due as best I could. I think I came out all right, over all, though it must be admitted that “WTV” does not roll off the tongue quite the same way that “DFW” does, to say nothing of the tight grace of “Pynchon”, so close acoustically to “Dylan,” and so often inflected in just the same reverential way.)
Some Literary Criticism
Where does Vollmann stand in my estimation now? That’s hard to say. As mentioned above, I basically quit after Europe Central. I think it’s swell that he writes about social justice issues, has apparently fashioned himself a latter-day Steinbeck or whatever. I like his Harper’s pieces but I can’t imagine buying one of his new books, or re-reading one of the old ones, however much I may have loved it the first time around, and you can hear the Vollmann-voice-imitation draining out of my prose as I pull myself out of my reverie. It sounds, rightly or wrongly, like listening to myself get old.
Other Things I’ve Been in Love With
I was a Lish-school devotee for a few years there; went through a whole Dickens thing. Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Jane Austen, Richard Brautigan, Marilynne Robinson, Harold Bloom. Kierkegaard, as I mentioned, and G.K. Chesterton, if you can believe it. Right now it’s the Romantic poets. I read with obsession and promiscuity: full of love and prone to fits.
But yesterday I went to the library at the Pratt Institute, where I teach, with a mind to go back to square one with William Vollmann. I set out, in short, to do the thing I described as “unimaginable” a paragraph above.
Market Forces
The house I live in now (an apartment in Brooklyn, NY) doesn’t have a single book of Vollmann’s in it so I meant to check out The Rainbow Stories and spend some time with it and then write this piece. Unfortunately, the Pratt library’s copy is MISSING and has been for some time. But luckily for me — if you can call it luck, and I suppose I will — the convergent realities of the housing and academic job markets in New York City necessitate my teaching as an adjunct at three different universities simultaneously, and since on this particular day of the week I had to go straight from my literature seminar at Pratt to my fiction workshop at N.Y.U., I was able to visit the Bobst library on West 4th street and they had a copy of The Rainbow Stories, which I checked out. Owing to relatively low demand for this title and my status as “faculty”, it was determined that I could borrow the book for five months.
A new paperback copy of The Rainbow Stories retails for $22.
Some Reunions
This morning I sat at my kitchen table and read the “Preface” and the first two stories (including “The White Knights”) and the “Note on the Truth of the Tales” at the very back, where I found the sentences about divine meteorology quoted above. Then most of my afternoon was taken up by a reunion with a friend from childhood. David and I have known each other since elementary school, were inseparable throughout high school, years when he had an old red SUV and I, like Vollmann, was unlicensed, a shotgun seat fixture (though Vollmann, for his part, is wall-eyed, nearly blind, whereas yours truly was merely indolent). These were the years we revered Hunter S. Thompson, and also when my Burroughs thing got going. David loved Thompson and Bukowski but didn’t have the stomach for Naked Lunch or The Soft Machine: all those murdered boys with their spurting cocks and the sentences hacked to ribbons; Fuck this bro, he said, and put the book down and picked up his bass guitar. Maybe if I had known how to play bass guitar or drive a car I wouldn’t have tried so hard to make Burroughs work for me. Anyway, David has become a professional photographer and I needed a new author photo and he was in town for our friends Ari and Alex’s wedding (high school sweethearts, though they went to the other high school) so he came over and we climbed out my window onto the roof of the laundromat I live above and for an hour and a half he took pictures of me wearing various dress shirts and at one point he looked up from his tripod and said, “Man it’s weird when you’ve known someone a long time but you only see them like once a year or less and you see how their face has changed,” and I wanted to know what he meant by this exactly, since he had by this time been staring at my face for forty-five minutes and would continue to stare at it for as long again while he took probably two hundred photographs (glasses on, glasses off; right profile, left profile; in front of the bricks, in front of the tree) but he declined to elaborate on his comment other than to say, “I didn’t mean just you, it’s like that with everybody.” When we finished we walked down the street to a new restaurant he’d heard about from his little brother Danny (who lives on an island off the southern coast of Japan, but keeps up with the New York restaurant scene, somehow) but the place wasn’t open yet so we went and got ramen instead.
And all this made me think about Vollmann too, not just because of the photographer, Ken, who appears at the end of “The White Knights”, but because Vollmann himself has one of the great weird author photos that I know of: the early one (in fact it may be archival, i.e. a picture of himself as an adolescent, not “current” even when he was using it, but who knows?) where he’s sitting on the floor in front of a brown couch looking right at the camera through coke-bottle-lensed grandma glasses (the kind that are tre chic now among the hipster set, or were three years ago, but this picture was taken in ’70- or ’80-something) and his head’s cocked to the side and you can see some acne on his cheeks and he’s got what looks like a home-made haircut and is frowning and holding a pistol up to his right temple, wearing a collared beige shirt. I have never forgotten that photograph since the first time I saw it. I did not want a photograph anything like it.
(What I wanted was something either like the one of Jonathan Franzen where he’s holding the tripod and has binoculars around his neck on the jacket of Farther Away, or else that one of Denis Johnson where he’s grinning widely, maybe laughing, and you look at it and simply cannot believe that this is the guy responsible for the hard miracle that is Jesus’ Son. But my publisher didn’t want a photograph like the Franzen one, and I didn’t think I could pull off the Johnson one, and so we climbed out on the roof.)
