Film: Desecration
Director/Writer: Dante Tomaselli
Have I Seen Anything Else by This Director and/or Writer: Nope, nor will I.

Listen, guys, I don’t know what to fuckin’ tell you. Back when I used to pounce on these online blu-ray sales, from the likes of Kino Lorber and so forth, I would apparently buy any fucking thing, as long as it met at minimum these two requirements: it was acceptably cheap in price, and gave off the air of some independent cult genre gem that you could be among the first to rediscover. And plus, look at this poster, which is reproduced on the (Code Red again) blu-ray case:

What that promises, at minimum, or at least it would if you did no further research into the film, as I apparently didn’t, this poster promises, as I say, at minimum one nun becoming perplexed upon seeing another nun in the nude, and possibly later being gruesomely skinned alive by the Devil. Beyond that, in this presumed world of mid-1970s Italy exploitation, the door was open for almost anything. Yet somehow, I was unable to imagine that door being open wide enough to allow across the threshold general incompetence made in 1999 by an apparently eccentric and variously-aged group of New Jersey dorks, or even a brief runtime that seems largely made up of an extremely old Italian woman coughing her goddamn lungs out, and I am not kidding, this movie Desecration is about 88 minutes long, and I swear to God 107 of those 88 minutes is made up of that old woman (Irma St. Paule) coughing into your stupid money-wasting face.

Anyway, there’s this kid Bobby (Danny Lopes), who as an infant suffers the sudden death of his mother, while she is tending to him one stormy night. When Bobby reaches the age of, I don’t know, 15? and is attending some private school in, it will turn out, upstate New Jersey somewhere, when, one day, he’s outside the Catholic school flying his remote control plane. Having a fine old time until he loses control of the machine and flies right into the head of a young, beloved nun (Christie Sandford), the ghost of whom will come to haunt the young man who suffers appalling guilt as he finds himself in danger of flunking out of a class. He comes under the tutelage of a priest who gives off a little bit of a Robert Z’Dar vibe, not so much in appearance as in vibe — no insult meant to Mr. Z’Dar — mixed a little bit with the main bad guy in The Final Sacrifice.

Anyway, in some obscurely occult ways, all of this will tie back to the mother, who died suddenly that night, and whose ghost also haunts young Bobby. This is much to the outrage of the boy’s father, the comically New Jersey Italian-y Salvatore Paul Piro, who we learn regards his late wife as a horrible witch, literally!

In fairness to this film, a little bit, this collapsing-as-its-being-built house of cards is built on what I took to be a sincere attempt to investigate guilt and punishment, by Tomaselli. Which, if you will permit me some frankly shouldn’t-be-permitted patronizing shoulder-patting, renders the whole experience kind of touching. Something is being sought, but all that’s found is the usual horror conclusion, that if one branch of a tree is rotten, that poison has probably already spread up from the roots and spread throughout even every twig and sprig. But in addition to that being one of horror’s many default modes — possibly as a means of excusing the genre’s inherent cruelty — comes off as particularly strange in the context of this story, which is one comprised almost entirely of dead-ending subplots before the aforementioned weird and tiresome twist.

But 98 per cent of the time, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. That’s something, I guess, even if what was being scene could be described as being in any way good. The gore, which is used more than I was beginning to think it would be, is cheap, the context often somewhat perplexing. The other two per cent of the time, the last two per cent of the movie, by that time I was pretty used to it.

II. Am I Supposed to Deck a Nun??

Film: The Crimson Rivers
Director/Writer: Mathieu Kassovitz/Kassovitz and Jean-Christophe Grangé, from Grangé’s novel
Have I Seen Anything Else by This Director and/or Writer: Kassovitz, yes, because apparently he directed Gothika which I am almost positive I’ve seen.

I expected more from this film, if I’m being frank with you all. Being a police procedural that shades into occult horror, which is the scent that’s always wafted off this thing, it combines two things I love, and I’ll be honest, coming from another country than America did give me added hope that something interesting and original might come from this fun, if perhaps slightly shopworn already by 2000 when the film came out, genre mash-up. What I didn’t expect was for it to go through the paces of being that kind of movie so slavishly that you’d think they were filming a series finale on a strict deadline. The kind of movie that Mathieu Kassovitz’s third film1 is, is the kind of foreign film that at the time of the post-Tarantino 90s and into the 2000s was being made for a particular kind of cinephile nerd, which is the kind of cinephile nerd who is indeed very interested in both European and Asian cinema, as long as those European and Asian movies are essentially those disparate films cultures’ versions of Hollywood genre cinema. Another example of this kind of thing is Christophe Gans’s Brotherhood of the Wolf, which became famous for the shot of Monica Belucci’s boobs that dissolved, in the cinematic editing sense, into a shot of a mountain. That movie also features Vincent Cassell, and which also disappointed me.

Cassell doing these movies I used to hold against him, and perhaps I still do a little bit, because they gave me a false sense of what kind of actor he was — they showed less of him than was actually there, which would eventually become apparent. Had I seen The Crimson Rivers back when I bought this DVD (don’t worry, it’s the Special Edition) probably some 20 years ago, it would have only reinforced that mistaken sense of the actor. In The Crimson Rivers, which could not give a shit if you noticed that it wouldn’t even exist if not for Seven so might as well not even pretend otherwise, Cassell plays the young hotshot police lieutenant, the Brad Pitt, if you will, of the film. Here, this cop, Max Kerkarian, is investigating the desecration of the grave, located in a small French mountain village, of a young girl who had been killed in a road accident in 1982. There is an occult/fascist vibe to the desecration (hey, they should have called this movie Desecration), the source of which needs to be tracked down. That hellish undercurrent is reinforced by the dead girl’s mother, now a Catholic nun (who has taken a “vow of darkness”) who tells Kerkarian that her daughter and husband were, in reality, killed by demons. This happened in another, nearby French village.

That other, nearby French village is currently being itself visited by a police detective, this one named Pierre Niemans (Jean Reno, doing his part to make the kinds of movies Cassell was making a living with), the, if you must, Morgan Freeman of our story. Reno’s Niemans, though, is much less expressive, both in what he’s given to say and reveal, or through a quite deliberately flat performance (I assume so anyway), and in actual performance, than Freeman’s Somerset was. So there’s less sense of why Niemans is always slumping around the way he was. For general cop reasons, I suppose. He sees some stuff, just within this one movie, that would fuck up anybody, including one quite Silence of the Lambs-ian murder scene, but Niemans has seen it all by then he almost doesn’t even care. Except of course he cares very much, I guess. Evidence would suggest. In this case, he cares about the murder of a local professor, bound into a fetal position (what a fetal position is is actually explained to us) with his hands and eyes removed. The hands and eyes, a doctor at the local hospital/university where the victim worked points out, being the two truly unique parts of every human body, functioning, the dean (Jean-Pierre Cassel) of the school/hospital explains, as “nature’s way of labeling us.”

What I probably should have expected was that The Crimson Rivers is is a quite plodding, in the way of moody thrillers of the era, walk through two subplots that join up when a particularly intriguing bit of forensic evidence is revealed, which irrevocably ties together the two cases being investigated by the respective cops. By this point, a ridiculous martial arts fight between Cassell and a room full of guys has been shoehorned in, but also, to his credit, Cassell has delivered the one genuinely human moment in the film, when, after shrugging off the warnings of the police archivist who was about to show them to him, he reacts to seeing the accident photos of the dead girl in 1982. It suggest, perhaps, that Cassell was ready and willing to try to get under the skin of his character’s wearyingly blowhard ways. If so, it began and ended there. Possibly because, regardless of how I presented it here, his role in the film is really subordinate to Reno’s, but only because the movie says so. There’s really no other good reason, beyond the producers assuming audiences related, or liked to think they related, more to the Wise Man Who’s Seen it All, than to the hotshot kid who’s in over his head.

It doesn’t help that the interesting occult vibe, especially with that intriguing bit of evidence, is resolved in what is perhaps the dullest way possible, so dull that I really should have seen it coming. That’s all I had left to hold on to, and as a result, watching the sequel, which I promised/threatened I might do when I announced these, I decided to bail on. It didn’t fit the rules, but also I’ve been quite disappointed by all, or most, of my recent film experiences, and so I was a little bit fed up, and I had books to read, and I don’t trust the prominent aesthetics of the early-to-mid 2000s any more than I do the mid-to-late-90s-to-early-2000s. So I didn’t watch it, okay?!

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This post is part of a series that is separate from, but related to, and will probably at certain points merge with, my Reading Project. For my details of what I guess is my Film Project, click here.

Author Never Read: Peter Cameron
Book Read: What Happens at Night

This may just be my interpretation of the situation, I don’t know if this has been speculated about elsewhere or what, but prior to the announcement that Martin Scorsese’s next film would be an adaptation of Peter Cameron’s thriller What Happens at Night, and not only that had been cast with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as the leads, and was currently filming, whenever it was I read that, prior to that, as I say, my understanding was that Scorsese’s next film would be an adaptation — of sorts, one kind of assumes — of Shusaku Endo’s A Life of Jesus. At the time of the announcement of the Endo adaptation, Scorsese said that after The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon back-to-back, he imagined himself focusing on smaller projects from now on. But now What Happens at Night was shooting, and it looked a lot more expensive than Scorsese had said his A Life of Jesus would be. Which makes What Happens at Night appear, on the surface, like a for-hire job, taken — as were The Color of Money and Cape Fear and Shutter Island before it — to smooth the path towards getting the film he was really passionate about, the Endo film, because even as celebrated as he was and is, and as inexpensive as he’d always said A Life of Jesus would be, he still somehow needs to trade with someone else who can give him the all clear. If all of this is indeed the case, and Scorsese’s adaptation of Cameron’s novel, with a script by Patrick Marber, is faithful to that novel, then it will have to count as one of the strangest for-hire jobs in Hollywood history.

I don’t believe I’d heard of Peter Cameron before that announcement, but What Happens at Night is his most recent, and certain of his previous titles — such as The City of Your Final Destination and Some Day This Pain Will Be Useful to You — were familiar enough when I looked him up that I suppose I must have. Though for one reason or another, if I had, I’d dismissed him as being the literary equivalent of those early 2000s indie teen comedies where there’s this kid who’s maybe a little too special to ever get along with anybody and so he has to go to this special school with others like him and wherein he finds the wings to fly. I really don’t know why, other than that those two book titles reek of the kind of nebulous angst that passed for “dark comedy” among the kind of hipsters with some millions, but not many millions, with which to make a movie in America, post-9/11.1

And maybe they are2, but I’m driven now to find out, because What Happens at Night is absolutely not that. It’s a novel of so many tones — of horror, of heartbreak, of comedy, of romance, of social commentary — from which Cameron doesn’t shift between, so much as somehow manages to make co-exist simultaneously. It’s a novel concerned with the most dispiriting ends of metaphysics, it feels somewhat out of time and somewhat out of place, a novel of a great and uncomfortable eeriness, and a novel with a playful, occasionally absurdist humor. A horror novel, on some level, and a serious one, but one with a gleam of light inside it. This is one of the most remarkable novels I’ve read in a long time, certainly this year.

The novel opens by introducing us to first, the Man, and soon thereafter, his wife, the Woman (the caps are mine, not Cameron’s, but I’d like to avoid confusing myself), as they ride a train to where, we don’t yet know. What we will learn over the course of the novel, or the basics anyway, is that the couple are in some unspecified Eastern European city ravaged by weather and poverty, because they have arranged to adopt an infant son from the local orphanage. It will also transpire that the Woman has suffered many miscarriages over the years, and is now dying of uterine cancer, and her primary motivation for wanting to adopt a child, apart from wanting to experience motherhood for whatever time she has left, but that so that after she’s gone, her husband, the Man, won’t be so alone.

After finally making it to the hotel where they will be staying, filled with staff who seem slightly too polished, too vacant, and in some ways interchangeable, the couple will learn that apart from the orphanage, this mountain town’s other big draw is the presence of Brother Emmanuel, a local faith healer of some renown. The Woman will become drawn to this figure. The couple first encounter him when a taxi, instructed to take them to the orphanage, accidentally (or was it?) takes them to his health spa, or shelter. After discussing their situation with a person who will be repeatedly referred to as a “helpmeet,” as just one example of Cameron’s occasionally, if mildly, archaic language, Brother Emmanuel presents himself.

They turned and saw a man standing midway between the door, which was closed, and their sofa. He looked rather young and was very tall and thin. Perhaps because his head was bald (or shaved), his skull and the bones and cartilage of his face seemed unnervingly apparent, as if his skin were one since too small and were being stretched to a preternatural smoothness by the bones beneath it.

You get the idea. Skeletal, sepulchral. A be-robed figure, one assumes, and which is more or less confirmed. And a figure whose pseudo-scientific nonsense the Woman and (though much less so) the Man initially completely reject. Curiously, when first confronted with such a charismatic figure, the Man is at least a little bit willing to hear him out — better give everything a chance than simply let his wife die, whereas his wife’s rejection is almost angry. Yet when, the next day, the Woman wakes up feeling better, feeling like she’s been cured, she becomes convinced that Brother Emmanuel, even through her minimal contact with him, is the source of her health’s restoration. The Woman therefore becomes obsessed with seeing Brother Emmanuel again, which she finds surprisingly difficult today. The Man, meanwhile, because alarmed by what he considers his wife’s complete delusion that she’s miraculously cured. It would be easy to draw only pity from the reader regarding the Woman’s illness. But for me, I felt the anger she hisses out when another character tries to push the woman, still resistant, to Brother Emmanuel:

You don’t understand! It’s taken me so long, so unbelievably long, to resign myself to what’s happening. But I am resigned. I can’t allow any more possibilities, everything that can be done has been done, and I’m too tired…

Yet when she awakes with a kick of life she hasn’t felt in months, and the way she describes the way she feels to the Man, it’s very easy to also feel her hope. Why not? Up to this point, What Happens at Night has been so odd, with a tinge of horror to be found in a mysterious female figure looming in the Woman’s vision as she awakes in their hotel room (a figure that will return once more, much later, with no less mystery attached), her husband away with the first of his many trips to the hotel bar, where he will meet Larus, the bartender, whom the Man will come to treasure as a friend, as well as the local, herb-y, powerful local schnapps, which itself is introduced to the Man by one of the novel’s other main characters, the peculiar old (how old is unclear, but deceptively so, apparently) showbiz gal, ex-circus performer, current actress and nightclub singer Livia Pinheiro-Rima. This character is pretty much only ever referred to by her full name, Livia Pinheiro-Rima, every time, and such a brassy, cheerfully cynical romantic cliche’ that it lends credence to their being a certain self-awareness to novel, on top of everything else.

It’s almost hard to know where to begin with all this, but for example the reason the novel feels out of time is because early on the couple’s travel seems very much in period, the first half of the 20th century, some time around there. Then again, that could just be Eastern Europe — I’ve never been, but by all accounts large sections of that region aren’t exactly on the cutting edge. Then there will be a sudden out of nowhere reference to Peggy Fleming, on the cover of a magazine the man picks up, but in which he could find no article about figure skating. Fleming’s big year was 1968, yet other references elsewhere seem more recent. So why Fleming? Why the Man’s interest, under the current circumstances — which are at some extreme point, as they are from the beginning of this novel to the end — should be something he ignores, yet he checks. Could the cliche that the sport is feminine be another reference to the Man’s apparently repressed homosexuality? Or rather, more likely, his bisexuality. This possibility is first brought a up early on, during the Man’s first encounter with the Businessman, over whose every scene from here on out will loom, at minimum, the question of the Man’s sexuality, who claims to recognize the Man. From where. Well the Businessman would hate to say, but there’s something very suggestive in his behavior, one that the man doesn’t reciprocate. This leads the Businessman to surmise, out loud, that the Man was “on the down-low.” Now, I don’t know the origins of the use of that term in the homosexual community, how far back it goes, but for me it goes back at least as far as a particular episode of Law & Order: SVU, so perhaps this novel, too, exists in a post-9/11 world.

Not to make light of all this, but it is funny. Without giving away too much about what’s to come in the novel, at one point the Man is alone with Simon, the baby they’ve come to adopt. The baby throws a stuffed monkey the Man has given him.

The man was amazed at how far his son could throw a stuffed monkey. Perhaps he would grow up to be a baseball player. He retrieved the monkey from the floor and gave him back to Simon — he was trying to think of the baby as Simon and not the child or the baby, but referring to him in this familiar way seemed almost presumptuous, like using tu instead of vous when speaking French.

Maybe you can see my point about several tones existing at once. I’d never considered that shift in perception when adopting a baby, and the heartbreaking struggle that can probably be for some, paired with that snooty non sequitur analogy is simply funny to me. Could I try to explain why to someone who doesn’t find it funny? I could try. Would I try? I would not. But I do find it funny, as I also found funny the moment when Livia Pinheiro-Rima, who has been trying to push the Man to eat the soup she bought for him at one of the town’s many odd restaurants, vouching for its nutritiousness and so on, pointing out all the soup must be eaten.

Why?

Because leftover garbage soup is garbage. There’s nothing to do with it except throw it away. And so it must be eaten.

Can’t it be reheated?

No. Don’t be ridiculous. Would you like to eat day-old reheated garbage soup?

And the portions! That practically deserves a rimshot. And this is not a surprising bit, coming from Livia Pinheiro-Rima, the very repetition of that name being itself some kind of joke, the character being such a self-aware type that at one point she actually name drops the person who, when you look her up, it becomes clear was in some fundamental ways the inspiration for Livia Pinheiro-Rima. What Happens at Night was published in 2020, so Cameron knew you’d do that. The self-awareness can cut both ways, however. The title phrase, “what happens at night,” is spoken three times in the novel. The first time was fine, the second two, which came close together in the same conversation, I found objectionable.

