That Old Multicolored Magic

It's an old storyteller's saw, of course (and rarely, these days, sharp enough to cut a woman in half)—the Deal with the Devil. Doctor Faustus—the well-known metaphysician and seminal mad scientist in our literature—leads the way, providing a motivation extant in a legion of fictional satanic pacts ranging from "The Devil and Daniel Webster" to Angel Heart. It is always about getting drunk with some kind of power, influence, maybe a little immortality thrown in for good measure—a lesser evil of the heart begetting a greater evil in the soul. And it never turns out very damned well.

But Daniel Wallace, in his fantastic new novel Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, subverts the genre of devilish dealings by delightfully removing such a motivation. Our hero isn't a wrong-minded egomaniac looking for the secrets of the universe, but a mere boy, Henry Walker, lodged at a painful crossroads. It is the grainy depths of the Great Depression, his mother is recently dead, his father has fallen from Wall Street mogul to destitute hotel janitor, and his beloved, angelic sister Hannah has decided she loves a stray dog (which she names Joan Crawford) more than him.

Henry stumbles from grace via a chance meeting with "Mr. Sebastian" (if that is his real name), a peculiar pasty-skinned gentleman who offers to teach Henry some nifty magic tricks, most of them to do with a deck of ordinary cards—but Henry must vow to never reveal the source of his artistry, which turns out to be shockingly powerful, if not borderline sinister: along with the preternatural sleight-of-hand technique comes powers of telekinesis, teleportation, and conjuring. Henry can just as easily make a full-course meal appear from thin air as he can commune with the newly dead. By the pricking of their thumbs and the mingling of their blood, Henry's fate entwines with the murky wishes of Mr. Sebastian—who then vanishes into the aether, with Hannah in tow. Henry will spend the rest of his life searching for her, in one way or another.

This tragic story is told in a series of secondhand flashbacks by Henry's former fellow sideshow performers, who knew him at the end of his career as a hysterically inept magician who managed, thanks only to the color of his skin, to find work. Like a giddy mash-up of The Canterbury Tales and Carnivale, we meet Rudy, the "Strongest Man in the World" (who actually is far from it), Jenny the Ossified Girl (who, as a woman passively rejected by Henry, is best able to tell the doomed tale of his One True Love), JJ the Barker (who seems to confuse his own childhood memories—specifically his feelings about his father—with those of Henry), and Jeremiah Mosgrove, the proprietor of Mosgrove's Chinese Circus (which is in no way Chinese), as well as a few other figures who emerge from Henry's past—both real and imagined.

Each of these characters is privy to a certain part of Henry's life story, and these parts eventually connect even as they contradict each other. Depending on who is doing the telling, Henry is depicted by turns as a miracle worker, a broken-down con artist, a heartsick lover, or a lost soul in perpetual mourning over his departed family, still seeking revenge against the man who took it all away from him—or all of the above. The stunning centerpiece of the novel concerns Henry's love for his stage assistant, the willowy, troubled Marianne La Fleur, a creature ever fluttering on the border between Life and Death. Henry conceives a magic show—part trickery, part séance—around an eerie aspect of their relationship that has his audiences gasping simultaneously in admiration and utter horror.

Henry ultimately defines himself by his losses; his signature card trick involves the Three of Hearts: one heart each for his departed mother, his vanished sister, and his unattainable Marianne. And being the performer, knowing the foul secrets of his magic disallows Henry the gifts of wonder and hope and laughter he is able to bestow upon his audiences. Believing in nothing, he is shrouded in his own lies and illusions. It won't be until he encounters a trio of hoodlum hecklers that Henry at last remembers magic isn't about the trick, believing isn't always about the truth, and that his illusions don't have to be as real as he's made them. The Devil, as it turns out, really isn't in the details—those small, beautiful, ordinary moments of our lives. It's the fact that we take such moments for granted that is a true evil.

"Only love can take us to the darkest places," a character eventually remarks, underlining the double-edged, tragic-comic nature both of this story and of the approach Daniel Wallace takes in telling it. Following three works of, essentially, shorter fiction, with Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician Wallace all but inherits the storied mantle in American Letters currently shouldered by Ray Bradbury, our master of simultaneously sentimental and wicked observation—a delicate and bittersweet trick indeed, and one capable of revealing the innermost chambers of the human heart. (This book, in fact, makes a fitting companion to Bradbury’s equally wonderstruck carnival tale Something Wicked This Way Comes.) We might allow magicians to trick us, but it's love that will ultimately make fools of us all.

Meanwhile, the sideshow parade only seems familiar to the Wallace canon—circus freaks peopled the Big Fish movie, but the citizenry of the novel was more mythical in nature; this is an illusion/allusion that Wallace, perhaps, fully intended—here using freaks and misfits to misremember, mis-tell, and just plain mistake the true story of Henry Walker, and carry it into the realm of lofty folklore, reminding us how ordinary lives fit into the larger pattern of human history. The tale, as such, flows like an unexpectedly long string of parti-colored handkerchiefs from the pocket of a skilled and charming prestidigitator, one who always keeps a knowing eyebrow lifted towards his audience, luring them with a recognizable trick, only to unleash an unexpected but heartbreakingly appropriate flourish at the end—a tale that is transcendently amusing in its variety, startling in its unregulated humor, bewitching in its final originality. This is, simply enough, one of the best, most captivating books of the year.

And it's impossible not to be curious about what kind of tricks Daniel Wallace still has in store for us, hidden up his sleeve.

Originally published in the Mobile Register August 19, 2007
as "Bigger Fish Swim in Wallace's Latest"
Written in Room 310, August 8-9, 2007

Let There Be Light

James Thurber once said, "There are two kinds of light—the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures." There is also a middle ground, a Twilight Zone between these two qualities: contre-jour, "against daylight," a photographic term for backlighting, that moment when the glare and the glow meet, and the outer edges of foreground subjects begin to disappear into the light beyond them.

It is in just such an area that Thomas Pynchon's new novel Against the Day takes place. As though assembled from those split seconds that occur between the flash of the bulb and the chemical alchemy of the silver nitrate that will eventually form a frozen image, Pynchon delivers a sprawling photomosaic of the World That Was in the decades prior to WWI—itself heralded by a mysterious, supernatural "heavenwide blast of light" in the wastes of Siberia on June 30th, 1908—one hundred years distant from our own time, yet perhaps an event that still illuminates, if not irradiates, this familiar world.

