Non-fiction > Recommendation > Post Road Magazine

The Stories of John Cheever

It was almost something—anything—by Borges and then a brief flirtation with Capote, but I returned to my original love, my well-trod, easy love: The Stories of John Cheever.

I say “easy” because so many writers have cited Cheever’s work as canonical, but I’m finally past the age when the undiscovered is believed to be more authentic, and I don’t care that he’s sometimes criticized as a product of his era—the martini and cigarette era, we can call it—or that he’s the Cassandra of suburban angst, or that he could write superb short stories but his novels were mediocre. At his best—sober, focused—there was nobody better. He was not a titan like Hemingway or Faulkner, but there’s room in the pantheon for gods of all types. We reserve a temple for him.

The first time I read Cheever (fifteen years ago?) it felt like eavesdropping on an adult conversation, involving very serious, sad people who leave most of the important stuff unsaid, and I remember thinking how amazing that was: a writer could make his characters say everything without saying much. Even better, a writer could have faith in his reader’s ability to know what wasn’t said, and why. This was a revelation. It still is. Of course, he flexed his muscles when needed, and the results—especially to my twenty-year-old self—were equal parts devastation and joy:

Odette has black hair and black eyes. She is careful never to expose her white skin to the sun for long, so the striking contrast of blackness and pallor is not changed in the summer. She needs and deserves attention—it is the element that contents her—and she will flirt, unseriously, with any man.

-Goodbye, My Brother

The Stories of John Cheever keeps going. You wait for him to run out of ideas, to recycle a mood or a character, but he doesn’t. Someone leaves home, someone returns; a wife realizes her husband is a stranger; a businessman has an affair. Such stories are shiny with use—we’ve read them all before, and wonder what’s the point of reading them again. Until we pick up his stories. Then it’s all new, as if we’ve never read about love or loss, or heard someone describe a woman sighing behind a closed bedroom door.

Originally published in Post Road , issue #21

Fiction > Short story> Diagram

Simulacrum

Henry Seton had a simulacrum of himself constructed, which he would place in his stead whenever his notoriously ill moods saw fit. Dinner, a night at the movies, a trip to see long-lost cousins—all these events Henry Seton’s simulacrum enjoyed, with his wife at his side and three children in tow. The simulacrum was an artist’s representation of Henry Seton, and thus was imperfect. Henry’s sharp features were sculpted soft, his proud posture had been reduced to sloping shoulders and a hunched back, and his resonant voice was flattened, like a recording played in a padded room. Yet his imperfect imitation was accepted, and in time friends and family saw Henry’s simulacrum as Henry himself.

Years later, after Henry had traveled the world by ship while his simulacrum maintained a responsible domestic life, Henry found himself back home. He returned a different man: graying hair, skin roughened and tanned by sun and sea spray, a limp from a knife wound suffered in Kamchatka. Walking past the homes he’d once called neighbors, he expected things would look much different. But it was all still there—the Milligan’s blue house with a picket fence in need of a paint job, the Irving’s yellow house with its pulsing sprinkler watering a crabgrass lawn—and to Henry it appeared as though time had stopped when he left, and was now slowly creaking to life with his return.

He knocked on his front door. He noted the blueberry bushes at the edge of the lawn, and the towering ash tree that had tripled in size since the morning he left. His wife opened the door. She wore a green house dress and was barefoot, and her feet looked soft and pale, the color of stripped bark. She put her hand to her chest. She stood, staring for a long time. Her shoulders sagged and her chin lowered, as though she had been warring against gravity for years and was now finally ready to surrender.

Henry gazed at his wife’s wrinkles with sympathy because there were no oceans in her past. He imagined her years had been wasted staring out the kitchen window at the ash tree, watching its branches fork and lengthen, its leaves sprout and unfurl and shudder and fade. Time was hunger, Henry thought; it ate without pause and left behind fading memories like hollowed bones. He felt he could see these bones scattered around his wife’s bare feet.

I assume my simulacrum has taken good care of you, Henry said to his wife.

Your simulacrum has been gone for ten years, she said.

Henry sighed. The artist warned me it might run away. He said sometimes they become aware of what they are, and they long for other places.

Your simulacrum didn’t run away, she said. It died.

Henry’s wife explained their youngest daughter had fallen into a lake while boating with friends, and the simulacrum—standing on shore, letting the sun warm its peach-colored skin—heard her cries and ran into the water. No one had taught it how to swim; it drowned without realizing the necessity of oxygen, confused even as water filled its small lungs. The simulacrum’s body was recovered later that day, caught in a rush of reeds by the lake’s edge, its swollen face locked into an expression of wonderment.

Henry listened to his wife’s other stories. They were a diary of the ordinary, filled with birthdays and graduations, career changes and surgeries, betrayals and reconciliations. All told, his wife said, we’ve had a good life. Your simulacrum treated us well. It stayed when you could not, and took on more responsibilities than we thought possible. We mourned its loss, not because it resembled you, but because it remained true to its creation.

Henry sat on the front step. He already missed the white scour of waves. The echo and circle of gulls. The musk of port cities. He stared across the lawn, at the ash tree with its slatted shadow thrown long and wide over the grass. He remembered the day he left: a hurried morning, filled with visits to his banker, his financial advisor, and his insurance company. His final visit had been to the artist’s home, a loft in an old mill with painted cement floors and windows running floor to ceiling. There, standing in the glare of afternoon sun, the artist told Henry construction of his simulacrum needed more time. The simulacrum’s capacity for emotion was too simplistic; it understood loyalty and little else. In its present state it could not function as a member of the community, much less as a husband or a father.