After David left I read “Red Hands” and most of “Ladies and Red Lights” (with its Thomas Hobbes epigraph and expense-account footnotes) — then my girlfriend got home and because she had worked late I stopped what I was doing to cook her dinner, or, really, to warm up leftovers of the dinner she had made for me two nights before — but in any case I did it, while she flipped through a magazine and took off her shoes.
Something Occurs to Me
Later that night as we were settling into bed I realized that I had read over 100 pages of The Rainbow Stories in two days. Hardly the breakneck pace I’d kept in college, when I probably could have (or would have, or did) read all 543 pages in roughly the same span, but I had a lot more free time on my hands in those days, and the ephedrine capsules besides. My point is that 100 pages of Vollmann — of anything — in two days felt like a real achievement: mine, but also his.
Reading Like A Writer
I read differently now than I did when I was eighteen, nineteen. For one thing, I think I can say without unbecoming pride or ostentation that I am sufficiently established in my own career — as both a writer and a teacher of writing — that I no longer read published books with a superlative interest in figuring out how they got that way. (Though occasionally one cannot help but find oneself nonplussed.) I am still as likely as anyone (more likely than some) to be surprised, influenced, inspired, affected, changed by the books I read, but at this point I feel that my strongest influence is my own body of work: I begin a line of inquiry in one story or book and search for a way to extend or complicate it in the next, or, having written a story or book preoccupied with certain subjects, I vow not to let the next story or book become an exercise in repetition, however dear those subjects may still be to me. (But it must be said, again by way of self-impeachment, that these lines I write avowing a diminished susceptibility to influence are largely a paraphrase of remarks made by Jonathan Franzen in the essay collection whose jacket photograph I so admired.) Also, I’m older, and have a diminished susceptibility to revelation in general. More’s the pity, perhaps; but then again.
Some Reunions (Continued)
All of this is a prelude to discussing the one thing that truly did — does — surprise me about my reunion with The Rainbow Stories, and that thing is Vollmann’s extraordinary, indeed exquisite, sense of control. What I as a young enthusiast took for pell-mell freedom and chaos is in fact the result of careful orchestration and staging, within individual stories and in terms of the collection as a whole. This doesn’t mean the work is without its excesses — or that it doesn’t, at times, scan to me as self-indulgent, repetitive, inscrutable, etc. — but if you had asked me, before I revisited this book, why I no longer read Vollmann, I would have phrased my answer in terms of losing my tolerance for a certain kind of sloppiness; but now, having had my reunion, I must say that my complaints about Vollmann are not to be phrased in terms of his qualities as a writer but rather in terms of my taste as a reader. As chroniclers of the damned and damaged world go, I unreservedly prefer the Denis Johnson of not only Jesus’ Son but Fiskadoro and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man and all the poems and Soul of a Whore. The Dennis Cooper of Try and Guide. DeLillo’s Mao II and The Names and Point Omega and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Going To Meet the Man and Joshua Cohen’s Witz and A Heaven of Others and most of Mary Gaitskill and Tao Lin and Barry Hannah and about half of Amy Hempel and all of David Gates and Donald Antrim and Virginia Woolf in The Waves and To The Lighthouse and (a bit grudgingly) Mrs Dalloway, and all the names I mentioned earlier, and other names you can probably infer based on these names, plus a few you wouldn’t ever guess, which is okay too, to have some secrets. It may be that William Vollmann is one of mine.
The new film, Birdman, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, centers around a theater adaptation of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Michael Keaton’s character, Riggan Thomson, writes, stars in, and directs the play. The movies have seen their share of short story adaptations (including several of Carver’s, from nine of his stories in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts to “Why Don’t You Dance?” as Everything Must Go starring Will Ferrell), but these tight, knowing globes often become both bloated and oversimplified when stretched to feature-length. Alice Munro’s “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship” had to drop the Friendship and Courtship to fit on the silver screen. The short story thrillingly convinces readers they’re in for extreme disappointment before veering into happily every-after, and in so doing, allows both the good (achieved) and bad (narrowly avoided) outcomes to co-exist as alternate realities. The film, on the other hand, is a sweet and enjoyable story of an unlikely romance, with an unsettling emphasis on the virtues of vacuuming.
So why then, does Birdman yoke itself to Carver? Mike Shiner, a balls-out stage actor played by Edward Norton, asks his director the same thing. In response, Riggan produces from his wallet a folded cocktail napkin, with a note from the gin-soaked man himself: “Thanks for an honest performance — Ray Carver.” It’s a tidy origin story — this was the moment when Riggan knew he wanted to be an actor — but Mike scoffs. “It’s on a cocktail napkin,” he says. “He was drunk.” Well, if words Ray Carver wrote while drunk intrinsically had less value, we might as well throw out his entire collected works. But still, Mike is on to something, and his question, “Why Carver?” remains.
