52 for '22: The Sound and the Fury

Movie: The Sound and the Fury (2014)

Method: Tubi

Nope! Nope nope nope nope.

Why Did I watch this?

This has been on my radar for a while, getting to be probably eight or nine years now, from whenever they announced it. Things are dicey these days with James Franco, but remember that glorious time in the early 2010s when him and Seth Rogen were the hottest comedy duo in tinseltown! This was right on the heels of This is the End (2013) and The Interview (2014) and I was a big fan. Franco always had this other weirder artsier side, and while I think he's better at comedy than any of his dramatic efforts (he is so notably bad in the Spider-Man films), the idea of these idiots coming together to put on an adaptation of William Faulkner was always really intriguing to me.

Also, you couldn't find this movie anywhere. Like, I don't think even peak Netflix DVD services had it. I found it for free on Tubi! Yay! But I've always been interested in American literature but loth to actually read it. I guess that makes me the most American of all. So to see this complex and intricate, indelible tale of the American South told in a movie, well that's just perfect. And told by an actor I enjoyed while casting comedy legends in all dramatic roles? That's really intriguing! It's also short. All of these elements would work against the movie, but whatever, it's a really interesting watch.

What Did I know ahead of time?

I knew it had James Franco, Seth Rogen, and Danny McBride. I knew a little bit of the story, like it centered around this Southern Family throughout the 20th Century, although I later learned that the novel was written in 1929, so it's not like it takes place over the whole century. I knew it was a story about a family's declining power in the South, Franco directed, and that it was not rated high, critically appreciated, or culturally significant.

How Was It?

This was so bad. Like, it's real bad. I have so much to get into. First, a necessary disclaimer - I said I was a fan of Franco in the 2000s / early 2010s, and that work is still great (his performance in The Interview is still one of the greatest comedic efforts of all time), BUT let's face facts, this dude was apparently a monster the whole time and problematic doesn't even begin to describe some of his accusations. It's that hard reckoning. Like, him being a horrible human doesn't make his old stuff less funny. But by all accounts he's a terrible human being whose career should be destroyed.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about how he approached the nuances of playing an adult with a severe yet vague mental disability. There is no other way to put it. Franco goes full retard. He goes full retard HARD. My immediate reaction upon seeing him on screen was just "Oh noooo! That's not good!" He cast himself as Benjy, the youngest of the Compson family, who is developmentally disabled to the point where he can't speak, is shunned by his family, corralled and abused. Franco is not the dude to play this. He has that weird lazy eye, but man, he puts in those buck teeth, hunches over, and just GOES for it, grunts and all. It was straight up Simple Jack man, like, it's rough as hell. Jeez, it might be worse. It reminds me of Borat when he says his son has very funny retardation and tried to bang his sister. That is literally the plot of this movie. How is this possible?

I don't know the solution here - do you hire an actor with a disability? Do you go straight down syndrome? That doesn't seem right to me. I suppose you just kind of avoid making this film in the first place since Benjy is such an important character. But hey, people in that situation and those actors need representation, too! It's a tough call to make that without making fun of someone. Even movies with noble efforts like The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) get tripped up in this stuff.

Early on there's also a handful of southern black teenager characters that are introduced as very aggressive, speaking and yelling straight into the camera, which is supposed to be from Benjy's perspective. "Oh noooo! That's not good!" Like, are we really showing the black sharecroppers that work on the plantation as negative aggressors? Whoopsie! It's so bad from the get go. If only there were a plot, theme, acting excellence, or directorial nuance here to salvage the cringiest stereotypes to ever be put on screen. The little kid who plays younger Benjy actually does a good job, you can read more into his eyes how he's trying to process a scene than Franco.

But definitely intriguing to watch! Franco's direction is insane. It's like The Tree of Life (2011) but directed by Benjy. The camera floats aimlessly, has a dead focus in characters' eyes and splices past and present constantly. It's supposed to simulate the stream of consciousness nature of the Benjy portion of the source novel, and it largely does that. The Sound and the Fury (1929) is famously dense and difficult to parse through, with many time jumps and different characters. The movie tries to do that, but maybe it's not the best thing for a film to do. See, with a book when you're confused, you can just re-read a passage. I'm not rewinding this movie every five minutes because something doesn't make sense.

