L. Andrew Cooper's Blog, page 10

Turning the Screw in CRAZY TIME

Crazy Time is a literary horror novel about a woman, Lily Henshaw, who goes through so much trauma that she begins to think that her experiences are supernatural, the results of a curse comparable to the suffering in the Book of Job. That she merely thinks the experiences are supernatural—she doubts her sanity, finds her senses unreliable, and therefore can’t be sure—is crucial for the way the novel unfolds. At least after the first couple of chapters (and possibly sooner), the novel starts “turning the screw,” a term I use to describe any narrative that places what is actually happening in the world of the story into unresolvable uncertainty, a kind of perpetual hermeneutic ambiguity.

The term, of course, refers to Henry James’s famous little horror novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), in which the (inset) narrator’s ghostly experiences may or may not be products of her mind. James uses first person to lock readers in his governess-narrator’s unreliable perceptions, whereas Crazy Time uses third person to lock readers in Lily’s point of view, and James turns his screw with poise and tidiness, whereas Crazy Time is… messy. With our ambiguous turns through compromised consciousness, however, we both exploit a kind of phenomenological weakness for dramatic effect. For both of us, supposedly supernatural phenomena become tests for the limits of conscious processing, gauges for the distance between that which is and that which is experienced, and revelations of the stability of the mind that is processing experience. Reading James, we must consider whether the governess’s sensory experiences of the supernatural reveal objective realities or a damaged mind. Crazy Time poses a less evenly divided question, preferring a spectrum approach. How much of what Lily experiences “actually” happens, and when what she perceives stems from hallucination and isn’t happening, what “actually” is? If Lily is insane, in her world, what might sanity look like?

Although Lily doesn’t have unlimited patience for doubting herself (eventually accepting that “crazy flows forward”), she has far more good sense than James’s governess. As an English and Philosophy double major in college, Lily asks and seeks answers for the sorts of phenomenological questions that interest James. Her book (I almost subtitled Crazy Time “The Book of Lily Henshaw”) offers an array of experiences that might play as un- or super-natural, and Lily stands in different relations of skepticism to them with regard to their “reality.” These different relations are softer and harder turns of the screw. By the novel’s second half, which is perhaps less horrific but permeated by the fantastic, nothing might be real, or everything might be real, or there’s a mix. If decisions are needed, only readers can make them, likely based on how much disbelief they suspend when faced with unnatural, extreme, absurd, and unsettling phenomena.

Trying to grapple with “What is real?,” a question asked often enough in postmodern texts (though hopefully not quite in my novel’s curious ways), Crazy Time’s readers might trip once or twice on the book’s other big phenomenological interest—the experience of time. If phenomenological instability of the “real,” primarily the reality of the spatial environment and what happens within it, points toward craziness (what else is psychosis?), then phenomenological instability of the temporal, experiences of time that disobey the even and predictable ticks of a clock, points toward crazy time.  Crazy Time doesn’t move like most novels. Split into two parts that are almost even halves, Part One covers an unspecified number of months, while Part Two covers a matter of (busy) hours. Some major events take pages and pages to play out, while others slip by in a sentence or two. Some sentences’ tortured syntax, if successful, will slow down reading, while others’ simplicity will speed reading up. Time’s instability is another screw turning, as it throws the scale of experience into uncertainty, deepening the interpretive quagmire.

This temporal instability comes at least partially from Lily’s struggle with PTSD—more on that in another post. For now, I’ll conclude by saying that crazy time, and Crazy Time, make the experiences of both space and time unreliable for both characters and readers. The book leaves no one standing on terra firma. Reading it shouldn’t provide an experience on par with Lily’s—that would be too horrifying—but having the screws turned on you should provide a glimpse of what such an experience might be like. And that, brave reader, is just the sort of phenomenon you’re seeking, right?

For Crazy Time on the Amazon Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QCVHRBJ/  

For the print version: https://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Time-Bizarre-Battle-Darkness/dp/1977250432/

CRAZY TIME and Flannery O’Connor

Horror, surreal distortions, absurdity, and religion: these are fundamental building blocks of my novel Crazy Time, and even though I don’t stand on any clear moral ground, since Flannery O’Connor was a master of using these building blocks in her fiction, I think I can safely claim her work in my book’s ancestry. However, I want to point out a closer connection with O’Connor, a tie of direct inspiration between her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and Crazy Time’s first chapter.

You can read Crazy Time’s first chapter in the Amazon Kindle preview: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QCVHRBJ/

In O’Connor’s first paragraph, the grandmother, who doesn’t want to go on the family trip to Florida but will go anyway, reads in the newspaper about an escaped convict, The Misfit, also headed toward Florida. She argues that the coincidence is a reason not to go. As she and the family travel, the grandmother thinks about how trips make her son “nervous,” and she brings up The Misfit again when they stop for lunch. The family and the restaurant’s proprietors generally discuss the world’s lack of trustworthy people and the fact that a good man is indeed hard to find.

Back on the road, the family soon gets into an accident and lands in a ditch. Toting guns, The Misfit and his two cronies find them. Conversation that is a delicate battle for the family’s lives ensues. As the criminals shoot members of the family, The Misfit, cold and detached, shares with the grandmother how he came to the conclusions that “‘crime don’t matter’” and that there is “‘no pleasure but meanness.’” By the end of the story, all the family members are dead, and the criminals move on.

One spark of inspiration for Crazy Time was a news article (unkept) about thieves deliberately sideswiping cars on the road so they would pull over. The thieves could then pull over with them and rob the cars’ passengers (or do worse) in isolation. The article struck me as good fodder for an urban legend, and the idea of criminals isolating victims on the roadside for terrible acts reminded me of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” I’d loved the story since my teens, and I wanted to craft something with the same kind of tension and brutality. Crazy Time’s first chapter began to take shape.