Henry spoke to his unfinished simulacrum later that day, on their way to the harbor. You cannot possibly understand my reasons for leaving, Henry said. Yet my family will ask you to explain, and you will feel a responsibility to answer. So tell them this: I have lived two lives as long as I have been a husband and a father. Both have been true, but one remains unfulfilled. That is the wisdom of my unsatisfying life. It is the best answer I know.

Henry ordered his simulacrum to help load his trunks onto the steamer vessel. They then sat in a small pub at the end of a cluttered alley, and shared a drink and a meal while waiting for the ship’s crew. People passing by their table in the darkened corner of the bar asked if they were twins, and Henry told them Yes, we are, but I’m the handsome one. Henry remembered sharing a laugh with one such person, and the simulacrum had smiled dumbly. Not so dumbly, however. There was a tilt to its imperfect smile and a glimmer in its dull, milky eyes, Henry recalled. As if it was privy to something wonderful and secret.

Henry stared at the ash tree across his lawn and searched for the beginning of his stories. He had killed a man in Bushehr; slept with the daughter of a prince in Karachi; stolen a fortune in gold in Porto Alegre and wasted it all on pleasure. The bones of his memories were not hollow, he felt. There was no need to toss them aside. Nourishment could still be found like crumbled marrow dissolving on his tongue.

His wife tapped him on the shoulder.  I suppose you want to see the children, she said.

If they will see me.

I can’t guarantee anything.

He closed his eyes and listened. The chirp of sparrows sounded familiar, like the cries of a gull circling high over a ship’s mast. His own breathing, rhythmic and strong, like the white scour of waves against a ship’s hull. And the smell of the suburbs, of fresh cut grass and sun-baked sidewalks. He spoke to his wife with his eyes closed: I can try to tell you the story of my life but I worry the memories will dissolve the moment I grasp for them. They will fade as if I were telling you a dream, as if I have been watching my life through a mirror, and now that I am ready to look away I can’t remember which is me and which is my reflection.

Maybe you are another simulacrum, his wife said. A better simulacrum that has made its way back here, to what was your home.

He opened his eyes. He had heard whispers of such a possibility. Simulacrums made in such perfect imitation of their owners that they suffered the same longing for escape. But Henry had believed his simulacrum was unfinished. It understood loyalty and little else. The artist warned him it could not function as a member of the community, much less as a husband or a father. Much less as an unsatisfied man running from the hunger of time in search of sun and sea spray and the circling cry of gulls drifting high above port cities.

Suddenly everything was in bright focus: the white of his wife’s bare feet, the small branches of the blueberry bushes, the gleaming sidewalk. Henry felt his pockets for his wallet. He looked at his brown leather shoes and tried to remember where he’d bought them. Bushehr? Karachi? Porto Alegre? Down the street?

I called out for you when you ran into the lake to save our daughter, Henry’s wife said. But you didn’t look back even as you realized you were drowning. You kept going. It was your most courageous moment.

Henry stood, slowly, and limped across the lawn, toward the ash tree. He strained to hear the echo of gulls. The threshing of waves. He touched the trunk of the ash tree and tried to remember the last time he’d run his fingers across its smooth bark.

All those years on an ocean vessel, Henry said to the tree. All those years and I never learned to swim.

Originally published in DIAGRAM September 2009

Fiction > Short story > The Bellingham Review

The Love Life of Tigers

Henry told the girl with short brown hair that he was sorry, that he couldn’t join her for lunch even though he found her very pretty and under different circumstances maybe they would have shared a bottle of wine and talked until dusk. But he was late and he was lost, and his wife was expecting him and somewhere along his travels he’d misplaced his luggage. Now all he had was a frayed green duffel bag. Impossible, Henry thought, that he should go on a trip without something more. But it was all he had, so he stepped off the train at an unknown station, and gazed at the surrounding trees while the girl with the short brown hair stared at him through the window and waved a small goodbye. She might have been politely covering a yawn.

Henry watched the train shrink down the tracks and disappear around a bend in the woods, and then he looked into the forest beyond. Soft tall trees on a late summer day, pools of light and dappled gold soaking into the quiet forest floor. No underbrush or fallen limbs. He walked up a gentle rise and stood atop an outcropping of boulders blanketed in moss and leaves. He hiked his duffel bag over his shoulder and picked his way over the rocks, canvas duffel rasping against his expensive suit, twigs crackling beneath his polished shoes. Strange, he thought, this green duffel bag. Like something a boy returning from the army would carry. But he’d never been in the army, never owned a green duffel bag. His wife would know where he got the bag. Women, Henry thought, remember those sorts of things.

The forest ended at a lush green lawn, a hill with a white pillared mansion at the top and a gravel driveway that snaked down from the mansion to a high stone wall and a wrought iron gate. He heard music, somewhere, piped-in orchestral strings and piano. He made his way across the grass, mindful of his frayed bag and his expensive wrinkled suit and polished shoes now flecked with forest dirt and bits of leaves. He set the bag down and wiped his shoes with the inside arm of his suit jacket. Then he heard something that sounded like the creak of a door, a low and guttering staccato.

Across the lawn, past the winding gravel driveway, there prowled a tiger. Broad, muscled shoulders and whiskers like cactus spines, yellow fur striped with rust. Its footfalls whispered in the grass. It raised its black snout to the fading warmth and sat on its thick haunches and its rumbling purr sifted the dirt below.

Henry saw other animals. A trio of peacocks, feathers with a hundred eyes, shimmering emerald and cerulean and quills the color of chalk. They preened past a row of hedges trimmed square and sharp as cubes. From the hedges leapt a raccoon. It scampered up the driveway and gave the tiger wide berth and continued toward the white pillared mansion. Beyond the hedges Henry saw a bear on a platform surrounded by iron stakes. The bear pawed and growled. It paced and swept its head from side to side. It bellowed. It harrumphed and pushed against an iron stake, black claws scraping on the metal.