I give it some credit for that. It does zero in on the three brothers, although the story is hard to understand. Like when Benjy sees Caddy on the swing and then later sees Miss Quentin. In the book it'd be easier, because you identify her as Miss Quentin. In the movie I'm just like, "Who the fuck is that?" There is no context, and while the one to one transition of story technique is admirable, at some point you need to calibrate for the medium you're now working in.

The most interesting character is probably Caddy, although we never really see her perspective. This is similar to the book, but again, it may have been worthwhile to update and zero in on what she's doing. There is just different context to discuss the one sister in the family all the brothers want to bang when you're watching this film in 2022. It's hard to track who is doing what and why, and I understand that's sort of the point, but I also don't know why that's the point. What are we getting out of that obfuscated form of storytelling? Let's get back to The Tree of Life (2011), which uses the medium of film to simulate a dream, with just long montages, surreal imagery, and evocations of feelings rather than plot. The story isn't even important, it's more how the characters react, what they remember, and where they ended up. In The Sound and the Fury, the story is everything. It's dense with characters and their own motivations, but we don't understand the severe consequences of their actions when it's portrayed as a flitless dream.

Again, I honestly sort of like the direction. I know, I know, just stay with me here. It's really unique, especially in the Benjy section and just full of these captivating shot choices that demonstrate perspective and placement. It's more the editing, voiceover, and writing that junks up this film. Ahna O'Reilly, who plays Caddy is pretty good - I haven't seen her in much else, but she apparently used to date James Franco and appeared in a handful of his films. Logan Marshall-Green pops up and is remarkably effortlessly cool. Everyone else is pretty trash. Except for the kid who plays little Benjy.

In addition to the black characters being fairly stereotypical, the movie also cuts out the entire last section of the book that focused on Dilsey the head house servant. We get that a little bit, like at the end of the Jason section we shift to Dilsey's perspective, but we never get a title card for her, it feels very abrupt, and it ends on Jason yelling at Luster. I know that in the book that section is more third-person omniscient, but it still exists to give the black folk in the book a voice. That doesn't exist in the movie. Yay! How did this come out in 2014 without pushback?

It's almost like it's just totally insignificant. It's such a cultural blip, there was no hype and no one has been interested in this since. It is not remotely a good movie at all, but it deserves to be up there as a terrible cult classic. I guess we don't need to give Franco our money, but I think everyone should watch this to study how much it misses the mark.

And yes, Seth Rogen and Danny McBride are in this, but as really minor roles. They play it relatively straight, though. Rogen is a little goofy, but McBride is an upstanding actor. I honestly don't know what their goal with this was. I think it would have been much better if they 100% leaned into making this film with the entire cast of This is the End but making it actually serious. Were they trying to flex their acting chops to show they could do serious work as well? I mean, imagine if these idiots actually pulled off an incredibly difficult Faulkner adaptation? I think you cast McBride as Jason, maybe like a Jason Schwartzman as Quentin. O'Reilly was a good Caddy, but you could get like Linda Cardellini in there to further the Freaks and Geeks made good connection. I get that Franco was trying to make real art here, but it just falls on its face. You could at least have fun doing it and go for broke with a novel concept.

I'm glad I finally checked this off, and I hate to say it, but it really did make me want to read the book. This is a true anomaly of a film, though, and while it's total dogshit, honestly deserves more of a look than it's gotten for its bizarreness. I think Franco's treatment of women makes that difficult because he's become someone who shouldn't be supported and the more obscure depths of his filmography will surely be forgotten. I wish there was someway we could get around that death of the author but also not support them? Like can't any proceeds just go to his victims? I don't know what the solution is, but I'd like to keep watching funny monsters in things I enjoy but ALSO be vindictive. Where is that line? I don't know, but everyone in Hollywood sucks so we'd better figure it out.

Check out more 52 for '22 right here!

Political Ideologies and Conservatism in Media - Here's Post #1000!

In the eleven years that we have been doing this, we have never missed a month without a post. We are coming down to the wire on this one in April, but not sure if you've noticed, but there isn't very many movies coming out right now. Nevertheless this is a golden age of streaming and watching crap, and we are consuming quite a bit of media from every available corner. There are a few things that have gone in my brain to make me think about politics and the nature of our two major governing ideologies. This is also a nice insight about what I've been watching and reading - Rod Chernow's Grant, HBO's Watchmen, FX's Mrs. America, Netflix's Waco, Jay Roach's Bombshell (2019), and Michael Bay's The Island (2005). Not too mention shifts in current Democratic and Republican ideologies. This will be a bit of a scattershot post. Are you ready to dive into what's been going on inside my brain?