The first thing I realized was that O’Connor’s story recalls (or perhaps predicts) more than one urban legend. Like many a legend’s late-night travelers who hear about an escaped criminal or lunatic on the car radio and later have a (typically deadly) encounter with the escapee, O’Connor’s characters reading about The Misfit in her story’s opening seems to seal their fate. Thus, when Crazy Time’s characters in the opening chapter—Lily, Eric, Kris, and Mia—notice that a pickup truck on the highway seems to be toying with them in their car, they think of urban legends and deadly outcomes with a kind of prescience.

Tension escalates as Lily and friends continue to imagine the worst, similar to the way O’Connor builds tension by having characters continue to discuss The Misfit and reflect on nervousness and the bad state of humanity. In both tales, the promise of the urban legend’s warning phase gets fulfilled when the protagonists’ cars end up on the roadside. In Crazy Time, the pickup truck sideswipes Lily and the others, and they end up trapped on the roadside with the men from the pickup, sadistic murderers who tease with conversation and certainly seem to believe that “crime don’t matter” and that there’s “no pleasure but meanness.”

The killers in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and Crazy Time’s first chapter all display a sociopathic indifference to the pleas and suffering of their prey, but they behave differently (Crazy Time’s killers are much more enthusiastic), and the situations take different turns and have different outcomes. If my chapter is successful, though, it shares with O’Connor not only a vicious brutality but also a feeling of emptiness, a senselessness that might carry more global significance. I leave that determination to you.

Again, read Crazy Time’s first chapter in the Amazon e-book preview: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QCVHRBJ/

A highway predator from Crazy Time… or an urban legend

O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: The Library of America, 1988. 137 – 153.

Countdown to CRAZY TIME

Crazy Time: A Bizarre Battle with Darkness and the Divine is a strange beast, a literary horror novel, a dark, surreal, contemporary supernatural fantasy that offers scares and suspense but seeks to terrify more on the level of concept, filling your head with thoughts and images that don’t fit right and perhaps shouldn’t even be.

The blurb on the back cover about the story is brief:

Lily Henshaw, an agnostic, suffers from increasingly bizarre traumatic events that convince her she’s in a crossfire between God and Satan reminiscent of the Book of Job. She doesn’t take sides: preparing to confront even the Almighty, she follows psychics, Satanists, preachers, and corporate executives toward an apocalyptic showdown.

Don’t get the wrong idea from the God and Satan stuff. Although the novel deals with some of the Bible’s most disturbing material–extensively with Job, also with the Book of Revelations–its perspective would likely offend (or, put another way, be way too horrifying for) a supremely devout Judeo-Christian reader. Lily goes through so much trauma that, by the time swarms of locusts and prophesying ghosts/hallucinations bring her around to a religious way of thinking, she’s so pissed off at the universe that her stance toward divine involvement is perhaps irreversibly hostile. Her quest for relief from her suffering and for answers to the question “Why me?” does little to improve her opinion. Satan isn’t the hero of her story, but God certainly isn’t either. She is.

Crazy Time will be coming from Outskirts Press in the next two to three weeks. Outskirts is a company that helps people with self-publishing, so Crazy Time, my eleventh book to be published, will be my first (kinda) self-published book. I suspect I will write again about this publishing experience, so I’ll only make a few comments here.

Why Outskirts? There’s an entire book on Amazon dedicated to bashing them, and other bad reviews aren’t hard to find, many resurrecting the term “vanity press” to focus the (hopefully fading) stigma against self-publishing in general. However, the actual criticism of the company seems to come from people who didn’t know what they were buying… so far I’ve gotten exactly what I’ve wanted from people who have been friendly and professional, but I’ve had experience and research to guide me through choices that might make others whine. Yes, they do upcharge significantly for things that one can do on one’s own. One pays them to avoid the hassle of doing things on one’s own. That’s why I hired them. Otherwise I… would do everything on my own.

Why (mostly) self-publish Crazy Time? No, the book hasn’t been rejected by a long list of publishers. In fact, since I first drafted it in mid-2016, I haven’t sent it to any publishers at all. Although I’m not as avid a reader as I used to be, I haven’t read or read about anything in the horror genre coming from mainstream presses in recent years that didn’t seem formulaic and/or familiar (and keep in mind that I specialized in horror for my Ph.D.). Story-wise, but also structurally and stylistically, Crazy Time is the kind of horror that I think many smart readers will enjoy but that mainstream presses would poo-poo for being bad product. As for small and indie presses, though I did use one for my 2018 quasi-novella-in-verse The Great Sonnet Plot of Anton Tick, my experiences with them have not generally been the best, and they end up requiring financial investments, too. Ergo, the moment seemed right to try the “self” route. Who knows? It could work.

Why Crazy Time now? Since 2016, I’ve written two other novels I haven’t tried to publish as well as more than 30 award-winning screenplays (one of which is an adaptation of Crazy Time, my only adaptation so far of a novel-length work). Quite simply, Crazy Time is one of my favorites, if not my favorite, on the list of my writings. I was not well when I wrote it, dealing with a host of problems, notably depression and PTSD, the latter of which the novel is in some ways “about.” As a result, the book is an emotional and intellectual maelstrom, still a layered experience when I visit it, even when double-checking galley proofs (which is almost pure drudgery, for those unfamiliar with such processes). Also, I adore Lily Henshaw, certainly one of my best characters, even though she told me when I finished writing the book that she’d never speak to me again (and after what I put her through, no one could blame her). Crazy Time is as relevant to potential readers now as it was five and a half years ago, and I’m sharing it now because I’m ready and because I believe it deserves to be shared.

