Late Reviews and Latest Obsessions

Let the Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Translated by Ebba Sergerberg, Thomas Dunne Books, 2007

I first came across Let the Right One In the movie and committed one of my cardinal sins of films and fiction, I watched the movie first. (Let's make things even worse, I watched it on a teeny tiny iPod screen while commuting to work.)

There is often a disconnect between what a book is and what a movie is, and I used to be among the camp who complained when a cinematic adaptation didn't live up to my literary dream, but I've since wised up to the different demands of the different arts. What you can accomplish inside one character's head on the page just doesn't always work well in a kinetic medium like film, and even the shortest novel often finds lots of scenes cut from the final theatrical release. To do justice to a large work or even a medium sized one often requires a miniseries -- which is why the BBC's Pride and Prejudice is considered the best adaptation to come along. Yet, the final products will always cater to different aesthetics.



Be that as it may, I was quite surprised at how different John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Let the Right One In was from the film of the same name. The novel has received a fresh round of interest as a result of the 2008 Swedish film directed by Tomas Alfredson (so much interest that an American version of the film is shooting, scheduled for a 2010 release). It's a commonplace to say that a horror novel is much scarier, much creepier, than its celluloid counterpart, but it is quite true in this case.

What's interesting about that, in a book about vampires, is that it isn't really the supernatural elements that are creepier but the human ones. Oh, certainly, there are small bits of horror in the book that don't turn up in the film (for example, in the novel, our vampire sleeps in a bathtub filled with blood; in the film, she just sleeps in a bathtub covered with blankets). That's kind of small potatoes, though later scenes involving a turned-vampire that just won't quite die, are rather wonderfully dreadful.

The film adaptation presents a more streamlined version of the central story but manages to lightly touch on almost everything in the book in allusive ways. The pedophilia at the heart of the relationship of the vampire and her human companion is only suggested in the film, while in the novel it is the human's animating drive. That the film manages to contain most of the novel, if only in gesture, is the happy result of the screenplay being written by Lindqvist himself. This is effective garlic to keep away fiction-bound purists who view other people's takes on "their" beloved art as fundamentally wrong-headed.

The story concerns twelve year old Oskar, a dreamy, shoplifting loner who is bullied by other children at school in 1980s Blackeberg, outside of Stockholm, Sweden. He lives with his mother in an apartment complex and he collects newspaper and magazine clippings of murders and criminals, dreaming of violent revenge on his school tormentors. One night two people move into an apartment in his building, a young girl and an older man. Eli, the younger appearing, turns out to be a centuries old vampire, and Hakan is an ex-school teacher and pedophile who kills to feed Eli's need for blood, a slave to his passions for her underaged body.

It is a creepy conceit of Lindqvist's, pairing a pedophile with a vampire several hundred years older than him but encased in a youthful body. It's an effective, tense technique, unnerving the reader and slightly tweaking our mores. This, Lindqvist is almost saying, you find this so much more horrific than vampires killing people and drinking their blood? Here the author also slightly alters basic vampire mythology, keeping Eli sort of a child despite her true age, her being trapped in the physical form of a twelve year old preventing her from ever quite gaining the wisdom that comes with adulthood, yet still old enough to hold the upper hand in the relationship with Hakan.

Much of the relationship between Hakan and Eli is unspoken in the film version and here it makes up a sizable amount of the squirms induced in the book's early chapters. It also adds a layer of creepiness to Hakan's practical decision to prey on younger victims. He needs someone he can overpower as he grabs them and knocks them out with halothane gas, before tying them up by their feet and slitting their throats to drain their blood for Eli. What else he may do with these young bodies Lindqvist wisely leaves off the page for your mind to stumble on to only later. Eli and Hakan together have come up with this slaughterhouse inspired scheme as the direct bite of the vampire infects others and often requires Eli to kill her victims in a very thoroughgoing fashion (twisting their heads off).

The friendship between the loners Oskar and Eli deepens, the two of them tapping Morse code messages through the wall, meeting at nights out on the apartment complex playground, and learning more about each other. She encourages him to fight back against the school bullies, a path of action that escalates the situation to horrific consequences. Meanwhile Hakan, seeing a relationship forming, experiences jealousy and fear, then botches a murder and is caught in the act before he can finish. He douses himself in acid to kill himself and disfigure himself so thoroughly that he won't be traced back to Eli, his outer form now taking on the monstrous implications of his inner self. A visit by Eli to his hospital in the night and Hakan's fall from out the hospital window gives us a shuffling zombie like vampire, a kind of mindless unstoppable force, and one of the novel's most horrific scenes in a basement.

This last scene brings together the Eli plot and the minor subplot of a teenage hoodlum whose mother is about to marry a local police officer, and it's one of the livelier and more amusing subplots at times. Other strands of the narration focus on Virginia, a woman Eli attacks but fails to kill, whose illness and eventual death almost destroys her group of friends, a bunch of older, out of work alcoholics. Lindqvist's story sags the most when we visit this group, Lacke the slacker, some time lover of victim, Gosta a housebound cat fanatic, and a few other wastrels, though Virginia and her illness is at least of some interest. Her sufferings as she undergoes the transformation, her desperate cutting of her arms and drinking her own blood for temporary satiation are awful to behold. But perhaps the worst, least effective moment in the novel comes during one of the scenes of Virginia's transformation.

