The Mystery of the Sea

Bram Stoker – 1902

The Mystery of the Sea is a fascinating fusion of genres that challenges you to resist expectations based on tropes known from romance, espionage and ghost stories. It’s by far the most romantic novel I’ve ever read, given that I never read anything romantic at all. It also reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe quite a bit, in particular The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and The Gold Bug, due to the intense presence of ciphers and codebreaking, nautical adventure and claustrophobic anxiety. Most curious of all is the almost arbitrary element of the supernatural that appears in early chapters and then disappears until the climax when its return borders on deus ex machina. I can honestly say I’ve never read a book where the protagonist is suddenly able to save the day in the final act after realizing that he has psychic powers, and yet somehow it isn’t laughably off-putting.

A young Englishman named Archibald Hunter frequently visits Scotland with the intention of building a house in Cruden Bay in Aberdeenshire near the ocean. (Stoker wrote some of Dracula in Cruden Bay.) He encounters a creepy, Gaelic-speaking local clairvoyant named Gormala. He rescues a beautiful American woman named Marjory from a shipwreck in the bay. A handsome fisherman drowns in the same incident and Hunter sees his ghost amid a procession that includes many Spanish armada sailors. He finds a document that contains a cipher that he believes will direct him to a horde of Spanish gold hidden underneath his own property. Hopelessly smitten with Marjory, he proposes marriage on only their second meeting, eventually learning that she’s a wealthy American patriot and adventurer involved in the current Spanish-American war. Lots of mystery and intrigue ensues as various parties arrive on the scene in search of the same treasure, leading to the novel’s centerpiece; a harrowing and suspenseful sequence depicting Archibald and Marjory’s trek through the subterranean sea caverns below his house.

In keeping with the novel’s seeming mishmash of genre elements is its alternately progressive and nakedly racist qualities. After going to such pains to portray Marjory as a brilliant, level-headed and completely ethical heroine who keeps pace with Archibald’s knack for cryptography and secret hand-sign communication, it also – out of nowhere – presents the sophisticated Archibald as rabidly hateful of black people precisely because of their blackness, which he finds repulsive and inherently evil. The undisguised and almost psychotic xenophobia goes unchallenged, forcing us to wonder how closely it resembles Stoker’s own views, becoming a massive stain on an otherwise compelling adventure story. Poe and Melville dealt with race in a straightforward way that tended to lump racist views together with mankind’s foibles and hypocrisies in general, leaving room to see their inclusion as a critique of racism rather than a validation. But not so with Stoker, who seems fine with Archibald’s righteous glee in murdering a black villain based mostly on his irrational assumption that the man intends to defile his beloved Marjory.

Despite the crazed racism in the book’s final chapters, and the almost ludicrous eruption of the hero’s second sight just in time for it to become useful in his defeat of a ship full of mercenaries and pirates (and one black man), amazingly The Mystery of the Sea all holds together and works in the context of its own logic and the world it creates.

Psycho

Robert Bloch – 1959

While somewhat innovative in its portrayal of a serial killer as truly ill and depraved and not just a kind of spree criminal, for the most part Robert Bloch’s Psycho is a simple potboiler and murder mystery. The prose is unexceptional. Everything uniquely interesting about the criminal mind of Norman Bates is only revealed in its final pages. It’s easy to see why its concise, lurid plot and minimal locations and characters made it ideal for film director Alfred Hitchcock’s plan to make a shocking, low-budget thriller that he was going to produce independently. It was moderately successful, but far from a bestseller until after the film adaptation became a hit, making it feasible for Hitchcock to buy up copies to help keep its twist ending under wraps. The novel gleefully cheats in a way that would be impossible in a film, as conversations between Norman and his mother take place with no hint that the deranged Norman is in fact speaking for his dead mother too. Hitchcock’s version is surprisingly faithful to Bloch; the only major divergence was the decision to make Norman a slight and nervous young man who would be far more sympathetic to audiences than the pudgy, middle-aged character described in the novel, who might have been more accurately portrayed by someone like Ernest Borgnine or Rod Steiger than Anthony Perkins. The novel is a page-turner, but just as the Hitchcock masterpiece of a film caused the novel to become a top seller, the film tends to make the novel seem much better than it really is too.

In the Days of the Comet

H.G. Wells – 1906

"I wish at times,” said I, with a gesture at the heavens, “that comet of yours or some such thing would indeed strike this world–and wipe us all away, strikes, wars, tumults, loves, jealousies, and all the wretchedness of life!”

The novels of H.G. Wells were probably the biggest political influence on me since I started reading them in my early teens. Their common factor that stayed with me was the readjustment of perspective caused by the extraordinary situations Wells conjured, that combined with his Freudian apprehensions about the human condition as well as his beautiful prose. I loved the fact that the Martians in The War of the Worlds were defeated not by human cunning or technology but by mere germs in our atmosphere whose impact no one could foresee. I loved the portrayal of a future society in The Time Machine where human beings have diverged into the caveman-like Morlocks and the beautiful but dumb Eloi. The Island of Dr. Moreau (my favorite of all) forces you to question what right humans really have to regard themselves masters of all life on earth. And When the Sleeper Wakes demonstrates that not even centuries of technical advances can cure people of their hunger for messiahs.

