Mark Thomas's Blog
August 22, 2025
SOMBRERO FALLOUT, by Richard Brautigan, 1977
“Plot” is never a primary focus in a Brautigan work, but here’s an overview of events in SOMBRERO FALLOUT, anyway (It’s sort of fun to talk about the book as if it were a conventional piece of fiction): A sombrero falls from the sky and lands in the middle of a small-town American street. That incident is supposed to be the beginning of a whimsical short story, but the main character, a writer known as “the American humorist,” doesn’t like it and throws the papers into a garbage pail. The story, however, continues to write itself while in the trash can. In that extended, self-written story, two people compete for the honor of picking up the sombrero to present it to the town’s mayor. That trivial bit of tension inexplicably escalates into a riot where hundreds of townspeople maim and kill each other. The survivors of that initial conflict then band together to fight government forces sent in to restore order.
That’s one plotline. The sombrero-induced carnage is interspersed with chapters describing the American humorist’s incapacitating grief when he is dumped by his Japanese girlfriend. (The woman’s ethnicity is a big part of his obsessive attachment, and that seems a little cringy to a modern reader.)
In a way, the cartoonish violence of the sombrero storyline satirizes the American humorist’s near-paralytic reaction to the breakup. He can barely function now that his girlfriend is gone, and he stares at one of her cast-off hairs for several chapters. Conversely, the trivial appearance of a sombrero inspires townspeople to hold off an assault by the US army. At the very least, it’s an odd yoking of psychotic flattened affect and hyperactive over-reaction. But frankly, a Sparks Notes rationale for the juxtaposition of the two storylines probably doesn’t exist.
The American humorist thinks his lifelong love of tuna fish sandwiches has exposed him to toxic levels of Mercury and worries that his writing will be affected. So maybe the wildly divergent stories are intended to be evidence of that brain damage.
More likely, the disparate narratives are simply a technique pulled from the absurdist writer’s toolkit. In Brautigan’s case, it’s a natural extension of his small-scale tendency to pair wildly dissimilar objects. (Think of his little poem “Loading Mercury with a pitchfork” or the scene in TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA where a hardware store sells sections of trout stream, racked up like vinyl siding.)
The presence of the title sombrero is never explained. But by the end of the book, thousands of people have walked past the hat without seeing it, so it is offered up as a trite symbol of collective myopia: “there’s more to life than meets the eye.” That’s a simple-minded platitude, though, from someone who revels in the bizarre, someone who wrote books like THE ABORTION and REVENGE OF THE LAWN.
Brautigan’s books are all concerned with the process of writing, and I think the appearance of the “sombrero” is part of that over-arching theme because it functions like a classroom writing prompt. I suspect that Brautigan, the celebrated burnt-out hippie author, dropped a hat amongst a collection of characters then retreated, Godlike, to see what would unfold. When the incident couldn’t carry a book-length story all by itself, it was jammed into the broken-relationship narrative.
Kurt Vonnegut once admitted to repurposing his weaker ideas by attributing them to Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer who makes frequent guest appearances in the novels. Maybe Brautigan is practicing a similar type of economy. He can’t bear to (really) toss the quirky sombrero idea into the trash, so he allows it to live after being discarded.
Anyway, I’m sure Brautigan fans are familiar with the iconic picture of him on the cover of TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, where he wears a domed, broad brimmed hat. The hat in that famous photo is NOT a sombrero, but it’s a first-cousin piece of western-wear, similar enough to make me think Brautigan is playing with the idea of an author’s relationship to the books he writes. We don’t know much about the title sombrero, but it “was not made in Mexico” and it belonged to an unnamed someone who “was very far away.” The hat is untouched by the whirling human chaos around it, much like the emotionally distant Brautigan. The sombrero is size 7¼ and if that matched Brautigan’s actual hat size, I’d confidently say he wrote himself into this book as an empty hat.
Of course, Brautigan tries to distance himself from the doppelganger philandering-hippie-writer characters that populate his novels. Yukiko, the American humorist’s girlfriend, says: “interesting . . . One would never imagine this by reading his books . . . he was going to be quite different from his books.”
