Nice Jacket: The Ginger Man

Dell's second Laurel printing from March 1974 of J.P. Donleavy's 1955 novel The Ginger Man - Art/Design Uncredited


I like to call this one Still Life with Debauchery. While it's no Cézanne, this cover does a good job of capturing some of the spirit of the novel with a few well-chosen objects photographed in a bare studio. The discarded clothing suggests sex. The whiskey suggests, well, whiskey. The old wrought iron chairs hint at domesticity and give the piece its structure. Sure, you could buy all this junk at a thrift shop for $20 (other than the whiskey of course) and take a snapshot, but the cover is still miles ahead of the pastel illustration montages on most literary paperbacks from the 70s. The typeface is spare and unobtrusive, almost an afterthought.

The cover below, from Oympia Press, is a mid-century abstraction of the shattered nerves of the novel's namesake drunk.


Berkeley went with psychedelic sex for their cover.

I think the ginger man looks best in tweed.

Here's an interview with J.P. Donleavy from the Paris Review's recently opened Art of Fiction archives.

Miscellany: Real Folk Vampires

In her Letter from the Balkans in November's issue of Harper's, entitled 'Twilight of the Balkans: Hunting the Real-Life Undead' Téa Obreht takes us through the history of real folk vampire stories from Eastern Europe. Far from the romance of Dracula's inspiration, Vlad the Impaler, the vampire story originally comes from peasants who were believed to rise from the dead and feast on their fellow villagers. They'd look more like a fat drunkard from a Bruegal or Bosch painting than a lithe, aristocratic Gary Oldman or Christopher Lee.

In the age of Twilight and Sookie Stackhouse, it's refreshing to return to the gritty folk elements of the legend.

You can read about one of the most famous Serbian vampires here. His name was Petar Blagojevic, and besides having a horribly coiffed head of hair, his resurrection was witnessed by officials from the Austrian Empire, a reputable source if I've ever heard of one.

If your tastes are more domestic, check out this entry on O.T.I.S. about Rhode Island's own vampire, Mercy Brown.


Here's another historical account of a Serbian vampire, named Arnont Paule.

Nice Jacket: The Lime Twig

New Directions paperbacks have fascinated me as objects since I first saw an old copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind on a bookshelf in a friend's attic on College Hill when I was a teenager. They've always struck me as the literary equivalent of a punk rock zine, with their black and white covers like photocopied collages cut from magazines by a kid in his basement.

The cover art for New Directions's 1961 edition of John Hawkes's The Lime Twig shows a fever dream, the blurred faces of a street crowd with only a woman's face in focus, her eyes and mouth in shadow like a skull or specter. The severe title helps enforce this uncompromising vision and prepare the reader for a serious bit of post-modernist horror.


The back cover, as with most New Directions paperbacks, includes a nice black and white author photo. Hawkes is shown in a woodland setting smoking a pipe. You can see a white mark on his wrist where his watch has blocked the sun. Writer's tan! The back is also jammed with text, not only a synopsis of the novel, but also quotes from Flannery O'Connor and William Kennedy. The whole layout looks more like a press release than a retail copy of a book. The spine is just as austere.

As is common with books of the period, the design and cover art are uncredited.

It looks like New Directions has added color to their covers. I still prefer the old DIY look.

Haywire - Episodes 1 and 2

Here's a recommendation: a new horror/sci-fi web series created by Scott Klein, titled Haywire. As of today, there are two episodes up, and a helpful timer on the website displays the countdown to Episode 3: fourteen days, nine hours, as I'm writing this. The series has gotten some attention lately, after being praised by Indie Intertube and SciFiPulse.net, and for good reason: the show crams a lot of intensity and drama into its five-minute run time. They've clearly got a very small budget to work with, but that doesn't stop the filmmakers from delivery a quality program.

Each episode opens with a comic-book-style intro that relates the story's basic setup--a bright light erupts in a small NY town, shutting down all electronics, and affecting those who saw its flash in a peculiar way: it sends their brains into a scrambled loop, and they are only able to continue endlessly doing whatever they were doing when the light hit.

Episode 1,"The Gardener," has a house full of trapped people nervously watching their neighbor, outside, working in her garden. When one of their friends approaches the woman, she attacks him, repeatedly shouting for him to get off her lawn.

The subject of the second episode, "The Beaten Path," concerns a jogger who is stuck repeatedly wishing everyone he meets a nice day. Unfortunately for him, he meets some rather nasty folks who are too wary of the new zombie people to return his greeting.