I expect to write more about the Crazy Time‘s genesis, the screenplay, and other issues I’ve mentioned here in passing. The book has yet to be born. It’s coming soon, in print and on the Amazon Kindle. I hope you’ll join in the fun.

Screenplays-a-Go-Go

For the last many months, I’ve been on a screenwriting binge, so I thought it was about time I produced a list of the scripts I’ve put in circulation. I’m including their loglines (one or two sentences that push the characters and conflict) and what, if any, honors they’ve garnered so far.

Feature ScriptsCalling Cards (drama, thriller)When a lonely ex-professor receives a visit from a charming former student, a magic trick with playing cards makes the evening develop in five different ways, putting their careers, their love lives, and even their survival at stake.Set in one location with three characters, one of whom appears only briefly, this script is perfect for a low-budget indie production.Come Alive (comedy, adventure, sci-fi, LGBTQ)A middle-aged gay couple’s attempt to rekindle their relationship turns into an absurd, hormone-fueled quest to defeat heterosexist aliens and save a new LGBTQ society.Winner, live reading, FEEDBACK LGBT Toronto Film Festival, 2020Crash Café (thriller)A deranged but calculating man takes the customers in a café hostage by poisoning them and withholding the antidote. He manipulates everyone as he focuses on the psychological torture of one woman in particular, and each of his victims must decide how much control to surrender in order to make it out alive.With only one location–a single-room café–this script offers all the tension of a more demanding production without the demanding budget.Crazy Time (horror, dark urban fantasy)A traumatized woman believes she suffers from a curse reminiscent of the Book of Job, but instead of responding with piety, she hunts down the horrors’ source, risking madness, the apocalypse, or both.The Masses (horror)As the people of a small town succumb to infectious tumors that change their behavior, a strong-minded woman tries to save her children from the fascist nightmare that her husband and other townsfolk are creating.Selection, Austin After Dark Film Festival, 2020; Honorable Mention, The International Horror Hotel, 2020Miasma (horror)When foul air that causes sickness, hallucinations, and violent behavior starts filling their house, a couple in a strained marriage must save their children and escape.Set in one location, a house, with only five characters, this script offers low-budget horror with high-octane thrills.The Phantom Cuckoo (drama)Diverse members of an extended family attempt to adjust to changes in where and how they live while personal and political differences threaten to tear them apart.Set in one location with an ensemble cast, this script does away with other budgetary concerns to focus on performances.Selection, Filmmatic Drama Screenplay Awards, 2020Sam the Rhino (mystery, thriller, noir, LGBTQ)A trans private eye’s search for his missing mother leads him into a web of intrigue with a wealthy family who may kill each other—and him—before they can help him find his mom.1st Place, Indie Gathering International Film Festival, 2020; semi-finalist, New York City International Screenplay Awards, 2020Undying (horror) A group of minorities fights back against a white supremacist stalker and kills him—several times. To save their neighborhood and themselves, they must find a way to get rid of him permanently.Finalist, WriteMovies Horror Award 2019; finalist, 13HORROR.COM Film & Screenplay Contest, 2019; finalist, Big Apple Film Festival, 2019Unreal Anthony (drama) A young man with a mental illness follows advice about trying to connect with new people, but his mind puts up barriers, ranging from the comic to the disastrous, that keep pushing connections out of reach.Selection, AOF Megafest, 2018; 2nd Place, Drama, Indie Gathering International Film Festival, 2018Wonder Drugs (drama, contemporary fantasy)A woman with an unnamed mental illness tries new drug therapies and goes on a hallucinatory journey—through a giant garden, a mall in the clouds, a live volcano, and more—in search of a whole, stable sense of self.Selection, Hollywood Screenings Film Festival, 2020; selection, Conquering Disabilities with Film International Film Festival, 2020; semi-finalist, Los Angeles CineFest, 2020; selection, Marina Del Rey Film Festival, 2019; selection, Chicago Screenplay Awards, 2019

Although I don’t have loglines for them, some of my short scripts have also gotten some love on the festival/competition circuit, so I’ll mention them:

Short ScriptsCharlie’s Mother (extreme horror)3rd Place, Outré, Hollywood Horrorfest, 2019Based on a story from my collection Leaping at Thorns, coming soon in a new edition from Three Bitches PressComplicity (supernatural / surreal horror)Semi-finalist, ScreenCraft Shorts Competition, 2019Based on a story from my collection Leaping at Thorns, coming soon in a new edition from Three Bitches PressSelfie Stick (psychological horror)Finalist, 13HORROR.COM Film & Screenplay Contest, 2019Silence (supernatural / surreal horror)Finalist, Hollywood Just4Shorts Film and Screenplay Competition, 2019Based on a story from my collection Leaping at Thorns, coming soon in a new edition from Three Bitches PressTapestry (supernatural / surreal horror)Finalist, Hollywood Just4Shorts Film and Screenplay Competition, 2019Based on a story from my collection Leaping at Thorns, coming soon in a new edition from Three Bitches Press

Adapting “Charlie’s Mother”

I’ve published… ten?… books, but I’m still relatively new to screenwriting. Before a few weeks ago, I had written two features. One of them went out to two festivals: it was an official selection at one, and it placed second in the drama category at the other, so I got pretty lucky. The other went to a production company, got read (yay!), and got rejected (boo). And that was it until, recently, I started a mission to adapt several stories from my collection Leaping at Thorns, due to be republished soon by Three Bitches Press. I figured that getting the stories some exposure in the film world might help out the book, so I should try my hand at some short scripts. The collection starts with a story called “Charlie Mirren and His Mother,” one of the most horrific things I’ve ever written, so I figured there was no reason why the adaptation couldn’t start there…

Well, there was one big reason. In the original story, the title character, Charlie, is kidnapped, and something unthinkable happens to him. Later, something even more unthinkable happens to Charlie and his mother, Sharon. The original story is locked in Charlie’s perspective, so a lot of what it narrates takes place deep inside Charlie’s head. When events begin, he doesn’t know what’s happening, so he imagines different possibilities. When events involve his mother, he thinks about his relationship with her, reflecting on key moments from their past. All this thinking and imagining occurs, of course, with no dialogue or present-moment imagery. It’s a natural way for Charlie to escape what’s happening to him, but it’s not at all screen friendly.