It’s also a novel that, it becomes clear in some of its rare direct moments, a nightmare version of what it must be like to not only be a gay man trying to adopt a child — from anywhere, let alone some far away mountain village in Eastern Europe — but a gay man by himself trying to do that. I imagine it’s unimaginable. As I say, Cameron eventually makes this part of the idea fairly clear when it’s made clear that both the mother and father must be present to take the baby home, and they cannot release Simon to the Man alone because a “baby needs a mother and a father.” I mean, well. And it’s very possible I should have picked up on this thread before Cameron starts waving his hands in my face, but in my defense up until this he had something of a roundabout way of approaching the topic. Either way, the Man’s eventual relationship with Simon, and, in ways, with the Woman, become both devastating, and compassionate, an ember in the ash, as when Cameron describes the man holding the baby:

Then he slightly increased the pressure of his grasp, because he wanted to make sure the baby knew it was being held.

II. Other Mommy is Outside the House

Author Read Before: Josh Malerman
Book Previously Read: Black Mad Wheel
Book Read: Incidents Around the House

In the coming months — one month in particular — you will see me posting both here, and elsewhere (with links provided here) about horror fiction, including a couple of authors who are largely new to me, but who are very much establishing themselves as modern day luminaries in the genre. And I could have save this post about Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House for October (that’s the month I was talking about), his 2024 bestseller that has been transformed into the film, much buzzed about because of the trailer, called Other Mommy, from director Rob Savage, and most notably, per the effect the trailer has had on audiences, star Jessica Chastain, as both literal, and other, mommy. And I thought about it, but as I believe I mentioned when I made this announcement, with William H. Gass towering over me, I needed a break, and I thought this novel, in a preferred and familiar genre, by a writer I’ve read before, and whose pages are laid out in a way that ensured quick reading.

First, as to my having read Malerman before. Many years ago, I read his second novel, Black Mad Wheel, which followed his breakout debut Birdbox (Netflix movie adaptation, etc.). Black Mad Wheel dealt with a rock and roll band that has been hospitalized, or something, and a lot of spooky “don’t have wars” communicated through weird music happens. It sounded more interesting than that, as someone trying (successfully) to sell the book to me would hope to be, but it turned out to be fairly dull and moony-eyed. But the thing that bugged me the most was that the band in the novel was said to have had a recent big hit, while their music is described with language dripping with implications of avant-garde genius. But the novel takes place in the early-mid-50s, which means that a band with Miles Davis-level artistic ambition had a hit akin to one had by Bill Haley & the Comets. It seemed, in short, remarkably ignorant of its subject. Plus I think at one point a Revolutionary War drummer comes marching out of a cloud or something.

As for Incidents Around the House, the reason the formatting of the novel ensures a quick read is because of this somewhat bizarre author’s note:

The unique format of this book is intentional: left-justified for narration/action, indentation for dialogue, with spaces between. All in the name of perspective: This story is told by a child.

Which means, in essence, a lot of double spacing and short paragraphs separated by that double spacing, with dialogue mysteriously centered on the page, a distinction from separating them with quotation marks that apparently strikes Malerman as especially childlike. Whatever, the sucker sure reads fast. It’s completely meaningless (the absence of quotation marks in What Happens at Night adds to he dreaminess), the kid, a little girl named Bela who’s somewhere between 4 and 12 years old, sounds like a naively lovable little bug when Malerman wants to turn the celebration of innocence at a furious blaze, and writes about a house’s layout like the guy who drew up the blueprints when Malerman needs you to understand.

The deal is this: for a long time, this weird creature, which began by peering at Bela from her bedroom closet, who calls herself the Other Mommy has begun appearing to the little girl, befriending her. Bela is firm about this, that they were once, and may still be, friends. The Other Mommy somewhat resembles the real mother (named Ursula, or “Urs,” as husband Russ calls her, but which I cannot believe anyone named Ursula has ever allowed themselves to be called), but often has her eyes on the wrong part of her face, things like this. And she also continuously asks Bela if she, the Other Mommy, can get into her, Bela’s, heart. Bela says no, but thinks about saying yes, and wonders what it will change in the lives over her parents, whom she loves (she calls her dad “Daddo,” a word I have now read something like 15,000 times and if I ever read it again I might die) but whose marriage, the little girl considers in a quite adult manner at times, when it suits the creator, is clearly falling apart. The little girl writes (? thinks? speaks?) in those words, about her world “falling apart.”

Anyway, another thing Malerman does, as a means of flouting the creative limitations his own concept has put on him but which he refuses to acknowledge, is have Ursula and Russ get drunk a lot and speak to their they (incorrectly) believe sleeping daughter about their troubles and frustrations, which include, in Ursula’s case, habitual infidelity, which she feels remorse and shame about, but which she has a hard time breaking from. Or so she tells her sleeping daughter. Anyway, the infidelity subplot would be clear to any attentive reader anyway. The little girl needn’t be aware as long as the reader is. Malerman eventually removes all doubt when the Other Mommy makes its reality clear to everyone, so there’s no doubt about the supernatural element at play, Ursula flees from a bad situation at a house full of fuckin paranormal hippies to be with her lover, some guy, whom she finds dead when she gets there. This appears to have been engineered, somehow, by Other Mommy. All of which points to both the Other Mommy’s malignant nature, as well as its growing strength. The point I need to stress here is that when Ursula returns to the fuckin hippies’s house, she calls Russ outside, and apparently what she says to him, and I’m inferring this based on events that follow, basically “I’ve been cheating on you for years, I just went to be with him while our daughter is being stalked by a demon, and but now he’s dead.” All in one rush, Russ has all this shit dumped on him.

(By the way, as this novel turns out to be about a fractured marriage, and the impact that can have on a child, and parents who behave selfishly and irresponsibly, the “incidents around the house” referred to in the title must be ones that occurred before the novel’s beginning, and which we are not privy too, because otherwise Other Mommy is a much better title, in at least it makes more sense for this story, as the clue that the threat of Other Mommy has reached unignorable levels is when she first appears outside the house, something that happens almost immediately.)

The above leads the characters on a kind of road trip (away from the house, see above parenthetical) that sees them staying with different types of people offering different kinds of help, the most reliable coming from Ursula’s mother, Grandma or whatever, who seems to come and go without explanation — at one point taking Russell and Ursula aside, saying something Bela couldn’t hear, and so neither could we, and then leaving — and who at one point wears a shirt that says “World’s Toughest Grandma” yet surprisingly never raps or hauls ass to Lollapalooza.

Nothing really interesting comes from any of this, save the I suppose not insignificant fact that Malerman, in the two novels by him I’ve read, is trying to communicate something beyond cheap thrills in his horror fiction, he wants his fiction to perhaps be helpful, which is noble enough I suppose. But his subjects look cheap in his hands, and a weirdly moralistic tone takes over. And it’s not that his characters’ actions are not regrettable, even to be ashamed of, but there’s an almost EC Comics sense of comeuppance and judgment attached that seems out of proportion.

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This post is the latest in what will turn out to be a very long series of essays about my year of reading, from 2025 to apparently the end of time. For more details about this project, please read this post.

First up is the one that, if I’m being completely straight with you, I’m much more excited to read than the other one, about which more in a moment, but anyway first up is this:

This novel, in case you don’t know, has been turned into a film by Martin Scorsese, a film that I believe is now in post-production and should come out late this year or early next year? Something like that? Anyway, this is a thriller, though one, I gather, with a more literary bent, and a more literary pedigree, than the word “thriller” usually suggests. I’m passing judgment in either direction, I’m just accurately describing the state of things.

And then, the one I’m somewhat less enthusiastic about, which I’ll get into in the actual post, this:

This, as I imagine even fewer people know, is the basis for that upcoming horror film The Other Mommy, the trailer for which set everyone’s jaw to wagging. Also, I have to be perfectly frank about this. My original choice for a second novel that’s about to be turned into a movie was rather more highbrow, not a term I particularly like, but for the sake of expediency, already wasted, I’ll go with it, but I ultimately decided against it, because I could use a break. Since the Cameron might very well offer all sorts of challenges, I thought it might behoove me and my mental state to go with something that was possibly something of a page-turner. Plus that trailer went viral, so I can only assume the same shall happen to me. The novel, incidentally, was something of a big deal in the horror community when it came out, in part because of its commercial success and rave mainstream reviews. So there you go.

In that same spirit, my films would appear, at least on the surface, to be similarly unchallenging, but I can’t know for sure if that will be the case until I’ve sat through them. First up:

Looks fun. It’s Code Red round three, incidentally.

And then this:

I’ve owned this movie for ages, and admittedly, the only reason I remembered that I owned it was from the sad news that the film’s lead actress, Nadia Fares, passed away recently. I evidently missed the news at the time. Anyhow, not to sound heartless, but remembering what kind of film The Crimson Rivers is, or anyway how I imagine it could very well be, made me think that this is the sort of film I would like to be watching these days. So there you go. The sequel is streaming, and I may or may not throw that in, free of charge. I don’t own the sequel, so that sort of does break the rules, so we’ll have to see.

Anyway, see you soon!

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This post is the latest in what will turn out to be a very long series of essays about my year of reading, from 2025 to apparently the end of time. For more details about this project, please read this post.

Author Read Before: John Gardner
Books Previously Read: The Resurrection; The Wreckage of Agathon; Grendel; Nickel Mountain; October Light; Vlemk the Box Painter; Freddy’s Book; a handful of short stories
Book Read: The Sunlight Dialogues

Another advantage to Haiti…is that one will not encounter that ass John Gardner in print, voice or leis, the mercenary ignorance o the NY Times to which we have all at last become accustomed. Well, as the Arabs say (translated from the Spanish): Sit in the doorway of your house and watch the bodies of your enemies pass. Speaking of that, Stanley [Elkin] must thank the Lord for small blessings: only think what the Master of Moral Fiction could have wrenched from The Living End.

- William Gaddis in a letter to William H. Gass, dated August 3, 1979

We have a lot of ground to cover here, so I’ll keep this part brief. One year, in high school English class, I don’t remember which year, when we got to the Beowulf section of our year, the teacher, a very smart guy and a good teacher, had decided to supplement our reading of that ancient text with a contemporary novel called Grendel, by John Gardner. I didn’t realize then, and barely wish to consider now, that Gardner’s novel, which takes the bones of that ancient, mythical, and anonymous poem and views the action from the point of view of the story’s monster, the flesh-eating, red in tooth and claw beast Grendel, whom most readers know as the threat to the village that our hero Beowulf must thwart, creating for this creature that in Gardner’s imagining becomes the abused, the confused, the confounded by mankind’s ways, that this novel, as I say, can probably be connected with a very straight and unbroken line to the current crop of The Villain is Misunderstood nonsense like Cruella and Wicked is not lost on me. Not to put any of this on the same level as Beowulf, or Grendel, for that matter. Anyway, that painful realization would come later. What I remember particularly about Gardner’s book are two things. Well three, the first being that I really liked it. The second thing is that about halfway through the book, Grendel engages in a philosophical debate with the dragon, who of course serves a somewhat different function in the original. Here, the two monsters debate life and the meaning, if any, there is to be found in it. Grendel asserts that there is something more. The dragon rather smugly disagrees. As their debate winds down, Grendel — a foolish being, easily outwitted by the sophisticated dragon — feeling uncertain about his own beliefs refuses to buckle, though his previous confidence is lacking. And I remember this exchange, which ends the debate, and the chapter:

“Nevertheless, something will come of all this,” I said.

“Nothing,” he said. “A brief pulsation in the black hole of eternity. My advice to you — “

“Wait and see,” I said.

He shook his head. “My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.”

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Film: Black Gravel
Director/Writer: Helmut Käutner/Käutner and Walter Ulbrich
Have I Seen Anything Else by This Director and/or Writer: No.

I just heard about this movie a month or so ago. The context was that at the time, a rep theater in Boston — and perhaps in rep theaters across the nation, but I knew of it through B…

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Anyway, the book that will be the focus of my next Reading Project post, is as I’ve been bitching about for literally weeks now, as though all of this were your fault, is quite a long book. Therefore, and even though I have made some progress in the book by nipping away at it here and there when I could, which inevitably delayed the last round of posts, but will hopefully short the next delay, but anyhow therefore I can almost guarantee that the Film Project posts will come first again. I hope that’s not a hassle or disappointment. But when gaps between posts become too lengthy, I become very stressed.

So, the book in question is this one:

I think I’m far enough along in this book to have a pretty decent sense of the thing by now, and fellas, it’s something. But I’ll get to that when the time comes. Of the three writers who are the subject of this little miniseries, my history with Gardner is by far the longest, going all the way back to my teenage years (I refuse to write “teens.”). I will get more into this, again, when the time comes.

The other, much shorter, book is this one:

I’ve read Houghton before, but that history is sleight enough that I probably shouldn’t “waste” it here. All I’ll say here that the fact that this is only going to be the second Claude Houghton book I’ve read strikes me as absurd.

On to the films!

I’ve been enjoying the habit I’ve fallen into of pairing some cheap, genre, possibly exploitational, but possibly also really good, it’s happened, films with something someone, perhaps a douchebag, would describe as more “highbrow.” Not least because of the virtues of variety; it’s not like it’s such a novel idea, but it also helps you see things in the cheap movies that probably aren’t there. It’s invigorating. Anyhow, on the arguable exploitational end of things, there’s this:

A film of many, quite interesting, alternate titles, which I’ll get into. Also, Code Red again. No memory of how I heard of this film, or in what context, but something tells me I should probably prepare myself.

And then this, about which I have to confess the following (cont’d after pic];

that not only is this physical digital disc a recent acquisition, it is the most recent movie I’ve bought. Which means it hasn’t been sitting on my shelves unwatched for years. More like weeks, verging on months. I heard about it in a way, which I’ll get into, that intrigued me for some unhealthy reason, and the fuckin thing was on sale, and didn’t otherwise seem easy to watch. And it’s right here next to me, I barely have to move to put it in the player.

So that’s it! I am doing my damnedest to keep the delays at a minimum, and in fact knocked out a decent chunk from the Gardner already this morning, so fingers crossed.

PS: I already have the thematic connection — not between the novels, but the one I made in choosing these books — for the next round of free posts, and I think it is a good one in which you will be interested. So interested indeed that you may wish to share information about my substack to your loved ones, and explain to them the benefits of becoming a paid subscriber!

* * * * *

This post is the latest in what will turn out to be a very long series of essays about my year of reading, from 2025 to apparently the end of time. For more details about this project, please read this post.

Writer Never Read: Kent Anderson
Book Read: Sympathy for the Devil

Many years ago, I conceived of a reading project for myself, which is something I do often but have only ever followed through on this one time, meaning now, these posts. This project, which I did nothing about beyond purchasing a couple of titles recommended to me in replies to social media posts I made requesting them, was to gather together and read a lot of novels focused on the Vietnam War, specifically combat novels. The combat novel, it seems to me, is something of a subgenre of the war novel, which itself is often a subgenre of the historical novel. The reason behind why my interest in Vietnam War combat novels suddenly sparked back then eludes me now, but I find the interest is still hanging on. Within the genre of war novels, I’m definitely drawn more towards the down and dirty aspects of what being in the middle of such a nightmare might be like — and these novels are not infrequently written by veterans — more than I am towards the Herman Wouk-ian sweeping epics (though I’d like to read those books, too), and as for Vietnam, well, growing up when I did, which was shortly after American movies decided to seriously lift the hood and look inside at the nuts and bolts of that war, a kind of bleak nostalgia for Vietnam was in full swing. Not the activism of films like Coming Home and, to a lesser degree, The Deer Hunter1, or the phantasmagoria of Apocalypse Now, but rather the more boots on the ground films like Platoon and Hamburger Hill and Full Metal Jacket. None of which is to say those films aren’t political — Platoon is pretty straightforward in that regard — but for example, with Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick was more than content with letting the viewer find whatever politics they wished to find within it. The point being that the Vietnam War was everywhere in the 1980s and 90s. TV detectives were veterans of it, whole TV shows were based around it, there was even a Marvel comic book for a while, that I never read, called The ‘Nam. Vietnam vets began writing crime novels. And the war, in general, began to loom, again, as it did when it was raging, like a kind of black stain on the country. Well we’ll see about that, I probably thought at the time (I doubt I would have heard about, or registered that I’d heard about, My Lai at that point), and then barely thought about it.

The Vietnam literature I have read, which is shamefully meager in terms of sheer quantity, has been memorable, however. Probably the first one I read was The Short-Timers, Gustav Hasford’s first, and still only findable, novel, and the basis for Full Metal Jacket. And to be perfectly honest, I’m sure I read that more out of a budding devotion to Kubrick than I did because I was interested in war literature. I remember liking The Short-Timers, though, while also being surprised by how much less profane it was than Kubrick’s film. I know a lot of R. Lee Ermey’s drill sergeant spiel was improvised by him, but even so. What would hold Hasford back from going full tilt, bad words-wise, in 1979, when the book was published? More impactful was Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried2, which I was drawn to specifically because of the subject matter, but I would guess also because of that subject matter being paired with the structure of interconnected short stories. An excellent book, though it’s been forever since I read it. I still have a memory, though, of going back time and again, while I was in the middle of the book, to a passage that described a soldier stepping from the shade of trees, into bright sunlight, and onto a landmine, so that his body seemed to be lifting up into the sun. A beautiful image that turns your blood to ice. Best yet, at least as far as my memory will take me at the moment, was the title story of Thom Jones’s landmark story collection The Pugilist at Rest. “The Pugilist at Rest” is one of those rare short stories that seem to somehow be about everything (Tobias Wolff has written many of these). Some stories that have that feeling can achieve this effect through a very narrow focus (ibid), while stories like “The Pugilist at Rest” take something huge like the Vietnam War, and the story of the main character, everything about his existence, blossoms out of that war. It’s a remarkable piece of work.