I say "zombie," but really, these guys wouldn't fit under the traditional meaning of that word. For one thing, they aren't dead (or undead), and they don't crave flesh. Still, for me, it falls under the horror sub-category that the George Romero films and 28 Days Later occupy. These sad, confused, braindead people, stomping through the only activity they know--if they aren't zombies, I don't know what the hell they are.

Check this show out if you have a moment. It's a quick download, and is worth watching. I'm curious to see where the series goes, if later episodes will back to these first two seemingly separate stories, or if a new story will appear with each show. It's quality short filmmaking either way.

http://haywireseries.com/

(All artwork and photos are taken from the Haywire website.)

Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner (1990)

The adaptation of older stories into more contemporary forms, particularly those which were adapted from archaic forms, epic poems, oral legacies, mythical texts, into novels and films, has always fascinated me, both for its rarely satisfactory execution and for the very mechanics of making a popular piece of art from ancient material. In many ways this process is akin to exhuming a Mousterian bowl from your backyard and selling it at Ikea. The critical reception of such exercises always dissuades me from reading or watching them. From Robert Graves's stodgy 1934 novel I, Claudius to Robert Zemeckis's ill-imagined 2007 film Beowulf, most strict adaptations seem to be trying a little too hard to stick to the fictional facts. Give me the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou. You can keep Wolfgang Peterson's Troy. Give me Styron's The Confession of Nat Turner. Keep Madison Smartt Bell's Haiti novels.

In her 1990 novel Thomas the Rhymer, Ellen Kushner, famous for a string of fantasy novels she published in the 80s and 90s and as the host of public radio’s Sound and Spirit tackles the legend of True Thomas, a 13^th century Scottish minstrel and purported prophet. You can read more about Thomas and some of his prophecies at this informative wiki page. Kushner uses four narrators to tell the tale of Thomas’s adoptive family, his exodus in Elfland, and his romance with a milkmaid named Elspeth. It all sounds pretty kooky in synopsis, but Kushner manages to tell her story in an engaging and earthy way. Surprisingly, the least deft of these four narratives comes from Thomas himself. When Kushner hands the narrative over to Gavin, a farmer, or his wife Meg, or Elspeth, we start to see some of the shades of reality seeping through the story. Thomas’s own tale is of nothing more than an orgiastic trip to the land of the elves. Kushner renders this fantasy in a dreamlike psychedelia that only occasionally borders on the inane, as when the elf queen’s brother becomes an orange flame and fights for Thomas’s fate. However, we see from the simpler folk around Thomas that he may have made all of this up to cover up his own gallivanting womanizing ways. The novel’s real worth lies in this examination of reality and the power of storytelling and song in shaping the narratives that are believed in the present and remembered in the future. While the elfin queen and the wondrous feasts denied to Thomas may have some significance as an allegorical digression about the limits of escape and emigration, the uncertainty of Elspeth’s fate is at the heart of the drama here. Thomas manipulates the conventions of the period to his advantage when he asks Elspeth if she would accompany him on his journeys, knowing full well she would risk her standing in the community by running around with an unmarried man. It is her life which is wasted by his flight. Of course, Kushner’s book is a romance, so Elspeth forgives Thomas and they live in happiness until the end of their days and bear many great children together. The end.

In all cases, Kushner renders her novel in a clear and uninflected style, which is infinitely more effective than trying to capture the language of the Scots phonetically, or intersperse archaic words and phrases. Her use of evocative perspectives reminds me of Styron or Faulkner without the arch literary pretension. While most fans of traditional fantasy might bemoan a lack of dragons and magic and violence, I find Kushner’s novel much more revealing about human nature than the average bit of swords and sorcery.

Oh, and how about the dust jacket pictured above. Not Nice Jacket material, that's for sure. I much prefer Kate Greenaway's watercolor below.

Miscellany: Literary Ranch Sale

I’ve always had an awe of the west, some vestigial cowboys and Indians longing for wide open desolate expanses, sagebrush scuttling across my path, clean air and big sky. Every red-blooded easterner has thought wistfully of a return to nature, to the frontier (which exists no more), an escape from the complications of society. I’m no different, and as I age, the comforts of the city become both more appealing and more confining. The call of the wild is stronger but more distant.

So, when I read Annie Proulx’s memoir, A Year of Birds: At Home on the North Platte River in December’s issue of Harper’s I immediately googled ‘wyoming ranches for sale.’ The hefty allure of a new state in which to ply my literary trade is a fleeting, but somewhat therapeutic indulgence.