I am going to try to make this largely non-political. I admittedly lean left, and there's no way to completely hide that bias, but I want to chat a little bit about how the media is far more conservative than we tend to credit it for. Part of this conversation then is how much dominant conservative groups espouse about the mainstream leftist media. Considering the preponderance of Fox News, right-wing radio talk show hosts, and as I will discuss, the general message of most American cinema, I'm not sure that is true. I do think that painting themselves as underdogs while having dominant media voices is not only a powerful way to position oneself, but a truly American one.

This country is built on being the plucky underdog. We love come from behind stories and that stems from the American Revolution. We were down 3-28 when the patriots of this country came back in the second half... Conservative media tends to have a "woe is me" attitude that emboldens its position. This is worth some discussion of political ideology.

We ought to leave behind Liberalism and Conservatism for a second, because in contemporary American politics those enlightenment-era ideologies aren't quite as clear-cut. Liberalism is more designed around emphasize civil rights, secularism, and yes, limited government. It is difficult to picture an era where that was an option, but it grew as a response to the oligarchies and monarchies of authoritarian kings. That of course is where conservatism originates - a strong authority that limits freedoms in favor of security and a singular head of state.

These original ideas have been mixed pretty thoroughly in the past three hundred years or so. I'm most curious about working out the role of government. Now, there are many different paths to political ideology, and it works best if we think of things not so much as binary left and right, but as a three-dimensional matrix where every possible belief exists as an infinite spectrum going in every possible direction. Thus, we've started to group conservatives in with juxtaposing ideas such as a government hands off approach to guns, but a very hands on approach to abortion. The inverse is true for liberals. Neither side has an actual ideology any more, at least one that can be justified by any universal truth. Both moreover simply favor familiar and established stances on issues long accepted by either party.

This of course hasn't always been true. Yeah, I've been reading Grant, the biography of Ulysses S. Grant, General of the Army for the Grand Old Republic and 18th President of these United States. It also centers around the formation of the Republican party, which seems insane now to be established around halting the expansion of slavery while Abraham Lincoln greatly increased the power of the Executive Branch. Simultaneously they seem to be both liberal in fighting for equality for all humans (err...male humans) while emphasizing a strong central authority. The liberalism of mid-19th Century Republicans was not unlike modern Democrats. While they believe strongly in egalitarian equality, they also believe that left to their own devices, private citizens will never provide this equality.

There's some heady contradiction there. It's as if the government is strong-arming its citizens to be nice to each other. During Reconstruction the South was divided into five Military Districts under jurisdiction of Union Generals in order to protect both the newly freed black population along with white Republicans who were persecuted and murdered without prudence or consequence. The government had to step in to protect freedom.

That's tough logic and one used to justify wars, security, and large standing armies by modern-day Democrats and Republicans alike. If the power of government is derived from the consent of the governed, is the role of government also to protect the governed from each other? Hence our ideologies start to conflict with each other.

We're running into that today amidst the on-going coronavirus pandemic. Donald Trump has put his party through the ringer by first placing individual response duty on the states in an effort to avoid responsibility, and then retracting that stance in favor of strong central authority when those states took stances opposed to his worldview. In the days since General Grant the Republican Party has slid far towards a more Libertarian stance, which emphasizes limited government and a completely free market. These were of course also early tenets of liberalism, which due to the tendency of parties to define themselves by opposition rather than intrinsic philosophy, has become at odds with the Democratic Party.

Modern Republicans favor an extreme individualized position. They don't want any taxes for government services and to survive on their own. That's an admirable stance, but one that feels ignorant in a world where gaps between the select few who can afford to survive on their own and the masses of people who require government intervention to survive gets wider and wider. This is of course not the only tenet of Modern American Republicans - the default is an emphasis on big business (not changed since Grant's time), traditional American values and concepts of religion, families, and households, and a general non-interference with their attempt to recreate that lifestyle.

Thus the foundation of liberalism has been split. Republicans managed to grab the self-sufficient small government emphasis and the Democrats latched on to the secular, global understanding that the world exists outside your backyard. I am very curious how we move forward after Corona if Trump continues to favor strong deference to Federal power while individual Democratic states want to do their own thing. To further compound this, what happens when the smaller state governments exercise greater control over lives, bodies, and economies than the Federal Authority that desires non-interference?