Charlie’s past and his imaginings ultimately give his fate much more power, so I knew I needed to bring them to life somehow in the screenplay. I had to break down my prose and start over, building up a script. Luckily, with the help of an old gift certificate, I had recently acquired a copy of Final Draft software, and it has a handy mode that allows you to represent your story ideas as “beats.” I took my story and tore it into pieces, separating chunks of text into beats representing crucial moments or possible scenes. I then color-coded beats from Charlie’s past–using ROY G BIV to show their chronological order–and lined them up next to beats from the story’s present. With the story cut up in terms of time instead of consciousness, I figured out a way to run it so that the impact might unfold in a viewing audience’s mind like I had presented it unfolding in Charlie’s mind for my original readers. For instance, I took one of the earliest chronological moments, a tense-and-then-tender moment between Charlie and his mother, and made it the script’s starting point, whereas it appears in Charlie’s mind about halfway through the original story. While a couple of scenes from the past might play like flashbacks, overall they have more autonomy. To give them that, I had to flesh out the dialogue and characters more. Charlie’s past became more immediate, more real. I think the story might be better in script-form as a result. In any case, the audience gets more of him as a person, as well as more of Sharon, who hardly has a name in the original story.

Another major obstacle to adaptation was the original story’s tendency to lavish description on Charlie’s extremes of psychological terror and disgust. A good actor could do a lot with those emotions, but I needed more than acting. The solution I decided on was to have Charlie’s kidnapper observe his distress and talk about it with him, savoring the details. The kidnapper was already a sadist, but this new dialogue makes his sadism even more distinct. Again, by bringing the inside outside and detailing it, I think I have made the story more potent–I leave “better” to the judgment of readers or viewers who experience the sadism for themselves.

All in all, adapting was a good experience, far more creative than I anticipated. I’m happy with the results. I hope someone will come across them and want to film them… in capable hands, I think “Charlie’s Mother” could be an unforgettable horror show.

Suspiria 2018: New Blood in Nightmares of Power

Dario Argento has said in several interviews, including the one I had with him, that he saw no need for a remake of Suspiria (1977) and was generally opposed to the idea. I’m generally in favor of remakes of films I like, but I took Argento’s point. Remakes can’t harm their sources, and they might do impressive things with already-proven concepts—however, I assumed that a remake of Suspiria would suck. Argento’s Suspiria doesn’t offer much in terms of story or character to work with; in its greatest moments, it is almost pure style. In remaking such a film I saw a strong temptation to imitate, but I saw little room for productive play. In other words, I didn’t see where a remake could go, so I expected it wouldn’t go very far or accomplish very much.

I am happy to say I was wrong about Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), which manages excellence by straying far from its namesake in some respects while staying tethered at key points. The look, sound, and pacing demonstrate the relationship succinctly. In place of Argento’s shocking palette of primary colors and assaultive sounds by the prog-rock band Goblin, the new Suspiria offers hypnotically drab greys and browns and the lulling experimental tones of Thom Yorke. The two approaches are almost inversions of one another, but they both result in dream-like atmospheres, in nightmarish worlds where witches seem likely to lurk.

 

Attached to Argento’s assaultive aesthetic is a tendency to pile one bizarre or violent set-piece onto another, leaving little room (or need) for character and story and allowing the film to come in at a tight 98 minutes. Guadagnino’s more meditative approach is almost an hour longer, 152 minutes, and it uses that time to provide what the earlier film denies. The new film uses the older film’s characters’ names and gives many of them the same or similar roles in a famous Dance Academy, but for a setting it trades in Freiburg and the fairy-tale-archetype-filled Black Forest for 1977 Berlin, which has a hard and specific reality underscored by news reports about terrorism and many lingering shots of the Wall. In their new setting, characters start over, developing backstories and nuanced emotional relationships that their more archetypal counterparts wouldn’t recognize. Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) is still an American newcomer to the Academy, but now she’s an untrained former Mennonite from Ohio who has issues with her mother that inform several dimensions of the film. Her backstory is perhaps especially important to her relationship with Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), still the functional leader of the Academy and now a dark maternal figure for Susie. No longer campy and two-dimensional, Madame Blanc is prominent in the post-World-War-II dance world, having given the definitive performance of Volk (“people,” a politically suggestive title if there ever was one) in 1948. She treats Susie at times as a daughter and at times an apprentice, grooming her to take the role she once defined on stage and preparing her for a different role in a witches’ conspiracy.

Tilda Swinton as Madame Blanc

 

What the witches—the teachers who run the Academy— are conspiring about is exceptionally vague in Argento’s film. Argento keeps their meetings offscreen (we overhear bits), but Guadagnino shows the coven in session, casting votes and revealing divisions as they choose either Madame Blanc or Helena Markos (also Tilda Swinton), the unquestioned head in Argento’s version, to go on as leader. Guadagnino’s witches are searching for a young woman to play a part in a ritual that somehow sustains the coven, which in turn sustains the women within it (the coven has protected the women through World War II and other catastrophes). The exact nature of the ritual is mysterious at first, but it does become clear. If, as several critics have argued, the earlier film’s coven provides a murky view of authoritarian power and violence, the new film imagines such power wielded by and for women who have specific goals—but their power is unstable. Resolving this instability becomes a major motivator for the plot and allows for multiple conflicts to unwind at the conclusion, providing an ending far grander in scope than the earlier film’s.