But I don’t buy that separation, I think it’s a defensive posture intended to insulate Brautigan from fans who think they have him completely figured out.
SOMBRERO FALLOUT is partly a social critique, in that Americans (inexplicably) worship senseless slaughter. In the “sombrero” storyline, the town’s inhabitants go berserk, riot, then band together to fight the state police and national guard. Federal troops finally re-take the town but there are 6,000 deaths including 162 children. So, what was the “Fallout” (or consequence) mentioned in the title? “The town was declared a national monument and became quite a tourist attraction with the huge cemetery there being featured on millions of postcards.” That sounds like a dig at Arlington and the hyperbolic reverence paid to America’s civil war. In Brautigan’s book, the mayor’s bullet riddled body lies in a barber chair and receives a tongue-in-cheek eulogy celebrating his pointless, quintessentially American, death: “He had done his best. It wasn’t enough. But still he was a brave man. He had fought his hardest. What else can you say? He was an American.”
There’s nothing glamorous about the violence; the town librarian gets both her ears shot off, then her corpse is trampled into hamburger. The survivors are traumatized and mystified by their own atrocities. “All they knew was that once they started, they couldn’t stop.” The behavior is obviously being critiqued, but it’s hard to take seriously, coming from Brautigan. According to his daughter, Arianthe Brautigan, in her memoire YOU CAN’T CATCH DEATH, Richard frequently got drunk and shot guns inside his own Montana ranch house; he considered lashing out with gunfire a valid emotional reaction. Considering his own behavior, it’s not surprising he has a degree of sympathy for the townspeople’s frenzy.
Of course, the most remarkable quality of any Brautigan book is its casual poetry. Sometimes, the effect is purely comic, a Chandleresque exaggeration: “Her smile was so subtle that it would have made the Mona Lisa seem like a clown performing a pratfall.” More often, Brautigan’s prose is a sophisticated collection of images, and surprising word usage. Here’s an entire chapter called “Suburb” that could easily appear in a San Francisco poetry chapbook:
Yukiko rolled over.
That plain, that simple.
Her body was small in its moving.
And her hair followed, dreaming her as she moved.
A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving, and watched her turn slowly over in bed. When she stopped moving, the cat went back to sleep.
It was a black cat and could have been a suburb of her hair.
Here, Yukiko’s hair is at least partly responsible for her existence, “dreaming her” while she moves. It makes me think that the act of creation is cooperative, Yukiko is a bit of raw material that is turned into a finished product by an independently living head of hair. A few lines later, another living creature—the cat—is described as an extension of that hair. In other chapters, the cat assumes primary importance and its purring is essential for Yukiko to remember her father.
This is typical of the strange power inversions in Brautigan’s books where trivial things often assume great importance. In that context, it makes sense that a sombrero could start a civil war, and a can of tuna could incapacitate the American humorist. And it partly explains why Brautigan is considered an anti-establishment icon: he always notices and champions the insignificant.
But it’s the surprising turn of phrase, rather than any underlying philosophy, that has turned me into an enthusiastic Brautigan fan. “A suburb of her hair.” Beautiful.
That’s one plotline. The sombrero-induced carnage is interspersed with chapters describing the American humorist’s incapacitating grief when he is dumped by his Japanese girlfriend. (The woman’s ethnicity is a big part of his obsessive attachment, and that seems a little cringy to a modern reader.)
In a way, the cartoonish violence of the sombrero storyline satirizes the American humorist’s near-paralytic reaction to the breakup. He can barely function now that his girlfriend is gone, and he stares at one of her cast-off hairs for several chapters. Conversely, the trivial appearance of a sombrero inspires townspeople to hold off an assault by the US army. At the very least, it’s an odd yoking of psychotic flattened affect and hyperactive over-reaction. But frankly, a Sparks Notes rationale for the juxtaposition of the two storylines probably doesn’t exist.