There are essentially two routes you can take with a vampire novel: either you can go the all-out ooga booga route and vampires are undead creatures repelled by holy water, crosses, garlic, etc. (or some variant on that), the Dracula model; or they are scientifically explainable freaks of nature infected with a virus or a parasite or something seen under a microscope, the I Am Legend style. You may even blend both types, but this is much trickier to pull off. Lindqvist tries hard, but fails at this third way, explaining in one scene that even though modern science would scoff, Virginia had a small tumor growing in her heart, a tumor made of brain tissue. It's not really a fleshed out theory, but in Lindqvist's vampire model, the vampiric virus is itself alive, somewhat sentient, and controls you through a small brain growing in your heart.

Seriously, that's just laughable and worse than that, unnecessary. It's like Lindqvist had to find some explanation for why the vampire's victims had to be "turned off" lest the geometric trajectory of vampiric infection overtake population growth. And since stakes through the heart is a reliable stand-by, why not do something there? The conceit is nothing short of dumb, and luckily the author touches on it once then moves on with his story (mercifully absenting it entirely from the film). No real plot elements hinge on this point and if I'd been editing his novel that would be the one place I'd really have issues.

The rest of the story, though, is a crisply written, unsettling little shocker of a novel. The end is one of the better hanging endings I've read in some time. Your mind can trace the later, post-novel events with a rather sure certainty and that's sort of what's so horrible about it. The futility and the repetition.

In a sense, though, Lindqvist's novel is really about love, about how we fight for it, we fight against it, we put up barricades against it, we are turned inside out and made monstrous by it, and how it can dominate and alter the very contours of our lives. The novel also turns out to be about desire and how we can confuse that with love and, worse yet, how we can be made monstrous by our desires. If you happen to see the film version first, that heart of the story is more in focus, clearer, stronger. If you pick up the print version, you may wish to turn on a few more lights in the house, because this is a love story with teeth.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle, by Michael Kupperman, Fantagraphics, 2009
(*click on all these pix to see them bigger)
(**yeah, Cleland, the shit was free. suck it!)
Somewhere between the publication of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and the retirement of Bill Waterson, the funny pages died. A few sheets of corporate wasteland occupy your Sunday comics section with barely a chuckle to be heard, while the closest thing you can find that could charitably be described as a funny book are Archie Comics, running on wheezes that were tired in 1960. What's mostly left is derivation in four color and grim-faced anti-superheroes angsting up the scenery.
And every page is full of one laugh more bizarrely induced then the last. What can you do with the completely serious illustration for "Modern Chimp Barbering Romance"? Or Mickey Rourke pitching pubic hair stencils? Or Henry Winkler as The Fonz making a guest appearance in a classic porno coloring book? It's these lovely juxtapositions of the unexpected and the unpredictable that makes Thrizzle such a gut-wrenching exercise in belly laughs. The jokes are absurd, but even better than that, they're funny. Really and truly, "hey-I-gotta-show-you-this" funny.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I gotta show you this:

A couple housekeeping bits.

Yes. I know. I've been like that guy or girl who says s/he's going to call and then never calls. I understand this. I'm in school full time and it's a monster full of duties. Blah.

But I do have a review kicking up soon. So there will be something relatively soon.

That said, the Federal Trade Commission is a box full of stupid assholes. Read this and get back to me. What I say below will make tons more sense if you do.

Apparently, if I get any advance reader copies of books, I have to disclose it by law, and since I don't have the dough Kos has for defense attorneys (or any kind of readership sufficient to warrant any attention), I am going to do so, as bitchily as possible obviously.

It's a stupid as fuck rule because the operating assumption in any review industry is that the manufacturer/publisher/whoever is GOING TO PROVIDE FREE COPIES TO REVIEWERS. That is no guarantee of a good review and it's certainly not the way to make a living, reselling advance reader copies.

That's the fucking industry, you idiotic shitfucks. If you don't even know what the fuck you're talking about when you make rules, either learn about it, or don't bother making the fucking rules.

Morons.

That there is the inherent suspicion that bloggers are doing something in some fashion different than any other publishing venture and must abide by special rules is clearly a law that is in violation of equal protection clauses.

So, for now I'm going to add a blanket disclaimer here and to the template until idiotic rules created by mouthbreathing fucktards are dispensed with. I suspect the first time this ethics rule is prosecuted will be the last time, so I'm prepared to be patient even if I'm seething.

And for the record, I'm not even sure how many books I've reviewed I didn't get for free. As in from the library. And I'm sure if you looked, you'd find plenty of negative reviews.

Lastly, when I was a professional reviewer at the Plain Dealer, there was an editorial policy that essentially stood as "if you can't say something nice, say something helpful" and negative book reviews often got shunted to off-days and tucked away in some section where they wouldn't attract much attention. They weren't usually put on the Books page in the Sunday section, so as not to upset advertisers. So the expectation of a positive review is actually far more prevalent in the professional industry than in the amateur one.

