Wouldst Thou Like to See the World?

[There are heavy spoilers for The Witch throughout this review]

Early in The Witch, the new horror film that is the feature debut of writer/director Robert Eggers, a baby disappears. By this I don't mean the infant boy's crib is discovered empty one morning -- I mean that while his teenage sister Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is playing peek-a-boo with him out in the yard that stretches from their family's secluded farm in Colonial-era New England to the vast woods beyond, between closing her eyes and opening them, the baby, named Samuel, who had been on the ground, on a blanket, on his back, looking up at her, vanishes. Bewildered, Thomasin tells her parents William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie), and they attempt a search (and it's only the family who is able to search; there is no one else in this part of the country near enough to ask for help), but it comes to nothing. The assumption is that a wolf has taken Samuel, but the viewer of The Witch knows different. Shortly after the disappearance, Eggers cuts from the farm location to somewhere else, somewhere perhaps in those woods. We see Samuel, with a knife being brought slowly down over him. Soon after that, we see the figure who'd wielded the knife, an old woman, a witch (Bathsheba Garnett), chunks of bloody flesh in a pile near her, grinding these chunks, and presumably other matter, with a mortar and pestle.

If, after that, you're given to assume that just about anything goes in The Witch, you wouldn't be far wrong. Eggers's film is the most relentlessly, even cruelly unsettling horror film I've seen since Lars von Trier's Antichrist came out in 2009. It's absolutely mesmerizing in its horror, Satanic in its imagery; it shows an understanding of the genre's potential that pretty much no other current horror filmmaker appreciates, in almost every frame. I liked it. I thought it was good.

The Witch has been much talked about, and was released wide, riding a wave of hype that many people were bound to think was undeserved, such is the nature of hype, but that sort of disappointment rarely has much to do with the film one is being disappointed in (such is the nature of disappointment). Still, some kind of backlash, whether stemming from honest objections to the film itself, as some of the criticism doubtless has, or from...something else, was inevitable. Currently, the big complaint people are having with The Witch is that it "isn't scary." Many of these people, from what I've seen, also consider the film "boring" and "so bad." I have no plans to address those criticisms here, because, in the parlance of our times, "I can't even," which in this case is short for "I can't even fucking live in this world anymore if this is the kind of conversation that's going to dominate, please God, ease my pain, I'm sorry for swearing."

So that shit can fuck off. It's boring and so bad, etc. What interests me more is trying to describe my own reading of the film, which, while I know is at least on some level shared by others, is nevertheless not the "interpretation" (and those quotation marks are more precisely used here than is the norm) that most people who've seen The Witch seem to favor. And please understand, by pointing that out, I'm not trying to toot my own horn -- I'm still arguing with myself about this movie. Plus, when I brought this whole thing up on Social Media the other day, I used a rather more absolutist tone than I should have. It is foolish to claim, or to imply, as I did, that what I don't see in The Witch isn't there at all. In fact, it would not shock me in the least to discover that among the people who disagree with my take on the film is Robert Eggers himself. I haven't bothered to find that out one way or another, because, and I mean this with all due respect, and I think he would understand, on a fundamental level I just don't care. The Witch carries for me a very specific power, and like anyone who finds a piece of art that matters to them, and whose love for it comes from somewhere not shared by everyone, I'm not interested in being told I'm "wrong" by the artist.

But anyway. I'm starting to sound defensive. The first thing to do is make clearer what The Witch is, as a story. The family in the film, in addition to the aforementioned parents William and Katherine, Thomasin, and poor Samuel, also includes Thomasin's younger brother Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), who's about eleven or twelve, and their younger twin brother and sister, named Jonas (Lucas Dawson) and Mercy (Ellie Grainger). Having been cast out from an established New England colony for reasons that aren't quite clear, but which seem to have something to do with objections William has to the colony's religious practices, William is forced to set his family up on a secluded patch of farmland outside of recognized society. I think it's possibly a leap to assume that what William demands is that the colony be more strict in this regard, but he is a devout man, and he wants to raise an equally devout family. He is not a cruel person, though. No one in his family is, but Katherine is sad because she misses England, where they're from, and since leaving the colony their lives have become immeasurably harder. Food is scarce, and there's no money. William is frustrated, ashamed, and demanding, but loving. Caleb and Thomasin seem to be the happiest, but their ages put them at just about the beginning and just about the end of puberty, so there's that to deal with, in the 17th Century, in a Puritan family. A state of affairs that Eggers depicts without judgment, by the way -- shockingly, he allows for the possibility that such people might, hundreds of years ago, simply be counted as regular people. Anyhow, perhaps because of their shared adolescent feelings, with no outlet for them at all, Caleb and Thomasin are very close, and protective of each other.

The problem is Jonas and Mercy, though that they are a problem, and not merely a typical younger-sibling nuisance to Thomasin, is not recognized until late in the film, and even then the focus never goes to them. Which is interesting. Before getting to that, though, I should say that the problem is that they seem devoted to -- in a way that at first seems teasing but by the end of The Witch could perhaps best be described as joyous -- to a goat that belongs to the family, a large black and brown goat named Black Phillip. Two things we don't know about Black Phillip is how long the family has owned him and who named him, and I think it means something that we don't know these things. In any case, thoughts and accusations and indications of witchcraft, and of the presence of an evil witch in the woods that abut the family farm, begin to overwhelm the family, and at the center, eventually, is Black Phillip.

The core characters in The Witch are, arguably, Caleb, Thomasin, and William, their father. By the end of the film, it's not so arguable that Thomasin is the lead, but for a good portion of the movie the perspective shifts between those three. At one point, I was certain that Caleb was the protagonist, but no. That the protagonist ends up being Thomasin is significant for all sorts of reasons, but the main one is that by choosing her, Eggers has created a film that almost begs to be read one of two ways: as feminist, or as misogynist. I think the misogynist reading is barely worth mentioning, though I can understand where it comes from. Before proceeding, I should say that this sort of reading of The Witch -- and I don't necessarily mean the feminist, misogynist, or religious hysteria (more on that one in a bit) readings, but the general approach to accepting a political or social subtext as a given -- is what I object to. But back to the point: though I reject the feminist reading (or rather, I should say I don't find it interesting, about which, again, more later) it is precisely that reading that renders the belief that that the film is anti-feminist nonsensical. Because there are two obvious approaches to the feminist interpretation, and to describe them will mean telling you how the film ends. So I'm spoiling the whole thing right here: we know there is a witch, and it destroys the family. It brings fear and distrust and paranoia into the family, and brings black magic and death to them through Black Phillip. One by one, the family members die, or are killed, until only Thomasin, who has borne the brunt of her family's accusations of witchcraft, remains. She goes to Black Phillip and demands counsel, at which point Black Phillip, who it must be assumed is literally the Devil, asks her "Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?" She has nothing left, and she says yes. At the end of the film, naked and covered in blood, she ascends into the night sky in the company of other witches, in a furious Black Sabbath nightmare.

The feminist reading of this can go either way. Earlier in the film, as the family's hardships increase we learn that the parents are considering hiring Thomasin -- giving her away, essentially -- to another family, to work as a servant, as a result of which Thomasin's family will be given some amount of money. This was a common practice hundreds of years ago, which doesn't change the fact that being a young woman of no means, or even who is simply not rich (and even if she was...) in the 17th or 18th or 19th or etc. century was an effectively impossible and hopeless situation. You were permitted to decide nothing. So, in The Witch, you can take the fact that Thomasin ends up as she does as a metaphor for the idea that young women in a Puritan society were, one way or another, doomed. Or, given the quite frankly horrifying look of ecstasy that sweeps across Thomasin's face before Eggers cuts to black, you can decide that this is what it took (not literally of course) for a young woman in a Puritan society to gain her freedom (this has certainly been the Satanist reading of the film, which is something you can look up, but that press release was as predictable as the Satanists probably believed it was going to blow all our minds). It's a genuinely repellent take on The Witch if you happen to celebrate that ending, not least because in order to get the ball rolling so that it stops with Thomasin in the throes of Satanic freedom, you have to first kill a baby and grind its body into paste. I don't imagine that taking the "you can't make an omelette" approach to social concerns this far is something we're really prepared for, even within the boundaries of fiction.