The American humorist thinks his lifelong love of tuna fish sandwiches has exposed him to toxic levels of Mercury and worries that his writing will be affected. So maybe the wildly divergent stories are intended to be evidence of that brain damage.
More likely, the disparate narratives are simply a technique pulled from the absurdist writer’s toolkit. In Brautigan’s case, it’s a natural extension of his small-scale tendency to pair wildly dissimilar objects. (Think of his little poem “Loading Mercury with a pitchfork” or the scene in TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA where a hardware store sells sections of trout stream, racked up like vinyl siding.)
The presence of the title sombrero is never explained. But by the end of the book, thousands of people have walked past the hat without seeing it, so it is offered up as a trite symbol of collective myopia: “there’s more to life than meets the eye.” That’s a simple-minded platitude, though, from someone who revels in the bizarre, someone who wrote books like THE ABORTION and REVENGE OF THE LAWN.
Brautigan’s books are all concerned with the process of writing, and I think the appearance of the “sombrero” is part of that over-arching theme because it functions like a classroom writing prompt. I suspect that Brautigan, the celebrated burnt-out hippie author, dropped a hat amongst a collection of characters then retreated, Godlike, to see what would unfold. When the incident couldn’t carry a book-length story all by itself, it was jammed into the broken-relationship narrative.
Kurt Vonnegut once admitted to repurposing his weaker ideas by attributing them to Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer who makes frequent guest appearances in the novels. Maybe Brautigan is practicing a similar type of economy. He can’t bear to (really) toss the quirky sombrero idea into the trash, so he allows it to live after being discarded.
Anyway, I’m sure Brautigan fans are familiar with the iconic picture of him on the cover of TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, where he wears a domed, broad brimmed hat. The hat in that famous photo is NOT a sombrero, but it’s a first-cousin piece of western-wear, similar enough to make me think Brautigan is playing with the idea of an author’s relationship to the books he writes. We don’t know much about the title sombrero, but it “was not made in Mexico” and it belonged to an unnamed someone who “was very far away.” The hat is untouched by the whirling human chaos around it, much like the emotionally distant Brautigan. The sombrero is size 7¼ and if that matched Brautigan’s actual hat size, I’d confidently say he wrote himself into this book as an empty hat.
Of course, Brautigan tries to distance himself from the doppelganger philandering-hippie-writer characters that populate his novels. Yukiko, the American humorist’s girlfriend, says: “interesting . . . One would never imagine this by reading his books . . . he was going to be quite different from his books.”
But I don’t buy that separation, I think it’s a defensive posture intended to insulate Brautigan from fans who think they have him completely figured out.
SOMBRERO FALLOUT is partly a social critique, in that Americans (inexplicably) worship senseless slaughter. In the “sombrero” storyline, the town’s inhabitants go berserk, riot, then band together to fight the state police and national guard. Federal troops finally re-take the town but there are 6,000 deaths including 162 children. So, what was the “Fallout” (or consequence) mentioned in the title? “The town was declared a national monument and became quite a tourist attraction with the huge cemetery there being featured on millions of postcards.” That sounds like a dig at Arlington and the hyperbolic reverence paid to America’s civil war. In Brautigan’s book, the mayor’s bullet riddled body lies in a barber chair and receives a tongue-in-cheek eulogy celebrating his pointless, quintessentially American, death: “He had done his best. It wasn’t enough. But still he was a brave man. He had fought his hardest. What else can you say? He was an American.”
There’s nothing glamorous about the violence; the town librarian gets both her ears shot off, then her corpse is trampled into hamburger. The survivors are traumatized and mystified by their own atrocities. “All they knew was that once they started, they couldn’t stop.” The behavior is obviously being critiqued, but it’s hard to take seriously, coming from Brautigan. According to his daughter, Arianthe Brautigan, in her memoire YOU CAN’T CATCH DEATH, Richard frequently got drunk and shot guns inside his own Montana ranch house; he considered lashing out with gunfire a valid emotional reaction. Considering his own behavior, it’s not surprising he has a degree of sympathy for the townspeople’s frenzy.
