Category: literature

PopCult Book Club Review #2 – The Hike

The Hike by Drew Magary
2016, Viking

margary

The Hike wastes no time in jumping right into the journey down the path. Ben is a businessman on a trip to the hills of Pennsylvania. Before dinner with a client, he decides to take a hike behind the rural hotel. He quickly becomes lost and finds himself on a path, a path that he must stay on or die. Ben meets a series of strange and fantastic creatures and finds he is on a journey of redefining the perceptions of himself. The resolution of the story brings a huge revelation that reframes the context of the entire novel.

Author Drew Magary is an odd fellow. He wrote for the sports blog Deadspin and currently GQ, he authored a nonfiction book on what a terrible parent he is and won a Chopped amateur competition. This unique point of view makes the prose of The Hike stand out. It’s sparse in a very Hemingway-esque style at moments. This is an interesting counterpoint to the ridiculous encounters like a cursing crab, a giant control panel manipulating cricket, and a good-humored man-eating giantess.

Magary cites books and video games as his main influence for The Hike. Homer’s Odyssey is a primary reference throughout the structure of the novel, a man on a quest to get back to his wife. There’re threads of Grimm and other traditional folktales woven throughout, particularly with an elderly woman in a cottage in the middle of the forest who turns out to know much more than she first lets on. There’s also some outright horror, especially with the Doberman-masked madmen that pursue Ben throughout the story.

Magary stated in an interview that many of the elaborate and silly solutions to problems in the text are inspired by the illogical or irrational reasoning of many King’s Quest PC games. I remember the monster manual Ben comes across in the hotel, and it’s utterly ridiculous methods for killing the bizarre and strange creatures listed therein. In the same interview, he explains that impetus of the novel came from his similar experience of going out and getting so easily lost in the woods.

The novel felt fairly like some fun fluff and then when Ben learned about his fate from the crab and confronted the Producer I started to see a significant turn in what was happening in the subtext. The final scene where Ben sees his wife again after decades of being away, while only a few hours have passed in real world time, and also has the revelation about what happened to her years ago was the big change. The Hike is a story about how impossible it is to share the effects of trauma and life-changing experiences. Ben sees it in his wife’s eyes, realizing she lived through the same journey as him, but we are left in a place where we see they cannot connect on this. The journey was such a singularly personal one that even though they see it in each other’s eyes we know they will never be able to sit down and share anything about it.

Discussion Questions:

How do you successfully communicate personal trauma and life-altering experiences?

Ben goes through a major metamorphosis throughout the Hike. Is he the same person on a physical level at the end as he was when he started? What makes our physical form our self?

Pop Culture BC Review #1 – A Head Full of Ghosts

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
Published by Harpercollins, 2015

a head full of ghosts

The strongest feeling I had reaching the conclusion was a sense of sadness for the main character. I don’t see how anyone could feel anything but that for Merry Barrett. She will never have closure because she is the only one left alive and obviously doubts her own interpretation of what happened to her family. This is the aspect of A Head Full of Ghosts that elevates it to that premiere level of horror in my personal opinion. It is comfortable with ambiguity and it uses that lack of information/understanding to make its horror tragic yet still frightening.

A Head Full of Ghosts doesn’t shy away from its influences. In fact, portions of the text outright name drop books, films, and authors to make it clear that Tremblay acknowledges these antecedents but works to present a narrative that plays with their tropes. By bringing in elements such as the reality tv show, the fractured point of view of a child, and a modern fan blog he tells a familiar story from a seemingly varying number of perspectives. When we reach the halfway point and learn adult Merry is the author of the The Last Final Girl blog we realize the author is saying that a single person’s point of view can be more complex than originally thought. And it also brings us back to the title of the text, A Head Full of Ghosts and how it doesn’t simply apply to the plight of Marjorie Barrett.

Tremblay has publicly stated that the novel is meant to be open for a multitude of interpretations. The big question when you reach the end is of course “Was Marjorie really possessed?” By not including direct transcripts of The Possession reality series, only having their events filtered through The Last Final Girl blog and Merry’s memories, we are forced to crane our neck around bedroom door frames in an attempt to see what truly went on in that house.