And of course there have been others. I read The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s proto- or ur-, your choice, Vietnam novel. I’ve read Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone’s “the war’s lasting impact” literary crime thriller. Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story, a curious thing, that one. Not fiction, but I’ve read Michael Herr’s extraordinary Dispatches. I also made it a couple hundred pages into Koko, one of several of Peter Straub’s horror novels and thrillers with some strong connection to the war (I was surprised to learn he wasn’t a veteran), which I abandoned for reasons I can no longer remember but when thinking back on what I did read, and how much it’s stuck with me, I can only assume they were really stupid and/or lazy reasons. But anyway, you get the idea. Not completely ignorant of this particular field of literature, but I’m no kind of expert.

I mentioned earlier that in the 80s and 90s, there seemed to be a kind of upsurge in the number of Vietnam vets who’d turned to writing crime fiction, as well as other kinds of thrillers. If not an actual upsurge in the numbers at the time, that’s when I started to notice, which is all that matters. James Crumley, one of the best to ever do it, and also who, yes I know, obviously started writing in the late 60s; the aforementioned Robert Stone, whose work obviously spread out to other arenas of literature, but who always seemed to be at least glancing in the direction of the crime thriller; Nelson DeMille, whose best-selling airport novel The Charm School is surprisingly cold-blooded; or, if the authors weren’t Vietnam vets themselves, then their series detective would be — see James Lee Burke and his character Dave Robicheaux3.

Which brings us, at long last, to Kent Anderson, and his novel Sympathy for the Devil. Originally published in 1987 (the same year Full Metal Jacket came out, a fact that I hope will eventually become interesting), reprinted in 1993 with a preface by Crumley, in which he expresses his friendship with and admiration for Kent Anderson, and his still hot anger about the war, and then again as a Bantam mass market paperback in 1999 (the year Eyes Wide Shut came out and Kubrick died, which is pure coincidence). That’s the one I have.

That’s a hell of a cover isn’t it? I’m just now realizing the pun in that last sentence, and I’m sorry. Not subtle, that cover, I think you’d agree, but why go subtle, and how do you manage it, with a Vietnam novel with that kind of title? I was assured by treasured subscriber Chas that Kent Anderson’s own favorite quote from a review for Sympathy for the Devil was “morally repugnant,” from the Kirkus review. I cannot confirm Anderson’s love for that quote, but I can confirm the quote’s existence (though if you haven’t read the novel, I wouldn’t read that review; in just a paragraph, it gives away a lot). Which is the whole thing with this book: though I generally disapprove of novel titles being simply lifted from song titles (from song lyrics is perfectly fine), you know, making that famous title my famous title, too — I disdain the practice, but what else to call this thing? That title is what the novel is implicitly pleading for.

And here, I hope, is where it gets interesting, because where anonymous Kirkus review book critic had a point is in acknowledging that Sympathy for the Devil is plotless. Where they miss the mark yet again is in acting as though this is a problem. “Plotless” seems to me to be an almost essential component of the combat novel. Our protagonist here is a young man named Hanson. When we meet him, he belongs to a Special Forces unit doing reconnaissance work. Early on, we pick up that his closest friends and allies in the whole of the American military are with him in this unit: a barely sane schemer named Silver, and an absolute psychopath named Quinn. One of Quinn’s big moments is when, close to the end of Part One of the novel, while he and Hanson are walking past a cartoonishly out of his element GI who has been gathering together a collection of pet ducklings, Quinn grabs one of the ducklings and bites its head off, to the horror of the GI, and the amusement of Hanson. Quinn considers it an example of his own genius.

So this is who we’re dealing with. Although one never occurs, on almost every page of the first and third sections of the novel — the second is different, and I’ll come back to that — it seems like another My Lai could break out at any second. You’ll read few war novels in your life more cynical than this one. It also manages to somehow be one of the most death-haunted, which is a competitive field, in how lightly it always seems to take the deaths of anyone or anything (not atypical for a war novel, animals fare poorly in Sympathy for the Devil, and if that’s a problem for you, as it is for me, buckle up). Or how unimportant. After chasing down and killing an enemy soldier who was fleeing a battle that enemy soldier’s side had lost:

Hanson put a fresh clip in his weapon, slung the SKS over his shoulder, and started to walk off. Then he stopped, turned, and looked in the dead man’s face. Already he was starting to look like all the others. His eyes were gluey and flat; the tiny wrinkles and lines that had made his face different from any other face were beginning to soften and fade. All you dead people, Hanson thought, look alike. Then he leaned over the body and said softly, “But now you don’t have to worry about being slow anymore, you don’t have to worry about dying.”

That’s the nice thing about war, he thought. If you win, the other guy’s dead. Period. And you’re alive. If you lose you’re dead, and your problems are over.

That passage comes fairly early in the novel. If you’re the kind of reader inclined to think that by encountering this attitude so soon, the rest of the novel must be about Hanson’s transformation from this callous, unfeeling beast into a human being again — if you, like Anthony Burgess, believe that in a novel the character must change — then have I got bad news for you. The bad news is for any of you who still have optimism in your heart, and would like it to be confirmed in fiction. But that doesn’t mean that in Sympathy for the Devil Hanson doesn’t change, because he does. We get that passage early because chronologically the novel is a little jumbled — though not confusingly so — but eventually you realize that, if anything, Sympathy for the Devil is about how Hanson got to that point, and stayed there.

Hanson joined the Special Forces because he was bored. Drafted into the Army, and after however many months in boot camp, he’s horrified to learn that after all that they’re going to be putting him behind a desk God knows where. Having none of that, and seeing that for an additional several months’ training he could be a combat-assured Special Forces soldier, he jumps on it. It is during that training where he first meets Quinn and Silver (Hanson and Quinn initially butt heads but get past it), and also has the meaninglessness of life and death and war and country drummed into him early. His first Commanding Officer, Lt. Andre, tears into one of the unit’s Vietnamese helpers for some mistake having to do with M-60s, really tore the man a new corn chute in front of everybody. Later, Andre explains to Hanson, and somewhat in the context of never being sure if the South Vietnamese men and women working for you are really on your side, or are spies for the Viet Cong, this having been the case, with fatal consequences, many times already:

“And you remember this morning, when I jacked him up about those M-60s? It wasn’t really his fault, but you’ve got to do that. Get too friendly with them and they lose respect for you. Can’t get ‘em to do shit.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I sound like some cigar-chewing asshole from Alabama. I used to be a good liberal. Got tear-gassed in a picket line once.”

He laughed and looked across at the smoldering patches of brush the tanks had shot up.

“Fire superiority and fear,” he said. “That’s how you enforce the law. That’s why those people back in the States push that peace and love so hard. It’s a real comfort to believe in the innate goodness of man. If you got that, hell, things are all right. You can sleep at night if you believe that.”

The man they’re referring to, Chung, is not disloyal. When Hanson asks Andre if he really thinks Chung could be on the side of the VC, Andre replies “No, not that. He hates the Communists. They killed his family.”

I should note here that Sympathy for the Devil begins with two quotes that Hanson has pinned above his bunk. One is by Anton Chekov, to the effect that in order to become desensitized to suffering, one must “cease to live.” The other is from General Vo Nguyen Giap, the Commander-in-Chief of the North Vietnamese Army, and it’s this: "Every day in the world a hundred thousand people die. A human life is meaningless.”

Those who choose to make a habit of commenting on the Vietnam War, it being so unpopular and such a catastrophe, have a tendency to either romanticize or completely disregard the North Vietnamese Army and the Communists role in it. While my own conservatism becomes ever more moderate, at least in comparison to the other kinds that are available, let’s not kid ourselves here. I’m reminded of a bit in The 50 Year Argument, Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s documentary about the New York Times, when one of the editors describes angry letters from readers canceling theirs subscriptions because they felt betrayed because after years of publishing op eds in protest against the Vietnam war, the Times were now publishing articles about atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. In Sympathy for the Devil, the only Vietnamese characters you learn anything about, or hear from, are people like Chung, or the Montagnards (shortened usually to Yards), natives indigenous to Vietnam, who also suffered much at the hands of NVA, and who, with characters like the somewhat mystical, and somewhat romantically wise Mr. Minh, accompany Hanson’s unit to do the same job, though in their case with a much stronger moral motivation, and essential good will towards their country, than guys like Hanson, and certainly Quinn, do.

Anderson writes about Mr. Minh and the other Montagnards with some warmth, and admiration. And he sees in Hanson something beyond a trigger happy psycho. Because Hanson was lost before he was ever drafted, no connection with his family, somewhat anti-social by nature, but frustrated by that nature, and the nature of the world:

But Hanson was looking for what he called clues, some pattern in the tidal pool that might explain something or part of something, might hint at what he should do, or forecast an event. The patterns and movement of larger masses — the ocean wind and the grass, the quality of the light, hawks and clouds — he called them omens. They were no more or less important than clues, but he watched them differently. Omens moved around and over him; they came and went suddenly, around and over him; they came and went suddenly, and he could only hope to realize their meaning before they were gone. They could not be studied like tidal pools. The world was alive with omens and clues, like dust sparkling in the sun. Hanson felt that if he could discern the pattern in time, he could leap into it and take his place in the world, like leaping into complex and manic dance.

And this is one of the main reasons Hanson wanted to join the Special Forces and see combat: it was his understanding, which turned out to be true, that it was in the shared experience of combat that true bonds between men were formed. There’s something naively moving about that idea, an emotion somewhat undercut by the scene where Hanson calls the woman in charge of filing and approving transfers, and asks that she change it so that he’s sent to train with Special Forces, not to a desk somewhere just because he can type. That scene, and that woman, are weird to the point of being eerie, and further strengthens the idea that, in war, only havoc and patternless violence exist, and that, as a Sergeant Major considers at one point, crazy people like Hanson survive wars because they realize that “none of it matters.” It’s no wonder, in any case, that when Hanson thinks of the word “home,” he’s thinking of Vietnam, not America. He returns to America at one point, where he has a hippie acid-freak wife, whom he treats quite badly; is driven slightly mad by the fact that he’s not dead, and has numerous awkward social interactions, such as one when he runs into a girl he knew in college; when she asks him what Vietnam was like, he says “No roads, no tourists. Well, occasionally you run across a few tourists but you get to kill them over there.” So he reenlists. There, Lt. Andre gives his life to protect Hanson just long enough for the new recruit to make it out alive. There, he learns what steps to take, and in what order to take them, when caring for your wounded buddy — to begin with, tell him it doesn’t look that bad. Because if you tell him how bad it looks, your buddy will die. When this part of Hanson’s training appears in the novel, I was surprised. The book had been so heartless up to that point, that to see these men being instructed on how to do something good took some getting used to. And to see that training be put into practice eventually, not just by Hanson but by Quinn, who I’m inclined to regard as the Devil of the title, not Hanson, changes the texture of the book, regardless of how callous the rest of it is.

One of the most curious aspects of Sympathy for the Devil is how self aware it appears to be. By that I mean, as a work of Vietnam War fiction, coming out in the midst of what in American culture was something of a Vietnam War boom. I pointed out that this novel came out the same year that Full Metal Jacket was released. This is good to know, because the two echo each other frequently, though not so loudly as to get too het up about it. There is a character in Sympathy for the Devil that somewhat resembles Vincent D’Onofrio’s character in the Kubrick film, but those characters travel different paths ultimately. And in any case I’m sure there’s some version, though hopefully less extreme, version of Pvt. Pyle in every war time boot camp. But then there’s that title, so explicitly evoking the Rolling Stones, and if there’s one Vietnam War movie cliche’ that could be counted on, it was the 60s/70s rock soundtrack. That’s all over Sympathy for the Devil, with references to the songs, and relevant lyrics, that the soldiers are listening to at any given time.

There are even references — indirect but impossible to miss — to Adrian Cronauer, the irreverent Armed Forces Radio deejay who was both real and played by Robin Williams in Barry Levinson’s tiresome Good Morning, Vietnam, which also came out in 1987, which means that those references to Cronauer must have come from Anderson’s personal experiences (in short, Anderson doesn’t seem to have liked him), rather than the culture in America in the 80s. So some of this is coincidence, or happenstance, or, really, probably has more to do with Roger Ebert’s rebuff to Gene Siskel’s critcism that Oliver Stone’s film Heaven and Earth (haven’t seen it) just recycled the same stuff from all the other Vietnam War films of the time, by asking “What do you want him to do, Gene, make up a new war?” Even as someone as decidedly not on board with Oliver Stone as I am, I did and do take Ebert’s point. Yet at the same time, reading Sympathy for the Devil, the novel feels like so much a part of its time, and that time isn’t the late 60s. When Hanson is back in America, he thinks:

And yet it was hard to believe that Vietnam really existed. It would be like going through the looking-glass into a familiar movie, to become actors, directors, prop men, in a long-running TV series in which you became the characters you had grown familiar with, comfortable with, over the years. Roles that had been waiting for you with lines you already knew.

Seeing the war as a TV show is a good way to underline how meaningless it was. I’m tempted to say there’s even a little bit — never mind how much of a both having and eating cake situation this would be — of a “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” about that attitude. But crucially, and as further illustration of the above, the novels ends in the only way it could: with stupid, meaningless, cataclysmic havoc.

II. Carnage Was a Serious Business

Author Read Before: Derek Robinson
Books Previously Read: Goshawk Squadron; Rotten With Honour; Kramer’s War; Piece of Cake; War Story; A Good Clean Fight; Damned Good Show; Hullo Russia, Goodbye England
Book Read: A Splendid Little War

The story of how I came to discover Derek Robinson is a boring one, so let me tell it to you. Back in roughly the same era as the one described above, 80s/90s, I was aware that several of my older brothers were watching — on our local PBS station which, back then, as all PBS stations nationwide did, aired a lot of British TV on Sunday nights, this being how Monty Python became popular in America, or at least in my house — a miniseries about British fighter pilots in World War II called Piece of Cake. An odd title, I think I probably thought at the time, but I’m also pretty sure I got the joke. Anyway, I did not watch the miniseries, but some time later, and not too much later, I was in a bookstore and I saw a copy of a book called Piece of Cake by Derek Robinson, and on the cover was a drawing of a plane and an old-timey pilot, and somewhere on the cover was a note about how this was the basis for the Masterpiece Theater show that I hadn’t watched. But I did read books, technically, and in any event it was undeniable that I bought them, so I bought it, and this one I did read. Also, many years later, though still a long time ago, I bought the miniseries on DVD. I still haven’t watched it. I think I might be too close to the source material.

Because that novel, all 600 or whatever pages of it, had an effect. I’d never before read a novel, about war, or one that belonged to either of the violent genres I preferred, horror and crime, where it got to a point where any character could be killed at any time. Over and over again while reading that novel, my eyes would lock, would stop reading the words, because I would be thinking, “Wait, did that guy just die?” It didn’t matter how important that character had been, or seemed like he would continue to be. If he was in the wrong place at the wrong time during a dogfight, he was gone. And graphically, gruesomely. I still remember when Flip Moran’s Spitfire is shot up from behind, and his guts exploded across the plane’s controls. And what happened to that one Wing Commander, who I thought we’d be following through to the end. And all the other names, whether they made it to the end or not: Pip Patterson, Moggy Cattermole, Fanny Barton, Flash Gordon, Mother Cox. The Canadian, Christopher Hart III, aka CH3. It’s disorienting to be reading a book, especially a long-ish book, and begin to realize that there’s no one you can comfortably hold on to. The book begins with an RAF officer tripping, falling through the hatch of a plane (a plane on the ground), breaking his neck, and dying. So he’s not our main guy. And before the war really gets going, another pilot, during training, crashes into a river trying to do a trick, trying to be a daredevil. Accidents, freak and just stupid, kill as many of Derek Robinson’s characters as German or Russian bullets do. This feeling of disorientation and mortal dread would be a constant, or nearly, as I continued to read Robinson. And you’ll have noticed the gallow’s irony of the titles: Piece of Cake, A Good Clean Fight, Damned Good Show, today’s A Splendid Little War. These are of course intentionally ironic, but there’s a side of them that is sincere: like Anderson’s Hanson, many, if not most, of Robinson’s pilots feel more comfortable at war than at peace.

And I don’t want to make the fact of sudden death being a prominent feature in Robinson’s war fiction to sound like some kind of exploitational distancing, some kind of sleazy attraction for a reader just looking for some gore. I’ve never seen a war movie that made me feel as off balance as Robinson’s novels do. It becomes a human and humane experience — facing even a fictional representation of the truth of war, facing the understanding that at any given second a bullet fired by someone whose name you don’t know and whose face you can’t see will take you out, will end it right here and now, strengthens the inherent understanding I believe even non-vets have that if anything, the reality must have been worse. There’s a death in Damned Good Show that might have literally made me do a double take. By then you’d think I’d have been used to it, but no, which makes this — I guess you could call it a theme, but I’d rather not, myself — facet of Robinson’s war fiction also interesting on a technical level. How does he do it? If you read Robinson regularly, how can he still shock in this way? And more interestingly to me, which I don’t think I’d thought about before reading A Splendid Little War — because sudden death disrupts everything more than once in this novel too — is the question of how he goes about it. I mean, on a planning level. Part of me thinks he just plays it by ear. If he’s put a character in a situation where they’d probably die, then they die. Such is fate.

Like Sympathy for the Devil (and these books line up in a number of surprising ways, not just the obvious ones), A Splendid Little War is essentially plotless. It’s 1918, World War I had recently ended, the Royal Flying Corps has renamed itself the Royal Air Force, and the Bolshevik revolution is in full swing in Russia. Prime Minister Lloyd George and Minister of War Winston Churchill disliked the Communists (who doesn’t?) and wished, on a strictly advisory level (wink, wink) to assist the White Russian forces, led, Robinson assures us, incompetently by a real historical figures Lieutenant General Anton Denikin and Admiral Alexander Kolchak, against the Red Army. So some RAF squadrons — including Merlin Squadron, the one on which we will be focused — are sent to Russia to train and accompany Russian soldiers and pilots in their quest to take back Moscow. Communication is terrible and generally what is being communicated by Denikin’s people to the British forces is complete bullshit, painting a rosier picture of White Russian progress in the war than, it slowly becomes clear, is actually the case.