Of course, the most remarkable quality of any Brautigan book is its casual poetry. Sometimes, the effect is purely comic, a Chandleresque exaggeration: “Her smile was so subtle that it would have made the Mona Lisa seem like a clown performing a pratfall.” More often, Brautigan’s prose is a sophisticated collection of images, and surprising word usage. Here’s an entire chapter called “Suburb” that could easily appear in a San Francisco poetry chapbook:
Yukiko rolled over.
That plain, that simple.
Her body was small in its moving.
And her hair followed, dreaming her as she moved.
A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving, and watched her turn slowly over in bed. When she stopped moving, the cat went back to sleep.
It was a black cat and could have been a suburb of her hair.
Here, Yukiko’s hair is at least partly responsible for her existence, “dreaming her” while she moves. It makes me think that the act of creation is cooperative, Yukiko is a bit of raw material that is turned into a finished product by an independently living head of hair. A few lines later, another living creature—the cat—is described as an extension of that hair. In other chapters, the cat assumes primary importance and its purring is essential for Yukiko to remember her father.
This is typical of the strange power inversions in Brautigan’s books where trivial things often assume great importance. In that context, it makes sense that a sombrero could start a civil war, and a can of tuna could incapacitate the American humorist. And it partly explains why Brautigan is considered an anti-establishment icon: he always notices and champions the insignificant.
But it’s the surprising turn of phrase, rather than any underlying philosophy, that has turned me into an enthusiastic Brautigan fan. “A suburb of her hair.” Beautiful.
August 7, 2025
WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN, a “cat in the stacks” cozy mystery by Miranda James, 2021
I really enjoy traditional “cozy” mysteries, like the Nancy Drew and Miss Marple stories, but I have mixed feelings about modern versions, such as the ones offered up by Miranda James.
On the positive side, it’s nice to take a break from visceral realism and spend a little time with characters who are fundamentally decent. I tend to read books in pairs and WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN closely followed Edward Adler’s NOTES FROM A DARK STREET, where rats eat a baby’s face and kids pour gasoline on dead cats and burn them for entertainment.
Cozy mysteries are a psychological corrective when the world (or more serious literature) tempts you to hang yourself in the shower. But at their best, cozy mysteries are more than just a sugar pill, they present a worldview where eccentricity is valuable, and happiness can be found in any bedroom or backyard. There’s a bit of Roman stoicism in the underlying philosophy that I admire. The “cat in the stacks” series also resonates with me because I believe, like most pet owners, that animals have a type of emotional ESP and their interaction with humans is fascinating, in and of itself.
The problem with newer cozies is the superficial modernization of the genre.
Miranda James has an obvious affection for Nancy Drew and Miss Marple because she mentions them numerous times in WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN. In fact, she seems determined to give her beloved forbears a sensitivity update by conspicuously including black and gay characters. In a way, that’s a positive development, but it’s also at the heart of my misgivings because the new mysteries are still underpinned by the same old value systems. The changes are just new paper on old parlor walls and, after a while, constantly mentioning the redecoration sounds insufferably smug.
I don’t want to criticize a cat for not being a dog, but modern cozies are full of self-contradictions that deserve to be called out.
In the “cat in the stacks” series, Charlie Harris is a fiftyish widowed archivist who returns to his childhood town, Athena Mississippi, to work in the college library. He inherits a house (he doesn't need) from his aunt Dottie, and also takes on Dottie’s cook and housekeeper, Azalea. Dottie left Azalea a bequest, so the woman really doesn’t have to work any more, but she’s “not the retiring type.” Charlie isn’t entirely comfortable being waited on hand and foot, but he lets Azalea continue to serve him out of consideration for HER. He would like Azalea to sit at the table with him for meals, but she’s a traditionalist and won’t hear of it.
Holy Crap, Charlie inherits a human being and lives a plantation lifestyle, all the while congratulating himself on his liberalism.