The other one, about Puritan societies dooming women, is more supportable (by the way, I should say here, if there's another way to approach a feminist reading of The Witch, please let me know), but it's complicated by the details of the film itself. How would this family have fared had they been able to stay in the colony, which is very clearly also Puritan in nature? How, more specifically, would Thomasin have fared? Maybe not well, but surely not this badly. This family is placed in a very specific situation, one that, if not unheard of (and obviously it wasn't), was still not the norm -- in the bulk of the film, they are living a life that was quite literally outside of regular colonial society. So the broader critique that hundreds of years ago Puritans should've been different doesn't even really apply. Furthermore, the men in the film are not bad people. Caleb is, quite frankly, a wonderful little boy who is very confused and as in danger of being harmed by Puritanism as Thomasin (however, instead of being damaged by Puritanism, he's killed by Satanism). And William, the father, is a weak but caring man. You could argue, and you should because it's a good point, that if Robert Eggers wanted to use the horror genre to construct a metaphor about patriarchal tyranny in Colonial America, but wanted to remain a good artist while doing so, he would create a father character who was not some cartoonishly abusive brute, but would instead show that even a caring man in that environment would have been insidiously, and unavoidably corrupted. However, when the charges of witchcraft begin falling on Thomasin, the one person in the family who refuses to believe she's guilty without strong evidence (outside of Caleb, who by then has been incapacitated) is William. This is perhaps taking it beyond subtlety and into the realm of, to paraphrase Jake LaMotta (I see the irony of that one, by the way), defeating its own purpose. If such was Eggers's purpose, which I clearly don't think it was.

But what about religious hysteria? And what the hell is my reading of The Witch anyway?? Well thank Christ, because those two things dovetail pretty neatly. To begin with, it's important to know that as the end credits of the film begin, there's a card that informs the audience that all the specifics of The Witch -- all the horror of it, is the implication -- is taken directly from actual New England folktales (and a lot of the dialogue, which is wonderfully rich and archaic, is taken from those same folktales, as well as journals from the era). I'll admit that I'm forced to take Eggers's word for this, but either way what becomes, to me, fascinating about this movie upon reading that is the idea that, as far as I know, for the first time in the history of the American horror film, a film was adapted from the very basic roots of fiction, before there even was a horror genre. The body of the horror genre is supported by two spines: superstition, and the fear of death. A certain sophistication, on which we continuously pride ourselves, has transformed the superstition part from a system of belief (and here I don't mean religious faith, but rather a belief in malevolent supernatural creatures such as, to pick a random example, witches) into what a lot of people writing about genre would call "formula." Or tropes. In horror, what Puritans, and others around the world from a variety of societies, once literally believed has now become a series of plot engines (as a lifelong fan of horror, I should probably add "when used poorly," but in order to explain why The Witch is unique, let's just generalize, since that is, of course, easier). Whereas our fear of death is as literal and present and hatefully consistent as its ever been. As I think I've indicated, many people approach horror as a sort of cloche beneath which they will find Metaphors About Our Nation Today and Social Commentary Of A General Sort, but while God knows there's loads of that stuff to be found throughout the genre's extremely long history, the constant, I mean, the absolute constant, metaphor within the genre, to the degree that it's not so much a metaphor as it is a synonym, is the fear of death. You can boil away everything else, but that one's not going anywhere. Unless you're one of those people who claims to not fear death, in which case: teach me. I want to learn.

Of course, in horror you can't just pass away in your sleep. You have to be killed by something or someone, which implies evil, malevolence, which, in turn, at least in this context, implies superstition. Superstition created the folktales on which The Witch is based. Superstition, in most cases, also suggests that some form of hysteria is behind it, and with this film, you have a very specifically archaic Christian worldview to draw from (and really, I can't think of anything that could be labeled by anyone as superstitious that doesn't have as its core some sort of spiritual component). But how can the film be about Christian religious hysteria, or any kind of religious hysteria, when in the world of the film those beliefs that we might deem hysterical are shown to be literally true? Not only that, but the audience knows them to be true before the victims in the film even suspect them to be present in their lives at all? They're not being hysterical: they've actually figured out the truth.






















Very often, I've found that people don't like taking the horror parts of a horror film at face value. They like to say everything weird took place only in a given character's head, or in any case we shouldn't take it -- the vampire, the ghost, the demon -- seriously as a thing itself because it doesn't exist in our world and therefore can only gain meaning if were able to find things beneath it. They call this "subtext," and it is The Ultimate Good when it comes to genre fiction -- it's the excuse for genre fiction. That's if you think genre fiction needs to be excused, and possibly because good genre fiction is often so appealing on a visceral level, excuses must be made. I do sort of think that the nadir (or apex, depending on the exact way you're interested in this sort of thing) of this is in the theories that swirl around Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. And I'm not talking just about Rodney Ascher's documentary Room 237, although God knows that did a pretty good job of distilling it all. I'm talking about the kind of thing I read all the time about that movie, that the ghosts in it aren't real, they're only in the mind of Jack Torrance because he's insane, and, er, later, they're also in the head of Wendy Torrance because she's so scared? But that kid really is psychic because that shit can't be explained away. So people pick and choose what's metaphorical and discard what they can't fit in. Meanwhile, the most interesting theory about what The Shining means is the one about the alcoholic writer and the haunted hotel that possesses him. The film is about the doom of Jack Torrance. I believe this take on the film might be regarded as shallow, but to me it is not only deep; it's what (more-or-less) traditional narrative art is. The question, to me, isn't "What more do you need," but rather "What else matters?"

Look also at Bill Paxton and Brent Hanley's Frailty from 2001, which leads the audience to believe that Paxton's character is murdering innocent people, and teaching his young sons to do the same, because he's suffering from a fanatical religious delusion that these people are in fact malicious demons, only, in the end, to reveal that those people were, in fact, malicious demons. This bothered many viewers because it implied a justification for murder, I guess, but given the tradition of the genre you might as well judge Abraham Van Helsing as equally immoral. The point is, for many, all of this has to mean something else. Frailty has to be about the wrongness of religion, not about demons on Earth, otherwise what are we even doing this for? There is no meaning within the specifics of the story itself. See also Antichrist, which I mentioned I think about a week ago, a film that, like The Witch, was also reduced to being a collection of social issues that Von Trier had the wrong opinions about, but which was rarely, from what I could tell, approached as a horror film, even though that's what it was, and it was the exact particulars of that horror story that explained what that film really was (see here for more on that one). What's important isn't what we decide that Antichrist is about -- what's important is what Antichrist is actually telling us it's about.

And so, The Witch. And so, Thomasin, and her fate. Except, hers isn't the only fate we witness. We see what happens to her father, William, and her mother, Katherine. We see what happens to Caleb (and what a striking piece of metaphysical terror that is). Thomasin's fate, and life, can be connected to all of these. You can bind them, in a lot of ways, or anyway a few ways, to whatever interpretation you'd like. However, we don't know, finally, where Black Phillip came from. We don't know who named him. And we don't know what happened to Jonas or Mercy. All along we've been given reason to suspect that they are the key. These two little five or six or seven-year-olds. But they were the Devil's way into this family. Them, and the baby. The youngest and most innocent, yet also the least convinced or interested or able to understand religion or its possible excesses, or their Puritanical lives. They are children with no experience with which to form a subtext, and that's why all of this happens.