Henry walked to a cluster of lounge chairs where two women lay. A black bikini and a white bikini. They wore sunglasses and their toenails were painted red. They sipped from margarita glasses frosted with sugar, filled with liquor the color of jade.

You’re in my sun, the white bikini said to Henry. Her hair was black and long.

It’s not him it’s the trees, the black bikini said.

Is it really that late? the white bikini said.

It is, the black bikini said.

We’ve been out here all day.

We have. Are you tired?

A bit, the white bikini said. It’s the alcohol, you know. I would never get tired if it wasn’t for the alcohol.

The black bikini looked at Henry over the top of her sunglasses.

You can take off your jacket, if you’d like.

I’m okay, Henry said.

Suit yourself, the black bikini said, and the white bikini laughed.

There’s a tiger, Henry said.

Of course there is, the black bikini said. It’s no bother.

What if it’s hungry.

They keep it well fed, the white bikini said.

But tigers kill for sport.

Do they? the black bikini said. We’re keeping our distance.

Tigers run, Henry said.

Well so do we, the white bikini said, and she ran her fingers over her smooth thighs. See these legs? These are runner’s legs.

Henry looked up and saw a man in a black suit carrying a silver tray with cocktail glasses. The man stalked across the lawn, tray still aloft.

The man stopped, out of breath. He stared at the green duffel bag.

Excuse me, sir. Are you a guest?

Phillip leave him alone, the white bikini said. He’s not bothering us.

I’m lost, Henry said. I got off at the wrong station. None of this looks familiar.

Well this is a private place, Phillip said. And if you are not a guest, or the family of a guest, I’m afraid—

You know I could sure use a drink, Henry said.

Phillip frowned. These drinks are for guests, sir.

Oh Phillip just give him a damn drink, the black bikini said.

Ma’am if it were up to me—

It is up to you, the black bikini said.

Phillip frowned again. Then he plucked a glass from the silver tray.

Be quick about it. No sipping.

Sipping is for guests, Henry said.

Correct, sir.

Henry finished the drink and set the glass back on the silver tray, and Phillip led him down the hill. They walked past the tiger which sat with its eyes closed. Late sun melted over the green, gnats hovering in warm slants of light, bouncing among translucent tips of grass. At the high stone wall Phillip set down his silver tray and unhitched the iron gate.

There is a bus station in town, Phillip said.

Where do the buses go?

I don’t know, sir. I don’t take the bus.

Then Phillip picked up his silver tray and rearranged the cocktail glasses, his lips pursed, empty glass pushed to the edge. He snapped a curt bow and closed the gate with a sharp click .

A row of cars sat against the curb, engines running. Henry smelled exhaust and hints of autumn. The fatigue of leaves and flowers. He walked down the line of cars. Young men in vests and dress shirts jangled keys and shouted numbers and drove away. At the end of the line a woman with thick blonde hair sat in a black convertible, two children fussing in the back seat. She leaned over the seatback and hushed them.

Beautiful car, Henry said. Is this a—

Unlikely, she said, still glaring at her children. The children quieted and shrank into the soft leather.

Well whatever it is, it’s beautiful.

Thank you, she said, and she glanced at his wrinkled suit. His frayed green duffel bag.

Beautiful, Henry said once more, and he walked across the street. There, on the sidewalk, he watched a young man in a vest and white shirt take the blonde woman’s keys. She hurried away, long, pale fingers clutching her children’s hands, black heels clicking against the sidewalk.

Henry watched and wondered where his children were. He ran his hand across the rough canvas of his green duffel. Had he taken someone else’s bag by mistake and left a soft leather case on the train. Stuffed with baubles for his children and jewels for his wife. A set of keys for his house on the hill where he could stand in the living room and gaze out the windows at the valley. His wife would call him for dinner. He could hear the footsteps of his children. Their giggles. Their sing-song laughter. He couldn’t remember their names. Colin and Isabelle. Jack and Ashley. Named for his father and mother, perhaps. Or his wife’s grandparents. She would remember. He never could.

The young man jangled the blonde woman’s keys and looked at Henry.

You waiting for one of us?

No, Henry said.

You a guest?

I’m afraid not.

Well that’s alright. The sidewalk is free.

Henry looked down the street. A flashing red light. A pile of windswept leaves crowded against the curb. He heard the tiger’s roar.

The young man jangled the blonde woman’s keys again.

Say you need a ride somewhere? To town, maybe?

Henry thought for a moment. The bus station, he said.

Bus station it is, the young man said.

Henry crossed the street and stopped at the stone wall and listened. Faint screams. He ran down the sidewalk, green duffel bag slapping against his side, and looked through the iron gate, up the lawn where late sun melted across the green, and saw the tiger crouched atop a lounge chair. Yellow fur flecked with red, white whiskers dark. A woman lay on the grass. Jumble of naked limbs, long black hair like spilled ink. Sunglasses hooked over one ear. The tiger pawed at her gently. She shifted limp under its claws.

The crack of a rifle. The tiger leapt. It bounded over the lawn, low and long, eyes narrowed and curved claws digging into the grass. It skidded at the edge of the forest and lifted its black snout. The bear pushed on its cage. Phillip stalked across the gravel driveway, rifle held in both hands. He raised it to his shoulder and fired again and the tiger slipped between the trees, leaves whispering against its yellow fur striped with bands of rust. Henry and the young man watched Phillip kneel by the broken woman.

Sometimes they catch them, the young man said. The guests, I mean. Sometimes the tigers catch them.

I warned her, Henry said. She said she was a runner.

Well it’s done now, the young man said. You still want that ride?

What about that tiger.

They’ll find it. Come on.

Henry sat in the black convertible. Its soft leather seat was warm. Much more comfortable than the train, he thought.

I don’t want you to get in trouble, Henry said.