In the Days of the Comet tells the story of a willful young working-class man in Victorian England, William Leadford, as he wrestles with personal and economic problems while a comet, at first only faintly observed in the night sky, makes its way steadily towards earth. I expected a presentation of society at large, but the story keeps close to William’s personal story as the external forces steadily close in; not only the comet but civil strife and even looming war between England and Germany. After being casually indoctrinated into socialism by his friend Parload, William begins to conflate his personal hardships with the injustices of the world. When he loses his job at a pottery bank and his fiancée Nettie rejects him for a wealthier man above her class, he swears revenge and purchases a gun. He witnesses violence between a local mining company and its oppressed workers. He identifies society as the Secure versus the Insecure, a Darwinian battlefield of predators and prey. Just as all crises converge – William stalking Nettie and her lover, enemy ships approaching the English coast – the comet gets close enough to illuminate the land all night long. Moments away from William committing murder, the comet breaches the earth’s atmosphere and begins to disintegrate, dousing all life on Earth in a mysterious “green vapor” that temporarily knocks them unconscious. The gas turns out to have not just transformative but curative effects on the human body’s nerves and brain. Humanity wakes up from this brief trance filled with feelings of compassion and connection with all living things. Greed and jealousy are universally left behind as primitive and childish, and societies around the world begin rebuilding systems and structures that edify rather than crush the human spirit. To William’s great surprise, Nettie wants to return to him while also staying with her current husband. He turns her down out of feelings of propriety, which he eventually comes to dismiss as an outmoded moral prejudice, entering into a polyamorous relationship between Nettie and her husband and William and his wife Anna. This is where the story abruptly ends, with an ambiguous interjection by the narrator reacting with shock to the elderly William’s memories of professed sexual freedom, suggesting either that the effects of the comet’s vapor wore off or possibly that the story we’ve been told was imagined or invented by William. I’m not sure I interpreted the finale correctly, or how I feel about its implications. I was along with Wells for the ride, fascinated by his radical propositions, so I felt a little let down if indeed the tale of the comet’s quickening effect on humanity is false. I say that even though I acknowledge that this would be in line with Wells’ relentlessly grim outlook on the nature of Man. I thoroughly love In the Days of the Comet for its beautiful language and ideas, but I can’t deny being disturbed by Wells’ suggestion that even the heights to which humanity can climb are only temporarily accessible at best.

The World of Dreams

Havelock Ellis – 1911

Although he provides many examples of his own dreams, Havelock Ellis doesn’t offer a lot of new or personal insights about dreams in general, except for a few brief asides at the end of some chapters. The book is more of a survey of dream research and theories up to that point.

Here are a few passages that I liked:

“In dreams, planes of existence that in waking life are fundamentally distinct are brought together, so that events belonging to different planes move on the same plane, and even become combined. Acting and life, the picture and the reality, are no longer absolutely distinct. Art and life flow in the same channel.”

“In our dreams we are brought back into the magic circle of early culture, and we shrink and shudder in the presence of imaginative phantoms that are built up of our own thoughts and emotions, and are really our own flesh.”

“I have cultivated, so far as I care to, my garden of dreams, and it scarcely seems to me that it is a large garden. Yet every path of it, I sometimes think, might lead at last to the heart of the universe.”

The Sirens of Titan

Kurt Vonnegut – 1959

“At first glance, the laboratory-gowned scientist seemed to be a perfect servant of nothing but truth. At first glance, one was convinced that nothing but truth could please him as he beamed at his test tube. At first glance, one thought that he was as much above the beastly concerns of mankind as the harmoniums in the caves of Mercury. There, at first glance, was a young man without vanity, without lust – and one accepted at its face value the title Salo had engraved on the statue, Discovery of Atomic Power.

And then one perceived that the young truth-seeker had a shocking erection.”

Empathy and cynicism meet and meld in The Sirens of Titan, which is Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel but the one in which he truly found his voice. The satire is often unbearably brutal and there are moments of powerful grace and humanity. Though not a solipsistic writer, Vonnegut’s inner conflict is never concealed. He sees life as futile and human beings as horribly flawed, but at the same time he finds so much redemption in the smallest instances of sharing and kindness between any two people. It’s a philosophical battle that never quite gets settled in his greatest books, which is what makes them so potent. An eccentric millionaire, Winston Niles Rumfoord, builds a spaceship and blasts off with his dog to explore the universe, getting sucked into some kind of wormhole or vortex that transforms him into a multi-dimensional being who can see the future, at least well enough to seem omniscient to most mortals, allowing him to remake society in his image, orchestrate interplanetary wars, and unify the world under a new religion called The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, the sole tenet of which is that all events are complete accidents, not the will of the Almighty. Meanwhile, another rich man, Malachi Constant, lives a completely frivolous life and becomes a pawn in Rumfoord’s agenda to demonstrate the absence of divine justice in the cosmos. And just when we think that Rumfoord is essentially a demigod, we find that he is not only at the mercy of natural forces but also of an alien race known as the Tralfamadorians, who have manipulated human history for no other reason than to make them able to produce and deliver a replacement spaceship part for one of their messenger robots stranded on Titan, a task that takes hundreds of thousands of years. (One other point of interest about the book is that it describes a future society where citizens accept handicaps to minimize any kind of physical or intellectual advantages they may have other others, a concept that will become the main premise of Vonnegut’s later famous story “Harrison Bergeron.”) The plot is not dependent on twists and turns, but there are several that bowled me over. More than the story, though, are various isolated scenes and subplots that really surprised and moved me. The Tralfamadorian robot, Salo, alone for millennia, has developed compassion and a profound sense of loneliness. Salo is crestfallen to find that Rumfoord, the only other intelligent being on the Saturn moon, has no interest in his friendship and only resents him as a fellow tool of the Tralfamadorians. This leads to Salo committing suicide by disassembling himself by a lakeshore. Chrono, the estranged son of Constant, is a surly brat on Earth but after being on Titan for many years, he goes feral and leaves his family to live with the native bluebird flocks, wearing feathers and learning their language, and even building votive structures in their honor all over the landscape. Near the end of his life, the repentant Constant undertakes cleaning and maintaining these shrines as a means of bonding with his son. Most striking of all, for me, is the tale of Unk and Boaz marooned in the deep catacombs of Mercury, (thereby – by Rumfoord’s design – surviving the disastrous Mars-Earth war). There is a native species in these caverns called ‘harmoniums,’ creatures that have no higher functions or thoughts beyond existing and who are fueled by vibrations. Dazzled by their simple beauty and the music they produce, Boaz bonds with the harmoniums, letting them feed on his own pulse, and ultimately chooses to remain alone with them on Mercury rather than escape with Unk. Whether foolish or heroic, or both, the willingness of characters to risk self-destruction to experience a bit of genuine warmth, kindness or tranquility is a phenomenon that Vonnegut returns to often. As he writes in The Sirens of Titan, “It was all so sad. But it was all so beautiful, too.”