Strip away the rest. The Witch is horror in its purest form.

It Doesn't Think

About, I'd say, a quarter of the way into It Follows, the new movie from writer-director David Robert Mitchell which has so far positioned itself to comfortably be one of the maybe two serious horror films, by which I mean it's not at least 75% intended as a joke and has earned a flood of acclaim, that we are permitted to have each year, as I say, about a quarter of the way into this thing our young heroine Jay (Maika Monroe) has just had sex with her new boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary). Hugh seems like a good guy, he doesn't force her into anything, and though lately he's been acting a little bit funny, the sex was Jay's idea, and so therefore etc. But then afterwards, in the car where the deed was accomplished, Hugh suddenly leaps on her and knocks her out with chloroform. When she awakes, she's tied to a chair in what appears to be an abandoned parking garage. Hugh is there, and he tells her that, listen, I just had sex with you so that I could pass on to you this condition under which I have been burdened wherein the sufferer is followed by a supernatural creature until either A) it catches and kills the pursued, or B) the pursued has sex with someone else, thereby passing, sexually transmitted disease-style, the otherworldly danger to another. Although it should also be noted, Hugh goes on to say, that those who achieve this dissemination aren't entirely off the hook because should the disseminated-to be killed by this creature before they're able to keep the chain going, the thing will then go back to pursuing he who had recently shed himself of this misfortune, i.e., in this case, Hugh. Furthermore, Hugh tells Jay, this deadly being can and will appear as just about any person it chooses, be it a stranger or even one of Jay's loved ones -- whatever it takes, Hugh insists its motive is, that will let it get close to you, that is, Jay. Finally, it moves very slowly, so you can buy yourself some time by driving places, and, again, having sex with someone will shift the responsibility elsewhere, and if everyone keeps giving the next person along this same head's up, everything should be fine. With that done, and with the supernatural creature in the form of a nude woman appearing to helpfully prove Hugh's not making all this up, he drives Jay home where her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) and friends Yara (Olivia Luccardi) and Paul (Keir Gilchrist) are on the porch waiting for her. David Robert Mitchell (the director, if you'll recall) films the drop-off by showing Hugh's car pull up to the curb as it would be seen by Kelly and the others. The car stops and Hugh gets out. We don't see Jay. He goes to the rear driver's side door and opens it. He's helping, or pulling, someone out, and he says "Don't let it touch you." Then he gets in the car and drives away, revealing, as the car moves off, Jay, clad only in her underwear, laying, folded up and somehow damaged in the street.

Say what you will about that premise, and I'll admit that as far as good ideas go it does seem a bit hinky to me, it doesn't strike me as unworkable. Before continuing I should also acknowledge that in the world of criticism it's considered either not kosher or not cricket to approach negative criticism with the goal of explaining how things should have been done. At least I think you're not supposed to do that, but maybe I'm mixing it up with something else you're not supposed to do.  But anyway, so listen: what about if David Robert Mitchell had cut all of Hugh's explanation, had cut even the sex scene, such as it currently exists, and simply left in some indication that either Jay or Hugh was going put the moves on the other, and then we cut to the car pulling up, the strange helping of Jay from the car, Hugh's now enigmatic "Don't let it touch you" (which in the film is not enigmatic at all), the car pulling away, and Jay's crumpled body. Had that been done, the audience would now share the point of view of the characters the camera, in this scene, wants us to share, that is Kelly, Yara, and Paul, none of whom heard any of Hugh's "Look, this thing follows sex-havers" speech. Allowing for the fact that yes, a malevolent supernatural creature doing anything for any reason is not comforting, as all of this pertains to films and storytelling, isn't it more effective to show the weird things happening before you explain why they're happening (if you even think it's advisable to explain them at all) than to say, in essence "A bunch of weird things are about to happen and here's what they are" before showing them? My argument is that yes, that first thing is more effective.

But It Follows is not remotely concerned with strangeness or atmosphere or even in sticking to the tiresome rules of the concept that it spent so much time tiresomely laying out. Once that concept has been locked down, the film is structured about how you'd expect: her friends rally around her to try and figure out a way to beat this thing while the possibility of taking Hugh's advice and passing this terrible fate along looms in Jay's mind, her two candidates being Paul, who's in love with her, and Greg (Daniel Zovatto), a classmate who's pretty quick off the stick when faced with supernatural terrors. So now the following should begin, although this thing doesn't so much follow as it does "walk into rooms" or "walk towards your staring face." In any case, remember that Hugh said this thing would take the form of anything that would help it get close to Jay, and so among the first forms it takes is that of a topless woman with smashed out front teeth who is in the middle of pissing herself. Oh, what a crafty plan, because that's Jay's favorite. It makes me uneasy how well this creature understands Jay. If this was a one-off mistake by the creature, like it thought "Oops I thought she liked bloody pissing ladies," that would be one thing, but with possibly one exception there is no reason to believe that Jay would ever let her guard down for any of the forms it takes, and indeed she never does. On top of this, that one exception is completely bungled because not only is the audience only told later why Jay might have been vulnerable to this form, she is not vulnerable to this form. The only reaction an audience member could be expected to have when confronted with information given in this order and accompanied by so little consequence is to think "Oh. Well, it didn't work anyway, so no big whoop."

For those who think it's necessary that a horror film have a subject, the subject of It Follows is obviously sex (it's certainly not following, I can tell you that much). And I don't agree with those detractors who accuse It Follows of Puritanism because sex can lead to all sorts of negative consequences, some of them terrifyingly negative; it's no use warning against them on one hand and pretending they don't exist on the other. So as a metaphor for these things, and more specifically the fear in people they engender, the idea behind the film is fine, but it's little more than that. Beyond it, the film doesn't seem to have a clear thought in its head, about anything. It gestures in a lot of different directions as if David Robert Mitchell understands that he can't go a whole movie without acknowledging certain things, like parents (the characters, by the way, seem to mostly be college students, or anyway of college age, who live at home). Often in the film, Jay can be heard telling her sister "Don't tell Mom." Though she's present as a character, or rather as an ambulatory sentience shaped like actress Debbie Williams, "telling Mom" in the context of this film would probably have the same effect as telling Santa would. Similarly, "going to college" in this case means precisely the same thing as "not going to college," and going to the hospital because you've been shot in the leg by your friend brings down as much heat from the police as having not been shot by anyone at all. Nothing in the film leads to any consequences that Mitchell might have to think through and factor in except sex, so I don't know, maybe the anti-Puritanicals have a point here, but in any event that premise, the sex monster business, is the one thing that Mitchell seems to have expended any effort on at all, but if he'd put enough thought into it, or the right kind of effort, he'd have ended up telling us far less about it.

The ultimate example of the thoughtlessness that simply oozes out of It Follows is the climax, the big showdown scene, which involves a plan developed by one of our heroes which nobody involved, including the audience and David Robert Mitchell, should have any reason to believe will work, but that's okay because what seems to have been the plan, this other plan (not to spoil anything, but this other plan is essentially "What if we shoot it?" which happens to be further complicated by the fact that actually the plan is "What if we shoot it again?"), all of which seems to end one way, but which the characters have apparently decided, despite having been given no evidence whatsoever to support this, ended in a different way. And listen, ambiguity is one thing, but being dumb is also one thing, and from the moment Paul says to Jay "Do you trust me?", It Follows becomes hopelessly dumb; when you consider what came before, that this bit is notably stupid is, well, notable.