The novel begins in pure innocence as the Chums of Chance (five young, bickering zeppelin pilots who, along with their literate dog Pugnax, happen to be the heroes of a series of adolescent adventure novels) descend upon the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. But it isn't long before the narrative focuses instead on a temporary passenger assigned to the Chums, the hapless Lew Basnight, a proto-noir private detective who has committed an unspeakable crime unknown to himself but that nevertheless has alienated him from society … before switching to the power schemes of railroad tycoon Scarsdale Vibe, a kind of cross between John D. Rockefeller and Snidely Whiplash; and then on to photographer and amateur chemist Merle Rideout and his daughter Dally, as they cross the American heartland, into Colorado where they fall in with anarchist dynamiter Webb Traverse … Wait! What happened to those Chums?

They'll be back in a few hundred pages. Pynchon wouldn't be Pynchon without a little sleight of hand, a few red herrings wiggling upstream. After all, the Chums exist in a kind of fictional universe—parallel but just off to the side of the universe where the rest of the characters exist … just as that universe, in turn, is set to the side of our own—a place of suburban trains never meant to arrive at any destination on the rail map—as if, to be brought to any shelter, one would first have to step across into some region of grace hitherto undefined.

The yarn of Against the Day is spun mainly from the lifelines of the Traverse family, beginning with kooky anarchist/domestic terrorist Webb and continuing to his four children—sons Reef, Frank, and Kit, and daughter Lake—who scatter to the respective winds following their father's murder at the hands of a hired gun, Deuce Kindred. Reef tries marriage but is more at home as a swindler and dynamite handler, like his old man—shifty employ that keeps him tuned to the underground, just in case he should ever find the will to act upon his weak desire for revenge against Deuce. It is Frank, meanwhile, disappearing into the desert landscape and eventually becoming a cog in the Mexican Revolution, who learns that blood spilled in retribution will not necessarily equal redemption. Kit tries to break family ties by attending engineering school in Europe—but his scholarship comes by way of Scarsdale Vibe, the man who likely paid to have Webb killed for blowing up his railroad lines. It is Lake who binds herself most closely to a sense of disastrous familial legacy and fate, by marrying Deuce—knowing full well his role in her father's death. (The Traverse family tree, incidentally, ultimately branches all the way into Vineland.)

While the Traverse children are the tesseract cornerstone of the novel, their numerous associates receive if not equal then certainly quality time. Along with Basnight, the Rideouts, the Vibes, and the Chums, there is Professor Vanderjuice, a kind of mad scientist, studying the aether and delving into time travel; Yahsmeen Halfcourt, a gorgeous "polymorphous prodigy" and schoolmate of Kit who is capable of warping space through sheer mathematical computation; the Zombini family, traveling magicians who create doppelgangers of their stage volunteers by using mirrors made of the refracting calcite Iceland Spar; an enclave of pseudo-spiritualists known as T.W.I.T. (True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys); and Cyprian Latewood, a fop who seems to have been teleported in from an Evelyn Waugh novel—most likely The Loved One.

To be sure, it's a cavalcade—often seeming to border on being a parade of names, only a few of which eventually turn into full characters. This is because Pynchon favors characteristics over characterizations—because he makes this his forte, it is not a weakness. The subjects in Against the Day are every bit as lifelike and as valid as Prince Florizel and company in Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights, or for that matter the multitude of wacky servicemen in Heller's Catch-22. By abdicating any deep psychological qualities not relevant to the matters as hand, Pynchon frees himself to render a world that refracts through his characters.

And it is an eerie, doomed world, indeed. Though the principals never articulate it, they clearly feel the boom being lowered, as the century turns and the War approaches, as from a dark cloud bristling with lightning. Pynchon treks into the metaphorical sci-fi terrain most frequented by Ray Bradbury, and retrofits history in the same fashion that Area 51 scientists supposedly reverse-engineer crashed UFO parts into our own, less advanced aircraft. Characters occasionally meet shadows of themselves; Trespassers, they are called—ghosts from the future who have come to warn, or perhaps mourning time travelers who want to revisit what is to be lost; it is never made sure. Meanwhile, among comical Star Trek and Doctor Who allusions, a military search is underway to locate the fabled land of Shambhala, as if to secure a backup paradise before the greater world is lost. And finally a device is invented that extrapolates information from photographs, allowing views into either the past or the future moments beyond the shutter click—suggesting that all of history is only some kind of false memory, anyway.

Pynchon's first five novels—from the paranoid quiltwork of V. to the giddy, melancholy divisionism of Mason & Dixon—are all stories of wrongminded, impossible, disrupted quests. Against the Day breaks this tradition, and Pynchon, late in his career, boldly sets off in a new direction—a move that seems to have disoriented many of his early critics. Ironically, it is his esteemed Gravity's Rainbow that is often described—usually by "postmodernists," and then with a certain aplomb—as a plotless, unstructured beast. That novel actually has a definite structure, though it is deliberately incomplete—the book even ends in mid-sentence to point this out. But here at last, Pynchon has turned in the novel he has been accused of for thirty-five years: there is no plot device outside the simple passage of time.

As such, the novel runs like, well, like clockwork. Exactly like clockwork, actually—gears clicking, cogs a-spin, cuckoos and all, chiming at intervals dictated by a kernel mechanism just out of sight… And though some might say the trouble with clocks is that they measure something you're never going to get to the end of, the pacing is ingenious: the multiple storylines alternate for exact amounts of time—just long enough to introduce some new tantalizing thread, or provide symbolic echo for one of the other episodes. Like Potocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa, I suspect it would be possible to read the stories separate from each other, that Against the Day—like the split beams of light that comprise the novel's controlling metaphor—would come apart just as easily as Pynchon has put it together.

Though there may be no tangible plot, don't be fooled—this by no means signals a dearth of story. In fact, Pynchon throws away more story elements than most novelists will employ in a full career. Through 1,085 pages of slapstick encounters, thwarted intentions, and sinister conspiracies both explicit and alluded to, he still only skims the surface of the world he's imagining. This is no shaggy dog narrative—the narrative is the shaggy dog, a tail-wagging catalog of visions of the unexpected, breaches in the Creation where something else had had a chance to be luminously glimpsed. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of day, not a full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance encounters with details of God's unseen world.

Long discussed as our one living writer capable of inheriting the literary mantle of Melville, Pynchon is actually shooting for the throne of Cervantes, here. And with this much story afoot, this many characters, this much mischief, Pynchon exhibits an astonishing restraint. Absent are the massive, brain-crushing narrative monologues, the characteristically arcane and cryptic ramblings; his tangents are now controlled, precise. What once took entire passages is now often done in a few words—a remarkable, heartbreaking economy, redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals. This is lightning that strikes right out of the bottle.