My theory is that Riggan chose a Carver story for his play for the same reason Iñárritu chose a Carver story for his movie. Carver’s work is literary — prestigious enough to impress — but still working class. He’s the contemporary short-story writer who’s okay for men to like, even though his themes are, at times, not all that different from Alice Munro (of whom, I have heard at least one man say, “writes too much about women”). If you knew neither story, could you guess which title — “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship” or “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” — was written by a nice Canadian lady and which was written blue-collar manly man?
I can’t speak to the quality of “What We Talk About…” the play; we are only shown snippets, though I suspect it too is bloated (there are dancing reindeer). But I can speak to the quality of the screenwriting (by Iñárritu, with two others), which is excellent. A single camera, giving the illusion of one long shot, follows the characters through backstage corridors, staying close to their bodies and even occupying their lines of sight. The last line in “What We Talk About…” is as close as Birdman’s camera, physically, if not emotionally, near: “I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not of us moving, not even then the room went dark.”
As in Carver’s stories, the dialogue is crisp and the characters are efficiently complex. But what most impressed me was the way the story moved through its own narrative, stealthily yet unexpectedly, like the camera through a narrow space. Carefully chosen excursions onto rooftops of the Majestic and into the streets of Times Square give relief from tight spaces, in the same way Carver uses anecdotes of car accidents and ex-husbands to relieve a claustrophobic conversation had around a kitchen table.
Birdman is about a short story adapted for theater, but it’s also a movie that could be adapted into a short story. Many issues that short story writers struggle with regularly are deftly handled here. Take this POV problem, for example: Riggan is haunted by his Birdman alter-ego, a macho, gravelly voice that tells him what to do. Some of Birdman’s powers — flight, telekinesis — may or may not have stayed with Riggan post-shoot. Which raises the question, in a close-third story, how does one indicate to the reader a character’s delusion when he is not capable of indicating it himself? (Birdman’s answer: use a taxi-driver.) Other, more basic craft questions are also addressed: How does one deliver backstory in an organic way? How can one write three-dimensional, secondary characters without allowing them to dominate a story? (I can’t help but mention that, also like many short stories, the last couple of “lines” in Birdman become sentimental and should be cut.)
That Birdman has answers to all these questions indicates to me that it’s of a piece with short fiction that’s currently popular: blurring genre (I’m looking at you, George Saunders), fantasy delivered in service of character (of which Karen Russell is queen), and blending of the real and unreal. That last one is particularly on trend — how many novels and stories have you read lately in which the fiction borrows overtly from the author’s life? Perhaps the main character even shares a name with the author. (Ben Lerner’s wonderful novels Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 come first to mind.) In Birdman, Riggan Thomson shares a similar story to Michael Keaton’s: they are both former stars of multi-million dollar superhero franchises, who turned down a late sequel. There hasn’t been a term coined for this cross-referencing between fact and fiction yet, but it’s the postmodernism of the internet age. It’s hyper-realism, fictionalized. We might call it hyper-fiction.
In Birdman, the vilified theater critic for the Times calls it “the unexpected virtue of ignorance,” giving the film its clunky alternate title. She’s referring to moments on stage that would be pretend but aren’t: real sex, real blood. It’s Borges’ life-size map (Ed Norton reads Labyrinth in a tanning bed, by the way, so the allusion is there); it’s life influencing art and art influencing life interchangeably.
Thinking of pursuing an MFA in creative writhing? Looking to be a spooky scribbler, putrid poet, or nefarious novelist? Here are some Monster of Fine Arts writing tips I’ve compiled for Halloween:
The familiar is reassuring. I can be reasonably sure that when I wake up in the morning, the space in which I wake will be the same as the one I fell asleep in; that coffee will still be something I grind and add to boiling water, and that cars will still drive down my street at most hours of the day. Change one of those–coffee’s now a paste added to ice; the primary form of transportation in New York is sledding–and the break that would occur is the stuff from which compelling fiction can arise. Not just a change in history (world or personal), but a change in the underlying rules of the world. Explorations of that have ranged from the speculative to the metaphysical, but underneath nearly all of them is a core of fear.
Jonathan Lethem’s short story collection The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye contains one of the most unnerving pieces of fiction I’ve ever encountered. It’s called “Five Fucks,” and it’s a kind of chamber piece, focusing on a man and a woman whose (sexual) collisions cause the world to be rewritten entirely, again and again — the shape of that reality becoming simpler and simpler. What begins as a realistically-rendered version of New York City transforms, over the course of the story, into a line-drawing simple cartoon landscape. There’s a third character here, too, a second man who yearns, unrequited, for the woman. Thankfully, Lethem doesn’t necessarily subscribe to romantic comedy clichés–he’s not there to be her eventual salvation; instead, he, too, is a sad presence, lurking on the fringes of the narrative, sympathetic but caught in the orbit of a disastrous bond. In whatever permutation, from the realistic to the Gothic, these characters collide; each time, the world as it’s been established is upended.