No trouble, the young man said. The bus station is too far to walk. That tiger might get you on the way. You never know.

Henry sat with his bag in his lap, fingernail scratching against the rough canvas. He stared out the window at the brown blur of the high stone wall. It would be dusk soon, he thought. The end of their bottle of wine, had he chosen that way. The pretty girl with the short brown hair. They would have had lunch, at a restaurant with thick white linens and quiet waiters. The menu printed on a single page, bits of multi-colored food stacked high in the middle of white plates. The food would have been good but not excellent, just disappointing enough to give Henry something to make fun of, and he would say something witty and maybe she would laugh, dizzy with wine, and her long pale fingers would brush against his and he would think back to the train stop in the middle of the forest. An outcropping of boulders for someone else to climb upon. Someone else’s wrinkled suit and polished shoes. Someone else to hear the scrape of black claws on iron stakes and see white whiskers stained dark. Someone else entirely, with a wife who remembered those sorts of things.

Originally published in The Bellingham Review April 2009

Non-Fiction > Film > Penny Blood

John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy

If horror fans can agree on one thing, it is their lowly place within the hierarchy of genre. We are a disrespected lot, cast into the slum of the art world, labeled as either maladjusted teens playing out frustration by ogling the slaughter of nubile coeds, or lonely gore-hounds with social anxiety and traumatic childhoods. The prevailing opinion is that any director can create horror—toss a ball of butcher knives into a crowded room and there’s your scary movie; keep a few people alive and you have a sequel.

But horror fans know how difficult it is to create that perfect poison. We have our kings, even if these kings are largely ignored, and when rare praise filters down through the rank and file of critics, it arrives with conditions. A great horror director is rarely deemed a great director without horror used as a reminder of his or her place. Which brings us to John Carpenter.

Critics are ambivalent about John Carpenter’s rank in cinematic history. He is not quite the director Hitchcock was, not quite the writer Polanski is, and like his hero Howard Hawkes, Carpenter violates artistic law by dabbling in multiple genres. The man that brought us 1978’s proto-slasher flick Halloween also gave us the sci-fi heartbreaker Starman , and the made-for-TV Elvis , starring Kurt Russell, Carpenter’s soon-to-be muse. It took a gentler movie like 1984’s Starman to give Carpenter his entry into the big-budget mainstream. Just as two years later it took a big-budget failure like Big Trouble in Little China to give Carpenter his walking papers, and put him back where he ostensibly belonged: as king of the horror slum.[1]

Style is a funny thing with directors, often portrayed as the opposite of substance , as though the two can’t happily co-exist. One could argue—and one will—that the style of a horror movie is its substance; imagine Halloween without its cinema verite elements, without the underlighting, without the slow, inevitable pans, or the bleak Carpenter score. Accusations of stylistic theft from Bob Clark’s Black Christmas are understandable (Clark’s slasher film predated Halloween by four years), but Carpenter’s signature style expanded in subsequent movies, making its original appearance in Halloween a harbinger, rather than a one-note imitation.

And what of Carpenter’s style? Carpenter is one of those artists that have slipped into the collective unconscious—you know his directorial watermark even if you don’t know his name. Even when the dialogue is strained (it often is) and even when the acting is mediocre (sometimes), a Carpenter film remains visceral. And visceral is all we horror fans really need. Carpenter accomplishes this by remaining straightforward. His style is his lack of directorial flourish. Again, the Hawkes influence is clear: Carpenter makes movies to tell a story, not to feed the auteur myth. His films trade in scary—they make us look under our beds and check the front door locks.

In particular, three John Carpenter films do that to us: The Thing, Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness . These three films comprise his “Apocalypse Trilogy,” yet this trilogy is unique in that none of the films are directly connected. They are brothers in nihilism, the machinations of doom offering us three scenarios for the end of the world: The Thing by way of alien invasion, Prince of Darkness by way of Satan, and In the Mouth of Madness by way of Lovecraftian Elder Gods.

*

Released in 1982 to cranky critics and an apathetic public, The Thing is considered Carpenter’s best work. Not purely horror, or sci-fi, or psychological thriller, it consumes the best elements of those genres and discards the rest. The plot is simple, taken from the John Campbell novella “Who Goes There?”: a shape-shifting alien invades an outpost in the South Pole, and picks off the men, one by one. The gory special effects—by the now-legendary Rob Bottin—and relentless tension shoved the Thing into the sci-fi/horror section, a box office death knell during a year when the only acceptable aliens were loveable strays (E.T. ). But to call The Thing science fiction or horror is an incomplete categorization. The Thing is, like its monster, a gruesome hybrid of multiple parts.

The Thing is Carpenter’s lone entry in his Apocalypse Trilogy that does not involve good vs. evil. The shapeshifting alien is not evil—it is a survivor. Just as its victims are not portrayed as saints—they are unlucky scientists, thrust into the bizarre and doing whatever they can to survive. Kurt Russell is one of the unlucky scientists, as is Wilford Brimley, yet this film is not about individual actors. The characters soon become interchangeable parts of the same paranoid group. Traditional horror techniques that give the audience comforting exposition (the wise old man, the research scientist, etc.) are tossed aside. We don’t know who, or where, the alien is. We become a part of that doomed outpost.

At its heart, The Thing is about bad luck.[2] Bad luck implies a chaotic universe, unfettered by morality. Bad luck reduces us to an existential speck, and reminds us of our frailty on a cosmic scale (a frailty later explored in both Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness ). If bad luck is the father of terror, than its child is the Jungian shadow; what do we fear most if not our darkest impulses? Carpenter has never claimed profundity in his work—if anything he has relied too much on self-deprecation, a charming character quirk that helps explain why mainstream Hollywood turned on him so quickly. But if there is any profundity to be uncovered in Carpenter’s work, it can be found in The Thing. The Jungian shadow-self is given graphic detail in the form of the alien shape-shifter, hiding within its victims, eventually turning nerdish scientists into mewling, tentacled monsters. Simply put: Carpenter shows us the monster, and it looks exactly like us.