Yes, Pynchon still has his fastball, after demonstrating a deceptive curveball (Vineland) and wicked slider (Mason & Dixon). His style is again historically (not to mention hysterically) affected—this time it's chiefly an era-appropriate turn-of-the-20th-Century idiom; think Arthur Conan Doyle on mescal. (I'm quick to imagine a hypothetical audio book, read by a smirking Orson Welles.) What's too often forgotten in the discussions of Pynchon's word games and conceptual puzzles is that the man can flat-out write. His prose is like a dream—literally. All described action takes on the thrust of greater import, of movement toward revelation. Descriptions of social conditions, mathematical theories, even just passing landscapes turn into roaring visual sweeps, the royal thunder of genius coming over the mountain—a sound not heard since the publication of Gravity's Rainbow. The result is both luxurious and unsettling as a reading experience, very like a moment of post-lunch midday drowsing that results in vibrant, unlooked for flashes from the deepest parts of the brain.

Against the Day is, ultimately, that kind of book, demanding to be read on its own time, for a reader to pay attention, to actually read, a simple thing we sometimes forget to do, in an age when books are too often expected to behave like television shows, and merely distract us. Distraction is, after all, the last thing Pynchon is after. How else to explain the fierce moment he brings the proceedings to a halt, some 150 pages in, to describe a terrible tragedy in a city that must be Manhattan—Fire and blood were about to roll like fate upon the complacent multitudes … but with only dwindling moments of normal history remaining, where could any of them have found refuge in time?

Using history both real and imagined, Pynchon creates a world that floats off the page, into our own, and beyond. People see the world differently—which must necessarily mean, according to the logic of Against the Day, there are different worlds to see. Parallel universes have long been Pynchon’s main concern—on landscapes intrinsically divided between the Haves and the Have Nots, he ever takes the side of those forgotten by history: the Passed Over, the Preterites, the Thanatoids. And now, the Trespassers, lost somewhere between a real doomed world and a paradise that probably never existed, not even in memory. Where does the truth lie? Was there a moment, now unreachable, where things took a terrible turn, and the world split … leaving us in the Bad one, while the Good one goes on spinning right next to us, but always out of reach?

Well, to paraphrase one of Against the Day's many characters, the "truth" is never as important as what lessons you might learn from the events themselves, however distorted they may appear to be. But ultimately Pynchon leaves us to our own devices, we Constant Readers, lost, ourselves—for in the end, we are the Trespassers into the world of Against the Day. And the fractured reality we see within is only a reflection of our own.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, May 13, 2007
Written in Cloverdale, February/May 2007

Being Harper Lee

I don't know Harper Lee, and I don't pretend to. I know some people who do know her—but this is like saying "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV." So when Charles Shields contacted me last fall about the book he was putting together, I spoke to him more out of my own curiosity than anything else. What could I know that would possibly be of interest? He was surely scraping the bottom of the barrel, calling me.

There are arguments to be made that his biography, Mockingbird: a Portrait of Harper Lee, is indeed composed of barrel scrapings and little else. After all, Shields did not have access to Lee herself, and many of her closest compatriots were loyally mum. Still, like any mulligan stew, the success lies in how you combine the elements you do have. Even given that this particular stew is one for which people have been hungering for some time, the question remains: how much flavor can something have when there's no main ingredient?

The book concentrates on the obvious eras: Lee's childhood and college years; her early period in Manhattan during the writing and revising of To Kill a Mockingbird; the time spent with Capote researching In Cold Blood in Kansas; the release of her book and then the film version; and finally an essentially speculative section, only 50 pages or so, devoted to the time since 1965. To flesh out what little is known, Shields uses heaping helpings from previously published biographies of Truman Capote, Gregory Peck, and Horton Foote. He's collected a multitude of interviews with and articles about people who surrounded Lee at one time (it seems he dug up every article ever published that even mentions Lee's name). Though of questionable value, there's also an abundance of first-hand accounts from people who claim to be former classmates, childhood friends, and other varieties of acquaintance.

Even with his careful reliance upon this bounty of sources, Shields misses crucial inconsistencies and downright contradictions that prove the fallibility of such varied subjectivity: in describing A.C. Lee, the man whom so many believe is the template for Atticus Finch, neighbors recall him being "detached… not particularly friendly" and further say "the image of facing down the crowd of rough necks has never rung true to me." But a page later, without comment, come two hearty, if slightly at-odds, accounts of A.C. facing down a group of Klansmen. Shields also leads himself into some early, unwarranted speculation about the personality of Lee's mother; by the time he offhandedly admits, late in the book, such views come from mistaken (or intentionally mistaken) accounts, the damage is done—he has perpetuated the error.

It is reasonable to assume that a reader wishing to better understand the author of To Kill a Mockingbird would appreciate a detailed description of small town life in Monroeville during the 1930s and the prototype personalities and events that would eventually find their way into Lee and Capote's stories (the Jewish storeowner who knowingly sold bedsheets to Klan members; the snuff-addicted baker of fruitcakes; the Monroe County court case that became the basis for Tom Robinson's trial). The book is therefore flush with ornamental, atmospheric, secondary detail. While impressive and even occasionally engrossing, it ultimately becomes testament to the Invisible Center. Shields at one point spends a full six lines describing the obvious functions of an Underwood typewriter.

He makes the same miscalculation later on, describing the Clutter investigation and initially making the most of newly unearthed materials from the Capote Papers at the New York Public Library—but buries the effort by piling on information (a four-page room-by-room description of the Clutter home, mainly devoid of any firsthand accounting) that can be more effectively gleaned from the pages of In Cold Blood itself.

Not surprisingly, the book is most effective in those fleeting moments when Shields is able to stand back and let Lee speak for herself. Good use—revealing Shields' reverence for his subject—is made of excerpts from the University of Alabama publications Crimson White and Rammer Jammer; Lee wrote for both during her time there. Even better are the snippets from interviews conducted during press junkets following both the publication of her book in 1960 and the release of the film version a handful of years later. All of the excerpts showcase Lee's evident warm personality, not to mention a wicked wit. (I'm convinced an authorized collection of these first-hand materials, framed by a minimal amount of contextual narration, would make for a great read; but then, you couldn't publish it as an authored biography.)

*** *** ***

On a chilly November evening in 2005, I entered the Capri Theatre in Montgomery and settled in to watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the title role of Capote. I was engrossed, but even in understanding that the film was a speculative, compressed take on the investigation of the Clutter murders that led into the writing of In Cold Blood, I was taken out of the experience each time Catherine Keener appeared onscreen as "Harper Lee." I knew by the report of a mutual friend that Ms. Lee had indeed already seen the film and, though she reportedly thought Hoffman did a fair enough job, was largely dismissive of its many inaccuracies.