That’s what I mean about the smugness of cozy modernization. There is no appreciation or understanding of systemic unfairness; the current system works great because most people are kind to the help—any evil in society comes from a few bad individuals, like the villains in a Scooby Doo cartoon.
In this instalment of the series, Charlie inherits another house he doesn’t need from his grandfather. He’s inspecting this windfall when his giant Maine Coon cat, Diesel, discovers a skeleton in an attic wardrobe. The skeleton is incomplete, missing hands and feet, and it’s assumed someone mutilated the body to prevent easy identification.
Interesting, Charlie’s civil war era ancestors have a literal skeleton in their closet.
For an instant, the book threatens to turn into a Henry Louis Gates Jr. exposé where Charlie’s ancestors are slave-owners, and he is forced into some painful self-examination. But no. A little investigation reveals that the Harris family forebears only had fair-wage employees, not slaves, so there’s no reason for Charlie to feel guilty about his multiple inheritances while Azalea heaps chicken and butterbeans on his plate.
“Cozy” mysteries, even the modern updated versions like WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN, are protracted celebrations of the status quo, where old-fashioned values are constantly reinforced. When Charlie phones his son Sean to chat about the mystery skeleton, Sean cuts the phone call short, because his wife is in the background hinting that it’s time for him to “help” with the dishes.
That’s cozy liberalism. Housework is clearly the woman’s responsibility, but a sensitive man will make the archaic situation tolerable by occasionally lending a hand. It’s like Mother Theresa bathing a leper instead of administering antibiotics to cure the disease.
Cozies always end with a public unraveling of the mystery. In WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN, it happens at a family dinner which also manages to reinforce Charlie’s plantation-owner status. “When the time came to clear the table for dessert, I was not allowed to help. I had been told I was the patriarch, and my help was not required.” Good old Charlie, always thinking others while he sits on his ass and lets people fuss over him. He’s the humble center of attention as he explains what happened.
The skeleton in the attic wardrobe was a woman named Maudie Magee. She was the girlfriend of Allan Harris, an unknown uncle. Allan and Maudie had a child out of wedlock, and that child eventually reappears in the novel as Martin Hale, who extorts a life lease on the Harris family farm by threatening to expose his bastardy. Maudie visits her illegitimate son on the farm, years later, and dies a natural death. Martin Hale buries her in the woods because he suddenly doesn’t want anyone to know he is a bastard.
Maudie’s body isn’t mutilated to prevent identification, she lost her hands and feet in an accident, but the mishap is never explained. What kind of rural accident could mangle a person to that extent but not actually kill her? It’s grossly unfair for James to gloss over details like that. The skeleton winds up in the attic wardrobe because Martin Hale’s ne’er-do-well grandson dug it up and moved it there as a prank. That’s right, a prank. Apparently, it’s the sort of crazy thing young Marty was likely to do, so there’s no point in nitpicking about the unlikelihood of his discovering the body in the first place, or the prank’s incomprehensible endgame.
Obviously, that scenario is just a bit of outlandish reverse engineering, a way to provide a skull for Diesel-the-cat to bat around in the novel’s opening pages.
Charlie’s debrief ends with a description of a secret cellar where a moonshine still was hidden, and his girlfriend Helen Louise comments “shades of Nancy Drew.”
In a way it’s a trivial comment, an innocent homage to literary forerunners. But I think modern cozies like WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN go wrong because they don’t truly appreciate the power of the books they mimic.
The Nancy Drew stories are genuine in their naivete and therefore possess a strange tension that is tough to duplicate. Carson Drew is Nancy’s emotionally detached lawyer father. Hannah Gruen is the uber-faithful housekeeper and surrogate mother. Ned Nickerson is the passionless boyfriend, always eager to separate from Nancy and investigate parallel leads. Nancy’s best friend George is a “tom boy,” 1950s code for sublimated lesbian. Everyone gently teases the fat friend Bess, who isn’t really fat at all based on the illustrations. The Nancy Drew world is a brittle construct, wallpaper thin, and if you pushed your fingers through it, you’d wind up in a Phil Dick sci fi novel.