The most important pilots in Merlin Squadron, for a while anyway, are Wing Commander Griffin, a hard-nosed man who is generally disgusted with the flippant attitudes of the men in his squadron, a man who is later described as being mad “that Russia wasn’t Germany,” because during the war, the real war, not whatever this is, there was a mission to be believed in. There’s the adjutant, Captain Brazier (adjutants are a key figure in Robinson’s work). Then there’s James Hackett, next after Griffin in charge of the men flying Sopwith Camels, an Australian pilot shot through with cynicism, and an awareness that in this particular case British lives might be lost for no good reason, and therefore something of a foil for Griffin; and Tusker Oliphant, the man after Griffin in charge of the DH9 bombers. Which is a lot of firepower if you’re only there to advise. This squadron, over the course of the novel, will attack and be attacked, will train surly, driftless, disloyal Russians, and, for logistical reasons, travel by train from one jerry-rigged air field to another, as inaccurate communications regarding Denikin’s advancements continue to pour in.

The pilots who take part in this do so on a volunteer basis:

Two-thirds of the squadron volunteered for South Russia. “I’ll take half,” Griffin told the C.O. “You can keep the drunks and the sex maniacs and the ones who like pulling wings off butterflies.”

Those last three all ended up in Vietnam with Kent Anderson. But there’s an irony here, too, because, for one thing, although it’s not a really important factor, there’s plenty of drinking among the volunteers Griffin does accept, and while Merlin Squadron appears free of sex maniacs, pulling the wings off butterflies seems par for the course. Because in its way, A Splendid Little War is every bit as callous as Sympathy for the Devil. Not least because, like all of Robinson’s novels that I’ve read (except potentially Hullo Russia, Goodbye England, his least violent and the most peaceful of his novels, if you don’t count the somewhat dour air of domestic strife within it) it is essentially a comic novel. And it’s a very British kind of humor, dry, expressionless, sharp. A Splendid Little War is indeed so British that it contains the line “‘Do shut up, Fitzroy,’ said Sir Franklyn.”

From the start, pilots are dying, in one way or another — the first to go crashes on page one (this man is brought up again, a couple hundred pages later, in a heartbreakingly dismissive “remember that idiot?” context, by one of his former colleagues), the next, Bellamy, some forty or so pages later, of typhus. Bellamy might have been taken care of, but he thought he just had the shits, essentially, and if he refused to fly because of that, then he would appear to the others as someone making up excuses to get out of the dangerous missions, and Bellamy had seen what that kind of behavior did to other men. So he left his typhus untreated, and died. Anderson depicts a similar kind of clash, during the many mentions in his novel of the animosity Special Forces feel towards the regular Army, whom they regard as pussies. As these bodies pile up, though, so do the funerals. The least likable character in the novel is the Radio and Supplies Officer, a slimy, scheming man named Lacey, on whom it eventually falls to write and give poetic readings over these graves. Lacey plagiarizes from the great English poets shamelessly, and everybody knows it, RAF pilots at the time being fairly well-educated. When a pilot named Stevens questions him about it, and points out the passages he recognized, Lacey attempts to justify:

“Your first line: ‘Calm is the morn…’ Tennyson, isn’t it? His In Memoriam. But…'“ Stevens hunched his shoulders. “Not entirely Tennyson.”

“I changed the ending. ‘Without a sound’ is what Tennyson wrote but it sounded flat, so I made it ‘after direst duress,’ which also rhymes with line three, ‘one Ray the less.’ The chaps like poetry that rhymes.”

“So, not content with pinching bits of Tennyson, you mess them about too.”

“Enhance, Stevens. I enhance them.”

“Who else did you rape?”

“Oh…Shelley. Line two: ‘For the sword out wears its sheath.’ I wasn’t convinced by sheath.’ Not a very manly word. I changed it to clasp,’ which rhymes with ‘blast’ in line four.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Near enough…”

Lacey is the Quinn of A Splendid Little War, except he never kills anybody, which is one of the reasons everyone else in Merlin Squadron so despises him. But you see the humor, and the tone of it. Much of A Splendid Little War, and Robinson’s fiction in general, is like this. A lot of banter among men of a similarly clever and over-it-all bent (with the exception of one pilot named Jessop, who seems like a really humorless pill).

However, it’s not all laughing in the face of death. Because of course, Robinson’s characters only pretend that none of it matters, that it’s all meaningless, and then only outwardly, to the public, if you will. At the funeral of — and I’ll just have to go ahead and spoil this, because it hangs over the rest of the novel — Wing Commander Griffin, who went out in a fireball resulting in a recklessly, stupidly daredevil move (though one that amounted to a self sacrifice) in the air — Hackett, the man angry about the whole set-up is the new Wing Commander, and Robinson describes him not paying any attention to Lacey’s nonsense eulogy:

Hackett heard none of it. He was thinking of the other funerals he had attended, a few in England, where pilot training was famously deadly, the rest in France Too many to remember. Long ago he had learned the trick or coping with funerals: you told yourself that the coffin was empty, the chap had been posted, so forget him. Often it really was half empty, with sandbags to make up the weight. But this show was somehow different. He hadn’t come to Russia for this. Hed come to fly, to put on a show for the Russkis, to bag a few Bolos [Bolsheviks - Ed.]. Not to put men he knew in holes at ten on a foggy morning.

After Griffin’s death, there is a movement among the officers who have gone up a notch in responsibility following him getting posted, to turn this stupid mission into something that matters, that means something, that will make Russia like Germany, and that will, and Robinson is fairly blunt about this, selfishly bring them personal glory. That frustration of Griffin’s, that Russia is no Germany, will come to make a little more sense to the men who once scoffed at it, and hated Griffin for feeling it.

Then of course, there are the Russians. Most of the Russians in A Splendid Little War are like the Vietnamese characters in Sympathy for the Devil — very few are heard from. One who is, and whose importance to the novel becomes more and more important as it goes on, is Count Pierre Borodin, Merlin Squadron’s Russian Liaison, who will go on to become also a pilot and soldier, one of nurse Susan Perry’s romantic interests, kind of (Perry is a strong character, and the only woman who isn’t some weird Russian peasant; also, Robinson is reliably both free-wheeling and pessimistic when it comes to war-time romance in his novels). For reasons unclear to me, Robinson has made this fictional character a distant relative of a real Russian composer, Alexander Borodin. It’s inexplicable largely because he does nothing with it, other than, I suppose, firmly placing Pierre among the White Russian nobility. But Pierre is no morally thoughtless privileged layabout. He considers the Bolsheviks to be heartless, cruel butchers, and the nobility to be stupid and greedy. At one point, he expresses his desire that neither side win the war. Also dragged into this Nestor Makhno, a real Russian anarchist at the time, who Robinson describes in vile terms — the commander of an army made up of the rampant slaughterers of the innocent, killing half a town at one point as a way, as one character describes it, “of practicing their anarchy.”

The fact that both of today’s novels revolve around Western military actions against Communist forces is not lost on me. And when dealing directly with the political basis for both of these novels, it’s natural to assume that the person writing the piece you’re reading will bring into whatever analysis he or she is capable of providing any of the political biases they may have churning inside them, and don’t you worry, I’m about to. Or rather, I’m not, because I imagine you can easily assume, based on what I’ve written earlier in this piece, what my political bias would be. But there’s no reason to get into that, because for me that’s no longer the point. As I hope I’ve illustrated, both Anderson and Robinson, in their novels, both of which feature absolutely appalling atrocities, disgusting acts of the most heartless cruelty (some of it mentioned only in passing, as second-hand information, which doesn’t make it seem any better) — the kind of cruelty that can make you catch your breath, the kind of cruelty that seems so in fashion these days — have created images of almost towering inhumanity, so overwhelming in their awful implications that fresh humanity comes out of it, somehow. A belief that we can’t possibly keep going like this.

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This post is the latest in what will turn out to be a very long series of essays about my year of reading, from 2025 to apparently the end of time. For more details about this project, please read this post.

I. No Black Magic, Only Cheap Tricks

Film: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Director/Writer: Terry Gilliam/Gilliam & Charles McKeown
Have I Seen Anything Else by This Director and/or Writer: Yes. Gilliam: all the Python stuff including Monty Python and the Holy Grail; The Crimson Permanent Insurance; Jabberwocky; Time Bandits; Brazil; The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; The Fisher King; 12 Monkeys; Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas; The Brothers Grimm; Tideland; The Zero Theorem; The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. McKeown: Brazil (with Gilliam and Tom Stoppard); The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (with Gilliam); Ripley’s Game

While it’s accurate to say that I had not seen this film until just recently, when I first bought the DVD I did give it a spin and was for some reason completely enervated by it within about 15 or 20 minutes, and never went back to it. However, I should mention, and I don’t know if I’ve said it in one of these posts specifically, but I know I’ve said it online, that by and large I think nostalgia is a poison, and that the tendency to cling to that culture you embraced as a child well into adulthood is making everybody stupider by the day, there are still some things that one liked as a child that as an adult whose curiosity has hopefully led them into all sorts of interesting corners of art from all over the world, still hold up to these more sophisticated tastes as being good, and one of those for me, or rather twelve of them are, for me, the films of Terry Gilliam.

The best of them have really not dulled over the years. Watching Brazil, which is still something I do on a pretty regular basis, is never less than an inspiring and invigorating experience, however ironic those feelings may be, given the film itself. I can still marvel at what he was able to pull off under extraordinary constraints with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the complete appropriateness that in Gilliam’s early years, he was associated with the film production company co-founded by George Harrison, Handmade Films. Because nobody’s movies, working at the level Gilliam was when he first broke out (almost to his detriment, as it turns out) looked more enticingly and enchantingly handmade than Gilliam’s. But partly because of this, I can imagine what some of my misgivings about the film may have been when I tried to watch it in 2009, or whenever it was.

Part of it, I think, is that what was so familiar about the film early on, so Gilliam-esque about it — and by that I mean the Renaissance-era style sideshow/traveling theater and magic show set, plying its wares, completely anachronistically, in the modern world as we know it, this sort of thing by now was feeling a little bit old hat from Gilliam. Add that to the fact that when the more appealing grunge of that traveling theater gives way to a more effects-heavy fantasyland not too far into the film, it looks anything but handmade. For what I’m sure are entirely budgetary reasons, and for the first time it’s really been noticeable, at least to me, Gilliam begins to lean on computer effects. And not only is that sad, just on its face, but the effects are not very good. The colors are also very bright, though this very vividness will wind up being somewhat ironic. But for while, watching the film, and seeing the different ways Gilliam has employed fantasy landscapes throughout his career, whether those landscapes can be taken literally within the confines in the story (Baron Munchausen), are part of a delusion (The Fisher King, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas), some mixture of the two (Time Bandits, and, let’s face it, Munchausen), or some encroachment of an unwanted future onto an as of yet not completely spoiled present (12 Monkeys), those landscapes always have a look of having existed, in whatever form they exist, for a very long time, and have been kicked around a bit. Too often, when the imaginarium of the title is breached, the effect is one of someone having just called you over to the computer to look at this thing they just made.

However. Another problem I probably had was the similarity of the too-whimsical title The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus to that of another movie from around the same time, Mister Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, a film the existence of which I dreaded then, and still dread to this day. I didn’t want an aging Terry Gilliam to become more whimsical. I wanted him to become more bilious. And one reason I was excited to finally watch this movie is that history has proved that I needn’t have worried. While by no means his best film, 2013’s The Zero Theorem imagined a suitably grotesque future, and, better still, much better still, a film I would count as one of Gilliam’s masterpieces, the long-embattled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which gestated and changed over many false starts over a good decade-plus, against Gilliam’s will, but the version he made is the version he made, and I saw it in the theater in 2018. I loved it. And that film now feels like Gilliam reacting, with some bile, even some spite, to the work he’d done in the past. It’s Gilliam’s Unforgiven.

By now, it’s probably not a great idea to get too deeply into the plot, but to some point I’ll have to in order to explain what a strange experience this film is, if you haven’t seen it. The aforementioned troupe of players is made up of Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), his daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), a young performer and carnival barker named Anton (Andrew Garfield, who I had no idea was in this), and a midget and probably all-around utility player Percy (Verne Troyer). Essentially the deal is this: Parnassus is immortal, having gambled and won a kind of monkey’s paw wager with the devil, known here as Mr. Nick (Tom Waits, who’s in it a lot more than I expected, to the film’s benefit). Well into his years as an immortal walking the earth, one day Parnassus meets the woman who will turn out to be Valentina’s mother. Parnassus makes another deal with Mr. Nick: if Mr. Nick will restore Parnassus’s youth, while maintaining his immortality, so that he can better woo this woman he loves, then the soul of any child born from that union will belong to Mr. Nick on the child’s 16th birthday. A deal hastily made, as Parnassus reflects at the film’s beginning, which is three days from Valentina’s 16th birthday. But ever the gambler, Mr. Nick has a new proposition: whichever one of them can win five souls between now and Valentina’s birthday will get her soul. What Mr. Nick winning souls means should be self evident; what it means for Doctor Parnassus to win souls is never quite clear, except that when it happens later on, it’s clearly a positive experience for the people whose souls he’s won.

By this time, a new member has joined the troupe. One night, they find a man hanging by his neck, from a rope, tied to the underside of a bridge. They take the man down, and find that he’s managed to survive, via some gadget-y conceit which don’t you worry, will be called back to. Anyway, this man is Tony Shepard, played, mostly, by Heath Ledger. As I’m sure most of you know, this film’s production, one of many productions in Gilliam’s career to face near-project ending hardships, was almost upended completely when Ledger died suddenly. I don’t mean to be flippant about the young man’s death, but in terms of the movie, there was now a serious problem to be solved. In the film, the imaginarium is on some level the inside of Parnassus’s brain. And when visitors cross over the mirror-y facade the troupe set up, they enter a bright fantasy land that conforms to their wishes for happiness. It’s best, we’re told, to not bring in more than one person at a time, because the conflicting wishes can cause havoc. But when Tony, who claims to have amnesia and to not know how he ended up hanging from the bridge (though he does know about the gadget that saved his life, hmmm, curious) joins the show, he becomes the one to, well, shepherd customers across, into the imaginarium (this is also much to the consternation of Anton, who is jealous of Tony’s new higher status in the show, and of how Valentina, with whom Anton is in love, seems to dote on him), the women he brings begin to see Tony as appearing as their greatest desire, which the script was reworked to mean not Heath Ledger, but first Johnny Depp, then Jude Law, and finally Colin Farrell. Farrell is in the film the most of those three, second only in screentime to Ledger, and in fact is in the role of Tony when Tony’s part in the film comes to an end — Depp and Law feel like little more than cameos. And Law is further hampered by the fact that his sequence calls for the most unfunny slaptstick muggery of any of the Tonys. And while actors mugging is not unheard of in Gilliam’s filmography, Law is a bit egregious. On the other hand, Ledger plays the humor pretty broadly, and he’s quite good. He’s a funny and charming rogue!

Now, I don’t want to spoil anything here. But where the film goes with Tony really took me by surprise. The film darkens to such a pitch, in a number of ways (there are two deaths that I did not see coming), that even when Gilliam can’t help himself by unspooling a string of fairy book platitudes about storytelling, and how storytelling will save us from fascism, and all that other kind of hoo-haw, the cynical, sick of this shit misanthrope side to the filmmaker, which has always been there in Gilliam but which finally really flowered in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, began its earliest bloom here (well, in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas… and Python), in the last whirlwind half hour or so of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, when whimsy gets kicked in the nuts.

II. Affection for the Deceased

Film: Love Me Deadly
Director/Writer: Jacques Lecerte
Have I Seen Anything Else by This Director and/or Writer: Nope, he didn’t make any others.

Listen, I didn’t really know what to expect with this movie. Although I suppose at the time I purchased it — probably in a Kino online sale, although the disc is not Kino, but Code Red (now defunct, I believe, correct me if I’m wrong), but I believe Code Red sold through Kino’s website, and was part of there sales, at one time — I suppose at the time I purchased it, I say again, I must have had some expectations. This cover suggests certain things:

and I would never deny that I’m up for a sleazy good time now and again, plus this is clearly going to be some low budget genre thing, and who doesn’t love those? And if it turns out to be great, good! If it turns out to be bugfuck insane, well, that’s what it turned out to be. I don’t know, I thought maybe it would be about someone murdering strippers in L.A., and only a fan of strippers could stop him.

But no. After a long opening credits sequence featuring a man playing in a park with his young daughter, we jump ahead to we will correctly assume is that little girl as an adult. Lindsey Finch (Mary Wilcox) is dressed in black, with a veil, and is attending a funeral, or at least a viewing. She makes a point of being the last person to leave the church. She goes up to the coffin, leans in, and doesn’t so much kiss the lips of the male corpse within, as rub her mouth on his beard, though I believe “kissing” was the idea you were supposed to take away from it.

Several things happen very quickly at this point. First, Lindsey throws a party. At the party is a blonde hunk of a fellow named Wade (Christopher Stone), with whom Lindsey apparently has some sort of past. She invited him to her party after all. At one point, Wade follows her upstairs, makes his move on her, is rebuffed, and then tries to rape her, backing off only when she scratches his face. “Fine, then!” seems to be his attitude after that, and he storms out.