I could not keep from wondering how uncommonly weird it must be to live a complete life, quite like anyone else, but for a moment or two, decades prior, when you had a hand in something extraordinary and which left a profound legacy. And for someone to then make a movie about that legacy, that singular moment from your life, without your participation or consent. A movie than then hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people see. I tried to think about how I might feel if someone in Hollywood made a film about something that happened in my life during, say, my college years (our intramural water polo team, while not heroic on the order of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team, did, in fact, rock). Would they get the details right? What would it be like to look into the 30-foot face of my onscreen avatar and think, Some of this is right… but the rest is all wrong?

About a month later, I was contacted by Charles Shields. His research had led him to an essay I wrote for the Mobile Register Sunday book review page, back in the spring of 2001. In the essay, I described how I had tackled the old but popular parlor-game around these parts: the half-baked speculation of whether or not Truman Capote had actually written To Kill a Mockingbird. I did this by simply reading Mockingbird and In Cold Blood back-to-back and, observing the different styles and tones, concluded that a kindergartner could figure out the truth of it. [The original essay is archived here: "Cold, Cold Mockingbird".]

I was rewarded for the exercise by a phone call from the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. (You can surmise that it was, indeed, Harper Lee—Truman Capote has been dead since 1984.) I keep a website/blog where I archive all my ramblings for the Register; for a while I included a short, humorous account of this phone call as a "postscript" to the essay, but removed it some time ago since it's an understandably fun story to tell, though usually with much more detail, and to persons of my own choosing. Shields apparently accessed it some years ago—which is a lesson not to put anything up on the web that you don't really want people to find.

*** *** ***

Meanwhile, there is no disputing the mystique surrounding the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. But I don't think you can pin it down easily by attributing it to a "literary mystery" regarding her singular output, followed as it is by a long silence. After all, go tell it to Emily Bronte. I don't think the ongoing fascination has, at its core, anything much to do with Lee's personal choices—that's just a symptom. The fascination, truly, is deeper—having much less to do with Lee herself than is comfortable to admit.

We live in a culture that equates success not only with cash flow but with notoriety, where the media feeds on personalities who are famous for being famous. Here is someone—Nelle H. Lee, ladies and gentlemen—who bucks all expectations, who has achieved unqualified success in her chosen field of endeavor… and who has apparently, subsequently, chosen the joy and satisfaction of simply having done Good Work. There is no evidence of a drive to better what, perhaps, could not be bettered. Not even the apparent need to ride the self-satisfying gravy train of celebrity that could certainly accompany Being Harper Lee—at any moment, she could pick up the phone and start making the talk show and lecture circuits. But there's really no need. The literary and popular stature of To Kill a Mockingbird is above and beyond any aid she could possibly give it, now or in the future.

And I'm banking that Harper Lee knows it. So she has chosen for herself the dignity of a quiet, normal life. Being the woman who wrote a book that defines a watershed moment in American culture and has touched and inspired millions—millions—of human beings around the planet… she chooses, courageously, to let her Good Work speak for itself.

For many of us, that choice—the conundrous decision to not behave like a famous person when in fact it is always within her ability, at any moment, to do so—is baffling. The unfortunate thing is that it should not be. We should all just aspire to have a little value in our lives, to do a spot of Good Work, find pleasure in it, and move on.

Atticus himself would ask of us little more than that.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, July 23 2006
Written in Cloverdale, late June/early July 2006

The Lurking Lovecraft

If I were to describe to you a writer who did the bulk of his work in the early half of the 20th century, attracted the attention of a few key editors and garnered a devoted audience during his short life… but who ultimately died broke and out-of-print (though happily his work managed to outlive him, reemerging in the latter half of the 20th century and now, as we enter the 21st, he is canonized and revered…) you’d probably assume I was describing F. Scott Fitzgerald.

But, no. The writer I’m thinking of is H.P. Lovecraft.

Born in Providence, RI, in 1890 and a resident of greater New England until his death in 1937, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was during his lifetime published only in pulp magazines: Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Home Brew, and others. Though his stories, essays and poems were well received in this format and won him choice followers and correspondents (among them Robert Bloch and Robert E. Howard), he never saw his writing collected in book form. Following his death, fellow writer August Derleth founded Arkham House publishers in 1939 for the sole purpose of bringing Lovecraft into hardcover print.

Lovecraft’s weird fiction has been creeping into our literary consciousness ever since; he is now considered the primary architect of modern horror. The early Arkham volumes eventually begat a handful of popular mass market and trade-sized paperbacks from Ballantine’s science fiction imprint DelRey. But the content of those books were taken from older, corrupt forms—pulp magazine reprints that had been indiscreetly chopped by editors seeking to fit the stories into available space. Beginning in the 1980s, Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi began painstakingly restoring the texts for Arkham House, using the original manuscripts.

Joshi’s revisions are newly showcased in the Penguin Classic editions of The Call of Cthulhu (1999), The Thing on the Doorstep (2001) and The Dreams in the Witch House (2004). These books comprise most of what Joshi himself dubs HPL’s “major fiction”; the first two feature the tales of cosmic horror that culminate in the novellas “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” and “At the Mountains of Madness” while the latter volume is built more around Lovecraft’s early penchant for phantasmagoric ramblings (he was chiefly inspired by fantasist Lord Dunsany and the poetry of Poe before finding his own voice). While Lovecraft’s narrative sojourns into a psychedelic dreamland do have their pleasures, it is his horror, and the philosophy behind it, that is his ultimate legacy.

Lovecraft’s main medium of choice: Alien Terror. War of the Worlds, masterpiece that it is, represents a tinker-toy version of HPL’s cosmic philosophy; indeed, Wells’s Martians are downright cuddly compared with what Lovecraft had in mind. In his universe, mankind is but a germ, at the mercy of larger forces that are always around us, and that we cannot hope to comprehend. These so-called “Mythos” stories (though HPL was always adamant that his fictions were unconnected) are populated by a group of so-called Elder Gods and Old Ones who exist beyond the knowable barriers of time and space, though they do sometimes take shape in our reality; his narrator characters stumble across one or two pieces of arcane information (evidence of these “gods”) that send them on giddy academic quests towards a truth that is, ultimately, a horror. Despite this seeming cosmology, Lovecraft was not interested in depicting typical forms of morality, of Good v. Evil. There are no supreme gods or devils with their attendant dogmas, only bad choices on the part of the curious humans. The maxim from King Lear to them applies: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.” That is, when they notice us at all.