I'll take my own personal ethics over that brand any day of the week.

An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town, by David Farley, Gotham, 2009.

I think someone said it on the back of the book in a blurb, but it really is true: if you're going to only read one single book about the foreskin of Jesus Christ, then you really want to read this one.

Yes.

You read that right.

Join me, will you, in this particularly weird history of the Catholic Church as we discover the silliness that is the world of relics. For the uninitiated, relics were bits from the lives of various saints and others deemed holy by Rome. These bits had a hierarchy and differing statuses. For instance, there were bits of saints bodies -- St. Valentine's head, for instance -- and these were primo relics. Then there were, just a little bit lower on the totem pole, bits touched by the saints, such as the ax that beheaded St. Valentine. Finally, at the lowest level were relics that were relics by their proximity to actual relics, such as the bag that held the ax that beheaded St. Valentine.

Of course, though, there were hierarchies within those hierarchies, bigger named saints having better relics. St. Paul being better than St. Valentine; Mary Magdalene better than St. Paul; Mary, mother of Jesus, better than Mary Magdalene; and, of course, the big magilla, Jesus. Anything that could be claimed to be something connected with the life of a saint, the bigger the saint the better, was venerated and placed in an honored spot in churches throughout Europe.

Of course, with the relics market being a hot property through the Middle Ages -- and during and post-Crusades -- it wasn't long before tons of folks were jumping on the bandwagon. Relics like splinters of the "True Cross" on which Jesus was crucified were quite the thing, so revered and accepted without reservation that John Calvin once quipped that if all the pieces of the so-called "True Cross" were collected in one place, they would form a whole ship's cargo.

These big ticket items were obvious draws, as were pieces of the table from the Last Supper, the spear that pierced Jesus' side, and so on. But, with the bodily ascension of Jesus, as the story goes, there was no tomb and no chance of nailing a sweet chunk of his body to tout around as a sign of how special you were. Nothing like some random skull could be toted around and claimed as Jesus' head. To be sure, there were relics of Jesus' hair and fingernails, but those were pale substitutes. Besides, even though one could logically extrapolate divine haircuts and nail clippings, there was nothing specifically Biblical to back that up.

Well, cue up your Luke 2:21, because we have straight from the horse's mouth confirmation that Jesus was circumcised which means --yes! -- Holy Foreskin left behind. We can never be sure exactly who figured out this crackerjack scheme, but times being what they were, it went over big. All that was needed was the story of Charlemagne being vouchsafed this particular bit of flesh from an angel and him handing it over to Pope Leo III (though there is a competing story that Charlemagne actually received it as a wedding present from the Byzantine Empress Irene).

Pope Leo III did what anyone else would do when handed what was reputedly an 800 year old piece of baby cock: he put it in the Vatican's most inner sanctum. And there it reputedly remained for seven hundred more years until Rome was sacked by the Germans in 1527. Apparently a soldier found the prepuce, which was little more than a couple chickpeas in size, thought it worth keeping, and took it with him. He was later apprehended in the nearby town of Calcata, where he was locked in a cave jail cell. He hid the foreskin there, was released, and thirty years later, miracle of miracles, the foreskin was discovered and became a centerpiece of the small town's church.

Celebrated by official church dogma, pilgrims who made the journey to the town to view the Holy Foreskin were granted ten years off their stay in Purgatory. And there the foreskin stayed for the next few hundred years.

This bit of dainty old flesh was deified practically, though it wasn't without competition. In the 12th century, an abbey in Charoux, France, decided to horn in on the action, claiming they had the real Holy Foreskin. They claimed to also have received it from Charlemagne, though they apparently lost it for an odd century or two. Theirs disappeared again, after Pope Innocent III declined to rule on its authenticity, only to be "rediscovered" in 1856. Ultimately, there were something like seventeen other competing foreskin claims. Yes, once one town had themselves a claim to some mystical Jesus dick, other towns wanted in on the action.

With a little prepucial sword fighting going on following the Charoux "rediscovery," Rome had to step in, and it did so, deciding in 1900 that anyone who even mentioned the Holy Foreskin would be excommunicated. They modified their approach in 1954, by deciding that plain old excommunication was too soft a decree and pronounced mentioning it would be punished with a harsher degree of excommunication that included shunning by all Catholics. This for even mentioning a relic they'd spent the last several hundred years talking up as grand and great.

The small town of Calcata was allowed to keep their relic. They were even allowed to conduct an annual parade through the town featuring the relic, but only once a year and never discussed any of the remaining 364 calendar days. The going consensus was that relic veneration had pretty much died out, Calcata was a fairly small town, what was the harm in leaving it as it was after setting up their penalties?

Then, in 1983, the priest of Calcata made a shocking announcement to his parishioners. The foreskin had apparently been stolen. It was gone once again, this tiny little bit of flesh supposedly from the end of Jesus' penis, which the priest, Dario Magnoni, had kept, of all places, in a shoebox in the closet of his home

Well, as you can see, this is quite a story. And this history is entertainingly told by travel writer, David Farley in his very amusing, highly enlightening An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town. The title takes its first three words from a papal condemnation of the relic and interest in it. It's hard not to see the church's point. What else could provoke a twenty-first century person to want to learn about what was clearly a faked bit of church lore, especially one so preposterous as this one?