It’s a hell of a metaphor. It’s also something that, in the way that Lethem has written it, summons up a whole lot of dread. In a 2000 interview, Lethem commented that the story was, for him, an attempt to “write the ultimate, you know, ‘getting laid destroys the world’ story. Just to get it out of my system, and sort of examine the material.” Years ago, there was talk of director Michael Almereyda adapting it for film under the title Tonight at Noon, with a cast that included Chiwetel Ejiofar, Lauren Ambrose, Ethan Hawke, and Rutger Hauer. That any information about the film’s fate seems to have vanished from existence seems like a strange parallel to the story’s constant overwriting of reality.
“Looking for anybody, anywhere at all.” It sits there on the page, alone in its paragraph, a condensed howl.
If you’re a certain kind of reader, there’s something terrifying about novels and stories in which the world itself seems to be (or is) nonexistent. The apex, for me, of this style would probably be David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, whose protagonist wanders an emptied-out Earth, looking back on her life and interacting with the abandoned spaces around her. It’s a surreal landscape, not a literally apocalyptic one, but its emphasis on emptiness leads to plenty of disquiet. One passage about seeking personages fictional, historical, and contemporary ends with the sentence “Looking for anybody, anywhere at all.” It sits there on the page, alone in its paragraph, a condensed howl.
Markson’s novel defies reason: its setup isn’t one that holds up to any logical explanation; instead, like Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable, it’s a distillation of loneliness, and the sense of being surrounded by absence. Alternately, it’s the sense that everything familiar has slowly changed: that sense that anything that could be relied upon is now on the verge of collapse. The shifting, looping city in Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren at times reads like a physical manifestation of this, as do the altered (and constantly fluctuating) landscapes of Lethem’s Amnesia Moon and Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World. All three novels also ask questions about identity, and they mirror that in the sometimes-bizarre goings-on outside of the bodies of the characters. In other instances, the use of a constantly fluctuating landscape can be politically charged: consider the use of disorientation as aesthetic device in works like Ann Quin’s Tripticks and Deborah Levy’s Swallowing Geography. Here, the settings themselves become unnerving, and the reader is left with far less to grasp onto.
Those same questions and anxieties can also creep into much more overtly pulpy forms. If you’ve read superhero comic books for long enough, you’ve probably encountered a storyline in which history is changed, and some hero (or heroes) must travel through time to bring continuity back to what it was before (or alter it further). One of the stories in the Kurt Busiek-written comic Astro City is a riff on this concept. The man at its center, it transpires, was married to someone whose erasure from history was a side effect of the rewriting of history. And rather than treat this as a trope of the genre, Busiek emphasizes the emotional side of it, and gets at something that feels very true: this kind of erasure would, in fact, be a nightmarish situation for those enveloped in it.
Grant Morrison’s run on the DC Comics character Animal Man ended with the title character meeting up with the person responsible for a series of horrific events that had befallen his family: namely, a Scottish writer named Grant Morrison. Their dialogue was alternately terrifying and wryly funny, but it’s also a nerve-wracking encounter between creation and creator. Think also of Chuck Jones’s cartoon “Duck Amuck,” and of Stephen King’s short story “Umney’s Last Case,” in which a fictional detective watches as his world is slowly dismantled by the author who created him.
These shifts in the world, and in the way characters react to them, tap into some of our deepest anxieties: that our bodies will betray us, that the relationships we take for granted may be abruptly sundered, that the places we know and care about will change beyond any point of recognition. Writers who blend this with a heady dose of the surreal can create works that disorient even as their more chilling effects burrow deep within the mind, joining with primal concerns there.
Halloween used to belong to the monsters. Tracing a perfect near-continuum from the Frankenstein’s Monsters and Gill-Men that papered many a boyhood bedroom to the disturbed teenager’s diet of Lovecraftian doom and the unlaid English major’s repository of Victorian dreadfuls, the creatures of the night once held a monopoly on populist hair-raising. But in the hallowed eves of today, you’re more likely to see the harbingers of nostalgia — the likes of Urkel, Carmen Sandiego and drag Monica Lewinsky — than the emissaries of the undead, the restless hunger for immortality, lycanthropy, and Modern Prometheum seemingly slaked by Sexy Corn, rock star wish-fulfillment and an endless contest to achieve the slyest wordplay couple costumes (last year’s winner: Baroque-en Record and Edwardian Scissorhands) or tastelessly topical shock valets (I don’t mean you Binders-Full-Of-Women, I mean you, Zombie JonBenet Ramsey). When did the stop-motion lizard people of the late-night circuit, the high gothic of Mary Shelly and Siouxsie Sioux, become passé and what is to be done when Bela Lugosi is forced to take a backseat to SpongeBob and Shrek? And who will haunt the suburban thoroughfares and laborsome loft parties when we are gone? For those of us that borrowed our friends’ cars to see the midnight showing of The Hunger and maintained a preference for muppets over CGI, monsters weren’t a fad, but a lifestyle. Assigned Ayn Rand and A Separate Peace, we snuck away to read Anne Rice, I Am Legend,and Poppy Z. Brite. Once the moon was full enough to cover every one of us; adolescent America was one big Midnight Society gathered around the campfire and we all had hooks for hands.