See how ideology is broken down? There is no ideology anymore. Small or big government philosophy shifts based on what is most convenient to the party in power at the time. Democrats who had strongly opposed strong Federal Power in the Reconstruction Era fell apart from FDR to LBJ as Federal Aid programs exploded and the New Deal and Great Society created a Civil Rights Welfare State that still shapes politics today.

And what about the Nazis? What about those damn Nazis? Fascism is clearly conservative - the strong emphasis on nationalism, values traditional to one's country, and strong central authority are all conservative talking points. The socialism of National Socialism wasn't really liberal socialism at all, in that one favors strong government to protect the downtrodden people while the Nazis did not have a great Civil Rights track record. What happens, then, when these viewpoints are co-opted by Klansman and neo-Nazis today who support Republican isolationist and anti-women movements?

Well, that made me think of HBO's Watchmen. Alan Moore's original graphic novel, Watchmen (1986) crafted a unique niche by distilling philosophies into the worldview of fictional superheroes and then letting those personalities bounce off each other until the world was destroyed (or saved). The nihilistic Comedian, Manichaean Rorschach, the utilitarian Ozymandias. It's fun.

In HBO's version, set 34 years after the original graphic novel, we see some of these same people, but I'm most curious about Rorshach's legacy. Lip service was given to Rorschach's original ultra-conservative views, but the follow-up sees the logical conclusion in the Seventh Kavalry, a white supremacist organization that adopts Rorschach's mask. Okay, let's catch you up.

Originally, Rorschach's whole deal was that he was a tortured little kid who wore a black and white mask that would mesh but never mix, leading to what looked like a constant Rorschach blot on his face. Alan Moore took inspiration from Steve Ditko's Question and Mr. A who were both Randian conspiracy theorist detectives. Did you know Steve Ditko was a rabid objectivist? Yay! Objectivists believe in the superior heroic individual, the idea that you are right and everyone else is wrong. It's very emotionally fulfilling but doesn't leave much room for caring about other people.

Rorschach thus is supposed to be a satirical superhero. He's a crimefighter with no regard for the gray area of crimes and exists only in guilty or innocent, right or wrong. Black and white. Somehow he became the most popular Watchmen character, but really that's no accident. It's difficult to understand that the world comes in shades of gray and we might not always be right. It's comforting to have definitive answers to big complicated problems. For immature folks, particularly boys, that's an easy philosophy to fall behind. You don't need to care about anyone else - there is one truth and only you can find that out.

This slides in well with Rorschach's conspiracy theories, which in both Watchmen turn out to be true. As a general rule I don't believe in conspiracy theories. The worst theories, like Flat Earth or 9/11, have an overwhelming evidence to support what is generally believed to be true. The most intriguing theories, like the Kennedy Assassination cover-ups or George Soros just can't exist in a world of constant leaks.

Anyway, belief in conspiracies have become part of the Republican doctrine. There is always someone more powerful out there out to get you but only you know the truth and can save the rest of the world. It's bizarre how these things have all coalesced together. In HBO's Watchmen the natural progression of Rorschach is a more reactionary path, where the Seventh Kalvary discover his conspiracy is very much true and thus give his writings much credence. This deontological thinking natural extends to the black and white races and when only one can be good and one evil, the white Seventh Kalvary make the only choice that makes sense to them.

Mrs. America presents significant cognitive dissonance when choosing a political ideology. It centers around Phyllis Shlafly's attempt to block the Equal Rights Amendment from passing in the 1970s. Such an amendment to the U.S. Constitution would guarantee legal equality across the genders. Spoiler alert, we have no such amendment, but the show is more focused on the great irony that an extremely competent and charismatic housewife fought against this bill.

Here's another arbitrary political center piece that got caught up in ideology, misplaced by what either party thought was right. Conservatives fear change, they believe the woman's place is in the home and Mrs. America presents all sorts of slippery slope arguments as to what may happen when that supposed delicate balance is disturbed. It also presents how misogyny and racism make common bedfellows. On the progressive side, though, the women fighting for Equal Rights are presented as nearly all young Democrats, although some like Betty Friedan are older and have been fighting to exist as their own individual selves with autonomy over their bodies and rights for a long time.