The undisputed big daddy of these stories is “The Call of Cthulhu,” a tale involving the discovery of a statue bearing cryptic inscriptions, and subsequent investigations into a voodoo-like cult in Louisiana and the sinking of a boat off the Australian coast by a hideous creature that arises from the deep. With “Cthulhu,” Lovecraft perfected the quasi-reporter/historian/scientific storytelling technique that would serve him throughout the rest of his career. Lovecraft understood how critical verisimilitude is for the weird tale better than his contemporaries, and better than most who have come after. Only Stephen King, who spends whole chapters weaving convincing internal lives for his characters, comes close. And, more critically, Lovecraft believes in the world and situations about which he is writing, taking no pauses for irony or comedy (a sticking point for some critics, who contend that a little levity would have taken Lovecraft a long way). He is thus able to drag the reader along with him, even though the punchline at the end may reveal little or nothing (the narrators, confronting unspeakable horrors, are often reduced to madness).

Other of Lovecraft’s stories, such as “The Shadow Out of Time” and the short novel “At the Mountains of Madness”—chronicling the discovery of an ancient Antarctic alien city—represent similar variations on this theme. And this remains a template for such modern horror as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and the television series The X-Files.

HPL also dealt with the ramifications of the alien “Elder God” influence on humans who wrongmindedly seek power through them in stories such as “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Thing on the Doorstep”. In these tales readers find the many references to Abdul Alhazred’s evil volume The Necronomicon, perhaps the most famous non-extant book in all of literature. HPL fabricated a tongue-in-cheek “history” of the book in 1927, and belief in its existence outside his stories has flowered ever since, due in part by Lovecraft citing it in association with other well-known if archaic tomes like The Sceptical Chymist and Hermes Trismegiste.

Most of Lovecraft’s stories take place in a lovingly described, rural, yet often downright creepy, New England—those provinces surrounding the fictitious city of Arkham (Lovecraft’s stand-in for witch-haunted Salem, MA)—a region he knew well. Elements from “The Colour Out of Space” and “The Picture in the House” evoke a backwoods dread on par with anything from Dickey’s Deliverance, even as the landscape comes—literally, in some cases—alive. Rounding out Lovecraft’s atmospheric Colonial Yankee oeuvres, if you’re hungry for Grand Guignol horror, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” has everything you’re shopping for—black magic, vampires, séances, zombies, spirit possession, and finally the requisite god-like alien entities who stand to destroy all.

Each of the Penguin Classics volumes comes with a typical scholarly apparatus of endnotes. Joshi has done far more than recall Lovecraft’s seminal intentions: he amplifies the autobiographical echoes buried in the tales, and impressively reveals historical minutiae. “Ward” is peppered with obscure but contextually correct place and character names, all of which are defined. Also helpful are the delineated cross-references to characters and “Elder God” entities who are named (or Unnamed as the case may be) throughout the Lovecraft canon; Joshi sorts them all out while explaining Lovecraft’s inspiration for them. Especially fun are the dissections of Lovecraft’s faithful descriptions of Boston’s North End and the routes of the Green Line trains, all of which add to the ghoulish verisimilitude of stories like “Pickman’s Model”.

HPL wrote as the Victorian ghost story was seeing its final days as the literary chiller of choice and the weird tale (eventually popularized for mass audiences by Rod Serling, via the vehicle of television) took its place. That his work appeared mainly in the pulps of the day has likely been one reason for Lovecraft’s slow acceptance; another is that his work is unabashedly pure genre, and his philosophies cannot be extracted from their presentation. Only one other author comes to mind as one so embraced by readers yet deflected by critics and academics: Tolkien.

Much like Tolkien, Lovecraft employs rich, rococo language to set his moods, pacing and atmosphere, even to contextualize his message. This is purple prose elevated to an art form. This is over-writing with teeth. And because of his baroque, hypnotic skill, Lovecraft gets away with what so many others cannot; only Hunter S. Thompson has more failed imitators than HPL. Because of this, even contemporary genre writers, while willing to acknowledge Lovecraft’s pervading influence on modern horror, are reticent to laud or even acknowledge his writing chops. Laura Miller, writing for Salon, called Lovecraft “American literature’s greatest bad writer.”

Sure, Lovecraft has his follies. There is scant psychology (excepting gibbering madness) in his stories, and no romantic interests. His racism, though mostly submerged, is certainly extant. And many of the stories begin with the now-hackneyed “I will tell you my tale, though you may think me mad” approach, which may well put off many readers. But even so, there is an addictive quality akin to chocolate-chip cookies in Lovecraft’s stories. Once his cadence takes hold in your brain, you’re apt to keep reading and reading and reading. This is a quality Lovecraft, as a good storyteller above all else, shares not just with another horrormeister like Edgar Allan Poe, but with such writers who were his contemporaries as Nathaniel West, Gertrude Stein, and Raymond Chandler.

The prestigious Library of America recently added Lovecraft to their ever-growing collection of “America’s best and most significant writing,” with Lovecraft: Tales (2005). Edited and notated by horror novelist Peter Straub (based on the Joshi texts), this compendium represents, in 800 pages, truly the best of Lovecraft’s efforts, concentrating mainly on the “Mythos” tales. Every disciple will bicker over omissions, but Straub has undeniably put together the best single-dip of Lovecraft currently on the market, better even than Derleth’s original Arkham House volume, The Outsider and Others.

No other writer in the 20th century left such an imprint upon his genre as did Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Horror books and films from Ramsey Campbell to Dan Brown to Jeepers Creepers all owe their approach and elements to the self-styled “Old Gentleman” from Providence. Stephen King, while accepting the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters medal at the National Book Awards a couple of years ago, asked critics whether they believe they “get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture.” He was speaking in his own defense, of course. But he might well have been asking the question on behalf of Lovecraft.

But from beyond the grave, he does seem to be getting his due.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, October 30 2005
Written in Cloverdale, October 18-20 2005

Keeping the Faith

During Game 3 of the 2004 ALCS, as the Boston Red Sox were trailing to their hated rivals the New York Yankees, one of the Fox broadcasters crawled into the stands of Fenway Park to have a word with season-ticket holder Stephen King. Asked how he'd like the series to turn out, King replied that though he enjoys drama and suspense, he also likes happy endings. It turned out the master of modern horror couldn't have scripted a darker hour for the Sox, nor a happier, more historic ending.