Modern Cozy mysteries can’t reproduce that bizarre magic, because it’s the product of an enlightened reader interacting with an old text. New books assume that the charm is purely intrinsic, and the storylines just need a few modern social references to be fully transferable to a new generation.
That strategy often ends up looking ridiculous.
When young Martin Hale shows up in Athena, Sean assumes he is an addict because he appears twitchy. Other characters instantly worry because it’s a well-known fact that addicts will do anything when they need a “fix.” It’s the kind of superficial thinking satirized in a Seinfeld episode, when everyone thinks Jerry’s financial advisor is a cokehead because he sniffs a lot (he’s allergic to Kramer’s sweater). In fact, young Martin Hale isn’t an addict, and there isn’t any real reason for Sean to make that assumption. It's just a clumsy way to point out that addicts exist in the modern cozy world, something Nancy Drew can’t acknowledge.
I guess you could argue that any expanded social awareness, no matter how sanctimonious, is an improvement. But WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN has other relative deficiencies, compared to old cozies. James’ novel has a weak plot structure, almost completely based on frustrated gossip. Typically, there will be an incident, and then Charlie will retell that incident to every character in the story within a few pages. He discovers the skeleton in the closet. Good. But he has to tell his son Sean about it, his daughter Laura, his boarder Stewart, his supervisor Melba, etcetera, etcetera. Charlie doesn’t have anything substantive to relate because a forensic anthropologist won’t be able to examine the bones for a few days. So, Charlie is essentially repeating the fact that he doesn’t know anything, over and over and over. When the forensic examination finally happens, Charlie trots out the results in another series of conversations. The technique reminds me of reality TV shows where you might see a fight during dinner, then a character gives an immediate recap of what everyone just witnessed: “I can’t believe Miranda just slapped Charles!”
Nancy Drew bops from place to place in her blue convertible following a rather obvious trail of breadcrumbs, but at least it’s physical activity, and she doesn’t phone Ned, George and Bess to constantly caption what is happening.
Hey, some people appreciate a “cozy” world where social interaction isn’t hard work. If a giant Maine Coon cat rubs its head against a person’s calves, they can be trusted; if the cat keeps its distance, the person is not quite right and shouldn’t be invited in for sweet tea. First impressions are always right, and you never have to revise your opinions, regret your actions, or critique privilege.
That’s fine, but modern cozies stumble when they overreach and try to be all things: not just comfortable but self-aware, worldly and modern. A few liberal platitudes can’t undermine an upper-middle-class value system. That’s solid, like an extra helping of cornbread served by a black cook.
On the positive side, it’s nice to take a break from visceral realism and spend a little time with characters who are fundamentally decent. I tend to read books in pairs and WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN closely followed Edward Adler’s NOTES FROM A DARK STREET, where rats eat a baby’s face and kids pour gasoline on dead cats and burn them for entertainment.
Cozy mysteries are a psychological corrective when the world (or more serious literature) tempts you to hang yourself in the shower. But at their best, cozy mysteries are more than just a sugar pill, they present a worldview where eccentricity is valuable, and happiness can be found in any bedroom or backyard. There’s a bit of Roman stoicism in the underlying philosophy that I admire. The “cat in the stacks” series also resonates with me because I believe, like most pet owners, that animals have a type of emotional ESP and their interaction with humans is fascinating, in and of itself.
The problem with newer cozies is the superficial modernization of the genre.
Miranda James has an obvious affection for Nancy Drew and Miss Marple because she mentions them numerous times in WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN. In fact, she seems determined to give her beloved forbears a sensitivity update by conspicuously including black and gay characters. In a way, that’s a positive development, but it’s also at the heart of my misgivings because the new mysteries are still underpinned by the same old value systems. The changes are just new paper on old parlor walls and, after a while, constantly mentioning the redecoration sounds insufferably smug.
I don’t want to criticize a cat for not being a dog, but modern cozies are full of self-contradictions that deserve to be called out.