Both sides have great difficulty unifying. There are enough big personalities at play that everyone wants their turn in the spotlight in addition to their common goals. The Democrats especially have an extreme range between the Black Panther sympathizing African-American contingent, the more moderate women who believe they need men to be their advocates, and the bra-burning hippies. Nothing is black and white here, despite the races involved. There is a wide spectrum and not all women fit into neat boxes of ideology. The most surprising aspect is how much a group of women in the show fight to remain complacent by their husbands' sides.

Okay, so by now you've probably spied some of my liberal sympathies. I honestly have trouble seeing both sides, but I do worry about the government overstepping its boundaries. It gets at that conspiracy thing. Have we let the fear of pandemic override our sensibilities towards liberty? Is a belief in the free market and personal freedom a truly liberal stance? Much of that comes down to simple trust in government, that they will relinquish power when the strife is over, they have our best interests at heart, and that they exist to protect the civil rights of the governed.

This becomes difficult because Republicans have crafted a narrative that has eroded this trust while simultaneously creating only one trustworthy figure - Trump. It's difficult to see strong belief in the leadership of anyone else. He rode to power on three tried and true methods: immigrant fear-mongering, goading conspiracy theories that make his downtrodden followers believe a secret truth exists that only they are privileged to know, and the constant women-hate that fuels conservative men and women alike. The leader of government constantly presents government as an intrusive, gun-stealing, mask-wearing, economy-busting demon that wants to infringe on liberty when it in fact exists to protect that liberty. In giving up free thought and common sense to a demagogue, though, his followers have crafted an unassailable central authority to rule them. What is the cost of socialist protection? At the end of the day is it any different than a war-mongering dictator? Rule of one or rule of many?

A lot of conservatism comes down to simply not caring about other people and focusing on the individual. Liberalism seems to believe that other people have feelings and needs that exist outside of your own. That's mostly at the heart of both ideologies. When conservatives are doing well, there is a natural thought of "Why can't other people do well, too? It's their fault." In recent memory this has morphed and morphed and affected one big genre: comedy.

At first you might think that of course comedy leans liberal, SNL, The Daily Show, and comics are generally thought of as extremely liberal. That's all punching up (mostly) at institutions for their own hypocrisy. But I have been watching a lot of old comedy as well, and it strikes me how much we think "Oh, you could never say that today!" It's also bizarre to me that many 90s comedians like Kelsey Grammar, Tim Allen, Adam Sandler, and Norm MacDonald lean conservative, or are out and out Republican. Comedy is difficult when you have to care about who you are insulting. For the record, I love all four of these guys. But there is a significant amount of "Oh, why aren't things the way they used to be?" feeling out of all of them and more. Even Jerry Seinfeld gets into a little bit of this and who knows why, he's like the cleanest comedian ever.

I have seen this objectivist stance bleed into pop culture more than even liberals and especially conservatives would like to admit. It's not only that Rorschach, despite Alan Moore's intentions, becomes the hero of Watchmen. You can see it everywhere. Batman succeeds in the Christopher Nolan films by superseding the rule of law through private enterprise. Tony Stark does the same. The government is incompetent and dangerous in Marvel films, literally full of secret Nazis.

The age old tale of one lone man, usually white, fighting against a shadowy corporation or hostile nation is a very old story, but one that remains extremely popular in contemporary cinema. I talked last summer about how the Old White Man Fights for his Family trope is a HUGE thing over the last few years. But there was one film that got me really thinking about this, which I saw the other day. Don't ask me why I watched it, but for the first time I caught Michael Bay's The Island.

I don't blame you if you've never seen it, it's really not great, but it is truly a conservative thinkpiece. Ewen McGregor and Scarlett Johannson have an apparently idyllic life in a post-apocalyptic socialist paradise where all food and housing is provided, the central authority monitors food intake and personal health, and everyone wears the same thing and works the same job. Little do they know that they are all actually just living organ donor clones for their wealthy counterparts in the real world.

From there it's a conservative checklist. There is a grand conspiracy. There is one man who knows the truth and is able to break free and release his world from the socialist nightmare. Scarlett Johannson is there as lip service to strong women but actually exists as a trophy without agency. It's a fascinating dive. The latter half of the movie is largely one big chase scene and it does buck the typical Michael Bay trend in that the military is the bad guy, although to be fair, they seem to be duped by the big bad socialist commander of the "utopia" created to supplicate the clone organ donors.