Then we meet a man who will turn out to be Fred McSweeney (Timothy Scott), a man we will come to learn runs the funeral home that Lindsey, we will come to learn, frequents. McSweeney is out tooling around town looking for a male prostitute. He finds one, and for an extra $10 over the asking price, this young man agrees to complete the transaction at McSweeney’s place of business (he claims he’s a veterinarian) because they can’t go back to his home, as he’s married. Anyway, in the mortuary, long story short, McSweeney kills the young man (a process that involves cutting up his neck, leading to the victim shouting “My blood! My blood!”, a sort of audio companion to the already rather straightforward visual component). The next time we see Lindsey, she’s at another funeral, this one being overseen by McSweeney again, who by now has started to notice her. He confronts her outside later, and announces that he has come to the realization — jumped to the conclusion, more like it, based on his thin evidence, even though he turns out to be right — that she’s a necrophiliac. Well, so is he! A match made in heaven, you might think, but you’d be surprised how many complications can arise.

For one thing, Lindsey is understandably and and rightly ashamed of her desires. McSweeney isn’t, and invites her to a kind of necrophiliac orgy. He softens the subject by saying things like “You’re not alone. In our group we have several members who... who participate” which only makes it sound worse.

Anyway, it’s the damnedest thing, this movie. In the film, Lindsey continuously follows McSweeney’s lead (he doesn’t let her in on the murders, which are on occasion carried out by his minions who work for him at the mortuary, and a real Bloodsucking Freaks-ian crew they are), only to recoil from it. She retreats to the arms of Wade, the guy who tried to rape her, and the idea that A) all is forgiven, and B) perhaps he can be her savior lands on the viewer, in 2026, a little off-balance, let us say. But on the other hand, already introduced into the mix is an artist named Alex Martin (Lyle Waggoner), a much nicer guy who she met at Alex’s brother’s funeral. The two seemed to hit it off, but then Alex drops out of the film for a long time. That is until Lindsey and Wade start dating, which results in one of the longest “we’re on a date!” montages I’ve ever seen, during which, by the way, the very controlling Wade sort of drifts into the background as Alex reappears, and is favored by Lindsey. Suddenly Wade, who doesn’t like Lindsey doing anything without him, seems okay with it all. One reason Wade is such an odd figure is that by the time he’s written out of the picture, you start to realize how much trouble writer/director Jacques Lacerte went to in order to devise some way to satisfyingly conclude this subplot he’d inadvertently created for himself by accidentally writing Wade into many scenes long after his usefulness was over, which was after he tried to rape Lindsey.

This ties into the other really weird thing about this movie. Wade’s fate is tied into murderous necrophiliac cult plotline, as I bet you’d already guessed, but so much of the movie is about the difficult relationship that Lindsey and Alex, now married, have found themselves in. Sexually they are completely incompatible (meanwhile one reason Lindsey might drift towards Alex over, say, a corpse, is because he reminds her of her father, which also suggests an incestuous side to all this), and long stretches of the film are about that. It’s almost as if Lacerte wanted to make a movie about what a rough gig he imagined being a necrophiliac must be, but figured he’d need to juice that premise a little bit with some thriller tropes, to drum up interest. But it is through those thriller tropes that Lacerte creates some truly memorable images, and the whole thing is so fucking cock-eyed, with a climactic rush of dot-connecting flashbacks that explains less than it thinks it does. The father obsession I get, they explain that, but how and why it took on a sexual component never is. Not that I need it explained, who could it explain something like that to anyone’s satisfaction, but the film seems to think everything is cleared up by the end. But with a film like this, I would almost be disappointed if I thought the filmmaker had better control of what he was doing than this.

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This post is part of a series that is separate from, but related to, and will probably at certain points merge with, my Reading Project. For my details of what I guess is my Film Project, click here.

I’m getting a little tired of linking to old announcements all the time, but I suppose I have only myself to blame, and I’d better get used to it. So with the first post of my Gaddis/Gardner/Gass series done and dusted, it’s time for the first of my free, randomly-themed posts (please see that second link for more). Now, as for the books. Some of you may remember that the second book of my last Book Project post, the one about Gaddis, was The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg, which I picked because cherished subscriber Chas mentioned it in passing in one of the comments sections here. Well, the theme of this round of novels is “combat,” and the reason I landed on that is because a social media pal of mine, Dr. Whom, keeps pushing me to read Kent Anderson. Since I didn’t read him when I was on his shelf, now seems like a convenient time to fit in this, his, and our, first novel:

Now here’s the thing. Some of you might know that all three of Anderson’s novels feature the same protagonist, and two of them are detective novels. Yes, well, I’ve already covered the Raymond Chandler or Philip Marlowe Loophole (I can’t remember what I called it), which is a way for me to get around my self-imposed rule to not read books that are part of a series, because detective novel series often do not require familiarity with the books that came before, or not enough to matter really, so any one of them can be read at any time. Pretty much. Well, I don’t know if that loophole would apply to the two novels that are detective novels — the second could be a direct sequel to the first — but just in case it would not apply, I have this new loophole, which is that Sympathy for the Devil is a combat novel set in the Vietnam War. So it’s connected, but apart, from the other two. Anyway, that’s my excuse, because I do want to read this book.

And because there’s no reason not to try to employ some kind of theme here, I’ve decided to use this as an excuse to read one of the novels I haven’t yet gotten around to by one of my favorite writers, this book by this guy:

If time were less of a factor, and I was just going to read a Derek Robinson novel for no reason other than my own enjoyment, I would pick Hornet’s Sting, his last World War I fighter pilot novel, but that one’s about 500 pages, Sympathy for the Devil is already about 400 pages, and I need to keep these things as uncomplicated as possible. More on my feelings about Robinson when the post is all about him. Or the second half of it is, anyway.

As for the movies:

The only Gilliam I haven’t seen. Not sure why. It’s a shame I’ve already seen The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, because I think that film stands with his best, and I would like to make my case for it. Which I guess I’m always free to do, but why add to my worries? Anyway, looking forward to this one.

And, picking up on the thread of not liking The Psychopath so much as I liked the idea of watching movies like The Psychopath, I’m going with this:

I have no memory of buying this movie, although some clues as to why I bought it do present themselves. I just hope it’s as crazy as it sounds.

By the way, don’t be surprised if the movie post goes up before the book post. As I earlier explained (it’s one of the links in this post, I can’t remember which one, probably the second one), if the reading is moving slowly, posting about the films first can keep the pace of my posting (forgive the alliteration) more or less on track. And in addition to the Anderson book being longish, I’m trying to read the Gardner novel, which is long, alongside everything else, just to get some momentum going with it.

So anyway, that’s it. See you as soon as I can!

Oh, PS - Check out my review of Jeffrey Ford’s The Twilight Pariah in the new issue of Mythaxis!

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This post is the latest in what will turn out to be a very long series of essays about my year of reading, from 2025 to apparently the end of time. For more details about this project, please read this post.

Film: The Psychopath
Director/Writer: Freddie Francis/Robert Bloch
Have I Seen Anything Else by This Director and/or Writer: Yes. Francis: Paranoiac; The Skull; The Deadly Bees; Torture Garden; Tales from the Crypt; The Doctor and the Devils. Bloch: Strait-Jacket; The Skull; The Deadly Bees; Torture Garden; The House that Dripped Blood; Asylum. Plus a bunch of his novels and short stories.

So what you’re telling me is that Robert Bloch, author of the original novel Psycho, later in 1966 wrote a movie called The Psychopath that feature a depraved and murderous mother-son relationship? Yes I am indeed telling you that, but this one is set in England.

It’s an Amicus film, is The Psychopath, Amicus being known to me as the cheap but still often pretty good knockoff of Hammer Films. And every bit as British! Looking at the above overlap, if you know some of those films, may suggest to you that director Freddie Francis and screenwriter Robert Bloch weren’t necessarily an ideal pairing. The Deadly Bees for goodness sake? And with how much this film does wind up being a retread of Psycho, it can’t possibly be that good can it? Well, maybe not that good, but good at all? Yes. It is!

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Author Read Before: William Gaddis
Book Previously Read: A Frolic of His Own
Book Read: Carpenter’s Gothic

One may claim one writes for oneself, but it’s a paltry claim. One more word on all this, I’m obviously convinced that my scholarly career has made me a better writer that I would have been without it, but I’m no longer concerned — as I was in my tempestuous, ego-maddened youth — with proving myself the greatest writer of all time. What I notice now is that all around me there are first-rate writers, and in nearly every case it seems to me that what makes them first-rate is their similar involvement in teaching and scholarship. There are exceptions — maybe William Gaddis, I’m not sure. (A brilliant writer, though I disapprove of him.)

- John Gardner, The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 73

That parenthetical is very John Gardner, the writer, of the three to be focused on in this mini-project, with whom I’ve had the longest history. But the man, in his abbreviated life, and despite the compassion he frequently displayed in his own fiction, could be quite rudely dismissive, on exasperatingly moralistic grounds — the most famous of his many books of literary criticism and artistic philosophy is called On Moral Fiction, after all — about other American capital “L” Literary Writers of his era, such as E. L. Doctorow (let’s just say my experience with Doctorow’s masterpiece Ragtime does not align with Gardner’s) or Updike, or William Gaddis. What can it mean to find Gaddis a brilliant writer, but to disapprove of him? On what grounds? Not personal, so far as I’ve been able to tell. I don’t know if the two men ever even met.

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Of the three writers to be discussed in this little project, among William Gaddis, John Gardner, and William H. Gass, Gaddis is the writer I have the least experience with. But alphabetically, he comes first, so I’m forced to dive right in. And I’ve started it, but that’s obviously all I’m going to say for now.

As for book number two:

Now, this book came up in the comments section of my last post. My valued subscriber Chas brought it up, because of something I brought up in the post itself. Anyway, as I was casting about for what the second book should be for the next post, who to pair with Gaddis, and knowing that my most likely candidates would come from one of three sets of bookshelves: my Favorite Writers shelves, my Valancourt Books shelves, or my NYRB Classics shelves. This seemed like a sign, because I’ve been putting this one off for a long time, it’s pre-20th century, of which I do not read enough, and in other ways it sounds right up my alley.

Also, regarding the second books in these Gaddis/Gardner/Gass posts. They don’t have to come from any of the shelves listed above, but if they come from any of my gen pop shelves, then they will be pulled from shelves/letters I’ve already covered. I won’t jump ahead for any of these. I hope that’s clear, and if it’s not, I hope you don’t care one way or the other.

Now to the films! As usual, no rhyme, nor reason, just intentionally shot bag of very mixed tones and genres and whatnots. So, to that end, we have, in alphabetical order, and with no further comment:

and…

I don’t expect to find too much common ground between these films, but I guess we’ll see. Anyway, catch you all next time. As announced in the piece in the first link in the first paragraph of this post, some of these posts my take a little longer than usual, but I’m going to do everything I can to minimize that. Talk to you hopefully soon-ish!

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This post is the latest in what will turn out to be a very long series of essays about my year of reading, from 2025 to apparently the end of time. For more details about this project, please read this post.

Film: Talk to Her
Director/Writer: Pedro Almodovar
Have I Seen Anything Else by This Director and/or Writer: Yes, but only Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Skin I Live In

In the realm of contemporary international cinema, Pedro Almodovar is one of my bigger blind spots. I don’t really know why. There are several of his films I’d like to see, and as I believe I’m about to prove I own some of his movies. But the man is fairly prolific, and before yesterday I’d only seen two of his films, and one of those two, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, which I saw back when it was still considered scandalous, has pretty much completely faded from my memory (well, I remember parts of it). The Skin I Live In, which immediately sounded interesting to me when it came out, but which I only saw fairly recently, by which I mean within the last ten years or so, anyway, I remember that one much better, and I quite liked it. And Talk to Her has always been mentioned as a particular strong film, so here we are.

And it’s a very interesting film, with which I’ve been struggling. It’s a film about two men, and the two women in comas who they care for, and about. The two men don’t officially meet until some ways into the picture, but Talk to Her opens with them, complete strangers, sitting next to each other at a modern dance performance. One of the men, Marco (Darío Grandinetti) is so moved by the performance that he begins weeping. The other man, Benigno (Javier Cámara) notices this, and the next time he’s at his job, caring for a beautiful coma patient named Alicia (Leonor Watling), he tells her about it. Against all medical evidence, Benigno believes she can hear and understand him.

When the two men meet again, it’s when Marco comes to visit the woman he loves, a famous and controversial female matador named Lydia González (Rosario Flores), whose recent and uncharacteristically frozen performance in the ring left her gored and comatose in the same clinic where Benigno cares for Alicia. Because of their shared experience, caring for beautiful coma patients, the two men become friends, and the men share their pasts. Marco is a journalist who was working on a story about Lydia González’s fraught and very public personal life, when the two of them fell in love. Now that she’s in a coma, however, and much to his shame, he feels himself withdrawing from her. Benigno tells him he has to talk to her, that she can understand, or at least he believes she can, because how can we really know so why not believe? And that is important that she knows he’s there and still cares for her. This is why he talks to Alicia, of course, a young woman he knew briefly before her accident.

Benigno lived across the street from the dance studio where Alicia attended class, taught by a very odd Geraldine Chaplin. He became enchanted with her. The two meet and hang out and get along, but Benigno is a bit obsessive, and when he learns that Alicia’s father is a psychiatrist who works out of his home — which means Alicia is also there — Benigno sets up an appointment with the man, where, for his own reasons, he chooses to mislead his therapist by making him believe that he, Benigno, is gay. Alicia, seeing Benigno at her father’s office, becomes not unjustifiably put off a little bit, and the two stop hanging out. The next time he sees her is when she arrives, comatose, at his clinic, where her father (Roberto Álvarez) pays extra to have Benigno and another nurse (Mariola Fuentes) to care for Alicia exclusively.

Okay, so here’s where it gets interesting. I knew I was at least in intriguing hands when Talk to Her opens, after the credits have run, with a curtain rising. In the narrative, the curtain is rising on the dance performance that Marco and Benigno both attend, but you know, and I know, and Almodovar certainly knows, that the curtain is also raising on the performance that is Talk to Her. Almodovar is a somewhat less depressed version of Todd Haynes, in that both directors embrace the concept, form, and style of melodrama, not ironically, but with the full understanding of the artistic possibilities inherent within it. Those possibilities are both of a stylistic and emotional nature. And since a certain overheatedness is part of the nature of melodrama, to create melodrama intentionally, as Almodovar is doing here, is to be somewhat more forthright about the performative nature of art.

As far as the emotional element goes, you have to be built to go along with that level of stylization to feel it, but Almodovar even comments on that in interesting ways. This is where Marco comes in. The guy cries at anything. He’d cry at a bean commercial, if it was a sad bean commercial. But I’m not kidding, this is almost his defining characteristic. Lydia notices this about him, and is drawn to it, when she witnesses him tearing up at an outdoor concert they’re both attending, with a string quartet supporting a solo (and, on my old-ass DVD, curiously unsubtitled) singer. In these sometimes bold, sometimes rather quiet ways, Almodovar is wondering at human beings’ capacity to be moved by any art, which is by definition artificial. And if it is, by definition, artificial, why not embrace that?

But late in the film, a twist is revealed (I will pause here to note that I saw this coming the moment the first clue was dropped, and I am not normally good at predicting this sort of thing), and, predictable or not, it’s a barn-burner. In that it sets the whole movie ablaze.

I’m now going to make a comparison that anyone familiar with both Talk to Her and the thing I’m about to compare it to might think is a little crazy, but bear with me. Some years ago, and I can’t seem to stop bringing this up, I gave in to my naturally morbid curiosity and read Samuel R. Delany’s justly infamous psycho-porn novel Hogg. Without going into detail, that novel is 200+ pages of non-stop sadistic depravity. And I’m not talking about consenting adults doing things I personally think are disgusting (well, I guess there is some of that, to be fair), but I mean rape and murder, all from the point of view of the rapists and murderers, in particular the titular Hogg and the young man he has kidnapped and abused into accepting that they have a “relationship” now. Upon finishing it, and understanding Delany to be a serious artist, and unable to come up with an answer myself, I decided to see if I could find out why Delany wanted to write such a book. What his artistic motivations were. I found some information in that regard, the one bit that has stuck with me being that Delany said, in one interview or another, that part of his goal was to see if he could make the reader feel sympathy for a character like Hogg. I knew what he was referring to, because Hogg ends on a note implying that something’s about to happen that will make Hogg unhappy, something that perhaps might even be a blow to his heretofore outsized self-confidence. But how Delany could imagine anyone who read all of Hogg would come away thinking “Oh well, that’s too bad. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy,” rather than thinking that what Hogg really deserves is nothing less than a bullet right in his forehead, is beyond me. I’m sure there are such readers out there. I wouldn’t want to meet any of them, but I guess there must be at least a couple dozen of them.

Now what is eventually revealed about Benigno may not, in the eyes of some, reach the heights of horribleness that are encountered in Hogg, but come on — it’s pretty fucking close, at least. And if it’s not right smack dab on the same level, it’s only because Almodovar insists that however misguided Benigno’s, let’s call it, affection might be, it is nevertheless genuine to him. He’s not a sadist. He’s just a sick deluded bastard.

Yet despite it all, Marco, when he learns of all this — I’m being coy about it, but you can probably piece it together — is horrified, yet sympathetic. The horrified part is interesting, because there are a couple of sequences near the end, when the film has ramped up into a brief version of a melodramatic thriller, that I believe very consciously nod, in their shot selections and particular settings, to 90s thrillers, specifically The Silence of the Lambs and The Usual Suspects. So Almodovar recognizes the unforgivability of what Benigno has done. His best friend at the clinic will no longer speak to him. But forefront in Marco’s mind — and when the two men reunite, by the way, is some months after the reveal and fallout — is the fact that Benigno is his friend. Marco cries at everything, and when he cries on Benigno’s behalf a display of perhaps the dangers of having too much empathy? I can’t see that really being a problem these days. But there’s something about how close to the surface of his skin are Marco’s emotions that makes me think, if they’re that easy to trigger, do they even really mean anything? The problem with that is this concept seems to fly directly in the face of Pedro Almodovar’s whole deal.