Fortunately, literature — even as compared to movies and bartender tattoos — isn’t just full of monsters, literature is monsters. Admittedly, the most memorable killers have come in human(ish) form, from Blaise Cendrars’ Rippers-eque Moravagine to sign-of-the-time slashers like Patrick Bateman and Hannibal Lector. But that’s not to say that books aren’t rich with waking nightmares, undigested psychological ectoplasms and tentacles in general. The following list aims to undo the long influence of irony with its evil twin and opposite number: deliberate obscurity and humorless elitism. All vampires, Gorgons, flesh-eating cadavers, Kaiju and denizens of the Monstrous Manual have been scrupulously excised. This, if you dare, are the well-nigh forgotten monsters of classic literature, because the idle past is always preferable to the overfamiliar present, and true monsters are not just the embodiment of period anxieties, but the horrific realization of the future. For that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.
The Sandman From “The Sandman” by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1816)
It would be remiss not to begin with the monster that gave Freud his principle instance of “the uncanny.” Hoffmann’s traumatized hero begins by recalling the legend of the Sandman, who steals the eyeballs of children as they wake in fright and goes on to see the Sandman everywhere; in his own memories of his father’s unsavory friend Copellius, a “borometer-seller” named Coppola and lurking somewhere behind his own eyes. Grand Guignol subplots proliferate (including the love of a clockwork woman), but in the end Hoffmann dares us to look inward, to the origin of our desires where dreams mingle with half-recalled memories and where there is no guarantee that such clarity won’t mean madness and suicide. Such is the price for seeing too much.
Gil-Martin From The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
A distinctly Red State boogieman despite being the creation of a Scotsman, Gil-Martin is the otherworldy and inseparable companion — something of a homicidally misanthropic Socrates — of the religious zealot Wringhim. Gil-Martin assures his friend that there can be no sin when one is chosen by God and much of Wringham’s confession is given over to Gil-Martin’s sophistry: “What is the life of a man more than the life of a lamb, or any guilty animal? (…) Can there be any doubt that it is the duty of one consecrated God, to cut off such a mildew?” Convinced that he murders in God’s name, Wringhim terrorizes his would-be congregation only to slip deeper into Gil-Martin’s power. Unlike most monsters, more likely to eat your heart than discuss the correct interpretation of scripture, Gil-Martin is an intelligent fiend and one of the most convincing depictions of pure evil in all literature. Toward the end of the novel, the Wringhim’s charismatic councilor is accused of being the devil — but the canny reader will recognize Rousseau, whose approach Hogg loosely parodies.
The Man of the Crowd From “The Man of the Crowd” by Edgar Allan Poe (1840)
If you live in a metropolitan area, you’ve probably caught yourself occasionally thinking of people less as individuals with distinct selves than as the tendrils of the vast and unfathomable crowd. But what if this were literally true? What if some of the people you pass on your commute had no existence separate from their abeyance to the city’s inscrutable rhythm? So it is with the ragged and weirdly featureless old man that our narrator follows through the city, a criminal without a crime, a living blank of a human being onto which the crowd seems to project its random desires on a loop. Far scarier than Poe’s usual neurasthenic murderers, “The Man of the Crowd” is also one of the strangest things he ever wrote (including his many comedies and “The Philosophy of Furniture”). Like the Man of the Crowd himself, the story is an enigmatic dead level unaccentuated by any plot or obvious intent.
Beatrice Rappaccini “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1844)
What is it about Beatrices? The latest in a long line of awestruck young men falling into a personal hell for the sake of a Beatrice, our hero is distracted from his studies by his view of the lustrous garden of mad botanist Giacomo Rappacini, who has raised his daughter to tend his poisonous buds and assorted ivies (note the lingering sense of Italians as exotic evildoers). Technically more proficient than a lot of the stories on this list, it’s still a challenge to not make “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” sound insipid; suffice to say, Beatrice builds up a resistance but, in the bargain, becomes pure poisonous love whose kiss is death. Disaster ensues. If there’s one thing that’s more amazing about Hawthorne’s story than that it out-Poes Poe, is more of a page-turner than Henry James’ more ambient “Turn of the Screw” or that his gift for description is seemingly without limit, it’s how much Beatrice, swathed in the metaphor of thorny roses and so on, seems to anticipate the invention of the rock ballad.
Silas Ruthyn From Uncle Silas by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1864)
A dead-on Victorian novel with all the trimmings, Uncle Silas is effectively a re-do of Charlotte Bronte’s painfully anticlimactic Villette, featuring the titular cadaverous, opium-addicted, possibly-vampiric Third Uncle, who torments an ingénue before trying to marry her off to his idiot son (like Leatherface, but with a claw hammer instead of a chainsaw). One of the great villains of the era of triple-decker novels, Uncle Silas also gave the Peter O’Toole the most scenery-eating role of his career, in the BBC movie adaptation Dark Angel.
Lokis From “Lokis” by Proser Mérimée (1869)
Although Proser Mérimée is best known as the author of Carmen, if “Lokis” is any indication, his heart was really in tales of rapey Lithuanian Were-bears. Clawing his way out of the birth canal, Michel tries to repress his beasty nature. But the pressure of marriage proves too much, despite his efforts to keep it together, “Lokis” breaks out and his honeymoon turns into a bloodbath, after which he disappears into the forest to eat salmon, shit, trundle, hibernate and break into horseless carriages for the rest of his days.