 

A central question for any viewer coming from the graphic violence of the 1977 Suspiria is likely, How does the witches’ power look on screen? The infamous opening sequence of Argento’s film, which culminates in the gruesome deaths of two young women in glorious Technicolor, is gone, but the 2018 Suspiria is anything but tame in its depictions of violence. Whereas Argento relies on camera movements and editing to suggest magic, Guadagnino exploits his source material—dance—and makes physical movement the stuff of spellcasting. Thus in one of the film’s most memorable and cringe-inducing sequences, Susie tries dancing the role Madame Blanc defined in Volk, and, as she channels the witches’ will, each of her jerky motions results in violent bends and breaks in another young woman’s body.

Dance works dark magic

At other moments, touching and hand motions pull off magical feats—bones shatter, arteries explode. While not as vibrant or elaborate, the violence of the 2018 film is just as extreme, and it’s located at the heart of the women’s profession, linking their physical power to their supernatural power. In this version, then, witches’ power—and perhaps women’s power—is deeply embodied, and their politics are literally and figuratively a dance that can break bodies apart. The breaking of bodies recurs in the setting, a broken Berlin, and makes resolving instability in the coven (and the larger political world) more urgent. The film’s trajectory drives toward a unity and stability whose cost is purification through violence, a heavy imprint of the fascism that the coven’s exercise of power ultimately reflects.

The dance troupe–a vision of unity through violence?

 

If the power the witches wield is ultimately fascistic, it is a sublime alternative to the power on offer by the patriarchy. Men get little representation in the 2018 Suspiria. Two police detectives stop by the Academy to investigate and get completely brain-wiped by the witches (who stop to fiddle with one of their absurd-looking penises just for kicks)—these men are a joke. The important male character is Dr. Klemperer (also played by Tilda Swinton), a psychoanalyst who makes the mistake of dismissing Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz), a student who flees the Academy and its witches at the beginning of the film, as delusional. Years earlier, he also dismissed concerns about Nazis pressed by his lover Anke (Jessica Harper, who plays Susie in Argento’s film), which caused him to lose her. He sets off on parallel investigations, searching for Patricia and Anke, and as a result he gets caught up in the witches’ conspiracy, taking on a role that demonstrates the relative weakness of psychoanalysis and male judgment before the power of the women who lure him into their rites. Suspiria (1977) and Suspiria (2018) are nightmares about witches, and thus they are nightmares about powerful women. The more recent film uses Dr. Klemperer to show how utterly a man might be diminished by the consolidation of a nightmarish form of female power, diminished not just in the present but in the revelation of a lifetime of impotence.

Tilda Swinton as Doctor Klemperer

 

On the surface, Guadagnino’s Suspiria looks and sounds almost unrelated to Argento’s, and a viewer looking for a repeat of Argento’s masterful sensual assault will leave the new film disappointed. What I found in the 2018 version is a film invested in the earlier version’s DNA—nightmarish reflections on power—combined with characters and storylines well-worth following. In addition to not wanting a remake of Suspiria, Argento has expressed dissatisfaction with contemporary horror. I don’t know if he has seen Suspiria 2018 or gone on record about it, but I think if it were a film of a different name, he might like it. It takes the art of horror film seriously, and it gets impressive results. That’s Argento’s legacy, and Guadagnino’s film, for all its deviation from Argento’s templates, fits perfectly.

The Positive of Power-Through Thinking

At times I don’t know where I should begin,

Whether to make someone scream loud or grin,

But I have set my brain on the matter

And found that readers grow sick of splatter,

So I need some new approaches to win.

 

A problem with being a… distinct… messed up… take your pick… individual lies in finding people who are like-minded, and after forty years on the planet, I have reached the conclusion that not enough like-minded people exist to be found.

Yes, I have found like-minded people through artworks, signs of lives and experiences like my own. Throughout the years I have been able to cobble together enough media from the “popular” culture to sustain me, but I never gave enough thought to why everything I liked got labeled with terms such as “alternative,” “fringe,” and “cult.” Actually, I gave a ton of thought to such labeling, writing an undergraduate thesis about the marginalization of popular forms in comparison to “high” or sanctioned-by-the-rich culture and then writing a dissertation about horror fiction, the bastard stepchild of literature, a genre that virtually all the greats have dipped toes in but no one wants to own as part of the mainstream’s backbone. I taught college classes on the alternative, the fringe, and the cult, showing mainstream students what’s going on out in the weird edges of their universes, and people usually (not always) rolled with what I sent their way, as college is a time for experimentation, after all. But what never quite sunk in for me, through all my research, teaching, and publication about the weird stuff, is that the weird is weird primarily because of a numbers game: it’s outsider art because not enough people want it on the inside, and the weirder it is, the fewer people want to deal with it.

Maybe in a few centuries, people will look back on some of the weird stuff as great, but in the moment, most weird stuff isn’t the charming, middle-of-the-road stuff that the middle of the bell curve embraces. Normal people, which is the vast majority (by definition!), don’t want the abnormal stuff, and I have finally begun to understand that. To produce stuff people want, I have to stop assuming people want what I want. I’ve got to temper my wild weirdness with a heavy dose of the normal. All great artists know they must cave to conformity—or they do it instinctively, as the mainstream is in their bloodstream. I’m not saying I’m great, but I’d like to be better, and what might have been missing from my oddball art all these years might have been a heavy dose of crowd-pleasing. Instead of poo-pooing the crowd-pleasing tidiness and happiness that define mainstream narrative, maybe I should have been including more of it, as there just isn’t enough crowd out there that isn’t looking to get pleased.