II. Condemned to Live

Film: The Quiet Earth
Director/Writer: Geoff Murphy/Bill Baer, Bruno Lawrence, and Sam Pillsbury
Have I Seen Anything Else by This Director and/or Writer: Yes, I suppose I have technically seen Murphy’s film Freejack. No to all the writers, though as an actor I did previously see Bruno Lawence in Roger Donaldson’s Smash Palace. If that counts for anything. I also haven’t read the Craig Harrison novel on which this film is based.

Speaking of films that remind you of other films as you watch them, I present to you Geoff Murphy’s intriguing 1985 New Zealand cult science fiction classic The Quiet Earth. In its opening moments (following a rather long sunset-based opening credits sequence, the music for which hit a particular noticeable swell when the “Music by John Charles” credit came up), with Zack Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) waking up naked in bed, to eventually dress and venture outside to discover what appears to be a completely unpopulated world, you can’t help but think of the opening to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. A bit later, when Zack pushes his exploration of this new reality, he will discover that all sorts of quite intense and enormously loud things happened overnight that he apparently just slept through (this is actually explained later on). Among those things is the fact that apparently a commercial airliner crashed nearby, and the way Geoff Murphy and James Bartle’s tracking camera reveals the scope of this particular catastrophe sharply resembles a similar moment in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 masterpiece War of the Worlds. So this is potential evidence that this small scale but very good SF film possibly influence some rather big films down the line, but Murphy’s film wears its own influences on its sleeve.

The Quiet Earth really is a one-man show for a good stretch of time. In the dips in and out of depression and bouts of bizarre behavior are moments showing Zack seeing the very relative potential in his situation as the only person left on the planet. If you ever find yourself in similar circumstances, I would think the problem would not so much be that there’s nothing to do. I think there would be no end of things to do — and in these sequences I was strongly reminded of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, though in a particularly Ouroborosian bit of influence, I suspect Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead took a little something here and there — between drinking all the time, playing snooker, teaching yourself to drive a train, seeing how the other half lives by living in their houses, and very gradually going absolutely bugfuck insane; the problem would be the complete absence of anyone to do these things with. The benefit of telling this kind of story, at least for as long as the film spends telling it, is that you can get away with the kind of artificial quirkiness of behavior that often rankles me, because at any given moment like that in The Quiet Earth, I can’t help but think “Yeah, in his shoes, I’d probably get to that point eventually, too.” The problem is the more bugfuck Zack goes, the lazier his political satire gets.

But that doesn’t last very long, and after a while Zack bounces off the rock bottom he eventually hits, and lands on his feet. One thing I neglected to mention is that Zack’s job, before all this happened, had to do with some kind of secret project to set up an energy field around the Earth so that planes and other forms of air travel (probably space shuttles and the like) wouldn’t have to land to refuel. Seems like not much gain for what must have been a hell of a lot of work, especially when you consider the possibility that this whole thing may have vaporized everyone else on earth. Because that’s the other thing, except for one body at the plant where he used to work, there are no corpses. Being literally the only man for the job, Zack tries to figure out what happened. In so doing, he eventually meets another living person — almost all “last man on earth movies” have at least one other person, and this one will end up with two! — a young woman named Joanne (Alison Routledge). The two get over their initial trepidation and feel immense relief. And I found it interesting that Murphy takes the time to address the fact that upon meeting Joanne, a certain sexual energy will have sparked anew within Zack, but show him struggling — successfully, but struggling — to not let this unbelievable new life he’s found himself living turn him into some kind of creep.

Anyway, romantic entanglements do eventually enter into it, as they must, because they would, first between Zack and Joanne, and then when a third person a man named Api (Peter Smith) finds them. It was refreshing that The Quiet Earth broke the tradition, in films like this, to have warring factions of survivors. There’s really only the three of them, and once they’re able to get over their mutual suspicion, the three of them get along famously, if out of relief if nothing else. From here, the plot of the film heads in the direction of “Maybe we can reverse this.” As far as my ability to understand, and therefore retain, all of this stuff, all I can say is that they all seemed to know what they were talking about. There’s also a very interesting theory floated regarding why the three of them didn’t vanish along with everyone else, one that adds a mortal chill to what in other films would have been left as simply a noble climax.

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This post is part of a series that is separate from, but related to, and will probably at certain points merge with, my Reading Project. For my details of what I guess is my Film Project, click here.

Author Read Before: Jimmy Breslin
Books Previously Read: The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight; I Don’t Want to Go to Jail
Author Never Read: Dick Schaap
Book Read: .44

There’s a good bit of acting, and/or directing of an actor, in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam. It’s a small moment, and I just noticed it for the first time when rewatching the film about a week ago. Anthony LaPaglia and Roger Guenveur Smith, as two homicide detectives working the Son of Sam case, are sitting down at a table in a restaurant with a top mafioso, played by Ben Gazzara, and some of his men. They are there to ask for the mafia’s help, in getting information within the Italian community, if anybody knows anything about the murders. The meeting is heated, what with Smith being black and the mob guys being racist, plus the fact that LaPaglia’s character and Gazzara’s character go back to the cop’s childhood. So, initially, the detectives’ request for help is rebuffed. So LaPaglia takes out a letter. Gazzara keeps eating, eyes on his plate. The letter is one left by David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, at the site of one of the shootings. Gazzara keeps eating, eyes on his plate, completely indifferent, until LaPaglia reads the words “I am the Son of Sam.” At those last three words, Gazzara’s head suddenly turns towards the letter in LaPaglia’s hand, with an expression on his fact that precisely and silently communicates the message “What the fuck?” Because that, I think, is at the core of why those serial murders, just one set of such killings in America out of hundreds, possibly thousands, continue to fascinate. When you first encounter a reference to the Son of Sam, you don’t immediately know the context of that name, why it was chosen. And on its face, there’s nothing sinister about it, but since we know it was self-applied by a serial killer, its very surface benignity makes it exponentially more frightening. (I touch on this phenomena, and I don’t think that’s too grandiose a term, a little bit in my piece on John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van.)“What blisteringly fevered and maggoty train of thought could have led to those words, and what depraved meaning could it have for the man who calls himself that?” Of course, once you know the context for the name, you realize just how depraved the meaning actually was, no speculation needed on our end. But before that, you speculate, and your very inability to land on an explanation that even makes any kind of lunatic sense — actual lunacy being blessedly outside our grasp — just makes it worse. It becomes almost cosmically frightening.

As I probably don’t need to tell you, between Christmas Eve, 1975, and July 31 1977, a serial killer who dubbed himself the Son of Sam, real name David Berkowitz, terrified New York City in a series of late night shootings, killing six and wounding another eleven. Most of the attacks were against young men and women sitting in cars at night. Early attacks occurred largely in or around Queens, though as the case gained notoriety, Berkowitz began to branch out to other boroughs. The murder of Donna Lauria on July 29, 1976, was the crime that allowed the police and journalists to start noticing similarities between that murder and earlier crimes. It was when Lauria was murdered that the realization dawned that there was a madman on the loose. So flamboyant a madman that he would join the ranks of serial killers like Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac in writing berserk and rambling letters to the police and the press (yes, Jack the Ripper probably didn’t actually write any of them, I know). The first letter, left at the scene of the double murder of Alexander Esau and Valentina Suriani, was addressed to Joseph Barelli, the homicide detective heading the investigation. His subsequent letter to New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin, in which Berkowitz, among other things, complained about those doctors in the press who would deign to psychoanalyze him, and accuse him of hating women, which he vehemently denied even though it’s clearly true. The primary victims in almost all of the shootings were young, attractive women with long brown hair. If their boyfriends were in the seat next to them, he’d kill them too, so be it. His reasons, he claimed in his letters, were that he was merely following orders, communicated to him by his neighbor’s dog, Harvey. The orders originated from Harvey’s owner, a man named Sam Carr, whom Berkowitz believed was a demon who controlled him and would punish him severely, if Berkowitz did not murder people, thereby providing Sam with blood to drink. This subservient role that Berkowitz imagined for himself makes him, in essence, the Son of Sam.

This was national news, so it’s not surprising that anyone with a relevant story to tell might try to turn the telling of that story into a payday. The most famous person to do so was the aforementioned Jimmy Breslin, columnist for the New York Daily News. Breslin was also a prominent crime reporter, with many contacts both within and outside of law enforcement. Though Breslin enjoyed his own share of politically incorrect controversies, especially as he got older, he was a tireless chronicler of the stresses and injustices and hardships in life as lived by regular people. In 1986, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, with “for columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens" cited as the reason.

Breslin bragged that he told the truth in his columns, whether the truth reflected well on, or was agreed to be the truth by, all of his readers. As a result, reading .44 in 2026, a time when art, and especially literature, is routinely sanded down and self-congratulatory, can come as a bit of a jolt. That’s because in .44, published in 1978, just a year after Berkowitz was caught, and in an era when arguably exploitational airport novels might actually be quite well written, pretty much everyone is at least somewhat racist, and not just white racism targeting black people, although that is sort of ever-present. Though, ironically:

Blacks were the only ones who got off easy. For the first time in the lives of some of them, they were above suspicion. They had, in the context of this terrible fear that swept through the city, turned white. They could sit or stand on a subway and not catch a suspicious or hateful glance.

I see the point, but that last bit is probably arguable. Anyway, most of the racism is aimed by Italians at the Irish, and vice versa, much of which is communicated through the relationship between Inspector Carillo, Breslin and Schaap’s fictional version of Barelli, and Danny Cahill, columnist for the New York Dispatch, and Breslin and Schaap’s fictional version of Breslin. No one, as you may have gathered, travels under their own name here, and that includes David Berkowitz, who here is Bernard Rosenfeld (however, and with the times when Berkowitz mentioned someone by name being the exceptions, the Son of Sam letters are quoted exactly as they were actually written).

Carillo rose to Inspector by virtue of how good he was at his job, and his strong political savvy, which left all of his Irish superiors to begrudgingly promote him to that position, because it would look weird if they didn’t. He also believes that all Irish cops are stupid, and that all the mistakes made early at the crime scene of the Son of Sam attack that opens the novel, in which a young woman named Connie Bonventre is killed and her friend wounded, are attributable to that fact. Carillo is a stickler for proper procedure, because it’s in the early moments that the most information can be gained and lost. This includes his intense regret that no cop was present at the hospital to question Connie Bonventre about who had shot her in the head, before she died. This attitude of Carillo’s comes off as callous, but is probably also absolutely correct and necessary.

As for Cahill, he’s less racially-minded than Carillo, but Breslin and/or(?) Schaap aren’t shy about showing his flaws. In addition to being arrogant, he worries he’s not good enough. He seeks fame, and when the Bonventre shooting news pushes his column further into the paper’s back pages, he complains that nobody cares that some girl got shot. He also feels a sick pride at being recognized by the Son of Sam, and to be referred to by the killer as “Danny” (Carillo has a similar reaction following the arrest). Furthermore, after distracting his own bleak thoughts by making a friend he was speaking to over the phone feel even worse:

Cahill hung up elated. He had driven truth from his mind, always a victory, and replaced it with that warm feeling which comes with doing well at another’s expense. If somebody were to do this to Cahill, if somebody were to start the day by telling Cahill that he has too much love of seeing others fail to be a good fellow, Cahill would require medication. Take it, he could not.

Well, Breslin was always going on about how he told the truth. This seems like evidence of him putting his money where his mouth is. Or pretending to. Who knows. (For the record, Cahill shares Breslin’s genuine admiration for Berkowitz’s prose style.)

One of the features of a book like this, by the way, these sorts of books being much more leisurely paced than they are now, is you get odd bits, like in this there’s a digression at one point about the police sketch artist, mentioned earlier, behind those laughably inaccurate suspect sketches of Son of Sam. If you’ve ever seen those sketches, and seen David Berkowitz, you might guess why Breslin and/or Schaap (though I’m betting Breslin) might wish to make that detour. You also get intense investigations into suspects who, finally, seem like they could be the guy, but which we, the readers, know are just more blind alleys. We’re in the head of Rosenfeld/Berkowitz as often and as early as we are in the heads of Carillo or Cahill or the victims.

At ten o’clock, he drove home to Hudson Terrace. The rain would protect him from the dogs for the rest of the day. He made a ravioli TV dinner and he watched game shows on television. He began thinking of Connie Bonventre again. He wondered why he never had felt anything after he had killed her. Then he thought of the others. He felt nothing about them, either. Well, you just shot them and that’s what you did, he told himself. He felt more satisfied than sad. This is what they have done to me, he told himself. They have taken away all my feelings. They have turned me into a soldier. A soldier can’t stop after each time he shoots someone. He can’t be going around a battlefield and weeping. He shrugged and watched the television.

There is much entertainment to be found in .44. It’s funny and satirical at times, especially when Breslin (again, one presumes) vents his spleen over his utter disdain for TV news “reporters” and anchors, or his disgust with the cynical, dishonest journalism to be found in the New York Post stand-in, and owned by a Rupert Murdoch stand-in, called the Express. The Daily News and the Post were rivals for years, and never more so than during the Son of Sam killings. Predatory pseudo-psychoanalysts spewing baseline Freudian nonsense on TV are also treated mercilessly.

There’s also some unintentional humor to be found any time Breslin and Schaap (pictured at the top) venture into the world of 1970s New York City discotheques. Breslin was a big enough name that I’m sure he was invited to some events held in such places, but the novel never quite feels at home in those scenes.

But it’s also a novel not lacking in despair, and the futility of fighting against a tide of people like Berkowitz:

The tips, the suggestions poured in in incredible numbers — and incredible detail. If one out of every ten calls could be believed — and nine out of ten rang true — then the City of New York contains dozens of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of potential mass murderers. That was the scary part. Only one bomb had gone off in one head, and already five young people were dead because of it, but anybody working on the case knew that there were dozens of similar bombs, ticking inside similar heads, each one capable of exploding momentarily or never. Pablo Birani [one of the novel’s prime suspects before suspicion turns to Berkowitz - Ed.] was not the .44-caliber killer, but he could have been. Pablo Birani could kill. He could kill without motive, without reason. He had a good mind; he was an intelligent man. It was just that his wires were crossed.

Still, it’s a very strange book. Why does it exist in this form? Why didn’t Breslin write a non-fiction account of his experience? Why bring Dick Schaap in, a sports reporter who, at the time, didn’t even work on the same paper as Breslin? On its surface, .44 feels somewhat tacky. Especially in the opening scene, where Connie Bonventre is getting ready for a night out — the prose lingers on both her youth and her anatomy more than I would say is seemly, under the circumstances, although Breslin and Schaap do not push this very far, and this sort of writing does not reoccur elsewhere in the novel. One could excuse it as the authors wanting to suggest there was probably a sexual component to Berkowitz’s crimes, without laying it on too thick. Then again, there are some awfully hair-rising dirty jokes, for lack of a less juvenile phrase, scattered throughout .44. But those never apply to the victims, or their fictional stand-ins, of Son of Sam.

But Breslin had to have approached this with some inwardly directed cynicism. In his July 28, 1977 column — published the day before the one year anniversary of Donna Lauria’s murder — Breslin discusses the letter the Son of Sam sent him, which ends “Remember Ms. Lauria. Thank you.” In the piece, Breslin admits:

What do I have for the 29th? I have this, a column about the .44 killer and his victims, particularly the first victim, Donna Lauria. Which is exactly what the killer wanted when he sent me the letter. He who would be God with the lives of young women can also use his great power to direct the newspapers to write what he wants and when he wants it.

.44 was perhaps Breslin’s way of getting some of that control back, to feel less used. I don’t know. I also don’t know why Schaap was involved. That they’d once worked together at the Herald Tribune doesn’t seem to cover it, and Richard Esposito’s biography Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth is exasperatingly silent on the process of writing the novel.

But it’s a serious novel, and a compassionate one (though in .44 Breslin writes less about the families of the victims than he did in his columns). It’s a novel that wonders how such a thing can even happen, how people can become these things, creatures who kill and maim remorselessly. It’s a novel that, when you strip away some of its NYC bombast and cynical bluster, worries about what we’ve done to ourselves, and how far into the future we’ll be paying for it.

II. Sam the Terrible

Author Read Before: Charles Willeford
Books Previously Read: Made in Miami; High Priest of California; Wild Wives; Pick-Up; The Woman Chaser; The Black Mass of Brother Springer; Understudy for Death; The Difference; Cockfighter; The Burnt-Orange Heresy; Miami Blues; Grimhaven; New Hope for the Dead; Sideswipe; The Way We Die Now; The Shark-Infested Custard; about half the stories in The Machine in Ward Eleven
Book Read: Off the Wall

Craig Glassman, the volunteer deputy sheriff and nursing student, who lived in the apartment below Berkowitz in Yonkers, was also targeted for harassment, if that’s the word, by the serial killer. Glassman received letters from Berkowitz, though for a while he didn’t know who was sending them, nor did he immediately connect them to the Son of Sam letters, received by Breslin and Barelli, that were all over the news. But for reasons known only to him, Berkowitz’s belief that demons were ordering him to commit murder expanded to include Glassman. So, the recently divorced volunteer deputy sheriff found himself receiving letters that said things like: “So, Craig, in your honor, I present you with many corpses so that you should have plenty of meat in the off-season.”

It would take too long to lay out all the connections that Glassman, and other cops, finally made that linked Berkowitz to the Son of Sam murders, but in Glassman’s specific case, they included, once his suspicions had been raised, seeing a rifle in the back seat of Berkowitz’s car, and in the passenger seat a handwritten letter that at a glance appeared to resemble the handwriting of the Breslin and Barelli letters, and the one’s Glassman had received. For a variety of reasons, including the scope of the police manhunt for the killer making it very difficult for all participating precincts, which means pretty much all NYC police precincts, and eventually Yonkers as well, to keep straight who was following what leads, and the investigative focus pointing elsewhere — did anyone really think the Son of Sam was in Yonkers? — it was difficult for cops who had similar feelings about Berkowitz as Glassman to get a warrant. Eventually everything fell into place, and the divorced volunteer deputy was in on Berkowitz’s arrest.