The Godfather

Mario Puzo – 1969

Possibly one of the most mediocre novels ever to be turned into a masterpiece of a film, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was nevertheless a bestseller that captured the public’s imagination, largely due to Puzo’s ingenious idea to fuse recently exposed details about the American mafia in nonfiction books like The Valachi Papers and Gay Talese's Honor Thy Father with the trashy roman à clef novels of Jaqueline Susann and Harold Robbins. It’s not great literature, and even Puzo himself, (like director Francis Ford Coppola), was not especially happy about his name being synonymous with mafia epics over the more serious, personal works that he took pride in. But it’s easy to see why the book lent itself to a screen adaptation. The characters are well-drawn, with the family dynamic being loosely patterned on The Brothers Karamazov. Without Coppola’s involvement in the film, it would likely have been a more routine Hollywood affair like Airport or Love Story. Speaking as someone who has seen the movie a hundred times and read the novel once, I can only say that the latter seems incredibly soapy, artless and puerile in comparison. Coppola was generous in sharing credit with Puzo for the adaptation, even insisting on the phrase “Mario Puzo’s” above the title on screen, but it’s apparent that Coppola is primarily responsible for everything great about the film, including Brando, the music of Nino Rota, Gordon Willis’ cinematography, and the huge cast of newcomers that he discovered. It was Coppola who outmaneuvered Paramount chief Robert Evans’ relentless interference. Evans, who wanted another Love Story, pushed for Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal to play Michael Corleone instead of Al Pacino, and generally needled, harassed and second-guessed Coppola the whole way. When the time came for a sequel, one of Coppola’s requirements was that Evans be kept away from him; (pretty much the last time Coppola would have the clout to make such a demand). The point is that I believe Coppola retroactively made the Puzo novel seem better than it was. For every “make him an offer he can’t refuse,” there are endless paragraphs that dwell on the sordid details of minor characters’ lives, like Lucy the bridesmaid who doesn’t know what to do about her abnormally spacious vagina. The writing is ridiculously misogynistic. Dwelling ad nauseum on Johnny Fontaine’s entire sexual history or on Sonny Corleone’s massive phallus and animal libido, Puzo’s prose comes off like the work of a terribly insecure and unattractive man with minimal experience with women trying to sound like he knows everything about them. Worst of all, probably, is the fact that Puzo allows no space in this 450-page novel for reflection or to critique the milieu he depicts. He describes the behavior of all these reprehensible people in almost a journalistic way, with a dearth of feeling about it all, which got translated faithfully into the film, which in turn led to the impression that both Puzo and Coppola were glamorizing the mafia. This is why Coppola made sure that the sequel was unambiguous in showing Michael, (despite being an impressive Machiavellian strategist), as a soulless shell of a human being due to the evil he had wrought, all thinly justified with a pretense of concern for “family.” The finale of The Godfather, Part II shows Michael completely alone, having killed, exiled or alienated all of his loved ones. Puzo’s novel contains no moments even remotely comparable in depth, poetry and pure decisiveness in its treatment of themes. This, combined with the absence of any style or beauty in Puzo’s writing, makes The Godfather pretty underwhelming, in my opinion.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Henry Farrell – 1960

It’s not great literature by any means, but it’s an interesting, light read as kind of a fan-fiction mashup of A Streetcar Named Desire and Sunset Boulevard, leaning towards the sordid instead of pathos or poetry. Possibly because the 1962 movie is so famous and is such a strict adaptation, the book reads like a novelization of it, not incredibly graceful or visceral, just efficient in its juicy storytelling.

Splinter of the Mind’s Eye

Alan Dean Foster – 1978

The king of movie novelizations and the ghostwriter of “George Lucas’” Star Wars novel, Alan Dean Foster was commissioned to write a sequel to the hit film, but was advised that it had to be something that could be easily adapted into an inexpensive movie if the powers-that-be decided that Star Wars needed a sequel. Obviously, and thankfully, that plan was scrapped in favor of The Empire Strikes Back. Nevertheless, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye retains the distinction of being not only the first Star Wars sequel but the very first work of “expanded universe” building in the Star Wars fiction galaxy, a sub-genre all its own that has flooded the earth with seemingly innumerable comics, novels, TV shows, video games, etc. Yes, it even precedes the notorious Star Wars Holiday Special, which taught us about Life Day and introduced Boba Fett before he ever appeared in film. Foster’s novel, presumably crafted with input from Lucas, is pretty underwhelming. It feels like Foster barely got Star Wars, and in all fairness, hardly anyone at that time could conceive of what it would become. The plot has Luke and Leia, still before knowing of their own sibling connection, crash land on an industrial outpost planet and scramble to evade capture by the always pursuing Empire. Luke retains some of his youthful humility from the 1977 film (aka A New Hope), but Leia is more irritable and unlikeable than she previously was. The focus stays on them the entire time as they pass through a frontier mining town and witness injustice while trying to stay undercover. Eventually, late into the book, Darth Vader finally shows up to fight a duel with Luke, whose Force powers are magnified by his contact with a sacred crystal. It’s an interesting read, but it never gets past the TV-movie mentality that would later give us The Ewok Adventure, an economical detour into a somewhat Star Wars-y landscape. But all this restraint makes no sense because it’s a novel. Foster could have made it more epic and ambitious than any movie, but he was curtailed by the demand to keep it simple for the sake of a future B-movie budget that never even came to pass. Thus we see that, as early as 1978, Lucas was already bending his art over to accept the insertion of corporate demands, something that would only get progressively worse over the years, culminating in his sale of the whole beloved franchise to the Disney media conglomeration.