What's the first Wyoming listing on ranchbrokers.com? That’s right, Proulx’s Bird Call Ranch is up for sale.

The 640 acre ranch is listed at $3.7 million, a hefty, if fair price for the stunning cliff side views (above) and the menagerie of birds and lions and antelope Proulx describes in her Harper’s piece. I’m struck by how lovingly Proulx relates her year alone on the ranch and how quickly she can be unburdened of her property. Maybe the Harper's piece was a bit of veiled real estate promotion. One could do worse than have Proulx marketing one's home.

I’m not sure which stories or books Proulx wrote while living at Bird Cloud, but she sold another Wyoming property back in 2006. So chances are you fanboys can’t purchase the house in which she wrote Brokeback Mountain.

Though I’m pretty faithful to the Audobon guides, Proulx cites the Stokes field guide repeatedly in her article. I’m thinking of checking this one out. Then again I don’t need a more thorough field guide to tell me the squirrels in my backyard are not birds.

Check out one of Proulx’s great watercolors below, apparently inspired by Bird Cloud.

For more information on the historical homes of writers near you, check out writershouses.com.

Nice Jacket: The Demolished Man

In order to widen the scope of The Bent Spine, I've decided to introduce a few new features. The first, which you're reading, is called Nice Jacket and will be dedicated to the incidental art of book covers. I'm no art historian or critic, and I know even less about design, but I know what strikes me as an interesting visual accompaniment to a book. Nice Jacket will always be brief. I don't want to bore you with theory (and to tell you the truth, I don't know much art theory). While I won't limit this discussion to genre books, I'm starting with one of my favorite sci-fi covers.

The cover art and book design for Signet's fifth printing of Alfred Bester's 1951 novel The Demolished Man are both uncredited. While the design is not revolutionary, it is certainly evocative of a certain clean, bold layout that was abandoned with the cartoon Frank Frazzeta covers of the 60s. The clean sans-serif title on the left and the bold text of the author's last name on the right leave room for a great bit of cover art below.

Unintentionally phallic, the art shows a towering collage of details from the book. From the gun at the bottom of the painting, to the silhouetted figure above, the tape reels flanking the figures head, the bifurcation of the two-headed brain, and some great red-and-green lasers shooting from the oracles' eyes, the artist has given us a psychedelic fantasy that has a strange visual appeal. It's not sophisticated, but it is pretty fun.

I like the back cover as well.

The City and the City by China Miéville (2009)

The City and the City recently won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel of 2010. Never having followed contemporary fantasy, I decided to start with a writer I'd heard much about over the years but never considered reading before. While The City and the City doesn't strike me as more fantasy than science fiction, I think the many distinctions between genres are often harmful and confine writers and readers in the scope of their imaginative abilities. In fact, part of our aim here at The Bent Spine, is to liberate genre fiction from its dearth of critical attention. While Miéville doesn't provide us with ghouls and goblins, dragons and warriors, he does embed a thought-provoking concept in a highly readable detective story that borders on the high political intrigue of John le Carré at his strongest. While I don't have much to compare it with, The City and the City deftly avoids the pitfalls of many science fiction and fantasy cliches. Miéville's vision is gritty and uncompromising in its ambiguity.

Inspector Borlu is investigating a crime in his dystopian home city-state of Beszel, when he becomes embroiled in a cross border conspiracy involving a secret power lying in the shadows between Beszel and its sister city Ul Qoma. Beszel and Ul Qoma, for the most part, occupy the same topography. They literally inhabit the same physical space. But through an amazing feat of mass self-hypnotism the citizens of either city do not see of interact with the citizens of the other. Only at the border gate of Copula Hall can one look from one city into another without fear of committing breach, the greatest crime possibly, and attracting the wrath of a shadowy authority called, you guessed it, Breach. Borlu examines the multifarious political factions of each city, the differences in culture, police procedure, respect for antiquity and taste in hot beverages. The only thing these two cities share, other than geography, is an intense fear of Breach. Miéville places his cities in a realistic Eastern European locale and makes many references to a geopolitical situation much like our own. This not an alien landscape, but a parable for a Jerusalem transplanted to Europe, where there are no physical barriers between the Israelis and Palestinians other than an odd self-imposed blindness.