The Horla From “The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant (1887)
The most frightening monster is that which is indistinguishable from madness. In this, the greatest of Maupassant’s many ghost stories, a pampered bourgeois becomes possessed by a parasitic consciousness that, among other trespasses, leads him to abuse his servants and burn down his house. A parable for class privilege and the self-destructive violence of the late Nineteenth Century’s landed gentry? Sure, but the suffering of our narrator and his struggle to find where he ends and the Horla (a sort of mental Mr. Hyde) makes “The Horla” the pinnacle of psychological horror and the appeal of bodily-displaced “mind vampires” has never really faded, from Freddy Kruegar and Killer BOB to the atemporal Horologists of David Mitchell’s recent The Bone Clocks.
Ayesha From She and Ayesha and others by H. Rider Haggard (1887)
One of the best-selling novels in history, She is pure colonial fantasy in which a pair of gentleman adventurers discover a primitive civilization presided over by She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, an immortal queen of a pre-Egyptian kingdom consecrated by fire and hands down my favorite mummy. Even if everything that surrounds SWMBO (or “Ayesha,” to the re-incarnated lovers she lures to her den) reads as faintly dumb or familiar by modern standards, Ayesha is an amazing character and, unlike most female monsters of the period, is depicted as formidable, self-possessed and eloquent even if desire does proves to be her undoing…at least until the sequels, which kept coming and inspired an entire genre of ‘lost city’ novels, Tolkien’s elf-queen Galadriel and a Hammer Horror film starring Ursula Andress.
The Damned Thing From “The Damned Thing” by Ambrose Bierce (1893)
Ur-American horror writer Ambrose Bierce is back in public consciousness thanks to True Detective — but if you found the actual Carcosa less frightening than your anticipations, you’re in luck. The Damned Thing is not a redneck child murderer, demon from hell or, despite the claw marks left on its victims, a mountain lion. It’s just some kind of thing. According to Bierce it’s a color we can’t see inhabiting an imperceptible air-inside-the-air. The point is, whatever it is, it hates us and it is everywhere all at once. Of course this Thing is only the granddaddy of all Things, from Lovecraft’s indescribable Things (which, nonetheless, he never tired of describing) to John Carpenter’s Thing, which not a dog in the same sense that The Damned Thing is not a mountain lion. As monsters go, Things have one big advantage over the human race: we can only describe what they aren’t. In other words, you won’t know it when you don’t see it.
The Great God Pan From “The Great God Pan” by Arthur Machen (1894)
Welsh freakazoid Arthur Machen’s grotesque novella about pagan orgies and brain surgery was just part of the prevailing fashion for Goat Gods — which were as ubiquitous in fin-de-siècle as zombies today — but he almost definitely invented the concept of tripping your balls off. Beginning with a scientist who wants to open the human mind to better understanding through creative lobotomy, he inadvertently opens the doors to Pan the pleasure god. What follows is an engagingly anarchic narrative (I use the term loosely) of rape, suicide and shape shifting women. Machen was a devoted occultist and late convert to Celtic Christianity and the tension between antiquity and modernity, what can be known and what lives just beyond comprehension, is present in all of his fiction; but not even his fae “White People” can equal Pan for sheer goat-fucking insanity.
Morlocks From The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1895)
Whereas most science-fiction stumbles by leaping ten or twenty years into post-apocalypse, the more optimistic Wells’ sets his after-scape in the 8,028th, just to be safe. Because, who’s to say that the inheritors of the planet won’t be subterranean albino ape-men? The Morlocks are not just literature’s premier subway-dwelling mutants, they remain its most malevolent, an evolutionary step backwards toiling in the pure night of a post-electric world, emerging from their tunnels to feast on the flesh of the Eloi (basically Californians to the Morlocks’ New York).
Sredni Vashtar From “Sredni Vashtar” by Saki (c. 1901–1911)
A blood-drinking polecat worshipped by a psychotic ten-year old boy. Devourer of cousins. Anyone looking for a pet name?
Count Magnus From “Count Magnus” by M.R. James (1904)
In M.R. James’ genre-establishing weird tale, a travel writer in darkest Sweden fails to appreciate a series of painting depicting the Count Magnus de la Gardie and ventures into the Count’s mausoleum only to encounter…something (the journal breaks off and we go back to the frame story). As ghost stories go, this may not sound too scary, but just imagine if the last piece of art you failed to fully appreciate decided to kill you.
Alraune From Alraune by Hanns Heinz Ewers (1911)
Next time you need to name check a novel about a prostitute impregnated with the sperm of a hanged man by a mad geneticist so that she gives birth to a vengeful nymphomaniac written by a homosexual Nazi, you’ll be glad we had this chat. There’s not a lot more to say, except this once-wildly popular answer to Frankenstein (of which it is kind of a misogynist reworking) is, I’m afraid, partly responsible for the Species movies. The more things change…
Thak, the Man-Ape From “Rogues in the House” by Robert E. Howard (1934)
Simian overlords and deadly orangutans are certainly not underrepresented in fiction, but if you’re talking about giant things beating the shit out of each other, you’re talking about Conan the Barbarian. In the unusual and early installment of the Cimmerion’s adventures, Howard mimics the style John Webster in a convoluted story with an excellent end-boss: the usurper Thak, an intelligent ape who has replaced a powerful clergyman and plots to rule the surrounding cities as a theocrat. Do I have to say more? It’s fucking Thak! All hail Thak!