Pictures of the Gone World

Lawrence Ferlinghetti – 1955

“...couples going nude into the sad water in the profound lasciviousness of Spring in an algebra of lyricism which I am still deciphering.”

Not only is this Ferlinghetti’s first book, it’s the first publication by his bookstore and printing company City Lights in San Francisco, which went on to put out books by fellow poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and many others. Ferlinghetti just died a few years ago at the age of 101! These poems are printed in scattered fashion across the pages, making use of wide unused spaces and without punctuation or justified edges. Altogether, they give the impression of someone reflecting upon considerable travels around the world. Ferlinghetti has the same detached, ironic voice of most of his fellow Beats, reacting to human activity with an alien’s bemusement and a bit of disdain. By far, my favorite poem in this collection is ‘The World is a Beautiful Place.’

“The world is a beautiful place to be born into, if you don’t mind some people dying all the time.”

Dandelion Wine

Ray Bradbury – 1957

“Knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise or set and when the tides came in or out. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of.”

More potently than any other novel I have experience with, Dandelion Wine exudes a warm, melancholy nostalgia not just from its text but even from its pages, cover and title. This was my third time reading it after reading it twice in high school, which means not much of it was still in my head after 30 years except for the basic notion of 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding becoming conscious of the world and trying to savor his summer months in 1928 small-town Illinois. There’s not much I can say about the book that other reviewers haven’t covered, so I’ll just make a few observations. I didn’t learn until recently that it is actually a fix-up novel mixing the main Spaulding plot with several short stories that Ray Bradbury had already published elsewhere. I wish that wasn’t the case, I wish it had all been original for the book and planned as a complete novel, but I can’t deny that it works and that I would never suspect it’s a fix-up if I didn’t know. Details that stand out for me: 1) An early chapter about Douglas, on the cusp of puberty, lying in the woods and being overwhelmed by the sensuousness of nature, eating fruit, and feeling the breeze on his skin. Soon after, he goes to the edge of an ominous ravine next to town and is struck by the contrast of primordial wildness and civilization and wonders how the two can possibly be reconciled. 2) There is a serial killer in the town, targeting women walking alone at night. He has been conflated into an urban legend about a being the townsfolk call “the Lonely One,” an almost supernatural boogeyman figure that parents use to scare kids with and about whom boys tell each other tall tales. 3) A couple things foreshadow Bradbury’s next novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes; a traveling junk man with mystical powers is a bit like the lightning rod salesman in the later story, and in one chapter, Douglas and his brother Tom visit a carnival and are captivated by a lifelike fortune-telling machine that they “rescue” with the intention of reviving it to restore its powers of prophecy. 4) A few times, modernization is dealt with as a corrupting influence, i.e. the “happiness machine” a man builds that backfires by distracting him and his family from the true happiness in their lives together, Aunt Rose reorganizing Grandma’s kitchen and buying her a cookbook, which spoils the magic of her instinctive cooking skills, and Grandpa’s rejection of a miraculous new type of grass that would never have to be mowed. In keeping with the style of Bradbury’s numerous short stories, many of the vignettes are ironic or tragic in nature, with twists that emphasize punishment for not appreciating the here and now, and reward for taking time to smell the roses. Sometimes this technique can seem needlessly cruel, like Twilight Zone episodes, such as the young man who falls in love with a woman based on her photograph only to find out that she is really decades older than him, and the elderly man in a rest home who dies in the midst of calling strangers in foreign countries so they can hold the phone to their windows and allow him to hear bustling life around the world. One of the stories I enjoy the most involves Douglas’ best friend John Huff, also 12 years old, who seems to be everything a boy should be, agile, kind, brave and knowledgeable about everything worth knowing. Being forced to move away, John is worried about being forgotten. Douglas assures him that’s impossible, but when John shuts his eyes and asks Douglas to tell him what color his eyes are, Douglas can’t remember. This is key to the theme of the novel, as Douglas learns to celebrate the vibrance and diversity of life, but also becomes aware of death, loss, the passage of time, and the fleeting nature of memory. The overall feeling of nostalgia for the magic of childhood is off the charts throughout Dandelion Wine, but it isn’t quaint or cloying. It’s genuine because it’s Bradbury’s honest agenda and not seasoning added to artificially create a sensation the book wouldn’t otherwise have. What makes it great is Bradbury’s unabashed pleasure in his use of language, pleasure in memory and reverie, celebrating reverie, celebrating both sensory experience and consciously reflecting upon and analyzing the experience.