Faithful is a journal of the 2004 Red Sox season, co-authored by King and fellow author Stewart O'Nan. In tandem they viewed, either in person or via television, every game in 2004, from spring training on through to the Fall Classic, with their eyes toward assembling this chronicle. Their ground rules were refreshingly simple—no press-pass locker room access, no hobnobbing with players (other than O'Nan's often amusing batting practice brush-ups), no insider reporting. King and O'Nan skip all that in favor of just jawing about the games like any two fans might, over beers in any given New England tavern.

The jacket flap of Faithful describes the contents as "a fan's notes" and it is precisely that—a commonplace book of plays and scores. As such, there are no pauses to explain who the players are, no definitions of the field positions, no "story-so-far" expositions on Red Sox history, no long soliloquies about the Meaning of Baseball in Our Society. (Well, maybe a couple.) This is a straightforward contemporary keepsake for Red Sox Nation (and, by the way, anyone who hates the Yankees on principal is an honorary citizen), and for the kind of fan who knows his way around a scoresheet, who'd rather listen to a static-stitched AM broadcast of a game (King: "With each inning you build your own Fenway of the mind from scrap-heap memories and pure imagination") than watch the graphics-laden Fox Game of the Week.

To that end, O'Nan and King do work their assignment like the best radio booth announcers—O'Nan reeling out meticulous play-by-play accounts, with King stepping in occasionally for extended color commentary. As such, Faithful resembles nothing less than the longest sports-page recap in history. And that's a good thing. Just as we teach our children sportsmanship via the old "It's how you play the game" chestnut, in this case it's not that we already know the triumphant final scores, but how the nuances of the games are communicated.

O'Nan, award-winning author of A Prayer for the Dying and The Night Country, is the more detail-oriented of the two, often spending pages analyzing a single game, describing each play. He has his fun, though—such as sneaking a telescoping fisherman's net into Fenway to catch longballs off the Green Monster, and taking shots at the "chucklehead blabbermouth" television announcers ("McCarver—the true inspiration behind the mute button"). His enthusiasm for proper baseball coverage, and the game itself as an entity of history and emotion, sails over the edge of the page: "A straight score, lumped with others from around the league, is flat and paralyzing. It's a mindless, uninvolved way to follow baseball, almost zero content, as if the game is just about winning or losing."

King takes a more Gonzo approach to the progression of games, sometimes lumping several together, searching for a hint of context, and his informal, cozy style is engrossing, as ever. He does get away with a few flourishes classifiable as Baseball Romance, though always briefly enough that the no-nonsense ethic of the book isn't sacrificed—such as one instance explaining the bedrock attitude of New Englanders regarding their beloved BoSox: "We buy new cars expecting them to be lemons… we expect the snow to turn to freezing rain, rich relatives to die leaving us nothing, and the kids to get refused by the college of their choice. And we expect the Red Sox to lose." True enough. One can't help but wonder how much this attitude has since been adjusted, and happily so.

The journal is also peppered with email exchanges between King and O'Nan; these connective, intimate moments allow the reader to feel he's eavesdropping on two well-versed fans discussing their favorite pastime. At one point, O'Nan describes a phone conversation during one particularly gripping, and ultimately disappointing, game: "When [King] hangs up, I feel like I've lost someone on the suicide hotline." Such has been the plight of the Red Sox Nation; as King elaborates: "Red Sox fans can't escape the Red Sox; that is the basic fact of our existence."

Such touches keep the book from becoming the equivalent of watching a Tivo replay of a game you've already seen. Still, the temptation is great to fast-forward to the good plays, the standout moments, like the mid-summer brawl with the Yankees that marked the turning of the tide for the Sox (that's the photo gracing the cover, after all), or perhaps to a Fenway game you might have attended just to see the coverage these guys provide.

More ink has been flung at baseball than at any other sport, often from pens held by too consciously erudite hands. Faithful is refreshingly and gracefully free of romanticism, of social explanations, fitted symbolism—the kind of overthinking that sometimes plagues a sheer appreciation of the game. It is a book about the machinery of the game itself—no frills, just a couple of fans (okay, a couple of extremely well-spoken, best-selling fans) ignoring literary pretension to hash over the plays and the players, the games, and the trades. Just like the rest of us do, citizens of Red Sox Nation or not, for 162 games, every season.

Originally written for the Mobile Register
Written at Steeplechase Court, December 2004

Chabon's Golden Key

Michael Chabon has become a hero of mine. A couple of years ago I heard him on the radio, reading part of his short story "Werewolves in their Youth," a tale of two outcast children escaping into their imaginary worlds, and how that escape becomes a link between them. It is such a great story, told with a candid, energetic tone, that I immediately went out and bought a copy to find out how it ended.

Chabon believes heartily in escape, particularly via art and literature. His earlier novels are The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, and he has a couple of story collections to his credit. Most of this work is well-grounded in details of modern, daily life: situations, decisions and imbroglios we all find familiar.

This is something he admits in his 2003 introduction to McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, an anthology of genre fiction which he edited. (A follow-up volume, McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, was recently published by Random House.) Chabon highlights a trend that has pervaded intentionally literary and "serious" writing for a while now: it follows too closely what we all know--the pains and tribulations of domesticity--and ipso-facto loses potency as a means to entertain us. (He makes the case quite well, asking you to imagine a world where all forms of fiction become supplanted by the "Nurse Romance"--then goes on to postulate this has essentially happened, with more adventurous and imaginative fiction usurped by what I've heard called "around the house and in the yard" fiction…)

So what should be done? For Chabon, the answer is to turn back to the stories that thrilled us when we were younger and rediscover the merits, both practical and artistic, of escapism--jungle heroes swinging from vines or bowl-headed spacemen zapping aliens on the surface of Mars, bloodthirsty pirates, magicians, cavemen, female lion tamers, and etcetera. Oh, and crusaders for justice in the form of costumed comic-book superheroes, naturally.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the 2000 novel that netted Chabon the Pulitzer Prize, is a fun-house display of all the primary colors that go into illustrating imaginative fiction. And it is a love letter to a glittering, romantic, bygone New York City of the 1930s--home to the World's Fair, underground communities of eccentric artists, and that 8th Wonder of the World, the Empire State Building. The city Chabon describes crackles with a warm, nervy energy despite the ongoing Depression, providing the title characters the spark of life necessary for the birth of their "funny book" empire; the novel is ultimately a testimony to the power of inspiration, and how art, both high and low, can shape and redeem our lives.

Young Joe Kavalier, infatuated with short-wave radio and illusionist stage-magic, is secreted from Prague just as the Nazis begin to roll in. This feat is accomplished by his hitching a ride in a pine box containing the Golem of Prague, early superhero fashioned of clay, from Jewish legend. What initially seems like a conceit of Magic Realism soon becomes a monumental matter of practical, not symbolic, significance as the novel unfolds. Though Joe successfully escapes to New York and the family of his cousin, Sam Clay, he remains haunted by the family he left behind--and by the promises he made to deliver them, in his wake, from what quickly becomes war-torn Europe.