In the hands of another director The Island could have been memorable cinema and people may have read into it deep enough to understand its conservative propaganda. But at its bones is the fact that this is basic story structure. Not every movie is like this, of course, plenty end with an individual learning to work in a team, or to break away on a secular journey to find new adventures in the world. But that savior, individual breaking away from the constraints of a homogeneous society reeks of objectivist privilege. I look at 1999 as the year where every movie was like this - The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, even Office Space. And yeah, I'm bleeding blue, but I'm not in favor of this kind of restrictive society. The key liberal cornerstone has always been individual civil liberties. Conservative media tends to bypass this though, when imaging the liberal fantasy society where the government controls every aspect of our lives.

That was a long rant but it had been building up for quite a while. I typically avoid politics here, but this is just honestly how I see things. I would be very curious about your viewpoints and if I'm way off base. What do you think about any of this? Support your local food bank. Here's General Grant.

Ain't no corona in whiskey!

They Make Books on Paper, Now?! Impressions of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

I don't read many books around here. Maybe it's my generation raised on a thousand television channels and then introduced to the unlimited shores of knowledge and internet everywhere but I don't pick up anything with a cover that often. Generally after reading a book anyway I retain about as much information as I would with a recent skim on its Wikipedia page.

On this note there aren't a whole ton of legendary authors or world-changing novels out there. We lack a Hemingway or a Steinbeck or a Shaw. This may also be attributed to a generation more concerned with Twitter than sitting down through an entire book. It's a flash-memory, instant gratification society, to which books deliver neither. I'm clearly no better, I respond much better upon visual stimuli rather than verbal input. To my credit though, over the past seven years I have managed to complete the following books all on my own:

Earth: The Book by the Daily Show
Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien
Why We Suck by Dr. Denis Leary
The Alphabet of Manliness by Maddox
Silent Bob Speaks by Kevin Smith

Impressive, I know. But I did manage to race through a book very speedily recently and it was super-awesome so I felt compelled to respond here. I speak of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith. The most interesting thing about this book lies beyond the obvious knee-jerk reaction upon hearing the premise and how good this thing really is. It should remain a staple of the Mashup Literary Genre.

This is a strange genre. It almost seems too easy to do but when authors pull off the intricacies involved it becomes a fulfilling means of injecting humour and modern attitudes (probably post-modern attitudes is more apt) into stuffy literature that has been so overdone to become the originator of many tropes today. As the Mashup exposes the tropes and folds them over upon the tropes of a drastically conflicting genre we gain immense reflection concerning the nature of storytelling. Awesome.

The genre began with a simple idea from Seth Grahame-Smith himself, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It works from the jarring title alone, there's an immediate interest spike from both Jane Austen fans and Zombie fans. Those are two crowds who should never mingle with each other. Actually they should mingle all the time, the results would be spectacular. Following this were tons of imitators but none were really that exceptional. Until Grahame-Smith returned with Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter is actually equal parts biography and fiction. It succeeds because of how much Grahame-Smith plays it straight. It doesn't deviate from the character of our 16th President, who was often melancholic with a hard, frontier attitude. Simply put, the book presents Abe following his life but whenever there's a little discrepancy or room in the record, Grahame-Smith throws in a Vampire Hunt. His mama died strangely when Abe was 9 years old, eh? Vampire. Abe mysteriously broke off relations with Mary Todd right before they were first to be wed? Vampire. This sounds worse as I'm writing it as it really is - there is enough background and development that the vampires eventually appear to be a constant threat to Lincoln's happiness and also tie themselves inexorably with the cause of the South and Slavery, which just fits perfect.

The book deftly presents itself as part-Secret Diary, part-Primary document and the remaining account reads not of sarcasm or snarky reluctance but as a genuine historical account. It's no different in structure or even tone and theme from a normal Lincoln biography. The only fantastic elements are the vampires and they fit in surprisingly well. It's the true sign of a master of the Mashup craft that it is not a random collision of genres. The Vampire Hunts are well thought out and integrated into a very accurate chronicle of Lincoln's life.

Anyway, I'll admit that I didn't like the ending. Since it's tougher to read a book than watch a movie I won't actually give it away here like I usually do on these things. If a movie has been out a few days you should have gone to see it already. If a book has been out a few years, well that's understandable you need some time to get through that sucker.

So that's it. This is a very well written tome and I hope that this genre works in this vein more often than a simplistic pasting of something ridiculous onto something chaste. That doesn't really work. The careful integration, clear historical research and flawless presentation makes the gore and insanity within all the more acceptable as fake true fact.