There are exactly two moments in It Follows that I thought showed some promise. They're very small moments, but I like small moments. Anyway, the first one is near the beginning. Jay is in her family's above-ground pool in the backyard, and there's a bug on her wrist. Mitchell shows her look at it and then lower her arm into the water, effectively, and intentionally, drowning the insect while using less energy than it would take to open a can of soda. I wondered what this might signify (hint: nothing). The other moment is when Hugh takes Jay to the movies and they're playing a game I won't describe but which involves imagining things about the people in the theater with them. Hugh says to Jay "Are you thinking about her?" Jay asks who and Hugh says "The woman in the yellow dress." Jay doesn't know what he's talking about, she sees no such person. Hugh immediately becomes anxious and asks that they leave the theater. I wondered "Does the supernatural threat in this film appear as a woman in a yellow dress? That's interesting...I wonder what kind of eerie visuals David Robert Mitchell has planned for this." He had zero of them planned, and you might imagine that the truth of his actual idea, that the creature can appear as anything, would at best open up certain possibilities, again, visually speaking, but, again, no. If anything it froze his brain. Nothing goes anywhere or means anything or has an impact or looks or sounds or is interesting. I've seen a lot of horror movies that I liked a good deal less than many people seemed to, but rarely have I been as baffled by the discrepancy between a film's reception and the film I actually saw as I am by my experience with It Follows. And as if all that isn't bad enough, there's a scene late in the film where a character is eating a sandwich, it appears to be tuna salad, a soft, noiseless sandwich, but the chewing sounds looped in would seem to indicate a lot of lettuce, raw onion -- thick, noisy things. What I'm saying is, the foley work does not at all line up with the sandwich I was looking at. I mean for Pete's sake. Who's minding the store here?

Come Out, Ye Gifted Kings and Queens

I don't know if this is the first time I've done this or not, and I don't currently feel like checking the archives, but anyhow, so, like, in about four months it will be October, and every October, including, for reasons that escape me, this coming iteration, I write about horror fiction every day for the entire month, all posts falling under the The Kind of Face You Slash title. I've been doing this for four years now, and while I have the structure and general approach down, it can be a struggle to find enough material to write about for 31 days straight. Now I fully understand this is not because there is any kind of paucity of horror literature available, but one person -- me, in this scenario -- can only learn about so much of it, and anything I can do to ease that burden will, you know...ease my burden.

So I'm asking: any recommendations? I already know some writers I'm planning to cover, like Graham Joyce, Gaston Leroux, Seabury Quinn, Quentin S. Crisp, and Walter De La Mare, so you needn't bother recommending them. I also try to not repeat authors, although sometimes I feel it's necessary, and have done it on more than one occasion. But if you click on that link (and honestly I don't know if that links to every Kind of Face You Slash post I've ever written, but it should show most of them) and at least scroll through, you should have some idea of what I've already gone over. But even of those authors already touched on, if you know of a particular story by one of them that you really think I should check out, don't hesitate to tell me about it. I'd already written about Ramsey Campbell on at least two other occasions when a reader recommended I check out Campbell's story "The Companion," which I did, and which was awesome, and which I wrote about, so good was it. So don't let the concept of "ground well covered" stop you.

Mainly, though, I'm looking for fringe stuff. By which I don't, or don't necessarily, mean horror writers who wallow to varying degrees of childishness in sex and violence, but stuff that has been unfairly overlooked, or, better yet, forgotten. Even if you think I might know a particular book or author, tell me anyway, because I might not, or might not know too much about it, or whatever. Just recommend away. Recommend like the wind. Below in the comments, please, if you will. Thanks.

Tick...Tick...Tick...(Or Whatever Sound a Calendar Makes)

Today is August 1st, which puts me just two months away from the beginning of everybody's favorite month, October. And October is the month where, around these parts, I do shit like this. I've done this for three years now, and every November 1st I think "Well I'm never doing that again. Fuck that. That's dumb." And I maintain that rough attitude right up until about mid-September, when I decide that I'd better do it again or else I'll have nothing to write about in October, and I'm supposed to be at least in part a Person Who Knows and Likes Horror, so...

But now, already, at the very beginning of August, I'm already excited to get back to The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! I'm not entirely sure why this is, but I'm approaching the whole idea with a renewed vigor. Part of it could be that at least three times now I've already said to myself "Oh, I can read that!" -- it's nice to have ideas early, especially if they're early enough that I can get a legitimate jump on not just the reading, but possibly the writing. But a greater factor in my excitement, verging on impatience, to do this project for a fourth year must be the genre itself, and genre fiction in general. You're probably tired of hearing me talking about it, but it took me many, many months to read Infinite Jest, and I knew, when I was at about the halfway mark, that when I was done I was going to dive headlong into the genre fiction I was intentionally denying myself. This was not just horror fiction, of course -- I also got a powerful hankering for crime fiction and science fiction, and, in fact, I've sometimes wondered if I could someday pull a stunt similar to The Kind of Face You SLASH!!!, but with crime and science fiction. Unfortunately, there is not yet a holiday celebrating the time Bonnie and Clyde killed all those cops, or the day that the one science-based event occurred, but not really, it was more just an imaginative extrapolation of current technological and sociological ideas, so the timing of either one would have to be entirely arbitrary, and therefore easier to blow off if I ever even settled on a date. Then, too, I must remember that my interest in science fiction doesn't translate into any kind of expertise, even of the very low, amateur/enthusiast level I manage with horror, and crime fiction, unlike horror fiction, thrives in novel form, much less so in the short story, for whatever reason, don't look at me, I don't decide these things. But speaking on a purely practical level, that leaves crime fiction right out.

So horror it is, and ever shall be. Upon finishing Infinite Jest, I've already managed to read three horror or horror-adjacent books, and while I won't be writing up any of those three in October, the fire has well and truly been lit. And while this post may read to you as nothing more than an announcement that I'll be doing that thing this year that I do every year, I wanted to get it off my chest anyway, because I'm sort of psyched, and I didn't expect to be. So there.

Very Poor Devil

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Moral gray areas. That's what serious artists often claim they like to examine. "Here," they say. "Here's a movie I wrote. What it does is, is it presents you with a man who does things that are so awful that you know you should be plainly disgusted by him. But you find yourself rooting for him, despite everything. Why is that? What is it about us that we can so easily find a link to such men? Are we all beasts inside? Or do we at least recognize the potential for violence, under certain circumstances, within each of our breasts? Also, it stars Antonio Banderas." So you take the the movie they wrote, and you watch it. Turns out it's about this hitman, a brooding, tortured man who has found, perhaps to his dismay, and against his own values, that the work he's best at is killing other human beings. This work proves highly remunerative, but his soul is dying. Except that, by the way, he does have his own private code under which he works, which says that he will only execute other killers, assassins less scrupulous than he, or tyrants, or members of secret government cabals who plot to blow up all the oceans so that they can become even richer! This hitman won't kill just anybody. And that movie is called Grosse Point Blank, and it stars John Cusack, not Antonio Banderas.

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The point is, all that "moral gray area" bunk the guy was peddling was pure snake oil. We're not stupid. We know we're watching a movie, so a little violence directed towards those who would perpetrate cold-blooded, black and white evil on the world is something we can accept, especially if the person dealing that violence is a bit conflicted about it. "Oh, look," we might think. "He doesn't even want to be doing this. It's tearing him up inside! I'm really glad he shot that one guy, though, the one who recorded himself torturing single mothers, and then sold the videos to heads of corporations who think such things are funny. That guy was a real fucker."

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So we're complicit in this hypocritical bullshit, but Grosse Point Blank, for instance, had the good grace to be funny, and I wish I had it on DVD, because that might be good to watch tonight. Be funny, be entertaining, and I'll probably nod along with all the phony moralistic hokum that you didn't have the balls to go all the way with. I just won't take you that seriously.

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Where was I going with all this? Oh, right. Horns, by Joe Hill.