The most terrifying moment for me in the book was the encounter between Merry and Marjorie in the basement. The production crew for The Possession had just moved into the Barrett home and was setting up. Merry ends up down there looking for snacks if I recall correctly. The two engage in a conversation about their father’s understanding of Marjorie’s condition, specifically how he, through the guidance of his priest, believes his daughter is possessed by Satan. Marjorie laughingly rebuffs this notion but goes on to say that she *is* possessed.

“Ideas. I’m possessed by ideas. Ideas that are as old as humanity, maybe older, right? Maybe those ideas were out there just floating around before us, just waiting to be thought up. Maybe we don’t think them, we pluck them out from another dimension, or another mind.” Marjorie seemed so pleased with herself, and I wondered if this was something new she just thought up or something she’d told someone before.

Tremblay has contributed to the modern Lovecraftian horror scene. My first read of his work came in The Children of Old Leech, a tribute anthology to Laird Barron. In that collection is Tremblay’s short Notes for “The Barn in the Wild”. This particular quote from Marjorie struck me as a very Lovecraftian in its existential nature. That sort of cosmic horror is often about horrors that transcend our notions of good and evil as well as existing before our concept of time began. Later in the text, Marjorie makes mention of a minor Lovecraftian demon and this is taken as her doing research online behind the backs of the production crew and clergy. It should be noted that Notes for “The Barn in the Wild” is also a found narrative short story presented as fragments of a “discovered” journal, yet another narrative construct whose validity comes into question.

There’s just as much presented in A Head Full of Ghosts that can lead the reader to believe Marjorie is deteriorating from paranoid schizophrenia or some other similar mental illness. Again, we only hear the story from the point of view of someone who was a child and the younger sibling of Marjorie. Many mentions are dropped that Merry was in no way fully aware of what was going on in her own home fifteen years ago. It’s no surprise to anyone who has read the novel that the biggest shock comes in the third act when we learn through a very casual, distant mention that Merry’s father, mother, and sister all died of poisoning that is publicly contributed to the father. Merry’s memories of the events leading up to that moment are some of the most chilling parts of the book. It’s very telling that in how she remembers the poisoning she is the one who taints the food. Moments later she discusses the trouble she’s had remembering her aunt entering the home and saving her after she lays there with the dead bodies for weeks. But then Merry admits that’s not what happened and she was told in retrospect police entered the home to save her.

This is where we are left, with Merry unable to know what really happened. We have just enough pieces of the story to fashion a narrative but not enough to understand what it meant. Great horror understands that it’s not a monster or scary house or the Devil that wrenches at our soul and tears up our eyes. Horror comes from a place of very raw truth when we confront our powerlessness. Childhood trauma can bring the toughest tough guy to their knees. That is horrifying. So many people seek out professional help to bring closure to those scarring moments of their pasts, but never truly move past them, only learn how to manage their emotions in relation to them. A Head Full of Ghosts posits “What if you were completely unable to move on?”. Whether it be heredity or demons, what if you were damned to spend the rest of your life both haunted by your childhood yet unable to fashion a working understanding of what it meant?

 

Discussion Questions

What was Merry hoping to achieve through her blog deconstructing The Possession?

How do you interpret the exorcism scene? What really happened? What was imagined by Merry in her memory?

What did Marjorie seek to gain from Merry attending the exorcism?

Are childhood memories simply a sense memory fabrication or is there factual truth within them?

Great Books You Should Read #1

The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier

celiaI became a lover of Jorge Luis Borges’ writing in college. If you’re not familiar, he was an Argentinian writer who trafficked mostly in short stories that evoked magic realism and played with the ideas of authorship, fiction, and meta-reality. Brockmeier doesn’t get as deeply academic as Borges would, but still touches upon the same ideas. The Truth About Celia begins with the mysterious disappearance of the title character, the daughter of science fiction author Christopher Brooks. The book’s structure is that of a collection of short stories written in the seven years since she vanished that revolve around that tragedy. Some are directly about Celia other opt to explore more fantastical spaces.

At one point, Brooks latches onto the medieval legend of the green children of Woolpit, a supposedly true event where two strange green-skinned children showed up in a village speaking an unknown language and only consuming particular foods. The fictional author Brooks composes a story where his Celia is one of these lost children, tossed through time into the past. Another story involves the toy phone in her bedroom ringing one night and Brooks engaging in a series of conversations with her.

Celia is a very sad story, but a very rewarding one. It’s not a novel about the investigation of a child’s disappearance and very little closure ever comes in the book. It is a story about how people cope with tragedy, particularly parents when they lose their children. Brooks’ fiction becomes his tool to his heal his pain and invent infinite lives for his daughter.