The Newts From War with the Newts by Karel Čapek (1936)
Karl Čapek’s unbelievably perceptive political fantasy War with the Newts centers around the titular Sumatran newt-people. Discovered just beyond the reefs of the known world, humanity quickly outsources its labor to the aquatic Newts. Only when mankind has become completely dependent on the new, hydroengineering-based economy do the Newts begin demanding a bigger cut of the coastline, by which time even the most highly-developed nations are in no position to refuse. Despite the title, the war isn’t a war so much as a massacre, as frogman proves himself by far the more adaptable species. Čapek’s targets are complex: nationalism, racism and, above all, capital — but the Newts are more than the means to a sociological end, as they evolve from gentle pearl-divers to an indignant proletarian class and finally take their place as the new master race.
It From “It!” by Theodore Sturgeon (1940)
Sturgeon is probably most famous for developing the useful Sturgeon’s Law — that is, “Ninety percent of [science fiction] is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud.” — and the nameless swamp monster of “It!” is the embodiment of this philosophy; a creature of pure waste, sentient fungus and accumulated detritus that lumbers through the countryside contemplating Its own oppressive consciousness even as it absorbs more fungus, moss and rot into its membrane. Like the very best monsters (including Its direct descendants Man-Thing and Swamp-Thing), It exists in a state of in-between-ness, occupying the void between living and unloving, natural and unnatural.
Cassavius From Malpertius by Jean Ray (1943)
In this Belgian gothic-surrealist novel…sorry, I’ll start again; Cassavius is the ultimate realization of Belgian oddball Jean Ray’s twin interests in Cocteau-like fantasy and sublime strangeness reminiscent of Bruno Schultz or Paul Valéry. A well-traveled collector and warlock (Orson Welles in the otherwise memorable film version), Cassavius builds a sprawling mansion to house his collection, which happens to consist of figures from myth trapped in flesh and forced to roam the grounds reliving their Hellenic salad days. This is as good a place as any to mention that when I was 8, my best friend Robert Harris locked me in the garage until his mom came home. Actually, I am still there.
Tash From The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis (1954 and 1956)
We all know that heavy-handed theologian worked Jesus into his Chronicles of Narnia as the lion Aslan, but did you remember that Narnia has its very own anti-Christ? That would be Tash the giant vulture-skulled Demiurge. Originally, presented as a cultural, rather than religious deity — that is, a swear word more than an actual being — Tash turns out to be totally real in the more-grisly-than-you-remember Last Battle. Tash is the false God made real, the monster we make when when we serve our own interest in Heaven’s name. Or maybe Lewis is just a pedantic patriarchal family-values allegorist (see the more-stupid-than-you-remember Screwtape Letters).
The Howling Man From “The Howling Man” by Charles Beaumont (1959)
Although the Twilight Zone adaptation of the ridiculously prolific Beaumont’s short story will have you believe that the man locked up in the dungeon Benedictine castle and guarded by an order of monks is the Devil, he isn’t. He’s the 20th century and when a boarder, tormented by screams in the night, sets him free, he unleashes 100 years of genocide, iniquity and nuclear war. Anastasia screamed in vain.
The Plants From The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch (1965)
The premier work of science hick-tion takes us out of the futuristic cities of most space opera and into the hinterlands, where spherical aliens have seeded giant deadly trees throughout planet, overwhelming the natural flora, blocking the sky, oozing sap, and replacing the welkin with a toxic atmosphere. More menacing than a Triffid, less fun than an Ent, this evil crop turns out to be an elegant metaphor for the climate’s indifference to man. Disch’s tiny band of backwater types enact their petty jealousies and give way to infighting, but not before taking a sylvan journey into the heart of the Other, to the place where all roots entwine. The Plants are the monstrous monoculture at the center of the world, who are still not altogether of it.
Behemoth From The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
How does Behemoth manage to stick out in a kaleidoscopic Soviet masterpiece whose other characters include Pontius Pilate, assorted succubae, a demonic assassin and Satan himself? It might be because he is a demonic seven-foot cat that walks upright, plays chess, knocks back vodka with the devil and makes wisecracks that are either untranslatable or just proof that cat humor is wasted on me. Other than being a talking feline, the louche Behemoth wouldn’t be out of place in most grad programs: he is sarcastic, well-read (to the point that he’s even read manuscripts that were burned by their authors) and indebted to powerful and evil forces. There may be more sinister cats in fiction, but as Satan’s minion — or, rather, mascot — Behemoth combines the amorality of house pets with the blithe condescension of somebody who wants you to know he knows somebody very famous. Also, his name means hippopotamus in Russian, which is a pretty good name for a cat.