Yet Glassman has curiously been phased out of most of the various fictionalized recountings of the murders committed by, and the investigation that led to the capture of, David Berkowitz. Glassman is nowhere to be found in Summer of Sam, for example. Most unusually, in .44, Breslin and Schaap split the Glassman figure into two separate entities. The cop who sees the rifle in Berkowitz’s car is unnamed, and is not sketched out in any way to resemble Glassman. More tellingly, Bernard Rosenfeld’s downstairs neighbor is named Mort. Of course, everyone’s names are changed in .44, and since “Mort” means “death” in Latin, Berkowtiz’s actual scribblings about Glassman — some of which were found written on his apartment walls when the police finally went in — make more sense if the name is Mort. Berkowitz wrote (and it’s right there on the book cover, see below) “Because Craig is Craig/So Must the Streets/Be Filled With Craig (Death),” which is nonsensical, but is slightly less so if the name is Mort, and you know what Mort means in Latin.

A likely reason for so many writers to have chosen to prune Glassman out of the narrative is the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the arrest, Glassman, according to his own daughter Shayna (who apparently is quite a pistol, and apparently subscribes to the “cult of serial killers” theory about Son of Sam (or at least some version of it; not surprisingly, Glassman’s 1991 death has been linked to this) went on a press tour. This is from an article in Westchester Magazine, written by Nathan Laliberte:

“My dad wanted Sylvester Stallone to play him in a movie, but the movie studios didn’t even want to look at it,” Craig says. “He was doing a publicity tour from the day the capture happened. He was writing letters to movie studios; he was all over the place doing radio and newspaper interviews.”After learning of Glassman’s intention to publish a book, New York City Police Detective Ed Zigo (who, along with Glassman and Detective Falotico, is credited with playing a major role in the Berkowitz arrest), dropped a snarky letter: “Hi Craig—remember me? I hear you’re writing a BUCK, I mean a book, about me and David. Be fair, Craig—I love you, too! (I’m famous also now—David sure did you and me a favor, didn’t he?)—Ed.” According to Shayna Craig, Detective Zigo—even decades later—refused to acknowledge the role Glassman had played in the Berkowitz arrest.

The book about Glassman—who died in a car accident in 1991—is titled Off the Wall and, due to a very limited print run, has become a collector’s item, currently selling for around $300 on Amazon. (One copy is priced at $750 because it is inscribed by Glassman.)

My copy of Off the Wall did not cost $750, or $300 for that matter, but check this out.

No dust jacket, but still. I had no idea it was there until the book arrived and I opened it. I’m not about to deny the role Glassman played in Berkowitz’s capture, but using “44” — as in .44 caliber, as in the .44 Caliber Killer — as part of your signature, even if only in this one context, strikes me as unsavory.

Despite what Ed Zigo said in his justifiably snarky letter, Glassman clearly was not the actual writer of the book, nor is it even a ghost writer type of situation. The writer was the great Charles Willeford, author of some of the great masterpieces in crime fiction, from the four-book Hoke Mosley detective series1, to the moral black holes of The Woman Chaser and The Burnt-Orange Heresy and The Difference (that one’s a Western), as well as one of the deepest gazes into the amoral void in all of crime fiction, the posthumously published The Shark-Infested Custard. Willeford went further and darker than almost any self-described hardboiled crime novelist, unless their name is Jim Thompson or James Ellroy.

All that being said, a true crime docu-novel (as some have awkwardly described Off the Wall), or, to use the probably more accurate Capote/Mailer term “non-fiction novel” was not something Willeford actively pursued. In Willeford, a book that is part biography, part bibliography, part extensive interview with its subject, and entirely index-free, writer Don Herron is frustratingly vague about how Off the Wall came to be, from Willeford’s perspective, saying only:

Willeford acknowledged that this book was hackwork when Signore [presumably an interviewer, though if so I’ve been unable to track down the interview - Ed.] asked him how he came to write it. He told told him that the publisher approached him with the idea, and the money was paid in advance. He liked the money in advance aspect. And that is why he wrote this book, for the same reason he forced himself to finish Lust is a Woman2, even though he knew it was terrible: money.

Off the Wall is not a terrible book, but it is a strange one. To begin with, it begins with a preface by Edna Buchanan, Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for the Miami Herald (she would eventually turn to writing crime novels), in which she effusively praises Glassman and Willeford, and takes every possible opportunity to compare Berkowitz to Robert Frederick Carr III, a serial killer about whom Buchanan had coincidentally recently published a book. All of which indirectly points to another strange aspect of Off the Wall, which is that it is by necessity a New York City novel, but Willeford was a Florida crime novelist. Therefore, the kind of depth of geographical and neighborhood personality and detail that is all over Breslin and Schaap’s .44 is pretty much absent from Off the Wall.

In Don Herron’s book, in the long interview section, Willeford talks about the book’s authenticity:

CW: That Son of Sam, that’s about 90% factual. I just had to write a few things, to put in some bridges.

DH: You interviewed Craig Glassman?

CW: Yeah, I interviewed — all the the dialogue is authentic. It’s exactly what they said. I couldn’t change it, the detectives, because the guys’ names were there. You change what they say, they’ve got you on a suit, you know. They weren’t too happy about it anyway, because they didn’t like the idea of Craig getting all that credit, you know.

This is important for a few reasons. For one thing, just because someone says something in an interview, that doesn’t mean it accurately reflects their thoughts, words, or actions from three or four years before. So already, Off the Wall is shading into fiction. Further, having read the novel, the bridges Willeford talks about include a lot of situations where the reader is in the head of not only Glassman, but Berkowitz as well, and I do not believe, as much as I admire Willeford, that he could swear all those thoughts could be said to have authentically belonged to those men in those moments.

But of course, it is also through those bridges that Willeford is able to emerge as the writer he is. This is a small thing, but it had been a while since I’d read anything by Willeford, and I’d forgotten about some of his quirks, such as the obvious delight he took in describing in detail, but not exasperating detail, what his characters were eating. Throughout his bibliography, Willeford continuously takes a break from the narrative, whatever it might be, and decides “Well shit, this guy’s gotta eat something,” and so we’ll get a little story about lunch. I remember reading about the protagonist of his early novel High Priest of California ordering fried shrimp and French fries at a restaurant, and for weeks afterwards I was craving fried shrimp and French fries (and when I finally got them, I was a little disappointed). This happens a lot in Off the Wall, possibly because Willeford felt confined as a writer-for-hire, and wanted to put himself in there when- and wherever he could. I don’t know if it’s based on fact, though it wouldn’t surprise me, but in Off the Wall Willeford describes Berkowitz as having an almost cataclysmic sweet tooth, one that leads him to put Cool Whip in his tomato soup. Which is enough of a justification for a life term in prison, as far as I’m concerned.

Even as Herron criticizes Off the Wall, he acknowledges these moments as Willeford bringing himself into what must have seemed a very impersonal endeavor. In one early scene, one that Herron also highlights, the lonely, divorced Glassman invites two of his fellow nursing students — two attractive young women — back to his apartment to study, with no particularly lecherous motives (in Willeford’s telling anyway), and they decide to take a break:

Craig said it was time for a break, anyway, and he brought out a plateful of tuna salad sandwiches he had made on wheat bread, and a two-liter bottle of Tab. While they ate, Debbi asked Craig about the Betamax, and he gave the girls a demonstration.

“Do you have any dirty movies?” Sandi asked.

“No. Just Patton. Do you want to see Patton?”

Sandi shook her head, and Debbi giggled. “I was just teasing, Craig,” Sandi said.

They drink a lot of Tab in this book. And very little booze is drunk in either this or .44. Anyhow, perhaps the most curious thing about Off the Wall is the fact that it is a co-narrative, equally about Berkowitz as it is about Glassman. This, in a book that was apparently pitched by Glassman to boost his own profile. In another typical bit of Willeford-ian bridging, the author indulges in the kind of deflating of pomposity and pretension that he’s always been very sharp about, though in this case, the deflating — which involves the turning of an abstract painting upside down, to the notice of none of its ostensibly passionate admirers — is done by Berkowitz. Much is also made by Willeford of Berkowitz’s Born Again Christianity, but it’s such a muddle of diseased invention and a kind of twisted version of “you will see all your dead pets in heaven” innocence, that there’s not much you can do with it, as an explanation. Breslin and Schaap didn’t bother. Willeford also hammers on the sexual motivation behind the murders, which Breslin and Schaap, as I’ve said, only sort of glance at.

Another thing Willeford does that’s surprising, and I wonder what Glassman, thought of this, is he sort of equates the two men. Not in their actions or thoughts or anything like that, but both men are inflicted by a terrible loneliness. Glassman can’t understand why his marriage fell apart, is rebounding from a number of failed careers, and is trying to get himself back on some kind of right path. To keep himself from going mad with loneliness, he shares custody of his and his ex-wife’s dog and cat. The dog doesn’t endear Glassman to Berkowitz, and is only one of the many meaningless reasons why Berkowitz began to see Glassman as his new Sam Carr (that, and every time he left their building to go to work as an auxiliary sheriff’s deputy, Glassman was wearing a cop’s uniform), or his co-Sam Carr. He hated both men, but acknowledged both as his masters.

Yet, and this is perhaps unintentional on Willeford’s part, Glassman occasionally comes off as kind of a dope. For one thing, as laid out by Willeford, it’s unbelievable to me that Glassman didn’t make the connection between the letters he was receiving, the strange upstairs neighbor who yelled at him over the phone, with the Son of Sam killings sooner. They were national news by this point, so certainly citizens of Yonkers were as attuned to any Son of Sam updates as anyone was. And there’s a bit where Glassman is tearing his hair out about the contents of one of the letters, focusing on insults directed at his mother, which leads him to speculate on the game known as “the dozens,” which is a game popular in the black community that revolved around topping the other guy’s jokes about one’s mother. I find it absurd that he would make that leap, additionally believing that possibly some black radical political group was behind the letters, though he eventually dismisses this as being “decidedly unfair to blacks.”

Arguably worse is the bit near the end, at the arrest, when Glassman is not only in on the arrest, but he was the cop — among dozens who were there — who got to Berkowitz first, drew his gun and, Stallone-like, yelled “Freeze!” I’m sure that’s what Glassman told Willeford happened, but I don’t buy it. And then — and although in Herron’s book, Willeford makes it clear that he shares Glassman’s frustration that his suspicions weren’t taken more seriously early on (“They would have found the gun. They would have found all that stuff. They would have had him. They would have saved two lives.”) — after that, in a sort of epilogue that I can only imagine Willeford writing through gritted teeth (if indeed he, and not Glassman, wrote it), comes this:

Craig got his divorce from Mac without any difficulties, and his social life improved. In hardly any time at all, Craig had more women to choose from than he could handle, and he made out like a bandit.

As unpleasant as that is to read, imagine what writing it must have felt like.

You shouldn’t take any of this as an indication that Willeford displays any misguided sympathy, or even much empathy, for David Berkowitz. In one section, he writes that Berkowitz could not understand why anybody was making such a big deal about his murders:

Sometimes the stories in The New York Daily News were so far off base, he didn’t even save the clippings. What puzzled David the most when he read and re-read the news accounts of the shootings was the anger expressed by everyone concerned. The people he shot were all nobodies, nobodies just like himself. There hadn’t been a single important person in the lot; nor would any of them, if any had lived, ever have amounted to much of anything either. And yet, the way their friends and relatives talked, and carried on, at least the way the newspapers reported they talked, anyone who didn’t know any better would have thought that the loss of these nobodies was of great importance to the world. Not only were they non-entities, they were either foreigners or the children of foreigners. He could tell that by their un-American names.

Willeford knows full well that by laying out an inhumane, anti-human mindset this plainly, by depicting Berkowitz as a man so utterly remorseless that he can’t imagine anyone caring about these brutal, senseless murders, that, almost counterintuitively, the humanity of the victims rises up, or should do, in the reader’s mind as a kind of natural defense against such horror.

In his August 3, 1977 column for New York Daily News, Jimmy Breslin wrote about Jerry Moskowitz, the father of Stacy Moskowitz, who had just been murdered by Berkowitz. The column, which is called “Door Opens, It’s Always Stacy,” begins this way.

At night, Pat Violante, whose son lay practically blind from a .44 slug, came to the home of Jerry Moskowitz, whose daughter had just died by the same hand.

“Did you tell your boy that Stacy died?” Jerry Moskowitz said.

“No,” Violante said, “what do you think I should do?”

“The boy don’t need any shocks,” Moskowitz said. “Let him take care of himself. Let him get over this, let him get better.”

“And then?” Violante said.

“Then the two of us work it out together,” Moskowitz said.

The column goes on to describe Jerry Moskowitz’s grief and regrets about what kind of father he’d been, and ends with him remembering that Stacy and a friend had once traveled to Mexico on their own. She saved money, they had no chaperone, and Stacy was especially excited to be doing something on her own, to be responsible enough to make her own life. Her father describes waiting anxiously for her at the airport, concerned until she finally walks through the door from Customs that something has happened to her. But there she was, beaming, talking about how she can’t wait to go back. The column ends like this:

“I can always sit here and see that door swing open and there’s Stacy. The door swings open again and there’s Stacy again.”

He turned around and stared out the window, out at the hot Brooklyn day.

“At least she had one good time,” he said.

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This post is the latest in what will turn out to be a very long series of essays about my year of reading, from 2025 to apparently the end of time. For more details about this project, please read this post.

For starters, just to get one important factor out of the way, there is not going to be a permanent change to the way I go about things here. What I have in mind is a kind of mini-project, which will change this substack for as long as it takes me to complete it. So allow me to explain. Given the nature of this project, and the obstacles it throws in my way when it comes to choosing books to read, I have had to forego reading certain books that I would have preferred to read, over ones I did read, but which wouldn’t have fit the rules I’d laid out for myself. (Click that link above for the full story, if you don’t already know it). These count as regrets, and there are some writers I’m going to do all I can to cram in, and three of those writers begin with the letters “Ga.” Not only that, but in life — all three of them are dead now — had connections with each other, were talked about in the same articles, debated each other on the nature and usefulness and importance and function of literature. And each of them, in their own way, is difficult. Hard to read. Challenging. And one thing I don’t want to do with this project is avoid challenging myself. I mean, I’ve already done that a couple of times, but I don’t want to do that hear.

So. The writers are William Gaddis, John Gardner, and William H. Gass. With this mini-project, I am going to read a book each by these writers, covering three posts. Those will be posts for paid subscribers, and I’ll get to that part in a minute. I’ll tell you straight off that I have a much longer and deeper history with Gardner and Gass than I do with Gaddis, and I’m going to tell you up front that I suppose in one way I am avoiding challenging myself, because I’ll tell you up front that I’m not going to read either The Recognitions or JR by Gaddis. I’m going to read Carpenter’s Gothic, which is considerably shorter than those other two (previously, years ago, I read his novel A Frolic of His Own). I have no reason to believe that Carpenter’s Gothic is any less challenging to read than Gaddis’s other work, but it is a lot shorter, which is important, because I really don’t want this project to take over this substack, or my life too much. Length becomes a more urgent matter when you consider that the John Gardner novel I’ll be reading is The Sunlight Dialogues, which is in the neighborhood of 800 pages. There aren’t many Gardner novels I haven’t read, so even if I wasn’t naturally determined to read The Sunlight Dialogues, my options are limited. Similarly limited are my options when it comes to William H. Gass, but again, I had my sights set on Middle C anyhow, Gass’s last novel (though not his last work of fiction), a book I’ve been assured by a friend is quite difficult, and this friend has read The Tunnel (as have I).

That’s the core of this, let’s call it a miniseries, but as you can imagine, given the almost-rigorous structure I’ve imposed on this Reading Project, merely embarking on this side project generates complications that ripple outward. Most obviously is the fact that, if I’m going to cover one of these novels in each post, and all of the writers begin with “Ga,” placing them all on the same shelf, there’s not going to be a whole lot of daylight left on that shelf to fit in writers either read or unread before by me, as the second book for each post. And for now, I fully plan on covering two books per post. If that becomes untenable — and if it does, it will be untenable because of Gardner and Gass, I don’t foresee an issue with Gaddis in this regard — I will deal with that at the time. But for now, I fully intend to cover two books per post. What this means, though, is that the second book will be something random. Or not random, but if you clicked on the link covering the rules of the overall Reading Project, you’ll see that I have favorite writers separated from the alphabetical gen pop of the rest of my library, as I have also separated all my NYRB Classics and Valancourt Books. So the second books will more than likely drawn from those shelves. Or, who knows, if I’m feeling scrappy I might grab something at random. These decisions will have to be made when the time comes. All of this also pertains to the Reading Project free posts that will fall between the Gaddis/Gardner/Gass posts for paid subscribers. I have some ideas for those, and in fact one of those is about to be announced, here, by me. Because the last round of posts were for paid subscribers, that means the next round will be free. So there will be one more set of posts before we get to Gaddis. Allow me to announce that post right now. There is a theme! Also, the two books cover both possibilities mentioned earlier, in that one is by a favorite writers who has pride of place on a special shelf, and another pair of writers who don’t, though one of the co-writers I am very fond of, and in fact have covered here in the pest.

Anyway, alphabetically by author’s first name, we have this:

This isn’t my copy, but I like how beat up this one looks. So, as you can see, this was co-written by Jimmy Breslin, whose I Don’t Want to Go to Jail was covered here last year. I only know Dick Schaap as a sports writer, and never as a novelist, so why he’s lending a hand to Breslin, a very good novelist, and, of the two men, the only one with a genuine and important connection to the Son of Sam killings, a highly fictionalized version of which is chronicled within the pages of .44, is a mystery to me, which perhaps I’ll be able to solve.