 

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Wind-Up-Bird-ChronicleI picked this novel off the shelf at a bookstore my sophomore year of college knowing absolutely nothing about it. Over a decade and a dozen books later I consider Japanese author Haruki Murakami one of our greatest living writers. Murakami is unlike anyone else you will ever read and has always felt more like film than literature. He’s about setting a mood and examining characters in their spaces. He’s about hinting at mystery and fantasy but never letting the lens explore it too closely.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle begins with protagonist Toru Okada’s cat running away. Okada begins searching his neighborhood and discovers the boarded up house next door and it’s well. Poking around the property leads him into encounters with a psychic prostitute, a teenage girl obsessed with the macabre, a veteran of World War II, and a truly evil politician. The novel operates as a series of interconnected vignettes and has a lot of Murakami’s common tropes. His main characters are wanderers and observers, they are passive to the point of frustration at many moments. But within that passivity is a sense of peace and stillness. Characters exist in the moment, conversations become the chief action of the story.

 

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

Blood-MeridianI was in the dorms the summer between my sophomore and junior year when I read this novel. I was blown away. It was my first encounter with Cormac McCarthy and I knew I had read one of the great American works of literature. Surprisingly, this is a variation on the story of Davy Crockett. That is never clear but if you are familiar with some of the tropes you begin to see them underneath the surface. The story follows a character known only as The Kid born under mysterious signs who encounter a powerful figure known as Judge Holden. Holden becomes a recurring figure throughout the novel and might possibly the Devil. The Kid ends up working to help expand America into the west by exterminating Apaches. The landscape becomes a surreal nightmare plane seen through the eyes of the Kid. Blood Meridian is one of those pieces of literature that you must imagine nearly killed the author to write. It is supremely intense, violent, and sprawling. It outright spits in the face of the romantic Western genre by making us seeing the horrible brutality and biblical horror of a lost time.

Pop Culture BC -August 2016

51RuP7pBWFL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_

I have so many books I need to read. And I do read them. But it often becomes a very solitary experience, as reading so often is. I decided that at least one book I read a month will be a communal thing which led me to start the Pop Culture Book Club.

For the month of August, our book will be A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. I’m familiar with Tremblay from a few horror short stories he’s written. His work would definitely fall in the space between Lovecraftian horror and weird fiction. I do not know a lot about A Head Full of Ghosts, other than it’s been compared favorably to the novels House of Leaves and The Haunting of Hill House.

In the last week of August, I will post my review of the novel along with 3-4 discussion questions to provide a jumping off point if needed. I hope you join me on this endeavor!

Purchase a physical or digital copy of the book here!

Book Review – While Black Stars Burn by Lucy A. Snyder

While the Black Stars Burn by Lucy A. Snyder
(Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press)

27181342._UY400_SS400_The collection begins with a story that only hints at the supernatural tales to come, keeping things fairly mundane. By the second piece, you are pulled into a beautifully created fantasy world. While the Black Stars Burn is a mix of Lovecraftian horror, fantasy, and science fiction and author Snyder handles each genre perfectly.

Personal highlights from the collection are:

 

“Spinwebs” – a story set in a medieval culture where humans and spider-like beings live in mutually beneficial relationship. The world of this story is very well developed in its few pages. You understand why the protagonist has such a love for her weaver and the way the world operates. The end of this story had me ready to read Chapter 2.

“The Strange Architecture of the Heart” – a science fiction story that hits the same buttons as “Spinwebs”. We learn all the details of the world that we need to know and it feels fleshed out. The piece is focused on a lonely housewife and her only friend, the family android. Dark and sadly tender. I wanted a second chapter on this one as well.

“Through Thy Bounty” – This might be my favorite story in the whole collection. A science fiction story set after a nightmarish alien species has conquered the Earth, we hear it from the point of view of a human enslaved to work as the alien’s cook. These creatures’ appetites are for the cook’s fellow humans so she was forced to butcher and prepare everything from infants to children to the elderly. I was genuinely surprised by the places the story goes and it has a very satisfying conclusion. Could imagine the movie version of this one.