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Joe Hill's new novel begins with our protagonist, Ignatius Perrish (or "Ig", as I rapidly tired of seeing him referred to), finishing up a colossal drunk by urinating all over the plastic religious icons set out in the woods, as a memorial to Ig's murdered girlfriend. It is at this spot that Merrin Williams was murdered, by Ig, or so many people in the town believe. But there is no proof, so Ig is never charged. Yet he's tortured by the circumstances that led him to leave Merrin alone that night, a year ago, when she was killed, as well as his new role as town pariah, so he "spends the night drunk, doing terrible things", such as urinating on her memorial, and then when he wakes up in the morning, he has two horns growing out of his head.

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So far, so good. That was my reaction anyway, because as a sometime fan of Hill's short fiction, I thought a novel about a formally ordinary man, beat to the ground by grief and spiritually wrecked, transforming into a demon, or maybe even the Devil himself, is a pretty terrific premise. But as you might have guessed by now, Hill is playing the same spurious game as I described earlier. Ig is, after all, a demon, or becoming a demon, when we first meet him. And everyone he meets senses this, and after a blinking, confused reaction to his horns, proceed to confess to him all of their worst, most secret urges. Here, Ig is trying to get help regarding his horns -- he thinks he might be hallucinating due to a brain tumor -- from a local clinic, but the doctor has other things on his mind:
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"To be honest," Renald said, "it's a little hard to concentrate on your problem. I keep thinking about the [Oxycontin] in my briefcase and this girl my daughter hangs out with. Nancy Hughes. God, I want her ass. I feel sort of sick when I think about it, though. She's still in braces."

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"Please," Ig said. "I'm asking for you medical opinion -- your help. What do I do?"

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"Fucking patients," the doctor said. "All any of you care about is yourselves."

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See? So at least he's trying to be funny. This kind of exchange, by the way, almost completely accounts for the novel's first forty pages, and I may not have to tell you that it gets really damn old, really damn fast. But in that time, it's not hard to notice a certain trend, which is that all the worst confessions come from people that Hill has decided we shouldn't like. And not just the specific characters, but rather the kinds of characters. The doctor, a man of authority, is a pervert. The nurse Ig met just moments before confessed merely to wanting to take her anger at a neglectful parent further than society would deem appropriate. Ig's girlfriend only wanted to eat a whole box of doughnuts, while the policemen he meets later want to brutalize him -- beat him with their nightsticks and possibly, what the hell, rape him. A nun confesses to being lonely, oppressed, a closeted lesbian who only wants to be happy. The priest, on the other hand, blithely confesses to screwing the mother of Ig's murdered girlfriend. So Ig leaves the priest gasping under a barbell, and helps the nun escape to a new life, aided by stolen church funds.

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And so it goes, throughout the novel, the plot of which, by the way, revolves around Ig's discovery of who actually murdered Merrin -- it was Lee Tourneau, his best friend from childhood, a fact you learn early on, before you even meet the character -- his quest for justice, and a series of idyllic, bittersweet flashbacks to his younger days, his life with Merrin, and Lee, and Ig's family, especially his brother Terry, now, like their father, a successful trumpet player (horns, you see) and late night talk show host.

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I'm not sure that Hill had any idea what kind of character he was creating with Ig. When he leaves the priest under the heavily-weighted barbell, I got the sense we weren't supposed to care much what happened to the priest, because Hill already told us what a dick the guy was. Plus, he helped that sad nun! Not long after, however, he pushes his elderly, wheelchair bound grandmother down a steep hill outside his family home and watches her frail body crash into a fence at, he guesses, about forty miles-per-hour. Ah, but here's what he learns about his grandmother after touching her wrist (another one of his powers):

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His grandmother, he learned then, had no hip pain at all but liked people pushing her here and there in the wheelchair and waiting on her hand and foot...She especially liked to order around her daughter, who thought her shit didn't stink because she was rich enough to wipe with twenty-dollar bills...It was Vera's [the grandmother] privately held belief that Ig knew what his mother had been -- a cheap whore -- and that it had led to a pathological hate of women and was the real reason he had raped and killed Merrin Williams...[who] had been a frisky little gold digger...

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So she hates everybody, and faked her way into that wheelchair. But hold on, she's still a frail eighty-year-old woman, and Ig still pushed her down a hill and into a fence. Unpleasant as she may be, that still makes Ig pretty hard to root for. Well, Joe Hill has anticipated your uncertainty, and we learn some time later that the old bat's fine! A little banged up but, crucially, Ig didn't kill her. Shouldn't have done it, maybe, but no real consequences to be het up about, so you can put your rooting caps back on.

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Much later in the book, Ig is asked by another character how he came to have those horns, these new powers, such a devilish appearance and demeanor. Ig says "Without Merrin in my life...I was this."

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The Devil is in us all without true love and whatnot, except for two things: Hill goes out of his way to make a case for the goodness -- of a sort -- of the Devil, Biblically speaking, and he also seems to forget that he's painted a reasonably full portrait of the young Ig, before he had Merrin, and guess what? He was a fucking peach! He helped people, giving Lee (who he believes saved him from drowning when they were teenagers) money and CDs when he thought Lee had nothing. Hill repeatedly tells us -- and I mean, repeatedly -- that Ig was a terrible liar, because lying made him sick. In short, he was a good kid. Oh, sure, we're told that the young Ig does some maneuvering so that the young Lee won't pursue the young Merrin, but he doesn't maneuver dishonestly, and besides, given that years later Lee will rape and murder Merrin, Ig wouldn't have been out of line if he'd skipped past the aforementioned maneuvering and simply pushed Lee under a train. So what's all this "I was this" business? You were what? A nice guy whose horns hadn't grown out yet? Physically grotesque, but still a person who would forever prove that it's what you're like on the inside that really counts? I mean, it's not like you were a priest, or a cop, or anything like that.

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Horns is really, for all it's profanity and perverse sexual shenanigans, something of a PC joke. The truly good guys are given nothing truly bad to live down, and the bad guys are never given anything truly good to cloud our view of them. Men are the worst, authority figures worse yet, and there's not a moment of gray in the whole damn thing.

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(In fairness, I must add that there is a scene involving a Christian Conservative politician, and Hill portrays the man with a surprising amount of sympathy. It's brief, however, and the implications of the scene go a pretty far way towards erasing that sympathy, at least in my eyes.)

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To truly illustrate this, late in the book Hill gives us a scene with Merrin's still-grieving father. Since this is a pretty good guy, Merrin's dad, he doesn't confess anything too bad to Ig, and later becomes a bit philosophical:
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"...My father wouldn't let me take the theology course I wanted, but he couldn't stop me from auditing it. I remember the teacher, a black woman, Professor Tandy, she said that Satan turns up in a lot of other religions as the good guy..."

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And stop. Now, listen. Joe Hill's dad is Stephen King, and King has in the past been called out by critics for portraying his minority characters, specifically his black characters, as one-note saints, magical souls whose only purpose is to help the more important white characters. Though I personally think a bit too much is made of this, it's not like those critics are basing it on nothing -- there's Mother Abigail in The Stand, Halloran in The Shining, John Coffey in The Green Mile, and possibly others I'm forgetting. But at least in King's novels the black characters get a look in. Despite what the critics say, even despite the validity of what they're saying, Mother Abigail, Halloran and Coffey are allowed to be more than just black. Joe Hill turns the only reference to a black person in the entirety of Horns into a politically correct non sequitor. Why would Dale Merrin feel it necessary to point out, apropos of not a goddamn thing, that the professor in question was a black woman? Because she's the one, indirectly, whose going to explain the whole thematic structure of the book, and you can't have a white guy do that. What would people say? The fact is, the race (or gender) of this never seen, and never again referred to, professor is entirely irrelevent. Why does Hill seem to think it is?