King Jesus

Robert Graves – 1946

“Do you ever relax from your monomania of holiness?” - Pontius Pilate to Jesus

I don’t think I’ve ever been as happily captivated by a novel from beginning to end as I was while reading Robert Graves’ King Jesus. I loved it so much that I felt like it was written especially for me. How Graves was able to present his enormous knowledge of antiquity, blended with his own theories and observations, filtered through his somehow poetic and completely accessible writing style, is nothing short of miraculous in my opinion. Equally remarkable is his ability to tell the story of the life of Christ from secular and pagan perspectives while also displaying due admiration for Jesus himself. The fictional historian who guides us takes the position that most of Jesus’ reported miracles were misunderstood or exaggerated in the retelling, but that Jesus was not only a genuinely gifted holy man with sharp human ethics, but was legally entitled to be known as the King of the Jews as well. I was hooked from the very first page, on which Graves describes the antagonistic relationship between Judaism and “mother goddess” cults in the ancient Levant. This connects to Graves’ other major work of the 1940s, his nonfiction study of paganism and poetry, The White Goddess. The scholar/historian narrator in King Jesus asserts that the great secret of ancient Judaism is that the right of kingship is actually passed through the female line, not the patriarchal. The Biblical characters Hannah (Anna), Elizabeth, Miriam (Mary), the mother of Jesus, and Mary of Cleophas all belong to a parallel or interior sect within Judaism that maintains the ways of the older cults devoted to the mother goddess. “In the name of the Mother,” is a password phrase recognized by them all. Graves suggests that Jesus’ birth was engineered by a clever, farsighted high priest who arranged a surreptitious marriage between Mary, the last in the royal matriarchal line, and Antipater, King Herod’s eldest son and heir, giving their offspring indisputable claims to the Judean throne through both parents. Herod spoils these plans when he condemns Antipater to death as an Abrahamic sacrifice intended to help cure him of the mysterious festering diseases that would claim his life soon after Jesus’ birth, forcing Mary to seek out an arranged second marriage with the carpenter Joseph and to flee to Egypt to protect the infant from the murderous Herod. One of the running themes of the novel is the misogyny that Graves seems to consider inherent in Judaism. The Israelites dread being on the sea, identifying it with the Female, i.e. female sexual power, the lust that corrupts and distracts holy men from their holy business. The great rarely-spoken-of enemy of the Jewish tribes is the mother goddess embodied by the apocryphal Lilith, “the first Eve,” and her fellow priestesses down through the ages. Lucifer/Satan/the Devil is never even mentioned, but it is stated that Jesus’ mission is to personally “destroy the works of the Female.” There is a remarkable and heady chapter in which a type of doctrinal wizards duel takes place between Jesus and Mary of Cleophas (Clopas), a prostitute ringleader and high priestess of the goddess cult, which climaxes with an agreement between the two of them to marry in order to fulfill messianic prophecies that both of them have vested interest in, although the actual marriage, to Mary’s chagrin, is to remain unconsummated. Jesus’ many recorded miracles are explained as either misunderstandings or exaggerated by word of mouth, and in some cases, the result of the power of suggestion. Jesus is careful not to attempt healing anyone who is blatantly incurable. A crippled man is able to stand because Jesus relieves him of his debilitating guilt. The changing of water into wine is just a metaphor, not an actual phenomenon. It is told that Lazarus, a cousin of Jesus’ witch wife Mary, was cursed by her with a condition resembling death in order to lure Jesus home, and that Jesus is somehow able to remove the trance, allowing Lazarus to seemingly rise from the dead. There are unexplained miracles too, however, which the author seems to accept, having no rational explanation, including Jesus’ resurrection. After exiting his tomb, he is last seen disappearing into the mist over a hill in the companionship of three women; Mary, his mother, Mary, his queen, and a third, unidentified woman. As in Frazer’s The Golden Bough, it is observed that crucifixion is an ancient tradition in many cultures, starting as a propitiatory ritual requiring kings themselves to be killed, and degenerating over time into a punishment for lowly criminals. As such, Jesus ends up accidentally fulfilling the pagan “dying god/dying king” prophecy, which he could have averted if he had accepted Pontius Pilate’s help, who clearly accepted that Jesus was King Herod’s grandson, even noting the facial resemblance. Just after his tortuous execution, Jesus’ wife/queen Mary comments to observers that her husband’s actual crime was not against the Pharisees or Rome but “the Female,” whose prophecies cannot be rushed into fruition, not even by someone of Jesus’ great gifts and genius. In losing his battle against the great mother goddess, fervently praying to his Father god to his last breath, Jesus is discredited and condemned. We are left to discern the meaning of his resurrection ourselves, as Graves’ narrator appears to run out of theories in the book’s final pages, but the implication could be that the Female’s, the Triple Goddess’ magic has won out over the Israelites’ slight-of-hand miracles and superstitions, as the three mysterious women on the foggy hill, like Macbeth’s trio of witches, lead the healed and resurrected Son of David off to his true destiny. King Jesus is a truly unique, beautiful, challenging and satisfying work of literature by one of the great English author/scholars.

Starship Troopers

Robert A. Heinlein – 1959

As a longtime fan of Paul Verhoeven’s film adaptation of Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein’s source novel has been on my reading list for years. The only other book of his that I’ve read is Stranger in a Strange Land. Supposedly, Verhoeven didn’t read much of the novel because he found it fascistic. I don’t know if that’s the case. I interpreted it as a story told from the point of view of a young soldier who is thoroughly indoctrinated in military philosophy. Probably 80% of the novel is a debate and dissertation, first absorbed and then expressed by protagonist Johnnie Rico, about everything from practical soldiering to the mathematics behind combat strategy. Rico is an interesting hero because, as in the film, he starts out a rather spoiled and self-interested boy, but, due to his inherent humility, quickly adapts to the life of an infantryman. Rico portrays himself as simple and unexceptional, but his writing and observations are advanced, and I wondered if this situation could occur because the society he lives in places minimal value on arts and letters, being completely militarist in orientation. What makes the book so interesting to me is the ultimately unresolved question of whether or not Rico is exclusively brainwashed or if the army just legitimately brings out and polishes his best natural abilities. Regarding the perceived “right wing” slant of the novel, I don’t buy it. Why can’t a brilliant author bury himself in an alien worldview just like he does with his main characters and fictional universe, to explore how systems and ideas evolve? The presence of militaristic statements by fictional characters does not make the author a fascist. That logic would lead you to believe that Nazis criticizing Jews in hateful language in Schindler’s List must mean that the work itself, and its author, are fascist too. This reasoning is absurd on the face of it. Further, the implication of fascism’s characteristic xenophobia is completely undercut by Heinlein’s depiction of a cooperating international Earth culture. Juan “Johnnie” Rico is from South America, but the language he speaks at home with his parents is Tagalog, and his squad in basic training is populated with inductees representing not only English but Spanish, German and Japanese-speaking nations. And in the final chapter, depicting a brand new infantryman preposterously boasting of his nation's many historical accomplishments, we and Rico are reminded that ideologies often flourish thanks to big lies. It's clear that Heinlein is highly skeptical of all political systems, including the one currently in power in his story. I was surprised how little combat against the giant “Bugs” of Klendathu actually takes place in the story. In fact, Rico doesn’t find himself in the middle of the war until the last dozen or so pages, and even then, ironically, he gets injured and knocked unconscious and misses the battle’s entire resolution. (Hardly the rousing finale you’d expect in a supposedly pro-war book.) In further irony, Verhoeven’s film was also dismissed as fascist propaganda by blinkered intellectuals utterly consumed with interpreting all art through the filter of their narrow agenda. These automaton-like critics lack the tools to acknowledge the subtlety and nuance of authors who are actually critiquing the very things they’re accused of promoting. That’s the real dystopia we’re in, which was always foretold by the best science fiction writers like Heinlein, Bradbury, Vonnegut, and many others.