The second novel for next time, and this one I’m both much more excited for, and conflicted about, will be this:

I spent more money on my copy of this book — never mind how much, and without a dust jacket, but with something else completely missed by the previous owner, which I’ll get into — then I’ve ever spent on any other used book, and although there is competition, this one still laps them all. As previously stated, I’m excited about this, because Willeford is one of my favorite writers, on the Mount Rushmore of American Crime Writers, which would be filled out by — and this is an extremely personal list, so don’t flip your shit because I don’t name Chandler or Hammett — Jim Thompson, Donald E. Westlake, and Chester Himes. Anyway, so there’s that. I am, however, conflicted, because writing this book was a very unhappy experience for Willeford, and I know he didn’t think much of it. I knew all of this before I bought it, it’s just that it would be more pleasant to have some reason to hope I was about to read Willeford’s forgotten masterpiece. Willeford on Son of Sam sure sounds good to me…

As for movies! It’s a shame I’ve already seen Summer of Sam. And that I’ve seen Out of the Darkness and Another Son of Sam, although I don’t own either of them anyway so they’re already disqualified (the one with Martin Sheen is surprisingly good) .I feel like during this difficult time, I’m probably going to have to mute my ambitions in this area. Not in number of films or number of posts, but rather in the ambitions of the films chosen. Oh, incidentally, this just occurred to me. I can imagine there coming a time in this coming stretch of posts where it would be more expedient to write and post the Film Project part of a given round of posts, just to keep things moving forward in as timely a fashion as I possibly can, if one of the books is slowing me down. So there might be a reverse round of Film Project first, Reading Project second. I can’t imagine that matters to anyone that much, and it might be just the thing to get me out of a tight spot.

Anyway, in an apparent contradiction of what I just wrote, these are the next films to be covered:

and…

No rhyme or reason, other than I keep almost watching both.

So that’s it! I’d say buckle up, but reading and writing are rather sedate activities. But I’m excited/nervous about this, and I hope you are excited/nervous with me.

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This post is the latest in what will turn out to be a very long series of essays about my year of reading, from 2025 to apparently the end of time. For more details about this project, please read this post.

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Author Previously Read: Michael Frayn
Book Previously Read: Matchbox Theatre: Thirty Short Entertainments
Book Read: Toward the End of the Morning

When I announced this round of books almost ten days ago (once again, I apologize for the delay), I said that while I technically had read Michael Frayn before, thus qualifying him for this section of this post, my experience of reading his work just barely crossed the threshold of acceptability. The book I read, Matchbox Theatre, came out in 2014, and was published by Valancourt Books, a very fine independent publisher that has reprinted several of Frayn’s early novels. I chose that book because it was short, and is made up primarily of what might be called short plays and dialogues, and very brief and odd stories. And to be perfectly frank, it didn’t do much for me, and I can’t remember any of the specifics. Since the book — which to date is his last published work, and Frayn, I’ve gathered, quite often announces that he’s retired from writing. I’m going to assume that at 92 he’s probably going to stick to that this time around. Anyway, though Matchbox Theatre landed for me with an indifferent thud, it hardly turned me off of him, given that it wasn’t a novel, not even a proper collection of stories. It’s more of a curiosity. In any event, that book is not my only experience with Frayn’s work, it’s merely my only experience reading him. I’ve also seen Peter Bogdanovich’s film adaptation of Frayn’s hit farcical play Noises Off. Not a beloved film — Frank Rich, who loved the play, hated the film — but I liked it enough to buy it (used, in fairness) and watch it more than once, so take that Frank Rich, ya turd. I also saw, back when Netflix mailed DVDs to people, the TV adaptation of another one of Frayn’s hit plays, Copenhagen, featuring Daniel Craig as Werner Heisenberg, Stephen Rea as Niels Bohr, and Francesca Annis as Margrethe Bohr. That TV movie was a dull as dirt affair; I’ve subsequently learned that director/screenwriter Howard Davies approached the task of adapting the play with a hatchet. The fact that he also brought a complete absence of any visual or cinematic sensibility was something I picked up on at the time.

Again, none of these disappointments put me off of Frayn, as I am primarily interested in his work as a novelist, which, when you look at them — there are eleven — you can see the wide variety of themes and stories he’s covered. He’s written comic novels, dramatic novels, at least one that sounds like it relies heavily on suspense, and at least one that you’d have to describe as a fantasy. The one I chose to finally tackle, Towards the End of the Morning, covers the kind of ground that I’ve been drawn to by other novels I’ve read for this project. I’ve told you about my interest in books set in the world of old-time radio, and this novel, first published in 1967 and reprinted by Valancourt in 2000, is about the newspaper business, as it used to be practiced, before journalism went straight into the shitter about ten years ago. Maybe longer. Which isn’t to say Frayn’s depiction of the business could be mistaken as glowing. I’m interested in stories about journalism and journalists, despite not liking very many of them. I just find it to be an interesting world, and an interesting environment, or anyway it used to be. Given that, the more cynical such a novel is, the better.

Surprisingly, though, Towards the End of the Morning does not spend a lot of time digging into the minutiae of the job. There’s no big news story that a group of reporters are vying to break in order to raise their own profiles. The news, global or local, really doesn’t enter into it. I don’t say this with an air of disappointment, but rather with the satisfaction that the novel turned out to be more interesting than I expected it to be.

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This post is the latest in what will turn out to be a very long series of essays about my year of reading, from 2025 to apparently the end of time. For more details about this project, please read this post.

So. The first book, this one by an author I’ve read before:

Michael Frayn just barely meets the unofficial minimum I have in my head of what counts as a writer I’ve read before, on anything more significant than “technically yes I’ve read this person before.” So more than one single short story, or poem, or essay, or whatever glancing blow on their bibliography would not count for me. I’ve read more than that by Frayn, but just barely, about which more when I write the post.

And then, for a writer I definitely, not even on a technical level, have not read before, yet at the same time, this particular novel by her has been one of my goals this whole project, finally making an excuse to read this:

Why this novel? What so enticed me? Because it just sounds so entertaining. Simple as that. There’s no crime in trying to have a good time with one of these now and then is there??

And to the movies, which are alphabetically and in other ways, as you’ll soon become used to, scattershot, as usual. First:

See star, see director, no further explanation needed or offered.

And:

First, it’s an excuse to cross another of this random assortment of Twilight Time discs I have floating around my home. Second, it’s a chance to catch up a little bit with Paul Newman’s directing career, of which I am largely, to the extent that I’d even say “effectively,” ignorant. And I have a sort of long-way-around connection to this movie that I will do everything I can to make interesting, or, failing that, brief.

See you soon! Oh, this one may take a little bit longer, because the Fuller is longer than I thought.

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This post is the latest in what will turn out to be a very long series of essays about my year of reading, from 2025 to apparently the end of time. For more details about this project, please read this post.

Film: Esther Kahn
Writer/Director: Arnaud Desplechin/Desplechin and Emmanuel Bourdieu
Have I Seen Anything Else by This Director and/or Writer: No

Not that you’re interested, or should care, but I own two Arnaud Desplechin films, and the one I’ve been circling, and have owned, the longest is not the one I watched for today. That film is La Sentinelle, and it’s a thriller, so I don’t know what I was thinking in choosing Esther Kahn (2000), a film set in Victorian London about a young Jewish actress over it. Actually, I know what I was thinking: Victorian London, and this movie co-stars Ian Holm. That’s more than enough for me.

Narratively, this film is simple. Esther (Summer Phoenix) lives with her large family, her parents and many siblings, all of whom work in a garment factory — and, this being a Victorian London garment factory, the conditions are poor. But they work hard, and seem, most of them, in the early stretches of the film, to be in mostly good spirits. Except for Esther, who not only is constitutionally withdrawn and moody, and who does not work hard at all. She becomes obsessed with the theater, where she goes frequently with her brothers and sisters. One such trip leaves her angry, because she was so put off by the lead actress’s performance. She argues, quite seriously, though her siblings both disagree and are uncertain where this passion is coming from, that this actress kept making mistakes, and that the performance she should have given would have been “so easy.”

There are several interesting things about Esther that the viewer learns early on, much of it through the narration delivered by Ramin Grey. When she’s seated in the theater to watch the play, which from what we can tell appears to be some sort of broad Yiddish comedy, she becomes rapt not by the story so much as just that this display of humanity is happening in front of her. Esther seems to associate stage acting with humanity more than she does the actual, non-performance humanity that exists in her home and in the community where she lives. In reality, actual life as its lived, she has at most a “disinterested curiosity.” At one point, she tells another character who has become frustrated with her detachment, that she watches everyone else like they’re sailing down a river, and she’s watching from the shore. She says this with some anger, a real frustration about the way her mind works, and the way her emotions don’t.

Inevitably, she’s drawn to becoming an actress herself. After some jobs as an understudy, and during one such gig, on a production of The Merchant of Venice, she comes into contact with Nathan Quellen (Holm), an actor whose career appears to be in some sort of free fall, but who has much wisdom to impart to Esther. Holm is in the film less than I thought he’d be, but the scenes between him and Phoenix are the best in the movie. What struck me most was how reasonable, logical, and philosophically acute much of what Nathan had to say. At one point, he cautions against any kind of purely technical, consciously performative acting. This, he says, is a lie, and “audiences don’t come to the theater to be lied to.” At the same time, he goes on to add, if an actor strives only for a kind of kitchen sink truth, then the audience is left with nothing to believe in. In other words, the artifice, which is to say the artistry, of performance must still be present. Later, he praised Esther’s progress after an acting exercise, saying that she’s managed to “forget the meaning.” Because of course, the character would know nothing about whatever Greater Meaning the playwright has put into the words the actor is speaking, nor should the actor perform as if they do. This is perhaps just a fancier way of underlining the importance of “being in the moment,” but to “forget the meaning” seems to me, someone who’s never acted, to be more to the point.

Another thing I found interesting about how Desplechin approaches the problem of depicting acting in a film starring actors who are actors. He basically never shows anybody acting. You see a little, though its mostly during rehearsals, where the actors — the characters who are actors, I mean — wouldn’t be expected to pour their heart and soul into a performance. You don’t even see the acting exercise I referred to above. A different acting exercise that Nathan has Esther do is laid out in great detail, before the film cuts and we never see her try it. I think several things are achieved in this way. The most practical thing about it is that however “realistic” we in the audience might find a given film performance, however believable and natural and whatever else we might call it, if we were in an elevator with a person behaving with the same level physically and emotional expressiveness that the actor who gave that naturalistic performance, we’d probably get off before we reached our floor. Acting is heightened behavior, almost by definition. In movies where an actor character is shown acting, it’s never on the same register as the performance of that actor — the actor playing the role, I mean — when they’re not on stage or in front of a camera , and shouldn’t be. One example that springs to mind is the clips of the films Jake Gyllenhaal’s doppelganger in Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy appears in — in that case, I thought the lily was being gilded a bit. There are exceptions to this — Naomi Watts’s audition scene in Mulholland Dr. arguably being one — but generally this kind of, frequently accidental, probably, metafictional element can be jarring. Desplechin avoids that by simply stepping around it. The other thing this does is keep Esther’s talent mysterious. What little professional, in front of an audience acting we see from her comes during the climactic, and chaotic, production of Hedda Gabler, and even then we see very little from her. Any big scenes we see her performing are obscured by Grey’s voice over narration.

And it’s important for her talent to be mysterious. The core to Esther’s story is her natural state of emotional remove. Nathan asks her if she’s ever had sex, and when she says she hasn’t, he goes on to tell her that her life must be lived, experience must be gained, if she ever hopes to reach the height of her gifts that he’s positive she’s capable of. Esther is, in effect, a sociopath, but one who goes about seeking a cure. To do so, she, somewhat mercinarily, hunts up a boyfriend, in the form of a snooty French drama critic (but I repeat myself) named Philippe Haygard (Fabrice Desplechin, the director’s brother). In the early goings of this relationship, though Haygard seems at first a good fit, as he’s enthusiastic about her talent and wants to help her succeed, the audience should be able to see trouble brewing because it’s very clear that the only reason she is doing any of this is to gain “experience.” I’m not really sure going about life in this manner is the same thing as gaining experience. It’s very clinical, in any case, and distinctly passionless.

Yet the life experience Esther seeks is ultimately found, and it comes very close to ruining her. Mentally, Esther is clearly quite unwell, and to have her first genuine emotional response to life lived as a human being is the crushing pain of heartbreak can make someone such as her wonder what the point of living that kind of life could possibly be. Better to be blank all the time, to be apart from the rest of mankind. If she didn’t have acting, if she didn’t have an outlet for the misery of experience, then I shudder to think what might have become of her.

My big question, coming out of this, is why Summer Phoenix hasn’t had a better career, because she’s remarkable in this.

II. Bloody Welshman

Film: Eva
Writer/Director: Joseph Losey/Hugo Butler and Evan Jones
Have I Seen Anything Else by This Director and/or Writer: Losey, sure have: The Boy with Green Hair; M; The Prowler; Time Without Pity; Blind Date; The Damned; Accident; Figures in Landscape; Mr. Klein. Butler, yes, he co-wrote Buñuel’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Jones also yes, as he wrote The Damned and Wake in Fright

Given how taken I was with Esther Kahn, it was disappointing to learn that it had been taken away from Desplechin, and about 15 minutes or so were cut from it against his wishes. His preferred cut isn’t available, from what I could find, and is only rarely screened. As a film lover, or anyway an occasional one, I should be used to that sort of thing by now, and in fact I am, as I went into Joseph Losey’s 1962 film Eva with my eyes wide open. I knew this film was a compromised production, such that it left Losey somewhat bitter and disillusioned — this coming after he’d already been blacklisted due to HUAC and McCarthy and all that, and had been exiled to Europe. In his biography of the director, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life, writer David Caute quotes Losey’s own feelings about Eva, after seeing the producer’s cut, which had severely whittled down Losey’s vision (about an hour of his version was cut out, a run-time which even Caute describes as “self-defeating” and “self-indulgent”'; self-defeating it may have been, but I refuse to accept “self-indulgent” as a criticism of art):

Losey saw this version, distributed by Gala in Britain, on 23 April 1963 and called it ‘a common, tawdry, little melodrama — unclear, pretentious, without rhythm and taste…’

Well I liked it. You’d think, under the circumstances I’ve just laid out, that Eva would play as some kind of style and personality free bit of European tedium. But it’s not that, and in fact if you’re at all a follower of Losey’s work, Eva seems to chronologically fit exactly where it can be found, in that span of films he made in the 50s and 60s, which also includes Blind Date, and has that same loose, yet rhythmic pace and aura, as though a jazz record had been the guiding principle in the editing room. And indeed, a desired Miles Davis score fell through, and the alarmingly large number of Billie Holiday songs Losey wanted to use (over 20) was pared down to three.

Similar to Esther Kahn, and for this I am grateful, the plot of Eva is simple. And before going into that, I’d like to say my excitement increased when I learned the film was based on a novel by James Hadley Chase. I’ve only read Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish, but that book is crazy enough that I thought Eva might entertainingly go off the rails, narratively-speaking, but it’s fairly controlled in that sense. Anyway, we meet Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker), first some years after the events of the film took place. Both distraught and distracted, in a pub a man angrily reminds Jones that the reason they’ve all gathered is for a remembrance of something horrible that happened. And soon we’ve flashed back, and we’re in Venice, at the Venice Film Festival, where a film based on a novel Tyvian Jones wrote has just won top prize. His future looks bright, the director the film, Sergio Branco Mallone (Giorgio Albertazzi) is eager to work with Jones again, if only Jones would write another book, and Sergio’s beautiful assistant, Francesca (Virna Lisi) is smitten with Jones — to Sergio’s, it must be sad, rather gentlemanly chagrin — and the two of them are about to be married. Her job, however, takes her away from Jones’s side for long periods. When he returns home, he finds that his home has been overtaken by an acquaintance of his named Pieri (Checco Rissone), and a call girl named Eva (Jeanne Moreau). Pieri is rather easily dispensed with, and Jones, naturally, becomes enamored with Eva, and pursues her. Jones does this guiltlessly, and one of the features of this film is how much of a worthless prick Tyvian Jones turns out to be.

A lot of what transpires over the course of the film is Jones becoming more and more dissolute. He drinks more and more, eagerly cheats on his fiancée, though it must be said much of this is done joylessly. Eva, who to some degree goes along with Jones’s desires, certainly doesn’t encourage him to enjoy himself more. Though this is putting things perhaps a bit too simply, Eva seems to despise Jones, as a kind of hobby. She certainly doesn’t care about him, and Jones, for himself, doesn’t really seem to care about anyone. Does he care about Eva? He wants her. That’s not really the same thing, or not necessarily the same thing. There is evidence that he cares about Francesca, but as his affair with Eva has been carelessly public, she learns of it, as does everyone else, and confronts him. During the ensuing argument, all Jones can offer up by way of a defense is to point out that he loves all women, he’s that kind of guy, and that’s just how it is. Well, okay. The depths of Jones’s selfish pointlessness as a human being only gets worse, and he’s left, by the end, where he deserves to be left.

The film I was reminded of the most while watching Eva was Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958). That film presents as a comfortable film with a sunny disposition, one that belied its rotten heart. Things go bad in that film in a way similar to the way things go bad in Eva, though in Bonjour Tristesse that turn comes as a surprise. The difference is that from the start Eva is far icier, much starker — it has no mask of pleasantry to remove. You know where you’re heading the moment you step on the boat. I will say that the fate of one character is rather clumsily handled, cinematically. I don’t know if this was the result of the producer’s cutting something, and it’s not as though you can’t figure out what happened, but the drama, the shock, is heavily diluted by the way it’s shot. Try telling that to Tyvian, though. That would cut no idea with him.

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This post is part of a series that is separate from, but related to, and will probably at certain points merge with, my Reading Project. For my details of what I guess is my Film Project, click here.