“The Abomination of Fensmere” & “The Girl With the Star-Stained Soul” – This duo of stories is connected through a continuing plot. Penny is a teenage girl whose mother has just died in a car accident. A mysterious man appears on her doorstep and claims to be from the girl’s estranged aunt who wants her to live with the old woman. The girl ends up in a small town in the American South straight out of a Lovecraft story. There are familiar tropes but where the story goes is with these elements is very entertaining. The second part takes a very interesting divergence to a landscape most Lovecraft fans would know and provides some beautiful imagery.

While the Black Stars Burn is a collection well worth your time, I can’t say you will enjoy every single story, as with collections there is always one or two that just don’t click. The overwhelming majority of stories here are wonderful, though. Very confident prose with a strong sense of world building.

Moving, Reading, and Digital Media

Google Infinite Bookshelf
The experimental digital bookshelf developed by Google.

I just moved into a new house. We bought it, first time homeowners. After having moved multiple times in my 20s, I decided I would spend the money to hire professional movers to handle the furniture and heavier boxes. It went off so smoothly, I was literally stunned. They arrived at 8am and by 11:30am everything was in the new house and unloaded off their truck. Yet, somehow I still ended up pulling a muscle in my neck (I blame unhooking some very tight washer hoses).

One thing we did before moving was sell off most of our books and DVDs. Once upon a time, I was a rabid collector of physical media. I used to go into bookstores and have an almost euphoric and disorienting haze come over me, being unable to recall a single title or author I might look for. I started keeping a piece of notebook paper folded up in my wallet with these names in case I happened to go into a bookstore. When I was in college, we would regularly visit the local Blockbuster and pour through their cheap DVD selection, growing my collection by dropping $100 a trip. Once I was out of college, I hit some hard times and sold off most of my DVDs for some coin to buy groceries with. Slowly but surely they whittled down.

Now, I only have a very minimal collection of things I consider fairly obscure: Seasons 1 & 2 of Frisky Dingo, Wainy Days, Seasons 1 & 2 of Upright Citizens Brigade, and so on. Mostly things that aren’t easily accessible on the streaming platforms I subscribe to. I no longer own many physical comic books and my weekly reading is done purely digital. For literature, I mostly read off the Kindle app on my iPad and only buy a physical book if I don’t have a digital option.

Throughout my graduate school days and into the present I still hear people bemoan this shift from physical to digital. Whether it be with movies, books, music, or anything else you can find someone who is slightly saddened by a decrease in the tangible. I remember sitting in the Writing Center where I worked at my university, where freshmen came to have their papers critiqued and revised, and having conversations with a couple fellow tutors who were totally against the idea of reading off a screen. Having been through an involuntarily move that forced by books into storage I was on the side of the digital. Their arguments touched on the sensory aspects of a physical literature mostly (feel, smell). I have begun to think of this as the fetish-zation of physical media. The same way a music lover might wax poetic about the groves on a vinyl record, so does the book lover talk in erotic tones about the smell of a used bookstore and the crack of a hardback spine. I personally just don’t get much from those sensory experiences.

Digital means a few different things to me. Because of my personal experiences moving so often I felt that my physical books were either not accessible or a burden I had to think about when going from place to place. Since I got my first iPad and started reading digitally reading and literature feeling freer to me. I can carry my whole library around with me no matter where I go. I can stream movies where ever I have a connection and I can sideload video files onto my devices for watching whenever I choose.

In a world where we have to become increasingly more aware of our impact the environment, moving from printed paper texts to digital ones seems like a necessity. I admit I haven’t researched the carbon impact of a tablet computer versus analog media, but I would have to think that over time the digital option is more environmentally friendly. It also takes less space on a planet that is becoming increasingly overcrowded. Being able to compress media is one way we create more space for each other and our environment.

Digital media is also revolutionary is what it can do for developing countries. Distributing books to people in rural, poor areas through pre-loaded devices would be easier in a digital format. In the same way I would have been able to move my library throughout my 20s if it had been digital, I can imagine how helpful it would be for refugees to hold onto their books despite having to leave their homes. Add in digital photos as a way for them to preserve memories instead of the sad reality of leaving physical photo albums behind when you don’t have time to pack up your life.

There’s a lot of fears around dropping physical media that are very valid. The infamous case of Amazon wiping DRM copies of 1984 off users Kindles rang as one of the most ironic thing our culture has experienced. DRM should be a major concern for digital users. It’s the one great hurdle to making digital media a universal form of the free exchange of information. This ties into copyright law which transcends the digital and affects all forms of media currently.