To learn more about it, to study the Vatican records and try to piece together the lore and the current whereabouts of the relic, Farley moved his wife and his dog and himself to Calcata, Italy, where he lived for several months, digging into the history as well as plenty of Italian food. The book, when not discussing ancient bits of revered dong, comes off as a kind of slightly whacked love letter to the strange town of Calcata, a refuge for outcasts from the country itself, but also from other places.

Farley describes the village as commonly referred to as a "paese di fricchettoni" which is to say village of freaks. With two actual Calcatas on the map, the old medieval town and the newer Calcata Nuova, the history doesn't make it difficult for a reader to understand those who call the residents freaks. New Agers, old hippies from across the continent, and wanderers from all around flocked to the old town. This sets Calcata apart, as something like 70% of Italians live within 1 mile of their childhood homes.

The older part of town had once been condemned by the Italian government after earthquakes earlier in the century destroyed a village elsewhere in Italy. All the old residents moved to the new government built Calcata Nuova, selling off their homes in the sixties to a bunch of hippies and artist types. In a place filled with Belgians, Americans, Italians from all over, Dutch, Spaniards, etc., Farley can only find freaks to befriend, including an old actor who appeared in Italian soft-core porn and who gives the author a book of nude photography of himself, sometimes in a state of arousal; fascists still dedicated to Il Duce; an old Contessa with bad gas who has been writing a history of the Holy Foreskin for ten years; and other assorted quirky characters.

The book generally trades back and forth being about the historical accounts of the foreskin and Farley's day to day life trying to research it and get answers while living in Calcata, traveling to Rome and Turin, and finding himself stymied at nearly every turn. He acts as a beard for the local foreskin expert, Patrizia, who claims the Vatican is blocking her research, asking for reference works they've denied her, while being fed the basic lore by her in return for his services. The lore itself proves almost as bizarrely entertaining as Farley's misadventures in Italy, a kind of slapstick antidote to the tendentious sturm und drang of Dan Brown.

For example, what will seem beyond absurd into a kind of grotesquerie was how much debate centered around this particular relic. Theologians through the ages spent much candlepower and brain juice formulating statements such as this head scratcher from Saint Anastasius Sinaita in the seventh century: "And as Christ's immaculate blood, mixed with water, trickled on and purified the earth during the Passion, the cut and lost foreskin bestowed holiness on the same earth. In any case He, who let it be cut off freely, saved the foreskin, so that He could assume it again at his resurrection, and He, uncorrupted and whole, could possess every sin of every body. Because our bodies will be complete at the resurrection, and stand by his side."

So, did you get all that? Jesus, at the age of eight days, saved his own foreskin, which he kept with him all his life, so he could have it after his body ascended into heaven and was resurrected millennia later. Let us further note that the author of this particular piece of nonsense ran an abbey

Further, in the sixteenth century, at least one Spanish theologian, Francesco de Suarez argued that Jesus' body could easily, after his resurrection, have regrown his foreskin. Unfortunately, neither Farley or de Suarez fail to go into any detail as to how specifically this is supposed to have taken place. One imagines that Jesus could have likewise as easily have healed the holes in his hands and side, rendering the story of Thomas and his doubt a moot one, but, alas, the record does not touch on this bit of supernatural healing.

So, ideas and hypotheses about Jesus' foreskin percolated throughout the centuries, and were hashed over at later points including by the seventeenth century Greek theologian Leo Allatius. This learned scholar's fantastical contribution to the argument about this Holy Foreskin was not only did it ascend into heaven with Jesus, but that it also traveled through space to become the rings of Saturn. Keeping that in mind, how much will it surprise you when I tell you that Allatius also wrote the first medical treatise on vampires?

Farley is, of course, by no means exhaustive in his accounts. We are spared the dull parts of the history and given just what the papacy feared, irreverence. And, honestly, what should a sensible person's reaction be when learning that certain bishops argue for the foreskin's authenticity by citing the message delivered by Saint Catherine in the fourteenth century that the Popes should move back to Rome from Avignon, France, and that Jesus himself put his foreskin on her finger as a wedding band? Or how can you react with anything but irreverence when you read the story of Saint Agnes of Vienna who claimed that every time she took communion, the wafer was transformed in her mouth into the "sweet" meat of Jesus' foreskin?

Let me remind you. I'm not making any of this up.

Farley's book is too good for you not to read. Irreverent? Absolutely. Entertaining? Just as much so. Fascinating? Your mileage may very, but such hidden nooks and crannies of the past can't help but draw me in. Farley paces everything wonderfully and delivers a gently funny travelogue and history that is both laugh out loud hysterical and stranger than just about any book of fiction you could find.

(And if you want more, for instance, photos of the various cast that make up Farley's researches, you have nothing more to do than visit An Irreverent Curiosity's Facebook page, where you can put faces to names. See Omar, Farley's translator, or Athon, the woman who lives in a cave with crows. Yes, there are faces to go with the whacked-out stories.)