I am not lamenting. In fact, although I have yet to see whether it’s going to go belly-up or go through the process of fetching an agent, publisher, and a mainstream audience, I not-too-long-ago finished my first novel with the philosophy of trying to please crowds who don’t all share my own particular mindset. The novel is called The Vengeance of Galatea Starcrusher, and though it has some horrific elements (from the first paragraph, my prettier protagonist identifies herself with Frankenstein’s Creature) it’s my first effort in many years that is pretty unequivocally not a horror novel. It’s science fiction, or more precisely science fantasy, and a lot of it is downright silly, going for absurd levity in places where before I might have sought a grotesque sucker-punch. I don’t think I’m as funny as Douglas Adams, but at times his ilk is the inspiration, and otherwise I’m riffing on space opera adventure from TV and movies circa Star Wars and beyond as my heroine kicks lots of butt on her way to hunting down and taking vengeance on her slimy, no-good creator. There are explosions. Lots of explosions. There’s chemistry with sidekicks. There’s a romantic subplot. Did I mention the explosions?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide’s soothing motto is key to its enduring popularity.

If people see in their heads anything like what I saw in mine, they’ll have a righteous adventure. They’ll have fun. They’ll SMILE all the way through one tidy happy scene after another. One or two scenes might make them gasp in horror, but they’ll come back to the adventure all the readier for the next tidy-up, which I do indeed provide. The writing experience was a blast; I hope the reading experience is, too. As I wrote, I imagined not what my ideal audience would want to read, but what general audiences might want to read. I didn’t always spit out exactly what I thought the normals would want. I’m still me, and the book is definitely a product of my warped imagination. But what produced it was an imaginary negotiation between me, sitting out on the edge of the bell curve, and other people I don’t know too well, sitting up high in the fat bell’s curvy center. If we can all get along, I’ll have a successful book of a sort very different from everything I’ve ever published.

That’s the hope, anyway. I can’t just flip a switch and become normal, nor would I want to, nor would readers be likely to respond well if I did. People don’t pick up novels to experience pure normality: they want to experience something, well, novel. The art of writing fiction is an act of balancing the outré with the familiar, titillating with the former and soothing with the latter, so that the people in the center of the bell curve feel like they’re glimpsing the outer edges, and the people further out feel like they’re being served, too. A good book needs extremes, but the extremes shouldn’t point all one way to suit most readers. An extreme of despair should have at least a glimmer of extreme hope. A younger me never would have admitted that, but my current thinking—thinking that powers through the aching desire to believe a critical mass of readers might just like to stew in darkness for 100,000 words—recognizes that people read to get away from the grinding conditions of lives that can often seem more than dark enough. Even dispositions that embrace the dark side need perks. Mine does. The artist’s job is to meet the needs people seek to have fulfilled through art, and heck if those needs don’t include a lift up more often than not. A long-time devotee of the arts of horror and dark fantasy finds that a tough pill, but then again, even most horror stories have marginally happy endings. I guess we know why that is. People’s need for those stories includes need for those endings.

Stephen King got most of his darkest stories out of his system when he was young: the bleakness of Carrie and Pet Sematary, hits certainly, hasn’t shown up as much since he got sober and became America’s perennial bestseller with a tendency to write about magic children saving the day. Writers in the grip of mental illness who described the world as the horror they saw—such as Poe and Lovecraft—did not come to good ends. The positive of powering through the realization that writing is a compromise not with the artist’s audience of choice but with The Mainstream is, quite simply, survival. King’s gift is that he can figure out what the mainstream is, what its tolerances are. I don’t know if I have that gift, but the challenge of trying seems worthwhile—for me as well as for any other author who wants to communicate a vision to minds outside the narrow band defined as being like her or his own.

June 8: Maudlin Self-Immolation and More!

Another Maudlin Account of Self-Immolation

 

When the dust settles and no one is left,

You’ve sunk your great height and slimmed down your heft,

You smell something burning and don’t ask who:

The smoke that is rising drifts up from you.

Water won’t reach you, no, not on its own;

It rejects anyone who lives alone,

So you can burn down until you are ash,

Crumpled leaves reduced to flakes in a flash,

Providing no comfort, giving no high,

Explaining nothing, not a reason why

You breathed in the first place, yes, you drew breath,

Wasting the air that just prolonged your death,

And now you’re speechless—you cannot defend

Why you would bother to stay for an end

Made by a chipping, a winnow-away

That melted substance until your last day

On which the birds sang and nobody cried

Because no one knew, as you never tried

To make connections, to form a network—

You chose isolation, like a big jerk,

And now lamenting sounds more like a joke

As grieving’s reserved for more worthy folk,

But in your passing there’s something received,

Something too beautiful to be believed—

Trees that died in forests and made no sounds

Understand feelings that go out of bounds

Such as the sense of a vast open field,

The lack of watching as you at last yield

To conflagration you’d have no one see

Take you and your past now and completely.

 

#

 

Every sentiment is a big fake,

And I don’t know how much more I can take

Of overflowing banks of affection—

I think somewhere I lost all direction—

I think that’s my car sunk deep in the lake.

 

I’m an ingrate, a hothead, and a snake.

Think of the idiocy that I rake

Up into piles of pure predilection,

Every sentiment.

 

I put good words into bile and I bake.

Nobody crosses the street for my sake,

But someone would attend my dissection

Only to see the ruin’s perfection,

Over which people serve coffee and cake.

Every sentiment—

 

#

 

Traitorous treasonous poisonous world,

You have your reasons for fucking the mass:

You drink champagne; yes, you do it with class.

Under bright lights with your white ribbons curled,

 

You can salute the new flag you’ve unfurled,

Join the rich ranks of righteous kissing ass,

Knowing the party is cool—it’s a gas,

Guessing the landings of lessers you’ve hurled

 

Down from the ladders they’d managed to climb—

They don’t need lifting; that’s not for their kind!