The future is always uncertain. But I feel very passionate and sure that the future of media lies in the virtual world. The ability to compress an entire library into a single handheld device is one of the most revolutionary things humankind has accomplished. My generation and the next will likely be the transitioners, but in handful of decades reading on screen will be the norm. Like vinyl, there will always be a niche market for physical books, but the way to open the doors of communication across the globe will be in how we develop digital literature.

Book Review – Greener Pastures by Michael Wehunt

Greener Pastures by Michael Wehunt (Published by Shock Totem Publications, 2016)

greenerpastures_fullsm

Greener Pastures is the debut horror short story collection from author Michael Wehunt. This was my first encounter with Mr. Wehunt’s work but the latest in my over year long focus on horror short fiction. What I found was a very strong variety of stories that touch on various types of horror. Everything about this book feels nothing like a first timer, but someone who is very confident in their craft, of weaving themes into narrative and building characters who react in real, human ways to terrifying situations.

Highlights from the collection were:

“October Film Haunt: Under the House”, a found footage story. Ever since I read Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, I have been a sucker for representing visual media in text for horror. There’s something so effective about reading a transcript of found footage that is much more terrifying than seeing it. There is such distinct imagery in this piece, but the meaning is left ambiguous. I read this story a few days before the release of the Resident Evil VII demo that also features found footage in a haunted house, and this story is much scarier than the decent jump scares of the video game. The cover of the book features an image from this particular story, a dog emerging from the woods holding a wooden crown in its teeth. Something that bears such horrifying weight in the context of the story.

“Deducted From Your Share in Paradise” begins with a number of women falling from the sky and crashing into a dystopian trailer park. The narrator is on the outside of the core events but he sees enough to inform us about what is really going on here. This story felt very much like one of Terry Gilliam’s darker works. Not pure existential horror like some of the others, but a bit of fantasy mixed in with the uncertainty of these women’s purpose in our world. The climax is satisfying but like all good horror leaves lots of questions on the table.

The title story, “Greener Pastures” is all the things I love in a good Reddit NoSleep piece. It’s concise, it is able to build mood in a short amount of time, when the horror is revealed it cuts right to the core of the protagonist, and we end on an open note. The setting of a lonely truckstop diner in the middle of a pitch black night is just one of those perfect settings for a good horror tale.

The final story in the collection is “Bookends” which I wouldn’t even classify as a horror story. It’s a deeply gut wrenching character piece on a man who is left with a newborn when his wife of thirteen years dies. It’s a reflection on grief and how blinded we can become when we experience a love that potent. The places the story goes are very dark and should be careful before you delve in due to the emotional weight and very real events present.

The stories here are all signs of a talent that is ready to go. Everything is polished and tight. Not a single story feels like filler and they all have shared thematic threads, grief in particular. A collection worthy of your time that will provide a satisfying experience.

Book Review – The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western

The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western by Richard Brautigan (1974)

Since college, I have developed a greater appreciation of the Western genre in film and literature. In particular, I enjoy the modern deconstructions of the genre (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Once Upon a Time in America, Blood Meridian, etc.). I had never felt inclined to pick up anything by Richard Brautigan, having foolishly discounted him as a post-hippie literary author. While the novel is strongly post-modern and experimental, its also a pretty straightforward Western. Because there’s that rich layer underneath of deconstruction it makes the main story that much more interesting.

The plot is very light and concerns two guns for hire, Cameron and Greer, who are enthralled by a mysterious Native American girl, Magic Child whom leads them back to her family home in the Great Plains. There, they meet Mrs. Hawkline, the owner of the house and some strange blurring of identity occurs between Magic Child and Hawkline. The two gunmen are also told they are being hired to kill an unseen monster that lives in the ice caves that run underneath the house. All the while, Brautigan refers to a presence that moves through the house unseen.

The story is a fantasy that is concerned with the idea of doubles. There are characters that act as doubles and conversations routinely repeat, with characters entranced and unaware. The result is that our protagonists feel as though they are not progressing through the story. The expedition into the ice caves is constantly on the precipice of happening, but there is always a coincidental distraction that pulls them away. The result is an intentional frustration in the reader that ultimately pays off with the unconventional epilogue. This is not a novel for a casual reader, but for someone who wants an intellectual challenge.