The Edgar Allan Poe Collection 6-8 and The Edgar Allan Poe Collection 9: The Pioneers, By Edgar Allan Poe, Read by Christopher Aruffo, Acoustic Learning Inc., 2009



Some time back when I did my month of Poe for one year's October, I managed to somehow stumble into a dedicated audiobook reader who told me he was devoted to making audio versions of all of Poe's work. I was hopeful he'd really do it, but a little doubtful. There's just so much to do and unless there's a publishing company bankrolling you, it seemed a Herculean task for one man with a microphone.

Well, that one man with a microphone, Christopher Aruffo, is back with armloads of new Poe recordings and they're topnotch stuff, demonstrating a growth in his narrative abilities and sensitivities. I recently finished listening to volumes 6 through 9 of his latest recordings and I'm telling you: if you enjoy Poe and you enjoy audiobooks, consider this a little slice of heaven on earth.

Aruffo has made it easy for you to purchase single discs of his versions if you're after a very specific favorite Poe and I review them in this fashion, though it is possible for you to purchase a three pack that bundles volumes six through eight. The ninth volume turns out to feature such long recordings that it is itself a multidisc edition.

The Edgar Allan Poe Collection 6

The sixth disc in this series features some a couple classic Poe pieces as well as an obscurity or two not usually recorded. Both "The Oblong Box" and "MS Found in a Bottle" are from Poe's sea story phase though the two couldn't be more dissimilar. The former is a kind of mystery (for which Poe is given the credit as inventor in his Dupin tales) in which an attentive ship passenger stakes out another passenger to determine what makes up the contents of a strange box the observed party keeps with him. The narration keeps our interest piqued in the curious doings in the stateroom in question, then gratifies it in a moment of excitement and revelation at story's end.

The second tale, "MS. Found in a Bottle" is the story which launched Poe's career, a first-hand account of a ship blown off course by the terrible Simoon (part typhoon, part hurricane and part sandstorm). When the ship capsizes, our narrator ends up aboard another passing ship which is headed toward the South Pole. Poe creepily adds to this black galleon the fact that each of the crew members are blind and do not take account of the narrator, the sole survivor of the previous ship.

In many ways, "MS. Found in a Bottle" presaged a number of other writer's Pole stories while also sharing with it elements of the nameless shapeless dreaded horrors populating many a tale by H.P. Lovecraft. Like many Poe tales, usually featuring a singular narrator, a solitary type who more reports the action than participates it, there aren't many opportunities for dialogue. Aruffo makes the most of the drama of the story, his powerful voice filling my headphones with his rich tones as the ship is beset by currents and lost. While it is a piece of absurdity to imagine that one might write a diary entry as you were in the middle of being sucked down a whirlpool, Poe's story is effective nonetheless, his early sureness of touch when it came to handling dread evident even here.

These two more well-known pieces are joined by "The Oval Portrait" and the last story Poe wrote, the unfinished "The Light-House," also in the form of journal or diary. Readers of Oscar Wilde's "Portrait of Dorian Gray" will recognize the main supernatural device of the fourth story rounding out this disc, "The Oval Portrait," that of the ability of art to so mimic reality that it absorbs the actual life or soul of the real world. Poe's narrator at least makes it abundantly clear why pedants are so rarely invited to parties.

The highlight of these lesser recorder stories, though, has to be "The Light-House." Here Aruffo camps it up for our entertainment, delivering the narrative in the fussy, elitist voice of a man not knowing what he's in for, but certain in his dreams. As the story was unfinished, it's almost never, if ever, committed to recording, and we have our reader here to thank for giving us not only a rarity, but one delivered with such panache. As the recording ended so abruptly, I was certain I was missing some tracks, but no. A check at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore's fantastic and thorough website confirmed what I dreaded. Just as I was settling into a fun tale, it ended. Alas!


The Edgar Allan Poe Collection 7

The seventh volume features only two stories, and with such a short title list, you'd guess they'd have to be good ones, and Aruffo does not disappoint. Here, he chooses to focus on two tales of premature burial, the obviously eponymous one and the all-time classic "The Cask of Amontillado."

Frequently anthologized, "The Premature Burial" allows Aruffo to demonstrate one of his especially wonderful strengths as a reader. Where the opening material dithers for quite some time with a number of anecdotes and treads near dry essay (and, surprisingly, you can approach dry after a number of nearly identical "buried alive" stories), Aruffo's pacing and emphasis keeps the material lively until we reach the narrator's sheer terror in the later pages.

A cataleptic with a long-running fear of premature burial narrates a few incidents of such happenings (apparently not too uncommon somewhere in the area of 150 years ago) and in a manner that presaged Freud's investigations into the unconsciousness, brings about his own almost coma-like condition through fear of such burials. Here Aruffo delivers a nicely chilling vocalization of the demon haunting our narrator's trances, as well as grippingly dramatizes the mounting panic of the narrator as the story closes.

The more famous of the two tales, "The Cask of Amontillado," the familiar revenge story narrated by Montresor, tells how he goes about plotting then carrying out his revenge against the ironically named Fortunato for a grave insult. We're never given the specifics about the insult, only that it was sufficient for Montresor to plot Fortunato's murder and premature internment.