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Well, so that's it. Oh, the book ends with a sort of chase, and snake bites and stabbings, and it's all pretty tedious, but at least it signalled to me that the end was nigh. And to that, I say "Thank God."

A Place Behind God's Back

In 1595, a long war between Sweden-Finland and Russia has ended. A contingent of Russian soldiers is journeying up north, through unexplored and unportioned land. With them are two Finnish soldiers, working for the Swedish king, to help the two kingdoms parcel out this new land and establish post-war borders. Each side would like as much land for their own country as they can get away with.
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Such is the set-up for director Antti-Jussi Annila and writer Liro Küttner's unusual 2008 horror film Sauna. At the center of the film are the two Finnish soldiers, brothers named Eerik (Ville Virtanen) and Knut (Tommi Eronen). The film drops us into the middle of the story's pivotal event, as we're introduced to Eerik as he is murdering a farmer for, he claims, betraying Sweden by withholding supplies. The murder is brutal, and Knut witnesses it, entering the farmer's home after, we learn, locking the victim's daughter in the cellar. Why did he do this? Why did Eerik kill the farmer? We know what both of their stated reasons are -- Knut claims to have been protecting the girl from his brother -- but Annila and Küttner don't let us come to know either man, or either victim, before it's all over. What we learn in subsequent flashbacks, to what led to the murder, alleviates our curiosity only slightly. And what could the reason possibly be for Eerik, after promising his brother that the girl will be released from the cellar, to leave her locked away, only revealing the truth to Knut days later?

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War, would seem to be the filmmakers' answer. Sauna has a disconcerting tendency, in its early-going, to appear simple-minded and pleased with its own pseudo-profundity. After killing the farmer, Eerik whirls on Knut and says, "This is what happens in peacetime!" Yes, well. Thankfully, Annila and Küttner rather quickly realize what actually interests them, and Sauna becomes a progressively stranger take on the idea that the only terminus for a soul stained with guilt is horror. Unending horror, even, unless you're careful. And even then...

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The Russians and the two Finns eventually find a village in the middle of a black swamp. Knut has by this time seen, or believes he's seen, a mud-spattered girl -- the farmer's daughter? -- appearing unexpectedly among the quagmire and barren, branchless trees along their journey, and he's professed a disbelief at his brother's recent behavior. Eerik, meanwhile, admits only to wanting to protect his brother and carve out a greater piece of land for Sweden. He's killed, he says, 73 people over the course of the war, including the farmer. He considers his victims "useless". But this village, we'll soon discover, has a population of exactly 73 people. Of these 73, only one is a child. And this group of 73 did not even develop the village themselves, but rather found it in their travels. Whoever did originally live here, they based their existence around the sauna, a squat white building stuck in the middle of an expanse of black water. In Finland, Eerik says, both the newly born and the newly dead are taken to saunas, to wash away the past.

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Both Ville Virtanen and Tommi Eronen are wonderfully craggy and haunted as the brothers, with Virtanen resembling a young Max von Sydow at his most fit-to-bust, and Eronen a young Gary Oldman at his most despairing. Annila paints his film in blacks and whites and browns, because what other colors could he use? Even the blood, when it flows here and there throughout, and begins to pour at the end, comes out a corrupt black, except when it mixes with a purifying stream. The whole film, in fact, slowly and subtly becomes an attempt to dispense with corruption, as first Knut, and then Eerik, seek absolution, and whatever punishment is connected with it, by entering the mysterious and dreadful sauna. What follows, and surrounds, this decision -- and whose decision it was is, I think, unclear -- is horror of a particularly cutting and bizarre sort, the supernatural revealing its full form without revealing what it is, or why it's here, or even what it wants.

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We know what the brothers want, but their simple desire for cleansing not only comes with an enormous price, but may in fact be a red herring. There is a lot at play in Sauna: not just guilt and redemption, but questions of war, of land, of family. The sexuality of one of the Russian soldiers comes into play, as well as, by extension, the sexuality of Knut. The one child in the village is a girl who disguises herself as a boy. Eerik has a wound on one hand which may remind you of the wounds suffered by a certain well-known historical and religious figure. All of these themes and story elements bounce off each other, and connect, or don't, in tight but perplexing 80-some minute film that contains in its final moments one of the most haunting and chillingly imaginative horror images I've seen quite a while, outside of the films of Guillermo del Toro.

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Regardless of the possibility that the source of the film's horror may have no connection, and may possess an animal indifference to, the jeopardized souls of Eerik and Knut, the fact remains that their fates are tied to the quest for redemption that every honest person spends their life trying to complete, in whatever small way. Most people don't have to journey that far, and many others think they have to travel further than they really do. Others, like Eerik and Knut, have a long way to go, an eternity, and though it may feel like a positive step, the events of Sauna would suggest that merely wanting redemption isn't enough. It depends on what you need to redeem, and where you seek it out. If you look for it in the wrong place, you may bring down more than just yourself.

Yet More Capsule Reviews

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Enjoy them, will you?

The Final Destination (d. David R. Ellis) - Supposedly, this is the last installment of this unfortunately successful, and unfortunately occasionally entertaining series of horror films. But what sets it apart as the last one? It's the exact same film as the previous three! A group of people, mostly young and boring, survive a ridiculous disaster with the help of the psychic abilities bestowed upon one of their number. Death, not having any of that, then begins to elaborately pick them off one by one. THE END. Again, it's no different from the other films, except that it's quite a bit worse. There is one set-up in the beginning, and call-back at the end, that might have been spooky if the rest of the movie weren't so bone stupid. Also, the special effects are terrible.

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First Name: Carmen (d. Jean-Luc Godard) - Apart from the pleasant surprise of Tom Waits's "Ruby's Arms" being used extensively and effectively in the film's last third, this wearyingly opaque story about a man and a woman who may be bank-robbers, or instead may be making a movie, and who are probably, this being Godard, Marxists, but who are in any case falling out of love, is a typically, this being Godard, frustrating wank. Maruschka Detmers is lovely, and frequently nude, though, and this is not something I take lightly.

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A Film With Me In It (d. Ian Fitzgibbon) - Written by lead actor Mark Doherty (I say "lead actor" as opposed to "star" because Dylan Moran gives the more memorable performance), this film is about a struggling, and failing, actor who suddenly finds himself living in an apartment where people have fatal accidents, sometimes separated by mere minutes. What does one do in such a situation? The cops won't believe a word of the truth, so you begin to act as though you were actually guilty of murder. The film is not un-funny, but its intentionally absurd premise is stretched way too far (eventually, people die of things that wouldn't actually kill them), and the allegedly hilarious, cynical pay-off is incredibly ill-advised: boring, old-hat, ruinous.

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Stalker (d. Andrei Tarkovsky) - A full review of this Russian masterpiece would defeat me, so this capsule format is a life-saver. At heart -- or maybe only at the edges -- Stalker is a sober, philosophical, science-fiction riff on The Wizard of Oz: in the future, after an unspecified global calamity (given that this was made in Russia in the late 70s, I think we can assume it was nuclear in nature), a mysterious new region has opened up called the Zone, and somewhere in there is a place that grants wishes. The especially desperate hire people known as "stalkers" who can take them to this place, avoiding the dangers, and traps, the Zone creates along the way. The film tells of one stalker (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky), known as "The Stalker", who leads two men -- The Writer and The Professor -- into the Zone, and towards wish-fulfillment. Or so they claim to want.