You’ve got enough knives for all the right backs:

They’re silver-coated to slide right through slime,

And they’ll carve a helping of what meat they find

Each time you mount your fired-friendly attacks.

 

#

 

When the world’s shapeless, I must do laundry.

When days transition, clean comes upon me.

It’s not like I’m scrubbing spots on the floor.

Tasks for deep cleaning—I’ve got a whole score,

But when I’m listless, I seek rinse fondly.

 

Clean socks and undies, refreshing to see:

Fresh shirts and pants show me who I can be.

I use detergent from the wholesale store

When the world’s shapeless.

 

If it’s time to fold, I may seek to flee:

I don’t iron, I say, sans irony.

But do relax, I’ve a couple loads more;

I won’t run out; I’m a laundering whore.

Out of the dryer, my life comes fluffy

When the world’s shapeless.

 

#

 

I throw words away, refuse for the heap.

I’ve nothing to say; shallow cries aren’t deep.

You might find value, a phrase you can keep,

But I must warn you, hoping is a leap.

 

I’m not trying tricks; I am not a thief.

If I write nothing, nothing’s my belief.

Through these nothing lines, I intend no grief,

But, perhaps, the truth, where nothing is chief.

 

Why put ugliness of the world in bows

When my sweet nothings capture how it goes?

Why say pretty things, purple passion throes,

When life’s progression has just lows, lows, lows?

 

I find no reason. I find none at all.

To rise beyond nothing, look for a fall.

 

#

 

In the discard pile we live with such style,

People look and wonder, and we just smile:

Yes, we remember life inside the deck,

Back before everything became a wreck,

But we admit it has been quite a while

 

To live unwanted, packed safely with guile,

To rest on the stack with the rank and file,

Forgotten because we are all mere dreck

In the discard pile.

 

Do we view played cards with venom, with bile,

With jealous hatred because we’re servile,

Bereft of color, begging for a fleck,

Forced to kneel silent and bent at the neck

With hope of change nowhere within a mile

In the discard pile?

 

#

 

I hear you. Maybe someday I’ll do that.

The sidewalks are broad enough for slinking,

So I could pad through, an asocial cat,

Walking the town as I do some thinking.

 

I could get out, and people could see me,

And I could see them. It could be normal.

I’d order a drink, maybe a coffee,

And strike up chatter, something informal.

 

I’d learn a name, and someone would learn mine,

And maybe I’d get an email address.

The whole conversation could turn out fine,

But by the end I would feel like a mess.

 

Names, people. I hear you. Maybe someday.

Maybe I won’t always get in my way.

 

#

 

 

May 24: Meaningful but Melodramatic, Exit Signs, Maybes, etc.

So much for meaningful dreams that I had.

They were just wishes wasted by a lad

Who believed too much, too little knowing

Dreams are bullshit made to keep you going

Until you wake up a true hard knocks grad.

 

You think it’s dramatic? Maybe a tad.

Perhaps these days being lost is a fad.

With speculation, old age is showing—

So much for meaningful.

 

It’s too bemusing, too trite to be sad,

Too catastrophic, imposed by the mad:

Symphonies played for nuked shadows glowing

Have nothing on grieved seeds I’ve been sowing,

Which grow to demonstrate everything’s bad.

So much for meaningful!

 

#

 

Our exit signs are popular in red,

Although people have trouble getting out.

Signage must service the sound solemn dead.

 

It’s a new market; wrap that ’round your head.

They need directions; many are about.

Our exit signs are popular in red,

 

But we can make them in bright green instead,

If such a color pleases them, no doubt.

Signage must service the sound solemn dead.

 

You should forget all the lies you’ve been fed

About zombies—horrid things make one shout—

Our exit signs are popular in red

 

Because we all know right where we’re headed.

All the sound go, live or not, in one rout.

Signage must service the sound solemn dead

 

Because we need them restored, for we dread

Rapturous moments, an Ending with clout:

Our exit signs are popular in red;

Signage must service the sound solemn dead.

 

#

 

Maybe and Maybe-Not lived in a tree.

They had a stunning mode of relation;

Living for them moved too decisively.

 

Better to linger introspectively

Until one hears a clearer vocation:

Maybe and Maybe-Not lived in a tree

 

That forked at the trunk, quite a sight to see,

Remarkable in symbolization—

Living for them moved too decisively,

 

And each side of the fork couldn’t decree

Whether the tree had stood since Creation.

Maybe and Maybe-Not lived in a tree

 

Haggling over possibility

And whether a thing could change its station:

Living for them moved too decisively,

 

Yet each of them inched toward certainty—

Out on the branches, a safe location?

Maybe and Maybe-Not lived in a tree.

Living for them moved too decisively.

 

#

 

When did the atmosphere get thinner here,

And when did things get hot, and when my crop

Of hope drooped dead, when did I run in fear,

Burning red, and when did the cage door drop?

 

How did the air get so heavy, how did

My store of juice go dry, how does a harp

By harping sound like heaven, which I hid,

Knowing how you like your razor blades sharp?

 

Why the acid ever oozed like autumn,

Why the cages slid, why the maximum

Joys hurt, why I always kiss the bottom:

Why is music inside the cranium.

 

Answer nothing like a groove unwinding.

Answers groove with nothings wound and blinding.

 

#

 

I’ve heard rumors about feelings of trust.

Asset with many—with loved ones, a must—

Foundation for buildings to stand the years—

Powerful enough to conquer all fears—

People about it have certainly fussed.

 

Maybe Nurse dropped me, a baby concussed

Who felt too anxious about being trussed

And baked and eaten alongside some beers—

I’ve heard some rumors.

 

The thing with trust is that it’s boom or bust,

Which means you can’t trust trust, or you’ll be cussed.