The monster-disguised-as-humans is a tired plot device now, and it was a tired plot device in 1982 (the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers contributed to the fatigue). But Carpenter made it seem fresh by reducing the scale and upping the intensity. Rather than start in the cities, world conquest begins in a remote Arctic outpost, and when the alien reveals itself it isn’t with white contacts lenses and piercing screams. It happens in full, three-dimensional glory. Heads sprout spidery legs and walk across the floor, lashing tentacles burst from stomachs, and necks split and blossom into gaping maws with rows of bloody teeth. It’s the audacious stuff of genius, confirming Rob Bottin is the Mozart of gore to Savini’s Liszt.

The Thing also terrifies because Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster refuse to comfort the audience with exposition. Early in the film we are shown a massive hole in the ice, evidence of an unearthed space ship site. That is all we are given. Standard questions (what is this thing? why is it here? how do we defeat it?) are left for the men to ponder, provided those unfortunate men have the time. Which Carpenter does not give them—clinical discussions of the alien are interrupted by gruesome deaths, and we soon realize we will never know, that for all our intelligence we still cannot outthink death. So we continue to ponder…but we do so while watching these men run for their lives.

*

Prince of Darkness was Carpenter’s second film in his Apocalypse Trilogy, and it remains—even after twenty forgiving years—an intriguing disappointment. It is the only film in Carpenter’s trilogy written by Carpenter, and its blend of physics and Satan falters under its own ambition. But the film is worth watching if only for the set-up, and the atmosphere of dread that persists despite the flaws.

We begin with a church, a team of physics grad students (including Carpenter favorites Victor Wong and Dennis Dun), an old priest (the reliable Donald Pleasance), and a cylinder of green liquid in the church basement. The students are brought to the church to research the nature of this green liquid that displays several reality-bending properties (it drips upward and pools on the ceiling, for example), and we eventually discover the origins of the green liquid via the usual narrative devices: translated ancient manuscripts, theological discussions, and the revelations of an old priest. Dream sequences play an important role in Prince of Darkness , an ambitious device because conventional artistic wisdom states that people don’t care about the dreams of fictional characters.[3]

We later learn these dream sequences—in which a shadowy figure tells the protagonist he is a visitor from the future, and is here to give warning about the green cylinder—are indeed messages from the future, transmitted subconsciously. The dream sequences are unsettling (helped by Carpenter filming the entire movie with a distorting anamorphic lens) and they transcend the pedestrian scares that populate the rest of the movie. This is an important point: making fictional dreams scary is damn hard (does anyone believe Hitchcock’s Spellbound is better with such scenes?) and it reveals Carpenter’s technique of teasing out exposition.

The green liquid is eventually revealed to be Satan, foreshadowed by insect swarms, worms on the windows of the church, a throbbing synth soundtrack, and shuffling hordes of homeless people falling under Satan’s power (including Alice Cooper in a remarkably creepy performance). Satan escapes by possessing one of the students and the possession spreads, turning Prince of Darkness into a locked-house battle of the unpossessed vs. the possessed. It is obvious that Carpenter loves a good siege movie (i.e. Assault on Precinct 13 ) which translates to Carpenter loving a good zombie movie[4] , and while there is nothing wrong with zombie movies, Prince of Darkness takes too much time and technical mumbo-jumbo arriving at such a simplistic climax. We expect something more, but Carpenter makes us momentarily forget our disappointment by reverting to his tried-and-true standards. Much like The Thing , nerdish scientists become vessels of doom. Once again, the monster looks like us.

The denouement almost makes up for this disappointing climax, taking a unique theological tack by revealing Satan to be the son of a greater evil, an “Anti-God” that needs Satan to usher him back to our world. A mirror is designated as the gate to hell, and just as one of the possessed characters is about to reach into that mirror and pull out the Anti-God, the protagonist’s girlfriend saves humanity by throwing herself at the mirror. Glass shatters, the girlfriend disappears, and we last see her floating in the netherworld, trapped on the other side of the glass in a pool of hazy water, fading into the darkness like Persephone.

For everything that’s wrong with Prince of Darkness , it still works. I recall a greasy terror after watching it the first time, and even now certain scenes keep their effectiveness: beetles pouring from a man’s mouth, Alice Cooper impaling an unfortunate soul with a sharpened bicycle frame, and murder by way of garden shears. Weak dialogue, a jumbled narrative, and pacing problems ultimately place Prince of Darkness among Carpenter’s lesser work. But it’s still scary, proving that even when Carpenter isn’t at his best, he’s good enough.

*

H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction has proved to be nearly impossible to translate into quality cinema—dreck like From Beyond and Re-Animator emphasize the unintentional camp of Lovecraft’s writing—yet the Lovecraftian ethos of man squashed beneath the scaly thumb of ancient, omnipotent evil is at last realized with Carpenter’s final film in his Apocalypse Trilogy. The result is In the Mouth of Madness , a giant wink interspersed with moments of genuine terror, played straight by the never-disappointing Sam Neil, and a cameo by Charlton Heston thrown in for good measure.

Framing horror as flashback is risky, especially if the flashback is told by the protagonist, because it reveals to the audience the protagonist survived to tell his tale. But Carpenter and screenwriter Michael de Luca work around this problem by twisting reality enough to keep the audience guessing. Sam Neil plays insurance investigator John Trent, and we first meet Trent in an insane asylum, his room—and his face—covered in crosses drawn with black crayon. A law enforcement agent of undetermined affiliation visits Trent, and asks him to recount what happened during his search for the horror author Sutter Cain. With cigarette lit by a shaking hand, Trent begins his flashback.