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The Wizard of Oz-ness of Stalker comes not only from the wish-fulfillment quest in a fantasy-land (which is achieved entirely without any -- okay, maybe one -- special effects, and almost entirely through the psychology of, it would seem, you, the viewer) but from the "real world" scenes being shot not in black-and-white so much as in sepia-and-white. And Tarkovsky's eye for those images is utterly astonishing. Calling a film hypnotic is such a bland thing to say, but I don't know quite how else to describe my state of mind when watching one of those sepia images, this one silent, of the Stalker lying in a shallow creek bed, as a black dog runs through the water towards him. Stalker lives almost entirely on its images -- and some execellent acting -- but what Tarkovsky accomplishes simply by photographing the Soviet Union and calling it science fiction is pretty extraordinary.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 31: Hurrah for the Race of Werewolves

You may not think you know the work of Guy Endore, but chances are you do. As a screenwriter, he worked on Tod Browning's The Devil Doll and The Mark of the Vampire, The Mask of Fu Manchu starring Boris Karloff, and has an adaptation credit on Karl Freund's Mad Love (coincidentally, this block of Endore's screen credits makes up a full two-thirds of the Warner Brothers Legends of Horror DVD set). Though he didn't write the script, Endore's novel Nightmare (also known as Methinks the Lady) was turned into the Otto Preminger film Whirlpool, and, perhaps most famously, his novel The Werewolf of Paris (first published in 1933) was the inspiration for the Hammer film Curse of the Werewolf, starring Oliver Reed.

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That's quite a list for a guy nobody's heard of anymore. All his novels are currently out of print (of course), though I have heard news about a new, highly-overpriced edition of The Werewolf of Paris that is set to come out early next year. Well, I couldn't wait that long -- plus, I couldn't afford it. I've endured glowing references to Endore's best-known novel (Marvin Kaye chose it as his selection for Horror: 100 Best Books, for instance, and on the commentary track for The Mark of the Vampire Kim Newman and Stephen Jones both admit that, were they able, they'd pony up the dough to finance a truly faithful adaptation of the book, just so they could see it*) for too many years, and when the opportunity to finally put my hands on an old, rather unattractive copy of The Werewolf of Paris, I didn't hesitate. And here we are.

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The story focuses primarily on two people, two men: Bertrand Caillet, a young man cursed at birth to be a bloodthirsty werewolf, and Aymar Galliez, Bertrand's uncle-by-proxy, and the only man who knows Bertrand's secret. Aymar is also the only man who can stop Bertrand's violence. The novel does not begin with either of these men, however, but rather with an unnamed American who lives in Paris and who one night, after witnessing debauchery and casual cruelty enacted by those around him, discovers an old manuscript in the possession of a hobo. The hobo agrees to sell the manuscript to the American, who discovers that it was written by a man named Aymar Galliez, and is, in essence, a memoir, and defense, of Bertrand Caillet, a French National Guardsman who was facing court martial in 1871. The remainder of the book is a sort of re-telling by the American of Galliez's memoir, filled out by the American's own research into the historical period Galliez and Caillet lived through.

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As I said, Caillet was cursed at birth. His mother Josephine, a young servant of Aymar's mother, is raped by a priest named Father Pitamont, who himself is the member of a family with a long history of evil and bloodshed. Josephine finds herself pregnant by this encounter, and her son Bertrand, though seemingly normal for several years, has certain features that make Mme. Didier, Aymar's mother, fear for his future. For one thing, he was born on Christmas Eve, which Mme. Didier insists to Aymar is a bad omen. Further, even at a very young age, his eyebrows meet in the center. Lastly, and most importantly to anyone who knows their werewolf lore, he has hair on his palms.

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And, indeed, poor little Bertrand is a werewolf, though he doesn't manifest as such until he's about ten years old, give or take. Not long after this, Mme. Didier dies (of natural causes), but even though she's no longer around to pour out her superstition to her son, Aymar does come to discover the truth about the boy, before the boy himself does. When the boy changes -- and feasts -- he's later aware of it only as a vague nightmare. Aymar, however, is completely aware of what's going on, though he neither knows how to convince anyone else of the incredible truth, or how to deal with it himself.

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Eventually, Bertrand is old enough to pursue his own life, and he moves from his country home to Paris. Aymar had by that time enjoyed some success in keeping Bertrand's condition controlled, but now the boy, a young man now, is free to do what he pleases. And what he pleases is fairly awful. As he travels to Paris, he's left behind more than one corpse, more than one innocent man to take the blame, and evidence of violent and deviant sexual appetites -- he badly injured a prostitute, for one thing, and -- though Aymar isn't aware of this -- had consensual sex with his own mother. This last crime against nature is one of the earliest hints at how far Endore was willing to go, even in 1933. The sex in the book is not graphic, but it's still rather alarming; the violence, meanwhile, is casually brutal. There's a great deal of cruelty in this book.

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There's also a great deal of humor. Endore doesn't waste a lot of time in revealing that The Werewolf of Paris is, among other things, a socio-political satire -- of an interestingly cynical and amorphous type -- but he also has some light-hearted fun with the basic idea of his story. When Aymar finally follows Bertrand to Paris, he wonders how he's going to find his nephew, and how he can possibly enlist the aid of the authorities:

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Aymar's first duty ought, then, to have been a visit to the police. But of this he naturally fought shy. What would he say to the police? For example: "I know something. There is a man who on certain nights craves blood so that he turns into a wolf and goes out to kill his prey."..."What proof have you?" --"There was a silver bullet, which was shot at a wolf, and was found in his leg." -- "The mere sight of this bullet wouldn't convince us, but where is it?" -- "I haven't got it, but he was born on Christmas Eve and his eyebrows meet..."

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And, in fact, Aymar and Bertrand do not meet again for the majority of the novel. While Aymar goes about his search, Bertrand desultorily lives the poor life of a National Guardsman, feeding his hunger, wracking himself with guilt, and falling in love with a rich young woman named Sophie de Blumenberg. Sophie is engaged to be engaged to a kind French soldier named Barral de Montfort. Barral loves Sophie without complication or selfishness, but he doesn't know that the outwardly sunny and endlessly happy young woman, like Bertrand, changes at night. Not into a wolf, but rather into a despairing and death-obsessed soul who lives her days at a fever pitch of brightness, to make up for the nights she dreads so much. When she crosses paths with the morose Bertrand, she notices that he's a kindred spirit (though why he is, exactly, she hasn't a clue), and soon this unhappy love triangle is going to be swept up by history, because the Franco-Prussian War, followed hotly by the Paris Commune, is on its way.

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Because The Werewolf of Paris is also a historical novel, you see. Quite a lot is crammed into less than 300 pages, here, but it really is Paris in the midst of this particular, and particularly bloody, historical meltdown that interests Endore the most. He returned to France over and over again in his fiction (he also wrote novels about Voltaire, de Sade, and Dumas), so perhaps that explains that, but Endore was also a registered Communist, which would seem to make what I take to be the proto-Communist government of the Paris Commune to be catnip to a guy like Endore. Except it's not, really. Look, I'll admit right now that my understanding and even basic knowledge of 19th Century French history is, well, really shitty. But in The Werewolf of Paris, after the aristocratic Versailles government is pushed out by the Paris Commune, France transformed into a state not unlike what Russia would become after the Bolshevik Revolution. The proponents and members of this new French government are referred to as Communards, and even, once, Communists, and they are all utterly corrupt. They are violent, unjust, and power-hungry, yet they claim to be a government of the people, restricting personal possessions and separating church and state.

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This last is obviously not solely a Communist measure, but, as with the Soviets, and as described by Endore, "separation of church and state" quickly became "persecution of Catholics", and Endore describes this aspect of the government thoroughly (and with some amount of creative license, I've gathered, though only in terms of creating specific incidents). Of course, the Paris Commune is eventually bloodily dismantled by an aristocratic rebel government -- mass executions of prisoners of at-best undetermined guilt is rampant on both sides, and bitterly described by Endore -- but this nightmarish cycle of bourgeois-socialist-bourgeois rule, with no justice or peace offered by anyone, would indicate that Endore was rather disillusioned with any form of politics whatsoever. His life, what little I've read about it, doesn't exactly bear this out, but the book is an intriguing window in any case.