Think of all too many wasted careers

Spent thinking rich folk will pay for arears

And you’ll know why trust arouses disgust.

I’ve heard some rumors.

 

#

 

You know, when you want to stand up and cheer

For the ones you didn’t think would make it,

For the ones you didn’t think could take it,

You know, when you want your hands up, here, here!

 

You know, when you want to cover your face

From the ones you said would never matter,

From the ones who watched you getting fatter,

You know, when you wallowed in your disgrace!

 

You know, you’re a fake and you’ve been exposed

By the ones you thought couldn’t ever tell,

By the ones you thought you could always sell,

You know, the lies and hate you always imposed!

 

We know what it means when you stand and cheer:

It’s the start of your well-earned life of fear!

 

#

 

I’ve had about enough of my dark turns,

Twisting revelations, even slow burns—

There’s a little devil inside who yearns

For happy endings, where everyone learns.

 

Boy meets girl, or boy, and that’s okay, too,

They get advice from some bat in a shoe,

Go to a party, big showdown to-do,

Knots get tied, all is well, and then they screw.

 

The pattern works well for all kinds of views,

And it’s far better than watching the news.

So go on, write it! There’s nothing to lose.

Dignity’s fictions are bombs to diffuse.

 

Nothing’s more common than bitter writing.

Give it big tits to make it inviting.

 

#

 

I write like no one’s reading. Liberate!

Maybe a stranger will stumble, connect.

Why would I intend to communicate

Except with this stranger on intersect?

 

This is my private exhibit for you.

It’s not for my friends or my family.

I want to make sure you think this thing through.

I want to provide you a part of me.

 

If you accept you’ll own me forever.

I’ll own a condo inside of your brain.

We will travel the whole world together.

You’ll drive me home, or I’ll drive you insane.

 

Welcome, my friend, to freedom I’m giving.

Me in your head is a way of living.

 

 

May 10: Ten Syllables, Strange Change, Stupidity Maintenance, and so on

The ten-syllable rhymed line’s seduction

Sometimes impairs my base will to function,

As I have lost myself inside the sound,

And I doubt my feet will now touch the ground,

At least not at this stanzaic junction.

 

What of real life’s strong-held malediction

For anyone who defies prediction

That words work better in strong prose’s mound—

The ten-syllable…?

 

I understand the modern reaction,

But I will issue no choked retraction

To satisfy assholes too tightly wound

To take word music wherever it’s found—

Yes, I say “fuck them” with satisfaction!

The ten-syllable!

 

 

 

Don’t get used to it. The best stuff changes.

What takes years’ planning, fate rearranges.

Enjoy a good moment—two if you dare:

Never forget that the world doesn’t care

For you or your goals. Its best estranges.

 

All throughout life, we will take our plunges

And get back up, scraping off the grunges

And other proof showing that we were there.

Don’t get used to it,

 

For upon our absence a plan hinges,

And we won’t be counted among the whinges.

We’ll carry on with will strong like a bear

And wield sharp weapons inside each nightmare

That on the daytime darkly impinges.

Don’t get used to it.

 

 

 

Famously facile, aptly maladroit,

We know somebody somewhere is stupid,

Send a drone to make sure, to reconnoit,

Find where everyone thrown for a loop hid.

 

Send out a message, two or three meanings,

Make quite sure none of them stands out too much—

With such a message people take beanings,

Hitting their heads for clear answers and such.

 

Stupendously super, hoorahed and hip,

They know they have little foibles to hide,

For each time their ratings go for a dip

They take extra shots of formaldehyde.

 

Yes, they know everything. Isn’t it grand?

Everything’s knowable now. Understand?

 

 

 

I want to tell all the secrets I know.

I want the secrets to be worth a show.

I want the hushed show to have millions go.

I want the millions to make secrets grow.

 

Secrets transform when they get left open.

Softer memory ends crestfallen,

And forces pull you under the ocean

And speak hard truths unmeant to be spoken.

 

With bigger secrets, more people hear you;

With bigger secrets, you’re a big to-do.

With bigger secrets, amazing shit flew;

With bigger secrets, your you-know-what grew!

 

I want to tell all the secrets I know.

They get you, you see, with the undertow.

 

 

 

Fair-minded people need to get it right:

They lost the battle, time to suck it tight.

Time to accept fairness has gone away;

Too bad if you choose to get sick today;

Time to accept they have turned out the light.

 

Do I exaggerate our current plight

When I say we’re screwed by whackos’ crazed might?

The screw drills deeper each day that they stay,

Fair-minded people.

 

We must evict the heartless parasite

Who knows nothing about how people fight

To breathe, to work, even to have a say,

Even to be sorts who care anyway,

Because of so much taken by the blight—

Fair-minded people.

 

 

 

I want to form an association:

Folks afflicted with dissociation

Can join with minimal hesitation

For it requires no congregation.

 

Indeed, we have enough of discussion

On our own, with our own repercussion

Sufficient for inner-head percussion

Worthy of a world-blurring concussion.

 

So what’s the point of associating

When we might not wish to be deviating

From our patterns geared to obviating

Unwanted turns, which are irritating?

 

Perhaps in the ether we’d discover

New exciting ways to help each other.

 

 

 

I’m a volatile personality.

I’m still working on what this means to me.

Up and down and through the fickle middle;

I’ve been on this ride since I was little.

It’s frustrating, and I know you agree.

 

What about the extra chances to see

Life in its grand, extreme variety?

My oh my, ain’t that one a big shit hill!

I’m a volatile personality.

 

I seem to have a greater destiny

Making up rhymes of fameless infamy

About the fuckers with whom I’d fiddle

Because my words more than their dicks diddle.

Doing that, do I cross a boundary?

I’m a volatile personality.