Knife-Wielding Death Dwarf From Daphne Du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now” (1971)
Daphne Du Maurier’s fascinating horror story “Don’t Look Now” (the inspiration behind my favorite film of the same name) may be the only work of fiction entirely based on the dangers of misinterpreting metaphor. While a killer roams Venice, a vacationing couple mourning for their deceased daughter fall under the sway of a pair of identical twins and become fixated on a strange figure in a red raincoat — just like little Christine used to wear. But it isn’t their little girl, it is a terrifying dwarf with a razor; the premonitions we’ve been following were only premonitions of an absurd and meaningless death.
The Cupboard Man From “Conversation With A Cupboard Man” by Ian McEwan (1972)
Nothing to see here, just a masturbating homunculus who lives inside a cupboard.
He’s in yours right now.
MisquamacusThe Manitou by Graham Masterton (1975)
Graham Masterton, the author of over two-dozen sex instruction booklets, has produced a baffling series of books probably aimed at making us forget the movie made out of his first, The Manitou. Misquamacus is an Indian spirit (more properly, a Manitou, a monster so Canadian-sounding, they named a Province after it) that takes possession of a fetus so as to exact vengeance on the white man; so far, so good but the problem is that Misquamacus doesn’t wait to grow up, but just goes for it after charging out of his mother-host’s uterus. A truly malevolent fetus, his rampage doesn’t get much farther than the nursery but deserves massive points for effort.
Freddy From Freddy’s Book by John Gardner (1980)
Freddy is the secret progeny of a University professor who keeps his enormous, ogre-like son secured in the attic, where, hidden from sight and denied any human contact, he wiles away his hours of captivity writing a book about Vikings. Freddy is, in other words, the writer we’d all like to be.
Larry the Lizard From Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalis (1982)
Mrs. Caliban is a quiet, pensive domestic drama reminiscent of Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge or Chopin’s The Awakening with the distinction of featuring a giant lizard-person. Larry, having escaped from an experiment, falls in love with bottled-up housewife Mrs. Caliban and reawakens the passion that has been all that snuffed out by a loveless marriage and the loss of her son. Mrs. Caliban’s lizard may not seem very threatening as monsters go — indeed, he seems an affable gentlecreature and alert lover — but Ingalis’ tone is less magical than it is wistful; Larry may be a figment of Mrs. Caliban’s loneliness and repressed desire, which establishes Ingalis’ short novel as a deeply feminist text and Larry as belonging to the same class of inner-beasts-made-manifest as Lon Chaney’s Wolfman.
Mr. Hood From The Thief of Always by Clive Barker (1992)
Clive Barker is known for his vaguely kinky horror and fantasy novels, but The Thief of Always is a surprisingly durable fable about a jaded young boy with the adorably Dickensian name of Harvey Swick who is invited to the Holiday House — where every morning is Christmas and every night is Halloween — at the invitation of the mysterious Mr. Hood. His every childish whim attended to, Harvey is loath to return home; but when he does, he finds that years have passed, his parents have all but given up looking for him and Mr. Hood is the house itself, draining the years from the children he lures inside his doors.
The Thieving Bears of Thieving Bear Planet From “Thieving Bear Planet” by R.A. Lafferty (1992)
Actually, they’re more like large flying squirrels, but made mostly of fluff “with not much body inside it,” the better to hide the things they steal. The only known inhabitants of an otherwise worthless and uninteresting planet, the only given scientific reason for the bears’ existence is that “anomalies are necessary.” But woe to the spaceman who touches down even briefly on Thieving Bear Planet, for he will find himself denuded not only of all his Pepsin capsules and comic books, but — such is the cleverness of Ursusfurtificus — he will soon lose even his knowledge of the cosmos beyond and, eventually, his ghost.
Mr. Potato Head From “Subsoil” by Nicholson Baker (1994)
Leave to a first-class observer of radical normality like Nicholson Baker to finally tap into the uncannyness of stem tubers. An agricultural historian Nyle T. Milner stays the night in a mysterious house well-stocked with vintage boargames, where he dares to play with an “original” Mr. Potato Head made from an actual potato (was this a thing?). The description of the potato’s vengeance is impossible not to quote: “A sprout grew smoothly into his right knee, seeking his synovial fluid. Several more penetrated his elbows. These hurt quite a lot, though not nearly as much as the one that found its way into his urethra. One wan ganglion discovered his ear canal, and another a tear duct, and Nyle began to hear only the dim, low pulsation of plant hormones and potato ideology.” In the night, the potato takes its vengeance, unfurling its roots to take possession of its victim and . Beware the potato, my friends, for the next fruit of the earth dug up for a child’s amusement may be your skull.
Kafka’s Father From Letter to His Father by Franz Kafka (First, Last and Always)
Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father is the greatest work of introspection ever written and one of the holy grails of modernism, in which Franz attempts to explain to his father why he fears him so and begs for his judgment. We can never read enough this most naked of confessions in which Kafka transforms his father into a monster more encompassing than anything in Lovecraft’s loopiest penny dreadfuls, a spiraling and encyclopedic fusion of the Old Testament God and deeply-buried childhood submission, more haunting than any ghost and more homoerotic than anything of Anne Rice’s vampires (understandably, the letter was never delivered). In his genius-level capacity for obsessive suffering, Kafka got it right: Dad is the ultimate monster.
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