The Once and Future King

T.H. White – 1958

Comprised of four novellas written in the 1930s and 40s about Arthurian legends, The Once and Future King is T.H. White’s most celebrated work, comparable in scope and eloquence to Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, White’s fellow English contemporaries. The four books are The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight and The Candle in the Wind. A fifth story, The Book of Merlyn, was intended to conclude the epic collection but was ultimately published posthumously. Like Tolkien’s The Hobbit, The Sword in the Stone was first published separately in the late 30s and is more of a whimsical introduction to the dense fantasy world to be further explored in the later, more mature books. As the basis of the animated 1963 Disney film, The Sword in the Stone may be the most famous story, but I felt that the centerpiece and soul of the book is The Ill-Made Knight, the story of Lancelot’s all-consuming and tragic love for Queen Guinevere. This passion causes him to betray his best friend and king, as well as his faith, and to compromise his honor. The portrait of Lancelot is like nothing I’ve encountered before, full of so much heartbreaking irony that it’s almost unbearable. Unlike Arthur, who was always destined to lead, Lancelot was a completely unexceptional and unloved child who craved nothing except the love of a father figure, a role that Arthur would fill. Much is made of his physical ugliness, which only adds to his low self-esteem. What he is, though, is a universally unmatched swordsman and warrior, making him a legend in his own lifetime. He carries a lonely and dark secret all his life; the knowledge that he is not benevolent by nature and has to actively imitate the behavior of good people in order to function as a noble knight. This humility, ironically, is what makes him the superior man in the end, though he never comprehends it. He feels like a pretender his entire life. In this sense, he is the noblest and truest hero, because he overcomes weaknesses to accomplish the things he does, whereas many of the other knights who seem “good” so effortlessly never seem to question their own righteousness. To make matters worse, being smitten by his idol Arthur’s wife leads to a one-sided burden of a relationship. Guinevere lusts for him but is generally capricious and jealous, barely concerned that her hysterics lead Lancelot to raving madness at one point, showing only fleeting regrets over the abject misery she is laying upon her guileless lover. The Queen of Air and Darkness (a.k.a. The Witch in the Wood) also stands out for its disturbing back-and-forth between Arthur agonizing over how to justify force to create peace and the witch Morgause’s and her children’s appalling cruelty to animals, including the gruesome killing and desecration of a rare, white unicorn. Throughout the novel, White’s prose is exquisite without becoming flowery. His famous use of anachronisms and his almost sadistic deployment of arcane British words and references can have you shaking your head at times, but it's never off-putting. Ultimately, its provocative debate about humanity’s penchant for war and whether or not it deserves its dominion over the natural world is what stays with the reader long after putting it down.

The Green Brain

Frank Herbert - 1966

This was Frank Herbert’s first publication following his signature classic Dune. It may suffer in comparison, but why compare? It’s a compelling and provocative story in its own right. Humanity has finally found a way to eradicate all insect pests, allowing it to confidently build housing in the depths of the jungles. Little do the masterminds suspect that bugs have not only collectively built up an immunity to insecticides, but – due to severe mutation – they’ve all neurologically linked to each other and formed a hive mind that thinks and plans. The insects also have the ability to mass together into human and other shapes in order to spy on humans and to intimidate as needed. Possibly an influence on movies like Phase IV and Mimic, The Green Brain is especially notable for the ecological themes that Herbert was known for, along with the idea of adaptation and the untapped potential of human (or animal) intelligence.

“A person cries out in life because it's lonely and because life's been broken off from whatever created it. But no matter how much you hate life, you love it too. It's like a caldron boiling with everything you have to have, but very painful to the lips.”