Thus met, the team of Kavalier (as the artist) and Clay (as the writer) soon weasel their way into the burgeoning comics industry, and ride (not to mention help generate) the wave of popular culture. Chabon devotes whole chapters to the origin stories of the central superheroes in the Empire Comics stable, such as the Escapist (a former Houdini-like stage magician, now the lead member of the League of the Golden Key, a secret society devoted to the liberation of the oppressed and powerless) and Luna Moth (a phantasmagoric, dream-world version of Wonder Woman, as might have been imagined by Lord Dunsany). These episodes interrupt the main narrative with all the force of a sucker punch, told with the irresistible energy and verve of an old Saturday-morning serial from Republic Studios. Here Chabon tips his hand, revealing his secret love, perfectly evoking the pulp pacing and atmosphere of comics--readers can nearly visualize the lithographic dots, the frames separating the action scenes, the thought-balloons of dialogue floating above the pages of text.

As a guiding light, Kavalier and Clay have a senior editor, a crotchety and frustrated literary novelist named Deasey, who tells them what they create is utter trash--and the trashier he thinks it is, the more successful their comics become. The superhero characters eventually graduate to radio, to film and to television. But as the story-telling mediums become more complicated and farther removed from Kavalier and Clay's original four-color palette, the same can be said of the direction of their lives, until the empire they have built together comes to danger.

Kavalier suffers doubt and dread regarding the fate of his family (as well as the fate of millions of others) at the hands of the Nazis, back home. For him, drawing the Escapist single-handedly dispatching entire German armies and cold-cocking Hitler himself on the chin isn't enough, and the money it brings him still cannot buy his family's freedom. Kavalier soon begins leading a double-life of his own, taking to the streets, looking for trouble, for fist-fights with Germans on wharves, in back alleys, even in broad daylight at baseball games. It is Kavalier's redemptive journey into understanding his creative output (the Golem he sets loose in the world) and how it can heal him, that what he does for a living might seem silly but retains meaning for others, that is the core of this novel.

Clay suffers the same angst, but from a few different angles. Throughout, he struggles with a desire to write stories with real literary substance, something people will take seriously (counter-pointing Kavalier's desire to actually do something meaningful…). "We're talking about a bunch of guys who run around in their long johns punching people, all right? It's not any Citizen Kane." Clay is told "It's not comic books you think are inferior, it's you," revealing a key sublimation. Wherever you find superheroes, you find alter-egos. And in the 1930s there was surely no more of a secret identity than homosexuality. But the efforts of Sam Clay to come out of the closet seem nearly a contrivance, despite being both keenly and structurally correct, in comparison to the emotional and psychological heft (not to mention the physical space in the narrative) Chabon gives Joe Kavalier's palpable internal struggles, feeling helpless despite being able to empower himself through an exterior means he cannot quite view as valid.

Eventually, as Joe's journey comes full circle, Kavalier and Clay becomes an argument against all those people who would dismiss "funny books" as a storytelling medium being two steps lower than the Dirty Joke. "The usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his life, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent… The escape from reality was, he felt, a worthy challenge."

After all--H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Land that Time Forgot--both novels originally published as pulp contrivances and dismissed as trash--are now available from Random House's venerable Modern Library imprint, and can be shelved alongside similar editions of Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights. Jack Finney's sci-fi social satire Invasion of the Body Snatchers is now reissued (and just in time, some might say) by Scribner, the same house that continues to bring us Hemingway. And the academia-meets-cosmic-horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, viewed in his time as a hack writer, relegated to the genre pages of Weird Tales and who died broke and bitter (just like F. Scott Fitzgerald), are now published by Penguin Classics.

So, if the canonization of Comics-as-Literature is to come sometime mid-21st Century (perhaps a collection of Walt Kelly's Pogo strips issued by the Library of America?), Michael Chabon will likely be leading the charge: "He loved them for the pictures and stories they contained, the inspirations and lucubrations of aging boys dreaming as hard as they could, transfiguring their insecurities and delusions, their wishes and their doubts, their public educations and their sexual perversions, into something that only the most purblind of societies would have denied the status of art."

As Stan Lee would say, Excelsior!

Originally presented at the Fairhope Public Library Tuesday Book Review & Lecture Series, November 9 2004
Revised for publication in the Mobile Register, November 21 2004
Written at Steeplechase Court, November 8, 9 & 12 2004

Of a Fond Ghoul

I've been fascinated by monsters since I was a child, suffering nightmares as a 9-year old after reading a brief description of Beowulf--including how Grendel would tear the heads off noble Anglo-Saxon warriors to drink their blood. But my monster of choice (and every horror aficionado has one) is least of all the vampire. From all candidates--the drooling werewolf, the snarling demon, the cackling witch--I most readily and typically cast my vote for the zombie, in all forms ranging from re-animated Egyptian mummy to Doctor Frankenstein's stitched-up, blasphemous revenant. There's just something about a crew of Romero's living dead shambling across a fog-enshrouded field in search of tasty human brains that inspires in me the Grand Guignol dread (or the Halloween glee, however you like to phrase it) sought after by all horror fans.

But not the vampire, I'd say. I don't care for vampires.

When trying twice before to wade through Bram Stoker's elongated epistolary melodrama (including once for college credit), I never made it. Following that creepy and exciting episode with Jonathan Harker imprisoned in the wicked Count's Transylvanian castle, I would bog down when the story switched to England and the frantic musings of Mina and Lucy, pondering their respective beaus and wedding days. Even Doctor Seward's observations of his fly-eating sanitarium patient Renfield weren't enough to keep my interest. Well, I guess I just don't care for the vampires, I'd say. But perhaps I'd simply been dulled by too many inferior vampire adaptations, and, as a younger reader, came to Dracula with expectations of carnival-ride thrills that could not be met.

Few stories have been adapted more times, in more ways. The version we all know--the Universal picture starring Bela Lugosi--descends not directly from the novel but from Hamilton Deane's slow-moving, drawing-room stage play, popular at the time. Countless other film treatments, radio dramas, musicals and television shows have emulated, imitated and diluted the story. The eponymous character has gone on to threaten not just Jonathan Harker and Professor Van Helsing, but Abbot and Costello as well. Dracula's children one way or the other, have proliferated in our modern literature and culture, from Kolchak the Night Stalker to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All of which may well serve, for some, to blunt the bite of the antiquarian Count.