We learn that Sutter Cain’s publisher hired Trent to find their wildly popular horror author, who had disappeared before submitting the final draft of his novel In the Mouth of Madness. Trent plays the skeptical agent well, yet his skepticism is tested by a series of nightmares. These nightmares are played straighter than the staccato visions in Prince of Darkness , but their effect is powerful. A deformed cop beats a homeless man; shadow-clad alley dwellers are revealed to be mutants; an axe chops flesh and blood spatters across an alley wall.

Trent’s journey takes us to the town of Hobb’s End, a place we discover exists only as a figment of Cain’s work. Sutter Cain imagines it, therefore it is. This follows the theme of fiction creating reality, prefaced by Cain’s editor telling Trent that Cain’s work has an unusual effect on its readers, turning many of them into paranoiacs. Carpenter introduces one such paranoid via one of his all-time best shot sequences: early in the film Trent and his friend have lunch in front of a giant window, and through the window we see an axe-wielding man in a trenchcoat. The man crosses the busy city street, walking toward the camera while people run in terror, and Trent and his friend remain unaware even as the man kicks aside the diner’s patio tables and holds the axe aloft. Cut to the window shattered by the axe, a rain of gunfire courtesy of the police, and later we are told the would-be axe murderer was Cain’s agent. Cain’s agent, it seems, has read In the Mouth of Madness and learns Trent will unknowingly usher in the end of the world.

And how does the world end? By Lovecraftian Elder Gods, of course. Trent eventually finds Cain in the hall of a Byzantine-spired black church, and Cain reveals that what he writes becomes reality, by virtue of his millions of readers. It is collective imagination taken to the extreme; if enough people believe something, it becomes true. Trent is merely a character in Cain’s book, used to bring his final novel to the world, and all of Trent’s actions are the result of Cain’s words. But Cain also reveals he is not acting from imagination—he is the conduit for those Elder Gods, who seek to return to the earth through the power of Cain’s fiction.

Sound confusing? It is, but Carpenter weaves these existential threads into enough horror and shock moments to make it all seem logical. Trent realizes his role too late—as much as he tries to burn the manuscript and prevent it from reaching the publishers, he cannot. The story is set and sealed. Trent will deliver the book, and the book will deliver the apocalypse. Perhaps this is the closest Carpenter will get to boasting, delivering the message that artists have the power to influence perception and thus reality. But I detected satire more than anything; Carpenter condemns those critics who give horror more power than it deserves. As if cinematic violence leads to violence in real life. As if all our fascination with monsters will one day unleash real monsters, not including the real monsters that walked among us long before cinema.

*

Though the past fifteen years have seen Carpenter’s status as “master of horror” fade into the realm of honorary, his style remains unique. We have yet to see another director from the “Carpenter school,” while Hitchcock has spawned numerous imitators, Fulci remains a working influence, and remnants of Dargento and Bava remain. This may have less to do with influence than with current horror directors’ inability to decipher just what it is about Carpenter that works.

Perhaps it is the earnestness in Carpenter’s work that makes his style difficult to imitate. Much of post-modern horror is either steeped in ultra-realistic yet sanitized gore (rather than amp the realism, the clinical vividness adds to the unreality) or done with a nod to the audience. It’s as though horror has yet to fully recover from Scream —a brilliant scorched earth take on horror and all its clichés—and directors are still searching for terror without irony. Watch a John Carpenter film and you are reminded that there is something to be taken from the past, that what used to work still does. His Apocalypse Trilogy proves the lie that true horror is easy. It also proves that true horror is the product of genius, even among the slums of the art world.

[2] Bad luck all around: That these men were given this particular assignment at this particular outpost, that the alien chose their outpost to invade, etc. I’ve always felt that randomness is crucial to effective horror, evident in the terror we feel when we hear news of a random shooter, picking off victims with no motivation other than homicidal urge. In contrast, we don’t find crimes as scary when the perpetrator knows the victim. There is some comfort in believing violence follows a pre-determined trail.

[3] The Sopranos notwithstanding.

[4] All zombie movies are, at their core, siege movies. The opposite also holds true. Yes, that means I’m calling Straw Dogs Dustin Hoffman’s only zombie movie.

Originally published in Penny Blood January 2009

Non-fiction > Essay > Boston Globe Magazine

The Blonde or Brunette

My wife, Rachel, and I have been immersed in the world of infertility treatments for the past four years. It’s an exclusive, rotten club to be a part of, a secret world of injections and mood swings, surgeries and waiting rooms, late-night crying sessions, alienation and rage. In other words, it’s a microcosm of life, concentrated into four years, under the supervision of a doctor. Every day of that four years is marked by a singular, obsessive focus: Get pregnant.

And what do we do when those four years have yielded a miscarriage and little else, except the remnants of track marks across my wife’s stomach from more than 200 hormone injections? Little else except the shaken foundation of a strong marriage, battered by an inability to share the love of parenting? We work through our disappointment, laugh at the absurdity of our situation, and embrace, as my wife calls it, “weird science.”

For the past six months, Rachel and I have been searching for egg donors, a process we have discovered to be both ridiculous and profound. We sit in front of our computer and browse a donor database, searching for candidates based on photo and bio. Whether they have pretty eyes, nice hair, a good nose, above-average IQ, athleticism, mental health, and whatever other positive traits we can think of. It’s like my wife is helping me select the perfect first date, only at the end of this date I will be taking my date’s egg to a lab, where a technician will fertilize her egg with my sperm, then the cellular glob will be injected into my wife’s uterus.