Miéville works in a long tradition of political science fiction, the sort of metaphorical story found in the best Philip K. Dick novels and Aldous Huxley. However, he never makes a completely clear political statement, and this saves The City and the City from becoming strictly a novel of ideas. He writes with a keen simplicity that at first seems rigid, but gradually flows into the staccato rhythms of Raymond Chandler. His imagery is always dark. There are no rays of light to be found here. As John Carpenter did in Escape from New York, China Miéville has created a dystopia both believable and entertaining. Though I can't say this is the best contemporary fantasy and science fiction have to offer, The City and the City shows the scene to be thriving with intriguing new work.

Check out this old, but interesting interview with Miéville at The Believer.

From Within - dir. by Phedon Papamichael Jr.

Netflix has really been ramping up their Instant View selection this year, in preparation, I’m sure, for an eventual total switch from physical DVDs to streaming films. For a while, their Instant catalogue, particularly the horror section, was kind of a grab bag, featuring some pretty bizarre, random—mostly lousy—movies, mixed in with a few classics. Now, at the end of 2010, I’m finding tons of interesting-looking films available to watch instantly, and coming across horror films I’ve never heard of that boast excellent user reviews and star ratings; it’s almost become difficult to keep up with the selection.

I don’t remember how I came across this one. It’s part of the After Dark/Lionsgate “8 Films To Die For” series, not all of which I’ve gotten around to yet. But I believe I discovered it from simply scanning the horror section in the Instant View for plots that sounded intriguing.

Well, here’s an intriguing plot: a small, conservative, religious town is besieged by a rash of suicides, which the pastor’s son and his cohorts believe are the work of a family who live off in the woods, and whose matriarch, a supposed witch, was burned to death a few years ago, blamed by the townspeople for the murder of a local man.

Fast-paced, yet sometimes very subtly spooky, From Within (2008) catches your attention in the first scene. A young girl (Rumer Willis, daughter of Bruce) sits outside with her boyfriend, sharing a romantic moment that ends with the boyfriend shooting himself in the face. Naturally distraught, the girl heads into town, to her father’s shop, barely able to speak, covered in blood. Before ten minutes are up (real time, not movie time), the girl and her father have both killed themselves in differing, equally disturbing, ways. So begins a wave of bizarre suicides that baffle the local community.

There’s a kid who lives on the outskirts of town, played by Thomas Dekker (John Connor from the two-season series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles), whose brother got the whole thing going by offing himself in front of Willis. It turns out, their mother was burned to death a few years back, after being accused witchcraft, and implicated in the death of a local man. It seems likely her death wasn’t the accident the newspapers reported it as.

The kid played by Dekker makes friends with a friend of the Willis character (Elizabeth Rice), and they go head to head with the pastor’s son (Kelly Blatz), a fired up, righteous, 18-year-old Pat Robertson, who makes no secret of his desire to wipe the witchcraft-practicing family off the map.

Everything moves very quickly. The above is only a very basic plot summary; there’s enough in this movie for a film twice as long—but the fast pacing and action aren’t presented in lieu of good characters or storytelling. There are some nice dramatic moments between Dekker and Rice, and Blatz is perfectly cast as the pastor’s son.

Director Phedon Papamichael Jr. shows us a church sermon, towards the beginning of the film, with Steven Culp, as Pastor Joe, giving an energetic sermon to help the townspeople deal with the three suicides of the day before. The scene ends with Pastor Joe’s son confronting him, looking at his father with nothing but disgust, and telling him, “What those people need to hear is faith. You just gave them a cheap Hallmark card,” or something to that extent. It sets the tone for the rest of the movie. At first, it seemed hard to swallow that the most popular kid in school is the pastor’s son, but shortly in, I accepted this, and also began to hate the Blatz character, who uses his position as a local leader of sorts to gather together a large group of hateful, pissed off fundamentalists to take on the devil in their midst.

There’s a lot about religion, Christianity, witchcraft, dark magic, and whatnot, but the movie doesn’t get preachy with it, and there are plenty of scary images and sudden, violent deaths to remind you that it’s a horror film, first and foremost.

Intense, occasionally thoughtful, disturbing, and overall fairly scary, From Within is one of the best films After Dark has brought us yet.

Audrey's Door by Sarah Langan (2009)

Today's post will take the form of a conversation between me and Mark.

M. Buozis: I think one of Langan's biggest strengths is her ability to capture the real heart of her down-and-out characters. Audrey's stultifying life in New York City is one I witnessed many times. The 30-something who is chewed up and eaten by the city and aged by it is a theme not often broached in horror fiction.

Audrey's neuroses ring true and they never make her annoying, just more endearing. The back story involving Betty Lucas is never over-powering, but Langan provides just enough detail to make Audrey's journey to sanity emotional and rich.