Aruffo brings to this reading his wonderful gift for dialects and different voices to the back and forth conversation between Fortunato and Montresor, delivering the victim in a gruff, accented characterization you'd be hard-pressed not to believe is another person. The reader also ups the ante on the recording by adding just enough sound effect manipulation to give us a catacomb-y echo as villain and victim climb lower beneath the earth. This adds a nice touch, some chilling atmospherics, while avoiding the overkill of overproduction some recorded books have gone in for, turning a reading into a staged performance.

I remarked to a friend of mine who had delivered an amateur recording of this same story that I thought in his version the coughing fit of Fortunato was overdone, but it's a delight to hear Aruffo take the very same tack. At one stage while he and Montresor are down in the catacombs, a coughing fit overtakes the intended victim. The scene includes, in the printed version, a moment of black humor that most readers overlook:


Both my friend and Aruffo read it arightly and provide this dark little story with the twinkling of humor often overlooked in many of Poe's works. The long, drawn out coughing spell followed up by the clearly ironic dismissal.

It is always a pleasure when someone of great skill tackles something you are intimately familiar and brings a little something new and exciting to the work, and Aruffo succeeds beautifully in this case.


The Edgar Allan Poe Collection 8

The eighth volume finds Aruffo concentrating on two popular Poe stories of doomed romances, Poe following his self-prescribed path to ultimate aesthetic beauty: the death of a lovely young woman. In the first of these, "Ligeia," we meet the notion of "the double" that Poe used so effectively in William Wilson. A young couple marry, our unnamed narrator and his ethereal bride who proves too fragile for this world, and thereupon after the wife begins schooling the husband in the divine and the occult. This education is cut short abruptly by the death of the title character, but it an obvious and telling signifier of what's to come.

Some time after his widowhood begins, our narrator moves away and finds himself married to another woman, his second marriage as passionless as his first one was crammed full of it. But tragedy once more strikes, because this is an Edgar Allan Poe story after all. The narrator's second wife, "the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine," falls sick and dies. On a night's vigil, he finds she rises and as her bandages fall away, she is revealed to be none other than Ligeia.

This itself is rather similar to the stories "Morella" and "Eleonora." In all three we are treated to doomed romances that you know are never going to be successful. Poe manages to fill the second romance or the sequel to the wife's death with dread and foreboding, only in one instance giving us the hint of a happy ending.

That happy ending makes up the second story on this disc, "Eleonora," though Poe himself later criticized this wish fulfillment style neat closure. A much shorter piece than the first, "Eleonora" feels decidedly the lesser work. That aspect is quite likely what lies behind the number of revisions Poe put the piece through over the course of his life.

Nevertheless, Aruffo is wonderful in the delivery of his characters. It's a shame that Poe should tend so regularly toward monomaniacal loner narrators who tend to monologue. With such a facility for differing voices, some of Aruffo's talents are wasted with Poe. Still, as a reader he does manage to inflect long, ornate passages with the right amount of breathing room, giving us thinking, breathing characters instead of essayists who happen to discuss dead brides. He is appreciative of the differences in male to female characters and doesn't simper his way through the small amounts of text Ligeia is given to speak in her story, nor does he simply pitch his voice a little higher, but offers up something far subtler and ultimately more feminine than either easy way out.

As a collection, volumes six through eight offer a nice round helping of Edgar Allan Poe stories from the obscure to the overly well-known, and Aruffo's reading is so pleasurable, so well-done as to put them up there among the legendary ones of Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price.


The Edgar Allan Poe Collection 9


If you're seeking hard to find obscurities, stories that almost never make it into recordings of Poe's work, then this is the one for you. A gem of a collection wherein reader Christopher Aruffo tackles pieces you simply can't find anywhere else. It's simply a treasure trove of riches in which we are treated to several of Poe's more hoax like stories. Included are "The Balloon Hoax" as well as "Hans Pfaal" and "The Journal of Julius Rodman," Poe's unfinished serial novel that was so convincing it fooled a member of Congress.

Aruffo also adds to his repertoire of Poe's essays from which he provided a wonderful selection in his Edgar Allan Poe Collection Volume 4 and Volume 5. Filling out the bill with these hoax tales and adventure stories are a few of Poe's more travel related essays including "Harper's Ferry," "Morning on the Wissahiccon" and "The Capitol at Washington." We also are given "Some Account of Stonehenge," which might be considered travel related, though it almost seems Poe's attempt at an encyclopedic account of the place.

Aruffo dispatches these with his customary style, turning what might read dryly on the page into fascinating accounts. The essays demonstrate Poe's less lurid side, though he's just as prone to his ornate, baroque style of composition. Aruffo delivers Poe as he is, bombastic, hyperbolic, critical and judgmental and all of it is a treat to listen to, in no small part because Aruffo's made such an in-depth study of the material. He understands Poe better than any other reader I've listened to, finding subtleties and nuances in the work most narrators miss.