Kink: An Autobiography

Dave Davies - 1996

Three years younger than his brother, Ray, Dave Davies founded The Kinks without him in 1963, only to have Ray join soon after and essentially take over as lead singer, primary songwriter and mastermind. This early sibling rivalry is at the core of Dave’s grudge against his brother, one that was never resolved in the entire 33-year history of the group, (which disbanded officially in 1996, the same year as this book’s publication). The eccentric Ray Davies became one of the top songsmiths and rock visionaries of the 60s alongside Bob Dylan, Lennon & McCartney, Brian Wilson, and Pete Townshend, producing a string of classic concept albums in the 60s and 70s. It might never have happened if the rebellious, Eddie Cochran-worshipping Dave hadn’t started the band in the first place and created the signature raucous guitar sound that made the first few Kinks singles so sensational. At only seventeen years old, he experimented with his guitar and manipulated his amps to create the raw sound that characterized the legendary riffs in the songs ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night.’ Skyrocketed to fame overnight, Dave was more than ready to dive into the swinging sixties with regards to fashion, drugs and groupies. Dave was the outgoing and good-looking rock star while his brother Ray was the brooding, suffering and distant artist. They apparently had so little in common that it’s hard to believe they are related. Dave claims that Ray manipulated and stole credit from him repeatedly throughout their career, but (as happens with many successful musical partnerships) neither of them could break away; they needed each other to produce the magic that was The Kinks – Ray's wizardry in the studio and Dave’s dazzling onstage guitarwork and outgoing rock image. Neither could have fired the other, nor gone solo with the same success as they had together. The book seems to be Dave’s attempt at therapy, unloading a lifetime’s worth of grievances all at once in the hopes of relieving his pain. It probably didn’t work since what it seems he’s really after is some basic human warmth from his big brother. The other big trauma of his life was being torn from his girlfriend at the age of 15 after she became pregnant and both sets of parents conspired to separate them, persuading the girl that Dave wanted nothing to do with her and vice versa. Dave spent 25 years wondering what became of this girl and the daughter she raised without him. The most heart-wrenching aspect of the book is this story, with Dave eventually being able to meet his daughter as an adult. While lovable in a rascally way, Dave is also frustratingly capricious all his life, alternately bragging about his sexual conquests of nameless (often underage) girls while also professing a deep-seated spirituality that encompasses Jesus, Zen, magic, witchcraft, ESP and UFOs. On one page, he may wax poetic about falling in love with the woman of his dreams and marrying her, and on the next describe nonchalantly cheating on his wife while on tour. Dave is nothing if not bold, and that’s what makes the book so interesting. Aside from essentially inventing hard rock with those early Kinks records, creating an edgier sound that none of their contemporaries had attained, he also had the longest hair of any rocker in 1964, longer than any of the Beatles or Rolling Stones, and additionally was unabashed about pursuing sex with men when he felt like it too. While not a great writer of prose, Dave Davies makes up for it with sheer genuineness. If ghostwriters and editors were involved, they seem to have stayed out of the way and allowed Dave’s personality to come through. You come away feeling like you really know the guy and that he’s truly let his guard down, and that more than anything makes the book worthwhile.

Ritual

David Pinner – 1967

“Your God, my God, our God, is freedom! Complete freedom! To do anything! Run faster than wind! Play till stars are tired! In this tree, the blood is sleeping, waiting for you to revive it. It will give you strength to grow. To be the best! And one day you will take the world by the throat and wring it until winter is dead and summer lasts forever! So touch the oak! Touch it! Grow!”

A neurotic, repressed Christian police detective is sent from London to a remote village in Cornwall to look into the mysterious murder of a young girl. After investigating, he is convinced the death was a Celtic sacrifice of some kind, which is borne out by the villager’s delight in taunting him for his religious fundamentalism. The policeman’s insufferable self-righteousness makes him impossible to root for and a ripe target of the villagers’ malicious pranks. They delight in sending him through a maze of wild goose chases and testing his chastity with their brazen sensuality. Ultimately, he is incredulous that the community seems to easily bounce between mainstream Christianity by day and the region’s traditional ways of nature worship by night, comparing the situation to the dichotomy of voodoo and Catholicism in Haiti. As a whodunit, the plot remains misty as the inspector’s sanity increasingly comes into question. The real appeal of Ritual for me was David Pinner’s florid language. A prolific playwright, actor and novelist, he has a poet’s delicate flair for allusions and metaphors, combined with a biting satirical edge that can be hilarious. Pinner sold the film rights to the book, but the filmmakers only adapted some key elements and crafted their own version instead, which became the cult classic The Wicker Man.

Cruising

Gerald Walker – 1970 

While not a bestseller, Cruising caused a bit of a sensation by being so relentlessly lurid and one of the earliest exposes of the gay subculture in New York City. Though written before the Stonewall riots, it depicts both closeted and uncloseted gay men actively pursuing their sexual needs despite the dangers inherent in the practice of “cruising,” picking up, or being picked up by, random strangers. My interest in the book came from the fact that it was the foundation for not one but two great movies released in 1980, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and William Friedkin’s Cruising, the latter of which was freely adapted from the novel. De Palma had developed the project before Friedkin, having been impressed with the book, but after he lost the rights to it, he modified some of its themes and details into a new story, which became Dressed to Kill. The novel is a parallel narrative about a college student (Stuart Richards) who brutally murders gay men out of a thinly veiled rage against his own latent homosexual feelings, and a rookie policeman (John Lynch) who is assigned to go undercover in the gay “community” to draw out the killer. Lynch has been chosen because he resembles the victims and is deemed the killer’s “type.” He is hopelessly backwards and simple is his thinking on homosexuality, women and racial minorities, and is in many ways just as irrationally homophobic as Richards and many of the cops who routinely harass and beat up gays. The book’s numberless chapters go back and forth between Lynch’s and Richards’ stories as they gradually converge. Lynch’s visceral repulsion at the thought of sex between two men is mirrored by Richards’ contempt for the succession of women he sleeps with, with varying success, as he tries to force the homosexual impulses out of his psyche. The two young men resemble each other so much that Lynch is actually mistaken for Richards by a bullying cop who encounters them separately a day apart in the same vicinity. (This is a potent element missing from Friedkin’s film due to a miscast Al Pacino, at least 15 years too old for the lead role, although he was admirably brave to take the role.) As far as I can discover, Cruising was Walker’s only published novel. He was a writer and editor with the New York Times Magazine for several decades. The book is not great literature by any means, but it’s not a mere potboiler either. The sometimes cliché psychological ideas ultimately give way to genuine suspense and a startlingly downbeat and foreboding conclusion.

Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark

Cassandra Peterson – 2021

Speaking as a onetime pre-teen hypnotized by the figure of Elvira on TV on Sunday afternoons in the early and mid-80s, I was excited to get Cassandra Peterson’s long-awaited autobiography. Her varied career reads like a guided tour of show business in the 70s, 80s and 90s. She was a Vegas showgirl (her childhood dream), a member of the Groundlings comedy troupe, the singer in an Italian rock band, and a shameless (though allegedly chaste) groupie who found her way into the hotel rooms of Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Tom Jones and Elvis Presley. Eventually – through drive, talent and luck – she found her greatest fame as the horror hostess Elvira, a Vampira knockoff, on a Los Angeles television station in 1981. The show Movie Macabre showcased B-grade and worse horror flicks punctuated with her withering comedic commentary. I remember being introduced to movies like The Devil’s Rain, Homebodies, Count Yorga and of course the classically awful Attack of the Killer Tomatoes via Elvira’s show. Now to the book. While a good, light read, as expected, I found myself frequently wishing it was better. Despite being in the works for so long, it somehow feels rushed. Peterson may not be a gifted writer, which is fine, but a good editor could have helped her avoid so much off-putting grammar, structure and mood swings. I found the strongest material to be the pre-show biz early years, with Peterson as a wide-eyed, hopeful and lusty teenage girl in the 60s, with her delirious fanhood for Elvis, The Beatles and others, using pluck and cunning to make her way from Midwest go-go girl to Las Vegas dancer to Hollywood starlet. There is much pathos in her story, being a frequent victim of sexual harassment and sometimes assault. The book, however, never shakes an unfortunate feeling of triviality. I hoped for something a little more insightful, profound and even epic, like Keith Richards’ Life, but instead got a fairly routine celebrity memoir. Not a big disappointment; a minor disappointment but more than worthwhile for any Cassandra Peterson fan.

Pimp: The Story of My Life

Iceberg Slim - 1967

"I turned my back to the sunlight. I felt old Morpheus slugging his velvet hammer against my eyelids. ...I woke up in darkness."

Culturally influential autobiographical novel by retired pimp Iceberg Slim, (a.k.a. Robert Beck). The book details his hardship-riddled childhood before moving on to his successful career managing prostitutes in New York City in the 1940s and 50s. The story is compelling on its own, but Slim’s deadpan writing style – a talent he discovered and developed after completing a prison term in the 60s – is what gives the book its alternately chilling and satirical tone. As in a Kubrick film, events are sometimes so hopelessly horrifying that you can only laugh at the absurdity of it all. Even though he claims to be sharing a cautionary tale, there is unmistakable pride in Slim’s descriptions of his own sharp intellect, his bella figura, and his sexual prowess, and the book famously became a Bible of sorts for young men seeking success in pimping and other vocations. Slim claimed to be reformed and was happily married for the rest of his life, but the most glaring theme that pops off every page is a deep-seated and nearly psychotic level of misogyny. In the world Slim operated in, women are thought of as almost subhuman, barely more intelligent than chickens, and can only be managed by being treated like livestock. Not even pets, but livestock. If you can compartmentalize that aspect of the book, you can’t help but be impressed by Slim’s clipped literary style and flair for turns of phrase. Although there is a glossary in the back, the task of wading through the tangle of arcane street slang throughout the book is downright brutal at times, especially when so many phrases aren’t even included in the glossary. All the interruptions to look things up make reading the book take about twice as long as it should, but I do admit this is part of its strange appeal as well, being comically frustrating. It’s almost like Anthony Burgess’ invented futuristic vernacular in A Clockwork Orange.

Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages

Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince - 2014

A long, meandering title for a long, meandering book, a 700-page, tabloid-style tome focused loosely around three of the most important and colorful writers of the mid-20th century. The fact that they were gay is incidental to their careers and legacies, as they prospered well before the Stonewall era, but it is central to the lascivious agenda of this book. Don’t expect much exploration of the artistic process or intellectual struggles; this is strictly a gossip-padded fantasy about the sex-lives of celebrities, in particular Hollywood stars. The first thing to understand is that - in the world imagined by Porter and Prince - every single famous or quasi-famous person you can possibly think of was either homosexual, bisexual or, at the very least, dabbled in same-sex escapades now and then. Many laborious paragraphs describing imagined orgies and other decadence can only be laughed at, but only if you’re not too bleary-eyed from reading the twelfth one within the same chapter. Then you flip through the hefty remaining 600 pages real quick to see if this is what the entire book is like, and finding that it is, you have to decide how much more you can take. What kept my interest most of the time was the book’s bizarre and schizophrenic ambitions. Buried deep is a genuinely well-researched and interesting triple biography of three literary titans of their day, and a portrait of the literary and theatrical worlds of the 1940s and 50s. Despite the impressive scope of the book, the authors sabotage themselves on every page with their lack of citations, flat prose, maddeningly excessive typos, barely concealed puerile obsessiveness, and most of all the odd lack of interest and knowledge of Williams’, Vidal’s and Capote’s major works. They briefly run through descriptions of various books and plays, but with even less insight than a quick glance at Wikipedia can offer. If there is a fatal flaw, it’s the quality of writing, including a lack of any imagination when conjuring dialogue for their famous cast of characters. Celebrities in every age group and from diverse continents all have the exact same wit and speech patterns as the authors of the book. It is sometimes claimed that direct quotations originate from second-hand reports the authors had with participants, and just as often it’s clear that the tales have scant credibility, being third or fourth generation gossip and libel against the dead, or even pure fabrication from Porter’s and Prince’s imaginations. If the book was a fifth the length, it would qualify as harmlessly silly light reading, but its sheer volume is what makes you keep wanting, in vain, to take it seriously.