Mark Rooster: I found her neighbor Jayne to be an even more, as you said, chewed-up, character. I don't think I could even take a story with her as the lead! When Audrey smashes the hula figurine and has that inner-vent about how Jayne's too dumb to realize how unhappy she is, followed by her shouting F you, Jayne! down the hallway, I felt pretty awful for her.

And there's that previous foreshadowing, the kind that sometimes works and is sometimes only annoying (works in this case), that line about "the next time either of them would see Jayne would be in much more unfortunate circumstances." That isn't the exact line, but it's something similar. I found myself thinking, Man, don't be right about that, let Jayne be OK.

M.B.: For me, the little bit of real obvious foreshadowing there was one of the only really weak moments in the book. It seemed somewhat out of place with the rest of the narrative. It's the only sentence in the entire novel where there's a sort of retrospective looking back. I thought it took away from the immediacy of the action. Why tell us something bad is going to happen and not just let us find out for ourselves?

I thought Langan's secondary characters were particularly strong. You're right about Jayne. Though she's intensely annoying, she is very real and very human. Saurab reminds me of a bunch of people I've met who are still holding onto this dream about making films, but living only on the kindness and wealth of their families.

The whole Chaotic Naturalist aspect reminded me of something Borges would do. Langan makes us believe the architecture and social aspects of this strange school of thought could be historical. As usual, I'd almost prefer it if Langan would've left out the supernatural elements and concentrated on the strange allure of the cult.

M.R.: I like how she lists her influences at the beginning of the book. I could definitely see elements of "The Tenant" and "Rosemary's Baby," as well as the others she listed.

I normally don't like the foreshadowing, but in this case, it added to the dread and foreboding I was already feeling, and it didn't throw me off too much. I figured Jayne was an innocent, anyway, and likely wouldn't make it to the final pages.

The Chaotic Naturalism was very intriguing. I even found myself gooogling it--not that I didn't believe Langan had made it up, but it just sounded so strange and yet nearly-possible, that I had to check, to make sure.

M.B.: Oh, yeah. I had to google it too. I think she throws in some references to real architects, like Gaudi, who used non-traditional forms taken from nature in their buildings. I love when authors flirt with the line between reality and fantasy. It draws me into a story much more than a strictly made up universe.

I found a lot of similarities to The Shining here, especially in the way the building uses people's weaknesses against them to make them go crazy. The Breviary, like the lodge in The Shining becomes a character by the end of the novel, and a character with an extremely powerful will.

M.R.: I loved the character of Shermerhorn (I know I got that wrong; I don't have the book right in front of me), in particular the scene in which his demonic figure approaches Audrey; the description of his arms being as long as his legs, and crawling like a spider, was very effective. Rather creepy, for sure.

M.B.: I definitely liked how Schermerhorn ended up being the man in the three piece suit from Audrey's nightmares.

Another aspect of Audrey's character that I particularly enjoyed was the way she could not leave anything to her imagination. She must read every website that pops up on the first page of her google search for The Breviary. She must check under Betty's sheets. She is afraid of what her imagination might create, how the unknown might haunt her.

Oh, and the old people at The Breviary. I can't remember such an effective exploitation of the creepiness of the elderly, particularly the wealthy elderly with their plastic surgery and fancy clothing. The tenants of The Breviary were the most horrifying aspect of this novel.

M.R.: I loved the way one of the chapters about two-thirds of the way in ended with all of the tenants stepping out of their rooms and clapping at once. Freakin scary! There was a lot of excellent imagery in this book. I'm looking forward to reading her other novels.

And you know, you mention the extent of Audrey's OCD--it really is remarkable that Langan could write such a character without her ever getting on the reader's nerves. You can see where she gets to Saurab with some of this stuff, and how it must be absolutely agonizing to live with, but she never gets boring or annoying to read about.

M.B.: The key is Langan only ever mentioned the OCD as it related to the action of the novel. There was no big long exposition about all of Audrey's ticks and obsessions. They all come out while she's battling with The Breviary.

In this respect, Audrey's Door is similar to Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn in which the narrator suffers from Tourette's Sydrome, but the verbal ticks and twitching never overrides the engrossing plot.

M.R.: I suppose if the author only mentions it here and there, as it pertains directly to the rest of the action, it works to give a sense of what this person's like without beating the reader over the head with it.

I find the same technique used sometimes with a writer including a stuttering character. Stephen King's written stutter is pretty creative (for example, "Wuh-wuh-what?" instead of "Wh-wh-what?").