While "Hans Pfaal" keeps a place in my heart just for the sheer audacity of its absurdity (the description of both the visitor who arrives by balloon to deliver the message that makes up the story and the account of the balloon's construction are simply laughable), the crown jewel in this case is what would have been Poe's second novel had he not come to contract disputes with his publisher (an all too common occurrence with the author).

I'm speaking of course of "The Journal of Julius Rodman," a detailed meta-fiction wherein an editor delivers excerpts from a supposedly fleshed out account of a trip over the Rockies preceding that of Lewis and Clark's. While there are entertaining passages throughout, filled with adventure and comic moments, some of the best of these passages of great enjoyment are given to us by the editor who seems at times rather impatient with Rodman's account, interrupting at any given moment to hurry us along in the action.

The style in which Poe writes, the depths he went to to add a veneer of verisimilitude to his work contributed to the fact that Robert Greenhow, one time translator for the State Department, included passages from the work in a document commissioned by the United States Senate.

As the two voices compete for narrative space, Aruffo deftly shifts back and forth, giving both men's accounts and creating wholly credible individual personalities for the rough and tumble gentleman of Julius Rodman, as well as a persnickety editor not too dissimilar in attitude at time from the unnamed diarist of "The Light-House." At times the piece seemed like it was not only Rodman against the elements and the various native tribes, but also Rodman against his later editor.

Alas, again, for this piece likewise ends abruptly, unfinished by Poe after being fired as editor of the magazine in which it had been appearing serially. The loss to literature -- as well as how its loss allows the morbid, brooding Poe to so dominate without challenge -- is, of course, incalculable.

I Spit on Your Graves, by Boris Vian, Translated from the French by Boris Vian and Milton Rosenthal, Canongate Crime, 2001



The first thing you need to know is that this novel, originally published in France in 1946, has absolutely nothing to do with the controversial 1978 film, I Spit on Your Grave. While the film was originally titled Day of the Woman, it subsequently changed to the more familiar title, and there the similarity ends.

Originally written on a bet (whether or not the author, Boris Vian, could write a bestseller in a couple weeks), the novel was the the first published for Vian who was an active member of the French literary and intellectual circles, having published poetry and had other novels accepted for publication.

This novel, a loose and nasty little pulp, was cooked up as a bet and passed off as a translation of an American novel by Vernon Sullivan, translated into French by Vian. It tells the story of Lee Anderson, an black man passing for white who moves to Buckton, a small town in America without any further specificity as to place, though we are led to believe that its location is somewhere in the south.

The notion of a white author purporting to be translating a black author -- i.e., passing for black -- while writing about a black man passing for white is one of the novel's little twisted charms. It'd sound almost sick to say that all the unpleasantries of the novel are cruel charms, but from time to time I'm in the mood for something rather sick and sadistic. To say that I Spit on Your Graves fills that bill would be an understatement.

Lee Anderson is in Buckton on a mission. To avenge his younger brother who was lynched for dating a white girl. His plan: to seduce a couple of white, rich sisters, humiliate them, then kill them. Single-minded of purpose, he finds himself a nice position as manager of Buckton's one bookstore, then goes about learning the ways and fashions of the town. This leads him, a twenty six year old, into hanging out, drinking, and having sex with a number of fifteenish year olds.

The first sign that this book was not written by an American comes right there.

While it may be perfectly plausible for men ten years their junior to hang out with French teens in the post-war years back around Paris, I think we can safely assume that small town, southern America was probably a whole different story. I'm not prude or naive enough to believe that no adult ever had sex with a minor in 1947 Alabama, just not so openly or so frequently.

With his in-town sex partners under his belt, Anderson begins casting about for the perfect prey. The semi-anonymous Judy's of Buckton aren't nearly as much of a challenge, nor as much as a prize. And so Anderson lingers, until a sickly upper-middle-class boy named Dexter introduces him to the Asquiths, a well-to-do family from Prixville. There he finds the two sisters, Jean and Lou, roughly twenty and fifteen respectively, who are sufficient for his revenge.

Taking his time, Anderson insinuates himself into their lives, at times pitting the two against each other, though sisterly bonds and Dexter's suspicions complicate matters entirely.

If there is a particular fly in the ointment to Anderson's quest, it comes on the reader's side, not the character's. Much like a certain lack of awareness of southern mores in the 40s, Vian's hep lingo or Negro approximations are weak and never very convincing. For French readers of the same era they were, by sales accounts, sufficiently authentic seeming, but from a later, Stateside perspective there are elements of the voice ("my good Negro blood" and the narrator's belief that his fluency in jive is genetically innate) that don't ring true.

All of this actually seems beside the point. Vian paints Anderson's anger and obsessions pretty thoroughly. While in some respects one could just as easily subtract the entirety of the racial element and merely make Anderson seeking revenge for the death of his younger brother at a party, this is one of the novel's strengths. While Vian is seeking a book that sensationalizes "the Other" to some degree, what comes out through all the pulp conventions is that human nature is universal.