The novel has some built-in trouble as well. Dracula was the last, great gothic Victorian horror novel, and as such is nearly a genre unto itself. But the world it so meticulously describes--a world of carriages and telegrams and gaslight--faded quickly into an age of motorcars and telephones and electricity. Just 25 years after first publication, the tale of Count Dracula from Transylvania was already creaky and quaint. (Consider The Exorcist--which had an impact upon moviegoing audiences in the 1970s similar to the impact of Dracula upon readers in 1897. Thirty years later, due at least in part to the essentially recognizable culture in which the story takes place, The Exorcist retains most of its shocks to first-time viewers, despite both advances in special-effects technology and a generally desensitized society.)

But even after a century, and all familiarity with the material, Dracula yet remains a masterstroke of horror, mainly due to Stoker's narrative technique. The tale is told through journals and letters and newspaper clippings, quilted into a linear timeframe. The horror builds first as the characters unknowingly describe events and situations, the full implications of which are obvious only to the reading audience. The opening sequence is told through solicitor Jonathan Harker, summoned to Transylvania to aid the Count in shifting his estate from the Old Country to modern London. Harker soon finds himself a prisoner, and his forbidden exploration of Castle Dracula results in a near deadly, if quasi-erotic, encounter with a trio of fiendish vampire "brides". A case study in the amplification of narrative tension, these opening chapters set up the rest of the novel as a stress-relax exercise that undoubtedly made Freud proud.

The story then switches to England, introducing the clutch of associated characters who will take us the rest of the way, as they discover (by comparing notes, literally) among their recent but disparate experiences evidence that points to the existence of a bizarre and dangerous presence in their midst. There is Mina, betrothed to the by-now missing Jonathan; there is her friend Lucy, and her fiancé Arthur Holmwood; American cowboy Quincy Morris; and psychiatrist John Seward, who eventually calls for aid in the form of his old professor, an expert in the occult, Abraham Van Helsing.

Van Helsing and his band of amateur sleuths are forced, via the corruption of Lucy, to accept the uncanny existence of the Count, and take steps to destroy him and his diabolical works. Their focus quickly turns from collecting and comparing information to a spirited chase of the Count across London, and eventually back to Transylvania. While the detective techniques employed aren't especially sophisticated (tracing shipping manifests and real estate documents, bribing low-level employees for information), the droll manner in which Stoker lays out the story and develops the characters, and his attention to seemingly unrelated, ordinary detail (so often excluded in adaptations, such as the Count's initial visitation to the grave of a suicide) in order to support far more unlikely elements, still delivers chills.

The Count, beyond the atmospheric opening scenes at his castle, makes only brief appearances, but powerfully creepy and disturbing ones:

Kneeling on the near edge of the bed facing outwards was the white-clad figure of [Mina]. By her side stood a tall, thin man, clad in black. His face was turned from us, but we all recognized the Count. With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker's hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man's bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.

Dracula himself is barely described--besides being generically tall, thin, typically garbed all in black and sporting a well-groomed white moustache or goatee, his physical aspect is left to the imagination of the reader. Otherwise, we know for certain only that Dracula has a vile yet powerfully magnetic charisma. And apparently he stinks--the Van Helsing bunch, upon gaining access to the Count's abode in Piccadilly, must light cigars to fend off the vile odor.

On the other hand, the Count is undeniably and specifically Satanic--there is a deeply imbedded Christian subtext in the novel that cannot be ignored, even down to the silly alias (Mr. DeVille) the Count uses while in London. Much of the novel's horror stems from acts that symbolically pervert and desecrate Roman Catholic belief; after feasting upon the lovely Mina, the Count tells her, "You are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin," an unholy echo of Genesis. Later poor Mina repeatedly refers to herself as "unclean" and marked until Judgment Day. Van Helsing, attempting to aid her following "the Vampire's baptism of blood," touches her on the forehead with a wafer, but she is burned and scarred by the sacrament. This is in contrast to so many modern, nearly secular vampire tales, where the creatures might be harmed either by any religious icon, so long as the wielder has stout faith, or by none at all.

Along the same lines, there have been a couple of recent and unfortunate attempts to recast Dracula as a love story, with the Count yearning for Mina, seeing in her some bizarre redemption or reclamation of mortal life. But you can't have the bone without the marrow. Dracula is by nature a corruption--a lustful, autocratic contagion exhibiting no human weaknesses. Rightly the only love to be found is among the story's mortal characters as they seek to protect and save each other from his machinations. To turn the Count into a kind of anti-hero undermines every foundation stone of horror (not to mention narrative meaning) Stoker has laid. The Count is not some misunderstood nobleman gone bad, he is a dynamo of sheer mortal and moral destruction, reveling in his power. He taunts Van Helsing: "Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine--my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!"

Yeah, and your little dog, too.

Dracula still succeeds because, even 100 years later, we are all essentially afraid of the same things that Stoker's contemporary audience was afraid of: Subversion, either of Love, or of Life itself, possibly both at once. For the Victorians, the Count was a symbol of unfettered lust, of desire allowed expression, and yet also the unseemly, ghastly consequences of a life lived in such a glut (Vice is death--but what a way to go, many hear Stoker whispering between the lines, since the pull of such Freudian undertones is weakened these days--even finding that Vampiric Style alluring, the ache of submission becoming equal to romantic yearning). Meanwhile, the Count remains a horrific elemental power, generating fear and dread.

H.P. Lovecraft asserted that the greatest fear extant in mankind, one that trumps all despite fad or fashion, is that of the unknown. Death, then, might easily be considered the Ultimate Unknown. Taking one step back, our most palpable fear would be of the possible pain leading into death (a stab wound, a shark bite, a heart attack). In Dracula, Stoker characterizes pain-into-death as the evil that might be brought against us, and that we might then become inspired to bear upon others. After Van Helsing scorches her forehead with the holy wafer, Mina believes she must carry the mark "until God sees fit"--a kind of Scarlet O, perhaps; her redemption lies in choosing to proceed with as much grace as she can muster. It is either that, or… vampires begetting vampires, unto the ending of the world.

Odd then, that is exactly how Stoker's character maintains a hold in our culture. Dracula survives, continuing to spawn imitations and adaptations and revisions--yet the bloodline doesn't weaken. Indeed, the Lugosi film, for all its flaws and shortcomings, is arguably the reason why Stoker's lone notable novel has remained in print for more than a century. Perhaps, just as the title character has always intended, he will be with us forever.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, October 31 2004
Written in Jacksonville FL & Fairhope AL, October 21-25 2004