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Endore's relationship with religion appears similarly conflicted. Catholicism and Communism traditionally don't mix, and Bertrand is sired, after all, by an evil and lascivious priest (though what we're told about Father Pitamont's family history makes it reasonable to assume that he joined the Church primarily out of a desire to hide out), and yet Aymar himself -- a skeptic and rationalist -- becomes more and more enamored with the idea of religious faith, brought on in no small part by the proof of the supernatural that lived in his home, as his nephew, for so many years. Not that I think that Endore was entirely in the bag for Catholicism, or even faith -- late in the book, Aymar and an atheist doctor have a debate on the subject (and lycanthropy) that makes both men look more than a little absurd.

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But then again, the doctor in question is a human monster, and Aymar, we know, is a decent man. So there's that. And what that is, is actually the core of the book. Not faith, but rather human, non-supernatural evil. When the Paris Commune has collapsed, and Aymar finds himself, with bitter amusement walking through the streets of a hellish Paris, he can't ignore the irony of his quest to apprehend or kill Bertrand, while missing for so long the fact that Bertrand's hidden crimes, while horrible, ultimately pale next to the massive evil that was in front of him the whole time:

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Bertrand, it now seemed to Aymar, was but a mild case. What was a werewolf who had killed a couple of prostitutes, who had dug up a few corpses, compared with these bands of tigers slashing at each other with daily increasing ferocity! "And there'll be worse," he said... Instead of thousands, future ages will kill millions. It will go on, the figures will rise and the process will accelerate! Hurrah for the race of werewolves!

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And what of Bertrand? If I have any major criticism of The Werewolf of Paris, it is that the actual, non-figurative werewolf drops out of the novel for long stretches (strangely, his actual transformations are never described), but when he does return as the center of the novel, Endore makes it count. Despite the passage quoted above, Aymar does understand the need to bring Bertrand to heel, and when he does, and what follows, is very nasty, very mean, very sad. And probably just, at least in part, but justice can be awfully pitiful sometimes.

*No they didn't. They just said they'd love to see a faithful adaptation. My brain makes me look foolish. Again.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 30: Ann Has a Martian in Her Womb!

This is going to be a tough one. Look, every day of this project is a crapshoot, because I don't know if I'm going to like the story or stories that I read, and therefore don't know what my attitude will be when I sit down to write about them. And I don't especially mind if I hate the story, because that will certainly give me something to write about, at the very least. What kills me is when I'm indifferent to the story. In those cases, I hardly think I can get by with saying "This one was okay, you might like it, but I don't know." This problem is sometimes compounded by the fact that I don't know anything about the person who wrote it, though today that isn't an issue. What's really bugging me today is that the guy who wrote the story to which I'll be directing my apathy is Richard Matheson, and in choosing to write about him today, I really, really wanted to put him in a good light.

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I don't think this can reasonably be considered a "first thing's first" kind of statement, but I do want to start off by saying that Matheson's fiction has severely dropped off in quality over the last decade or two. More, possibly, because he actually doesn't publish much these days. But outside of a couple of really good Westerns he wrote in the 1990s (Journal of the Gun Years and The Gunfight) his later fiction has been sort of awful, with the nadir coming in 2002, in the form of a novel called Hunted Past Reason. This is a novel that combines Matheson's non-mainstream spiritual beliefs with an alarmingly graphic Deliverance-style suspense story. Though I don't share them, I'm not going to spend any time mocking Matheson's beliefs, but I must say that preaching about reincarnation doesn't mix well with male rape. Few things do, I suppose.

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I read Hunted Past Reason at a time when I was well past my early exposure to Matheson's work, and was coming to find much to dislike about his new stuff. But I loved that old stuff. Great short stories like "The Distributor" and "Born of Man and Woman", and truly classic novels like I Am Legend, plus his work as a screenwriter on Burn, Witch, Burn!, the films based on his work like The Incredible Shrinking Man and Duel...the guy's got a hell of a resume, and his reputation as one of the great genre writers of the 50s, 60s and 70s is entirely justified. As he got older, he just lost his feel for it. Big deal, it happens; it happened to Robert Bloch, also, and I'm not the kind of guy who believes that bad work late in a career tarnishes the good work done before. Still, books like Hunted Past Reason made me wonder if I'd grown out of Matheson, and that maybe if I went back to his old work I'd find that he was never that good, and that it was all hype. So I reread I Am Legend, and doing so completely shot the shit out of that theory. It's still a great book.

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All of which, finally, made me confident about today's reading, because I was gonna read something old. Because Matheson has written in so many genres, I figured the best book to use was a collection of old Matheson stories, put out by TOR several years ago, called Duel, and I picked a fairly long one called "Trespass". It's about a guy named David Collier who, as the story opens, has just returned home from South America after six months to find Ann, his wife, strangely withdrawn. He's been dreaming of this homecoming for a long time, and is shaken by its anticlimactic nature. Why is Ann so upset? Because she's pregnant. And she conceived within the last six months. David is understandably outraged, but Ann assures him that she did not cheat on him, and does not know how this could have happened. A skeptical David reminds her that he's a scientist, and that conception is impossible without intercourse (or at least sperm, but Ann's argument implies that this was also nowhere to be found).

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As the months pass by, David frantically tries to find an answer that will prove his wife correct -- he consults Kleinman, their doctor, and David's fellow scientist and friend John Meader -- but comes up empty. At the same time, Ann -- who is increasingly angry at David for refusing to believe her, let's face it, pretty messed up story -- begins behaving erratically. She eats incredible amounts of salt. She drinks gallons of water and coffee. She goes outside, into the cold Indiana winter, wearing very little and catches pneumonia. She begins reading every book on every subject she can get her hands on -- on physics, geography, history, chemistry, etc. -- books she never showed any interest in before. She begins chanting a strange singsong with lyrics such as "To walk on shores of orange sea, cool, to tread the crimson fields, cool, to raft on silent waters, cool..."

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And there's more. Her pneumonia is cured in seventeen minutes. X-rays show the fetus continues to change its size, apparently at will. It also has two hearts. So basically, it's a martian. Yeah, that's where this story's going, and you probably knew that, as I did, and you probably also, as I do, find nothing inherently wrong with that premise. In fact, the story threatens to have a surprisingly nasty ending, though it ultimately goes soft (while maintaining a kind of subjective bleakness in the heroes triumph). The problem is the story's overall flatness and repetition. Ann eats salt and drinks a lot of coffee and water, and she keeps doing that for pages. Page after page after page of that. Possibly this is Matheson's attempt to build up the strangeness of his situation so that the final revelation of what's going on, and the various characters' essentially rapid acceptance of the idea, will go down easier, but it doesn't quite work.

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The title of this post is the exact line of dialogue as delivered by John Meader when he tells David and Kleinman what he believes Ann's real problem is. He says: "Ann has a Martian in her womb!" I wonder how that line would have played for me had he said "alien" instead of "Martian" -- I still may have not been a fan of it, but I think I at least would have given it a pass. As it stands, all I could think was, "Why 'Martian'? How the hell do you know it's specifically from Mars? General 'alien', okay, but there's nothing about Ann's symptoms that scream 'Mars'." Of course, in the 1950s, when the story was written, "Martian" and "alien" were basically synonymous in popular culture, but the line still reads as plain goofy.

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I don't know. I don't know what else to say about this story, really. Despite my misgivings, it is fine. But this is Matheson, and I wanted to read something great by him, or at least very good, something I could point to and say, "See? When people say Matheson is great, this is what they're talking about." And he is great, or was, but my choice of story unfortunately does not bear that out.

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Read I Am Legend instead.