That's a rather kumbaya ending for a review of a novel that features tons of underage sex, a couple of brutal murders, and rape, I know, but there is actually more going on than just a down and dirty shocker. It's too short and too harsh to see it at first, but upon later reflection, Vian, like most good artists, couldn't help slipping in a little deeper meaning. The only drawback is that he gets you right inside it all to make you see it -- and for some, that may be too much

Jeeves in the Offing, by P.G. Wodehouse, Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1960, Reprinted 2002 by Overlook Hardcover


You may ask yourself, is there any point in reviewing a Wodehouse novel? Or rather, you may ask this of me. I am, as has been established previously, completely and totally smitten with every word that drops from the pen of P.G. Wodehouse. And no novels or short stories so delight me of his as the classic Jeeves and Wooster brand.

I may as well review sunshine, cool, clean water, the smiles of beautiful children, fuzzy puppies, and all other manner of things that are perfection themselves. When the dark clouds have gathered on many a friend's brow, my advice has been steadfast and true: get yourself some Wodehouse and escape into sheer bliss.

How many of these friends take my advice I can't say for certain, but it remains solid. In the years prior to my discovery of these delightful books, I used Tom Robbins in a similar fashion. The problem is that Robbins writes so rarely that depending on your bad days mileage, you're very quickly through the entirety of the canon and back to rereading his novels. With Wodehouse, you have plenty to choose from -- there only being one drawback that may irk some. Wodehouse recycled his plots with a vengeance.

Were you to describe to someone the novel as such, you might describe any number of them: "Bertie Wooster is summoned to his Aunt Dahlia's home Brinkely Court to assist her in some project. In the course of this adventure, he inadvertently finds himself engaged to a girl, breaking up the engagement of someone else, being considered a crackpot by the locals, making an ass out of himself, botching events up completely, then finally resorting to the ingenious advice of his valet, Jeeves, who saves the day for all parties."

Because that is more or less the outline. Maybe it doesn't take place at Brinkley Court, maybe Bertie is assisting his other aunt, maybe a few other variations on a theme, but one way or another Bertie Wooster will make a hash of things and Jeeves will provide the solutions.

In this particular volume, Jeeves in the Offing, Jeeves is away on a vacation, which only provides Bertie more scope and license, though there is actually little even Bertie can do to upend this particular story. Events are already well out of hand before he even comes on the scene to apply his brand of brainpower. After breakfasting with an old school chum, Reginald Herring (nicknamed, obviously, Kipper) he opens the paper to find an announcement that Roberta Wickham is engaged to one Bertram Wooster.

News to him, he legs it to Brinkley Court where he discovers that Roberta, or Bobbie, is actually secretly engaged to Kipper, but has announced her engagement to Bertie in order to soften up her mother. The idea being that after envisioning the horrors of Bertie Wooster for a son, Lady Wickham will welcome Kipper with open arms. Meanwhile, Bertie is also set upon the task of preventing guest Willie Cream from making his advances to another guest Phyllis, locating a missing eighteenth century silver cow creamer dish, and preventing Kipper and his newspaper employer from being sued for libel by Bertie and Kipper's old school headmaster. Naturally, it all goes to pot, Jeeves is summoned from his vacation, and everything ends pleasantly. Yet again.

The lovely thing about these books is the madcap plotting is actually astonishingly complex. There are never any less than three separate plots going simultaneously and each attempt prior to the wise ministrations of Jeeves only complicates matters all the more.

But the true joy isn't so much the plotting and the incidents, which it must be said, are beyond choice. No, the true joy these books brings comes in how all of that delirious cloak and dagger, mistaken identity, love lost and regained stuff is all wrapped up in prose that just cooks.

As a sampling of this first rate stuff, I reproduce below, random Wodehouse quotes from stories and novels not merely from the book in question. It's all good, and you're missing out if you continue to let another day, another hour, go by without plunking yourself down with a tidy little volume such as these choice Overlook reissues.

• Boko Bagshott we called him. Took a girl to supper once at the Gardenia. Supper scarcely concluded when an angry old gentleman plunges into the room and starts shaking his fist in Boko's face. Boko rises with chivalrous gesture. ``Have no fear, sir. I am a man of honour. I will marry your daughter.'' ``Daughter?'' says the old gentleman, foaming a little at the mouth. ``Damn it, that's my wife.'' Took all Boko's tact to pass it off, I believe.
• Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.
• Jeeves coughed one soft, low, gentle cough like a sheep with a blade of grass stuck in its throat.
• "If I've tried once to remember that tobacconist girl's name, I've tried a hundred times. I have an idea it began with an `L'. Muriel or Hilda or something.''
• He had the look of a frustrated tiger whose personal physician had recommended a strict vegetarian diet....
• The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.
• Her voice trailed away in a sigh that was like the wind blowing through the cracks in a broken heart.
• The Duke of Dunstable had one-way pockets. He would walk ten miles in the snow to chisel an orphan out of tuppence.
• The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.
• She was feeling like a mother who, in addition to notifying him that there is no candy, has been compelled to strike a loved child on the base of the skull with a stocking full of sand.

And so on. Every book is crammed with gems along the way. Take my advice, friends, if the world gets you down. The solution is any one of nearly one hundred novels, or perhaps the greatest short story of all time "Uncle Fred Flits By." You won't regret it.