Of course I’m both overstating and understating the process. The arrangement is strictly professional – there is no personal interaction with the donor, and the procedure is more complicated than simple egg fertilization. My wife’s cycle has to be timed to the donor’s cycle so that her body can accept the embryo when it’s finally transferred. And because the hormone treatments send the donor’s ovaries into hyperdrive, we don’t just get one egg. We get anywhere from 10 to 50 eggs, on average. Those eggs become our property, frozen for future use should the first attempt not work.

Yes, it’s weird science. It’s also fascinating, because it brings up many questions, especially when I suggest an egg donor who looks nothing like my wife. Maybe she has blue eyes like Rachel, the same curve to her smile, similar interests. But what if she has brown hair to my wife’s blond? Is 5-8 to my wife’s 5-4? Am I making my choice based on some subconscious algorithm of genetic fitness, sparked by an overly systematic analysis not normally found in choosing a mate?

Even more bizarre is when Rachel suggests an egg donor who looks nothing like herself. I wonder if she’s attempting to “improve” upon her own genetic legacy by picking the right donor, if her perceived failings in the fertility game have caused her to doubt her own fitness. Maybe she secretly thinks I’d be better off with someone else, a woman who can give me a child the old-fashioned way. Without doctors and injections and procedures that require hand scrubbing.

But I won’t ask those questions, because I know what Rachel would say. She would say we’re making it up as we go along, that doubt and fear are unavoidable. So I’m left to invent answers to my absurd questions, and the best answer I can come up with is this: My wife and I love each other. Love is the essence of our marriage. Not how many times we’ve been to the doctor, how many needles we’ve prepped, how many post-op recovery rooms we’ve waited in. Searching for an egg donor is another extension of our love and commitment. There is no wrong way and right way to pick the best donor. Like all major life decisions, it will take compromise and patience.

We’ve set no deadline for selecting our egg donor. Somewhere in the world there is a woman for both of us, and we will have a family.

Originally published in Boston Globe Magazine May 2008

Non-Fiction > Pop Culture > Jetcomx.com

Lovecraft on a String

I watched Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond last night. It was much better than its source material—a Lovecraft short titled, oddly enough, From Beyond—and it got me thinking about that Anglophilic old mollycoddle. Lovecraft, I mean. Not Stuart Gordon (who is neither Anglophilic nor a mollycoddle, as far as I can tell).

What is it about H.P. Lovecraft that endures? It can’t be his writing–overwrought, creaky, and humorless, the equivalent of faux Medieval antiques. It’s not the man himself, a caricature of the underappreciated artist muddling his fiction with talk of inferior races. Why does he linger then, on the edges of pop culture, much like his howling Other Gods linger on the edges of our world? Why hasn’t he faded into amusing irrelevance? Why do I criticize the man’s work and still count him as one of my earliest influences?

Lovecraft is a little like George Lucas, in that we wish he’d hired a ghostwriter to take his terrific concepts and turn them into literary gold. The Lovecraftian universe works despite itself, a perfect illustration of the almost, a set-up man tidying the path for more talented writers. Mignola and Gaiman come to mind; Mignola’s The Conqueror Worm is better than anything Lovecraft ever did, which may be an unfair comparison (Mignola had Hellboy and Nazis to work with) but I’m making it anyway. Chabon’s August Van Zorn showed promise but disappeared into the ether. And the less said about my early Lovecraft homages, the better.

Still, the man endures. Or, rather, his mythos endures. The Lovecraftian philosophy was the greatest of his artistic creations, a kernel of truth buried beneath a soft pulpy shell. Call it existential vertigo if you must, but those of us in the know understand our abiding horror was packaged to perfection by Lovecraft. His portrayal of the universe as a cold, unfeeling abyss, populated by unknowable beings paying us little mind, strikes too close to home. It puts us in the role of the blind ant, antennae to the ground. It wounds our ego and corrodes our comfortable mythology of creator as loving father. Lovecraft’s gods are absentee, at best, and just as plausible as anything the world’s religions have come up with. Also–and this might be the most important point–his monsters are, in a word, cool.

I can’t think of any fictional literary world as open source as Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. His influence is found in unlikely haunts, from video games (Capcom’s Marvel Super Heroes playable character Shuma-Gorath, the tentacled, monocular demon[†]), to New Age bookstores (a small but persistent community of crystal-wavers and chakra-navigators believe Lovecraft’s sunken city of R’lyeh to be the location of Atlantis[‡]), to the Necronomicon (an apocryphal book of conjuration by the non-existent mad Arab Abdul Alhazred) occupying its own obscure niche as the world’s first proprietary grimoire. The list goes on, filled with fan fiction, satire, and marketing cross-overs (Church of Sub-Genius, Justice League, even the kid’s show The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy all contain subtle and not-so-subtle references to the Cthulhu mythos).

The communal imagination spawned from Lovecraft’s pen is reason enough for his recent surge in acceptance and popularity (can you imagine a “serious” writer counting Lovecraft as an influence fifteen years ago?). Lovecraft has gone from pulp to pop, a jump of Warholian proportions. For all his technical faults, for all his literary myopia, he accomplished what every writer dreams of: immortality and worship. The Other Gods would be proud. If they cared.

___________________________________________________________

[*] Pragmatic agnosticism may or may not have influenced Lovecraft’s belief in cosmic indifference.

[†] Shuma-Gorath is a creation of Robert E. Howard, with obvious influence from Lovecraft.

[‡] 47°9′S, 126°43′W

Originally published in Jetcomx.com  March 2009

Non-Fiction > Travel > Eclectica

The Not-So-Lonesome Highway

My wife and I have long fantasized about a cross-country road trip, one of those quasi-spontaneous forays into the heart of America that ends with a journey across the Mojave Desert, where the highway is an infinite vanishing point and roadside diners serve 90 cent Jell-O.

Of course such fantasies remain just that—nostalgia for something we’ve never done but always envisioned. But on a recent trip to San Francisco courtesy of frequent flier miles, we finally decided to tackle half our dream. Instead of the direct flight from Boston to San Francisco we’d land in Vegas and drive Route 15 South across the Mojave Desert, past those roadside diners and frontier outposts, through Barstow, Bakersfield, and the San Joaquin Valley, and finally to that paragon of the West Coast. Not quite the cross-country trip romanticized as every American’s birthright, but what could we do. We hate driving.

I sheepishly admit I expected something similar to my mother’s recollections of her road trip through Nevada and California in the early 1970′s, before cell phone towers and aluminum wind turbines sat atop the distant hills like the scaffolding of a futuristic empire. The Mojave Desert of her youth sounded vast and dangerous, one of the few frontiers left in America where you were on your own, kept company only by crumbling ghost towns and lone gas stations and Steinbeckian stretches of dusty nothingness. “Make sure you bring plenty of water,” my mother said the night before we left. “The last thing you want to do is break down in the desert without any water.”

Of course that was the first thing I wanted to do, and the thought of driving through a post-apocalyptic landscape with nothing but our wits, cellphones, Google map print-outs, gourmet Buffalo jerky and organic grape juice was so enticing that we spent only one night in Vegas—ever the suave gambler I won $3.75 at the nickel slots—and left the next morning for our journey across the wind-scrubbed desert plains.

What we found, however, was traffic. A constant flow on Route 15 South, even in the middle of the desert with its bleached skin and Joshua trees and spiky bursts of yucca. It was the kind of place that beckoned us to pull over and sit on the hot earth and listen to the wind. But if we’d pulled over it would have sounded like rush hour outside our Boston apartment. The urban surf of thrumming cars was everywhere.

We continued along Route 15 into California, past the town of Baker, a former borax mining town and now home of the “World’s Tallest Thermometer.” From Baker we drove past the town of Zzyzx (pronounced “Zai zix”) and continued through Barstow. Along the buzzing highway I found the ghost towns I’d been looking for but instead of ramshackle mining outposts these were clusters of newer single-story homes with shuttered windows and gleaming cement driveways slowly being covered in brush. Barstow and its surrounding communities were once stopping points for silver miners en route to the Calico Mountains, and Barstow itself enjoyed a brief boom in the early nineteenth century as a rail hub for immigrants entering California on Route 66. But today Barstow is poor, with 20% of its population living below the poverty line, and its surrounding communities aren’t stopping points for anything. They’re casualties of sub-prime mortgages and the failed fringes of sprawl, aborted subdivisions in the middle of the desert with sun-warped vinyl siding and driveways that end in the pale dust.

Outside of Barstow in the tiny town of Yermo, we stopped at Peggy Sue’s Nifty Fifties Diner. The diner stood alone, a salmon and pink-colored building with gunmetal-gray tanks from the nearby Marine Corps Logistics base parked across the road. Patrons wore cowboy hats and dusty jeans. The walls were covered in faux-vintage ads for Coke and Exxon, stenciled graffiti on the bathroom walls with classic ad jingoes (“You’ll wonder where the yellow went / When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent”). An Elvis fortune telling machine greeted us at the front door, hands poised over a milky crystal ball, gears whirring as his upper lip creaked into a sneer. We browsed the gift shop, its crown jewel a painting with Elvis and Marilyn Monroe locked in a kiss. Middle America’s cultural icons, both dead from drug overdose.

The diner didn’t serve Jell-O, so on we went, down Route 58 West toward Bakersfield. Rest stops advertised grass tracts for weary travelers to walk their dogs, and vending machines served ice cream and Gatorade. On the restroom walls hung posters of missing children and runaway teens, and signs indicating California’s current water shortage, asking us to Please Preserve Water While Washing Your Hands. Yet the grass was green and freshly watered, and I stood on the lawn and let the moisture cool my ankles while I called my friend on my cell. “We’re in the middle of nowhere,” I told him, but I realized that wasn’t true. I was in the middle of anywhere—along the Massachusetts turnpike, outside of Jersey City, commuting from the suburbs of Atlanta. I had ice cream and a lawn and Gatorade. I had my cell phone and satellite radio. The only difference was the backdrop, the glorious Mojave Desert now the world’s biggest set design.

We spent the night in Bakersfield—the most ozone-polluted city in the U.S. according to a 2006 American Lung Association report—founded in 1858 as an alfalfa field for hungry horses carrying homesteaders through the Tejon Pass. The next morning we journeyed into the farms of the San Joaquin Valley. There we found endless miles of pistachio and almond tress, orchards and grape vines and potatoes and gently rolling hills clotted with cattle. Drop sprinklers sprayed sheets of water pumped in from the Kings River and the now-extinct Tulare Lake, only good for its groundwater because irrigation has drained it dry. As we headed north on Route 5 the farms thinned and wind turbines took their place. The turbines were everywhere, crenellating every ridge and hilltop, dizzying if you stared at them for too long. Trucks roared past, carrying loads of peppers and green beans and garlic that left a wake of white skin whipping in the road currents like cherry blossoms.

We stopped briefly at Harris Ranch in Coalinga, California, two hundred miles south of San Francisco. Harris Ranch is a massive hotel complex done in Spanish tile, with palm trees and lush grass and overflowing parking lots. Behind the hotel lies a landing strip for private jets; the parking lot is packed with SUV’s and luxury sedans. We browsed the gift shop. I bought another organic grape juice. While my wife used the restroom I stood in the hallway and looked at paintings for sale. Oils of cowboys rustling cattle, of cowboys standing around wagons with the sun setting over the distant Calico Mountains. On the last stretch to San Francisco I thought of those paintings, portraits of the way the land used to be. Before grass and vending machines and traffic. Before the middle of nowhere became the middle of anywhere.

Originally published in Eclectica July 2008