In the “cat in the stacks” series, Charlie Harris is a fiftyish widowed archivist who returns to his childhood town, Athena Mississippi, to work in the college library. He inherits a house (he doesn't need) from his aunt Dottie, and also takes on Dottie’s cook and housekeeper, Azalea. Dottie left Azalea a bequest, so the woman really doesn’t have to work any more, but she’s “not the retiring type.” Charlie isn’t entirely comfortable being waited on hand and foot, but he lets Azalea continue to serve him out of consideration for HER. He would like Azalea to sit at the table with him for meals, but she’s a traditionalist and won’t hear of it.
Holy Crap, Charlie inherits a human being and lives a plantation lifestyle, all the while congratulating himself on his liberalism.
That’s what I mean about the smugness of cozy modernization. There is no appreciation or understanding of systemic unfairness; the current system works great because most people are kind to the help—any evil in society comes from a few bad individuals, like the villains in a Scooby Doo cartoon.
In this instalment of the series, Charlie inherits another house he doesn’t need from his grandfather. He’s inspecting this windfall when his giant Maine Coon cat, Diesel, discovers a skeleton in an attic wardrobe. The skeleton is incomplete, missing hands and feet, and it’s assumed someone mutilated the body to prevent easy identification.
Interesting, Charlie’s civil war era ancestors have a literal skeleton in their closet.
For an instant, the book threatens to turn into a Henry Louis Gates Jr. exposé where Charlie’s ancestors are slave-owners, and he is forced into some painful self-examination. But no. A little investigation reveals that the Harris family forebears only had fair-wage employees, not slaves, so there’s no reason for Charlie to feel guilty about his multiple inheritances while Azalea heaps chicken and butterbeans on his plate.
“Cozy” mysteries, even the modern updated versions like WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN, are protracted celebrations of the status quo, where old-fashioned values are constantly reinforced. When Charlie phones his son Sean to chat about the mystery skeleton, Sean cuts the phone call short, because his wife is in the background hinting that it’s time for him to “help” with the dishes.
That’s cozy liberalism. Housework is clearly the woman’s responsibility, but a sensitive man will make the archaic situation tolerable by occasionally lending a hand. It’s like Mother Theresa bathing a leper instead of administering antibiotics to cure the disease.
Cozies always end with a public unraveling of the mystery. In WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN, it happens at a family dinner which also manages to reinforce Charlie’s plantation-owner status. “When the time came to clear the table for dessert, I was not allowed to help. I had been told I was the patriarch, and my help was not required.” Good old Charlie, always thinking others while he sits on his ass and lets people fuss over him. He’s the humble center of attention as he explains what happened.
The skeleton in the attic wardrobe was a woman named Maudie Magee. She was the girlfriend of Allan Harris, an unknown uncle. Allan and Maudie had a child out of wedlock, and that child eventually reappears in the novel as Martin Hale, who extorts a life lease on the Harris family farm by threatening to expose his bastardy. Maudie visits her illegitimate son on the farm, years later, and dies a natural death. Martin Hale buries her in the woods because he suddenly doesn’t want anyone to know he is a bastard.
Maudie’s body isn’t mutilated to prevent identification, she lost her hands and feet in an accident, but the mishap is never explained. What kind of rural accident could mangle a person to that extent but not actually kill her? It’s grossly unfair for James to gloss over details like that. The skeleton winds up in the attic wardrobe because Martin Hale’s ne’er-do-well grandson dug it up and moved it there as a prank. That’s right, a prank. Apparently, it’s the sort of crazy thing young Marty was likely to do, so there’s no point in nitpicking about the unlikelihood of his discovering the body in the first place, or the prank’s incomprehensible endgame.
Obviously, that scenario is just a bit of outlandish reverse engineering, a way to provide a skull for Diesel-the-cat to bat around in the novel’s opening pages.
Charlie’s debrief ends with a description of a secret cellar where a moonshine still was hidden, and his girlfriend Helen Louise comments “shades of Nancy Drew.”
In a way it’s a trivial comment, an innocent homage to literary forerunners. But I think modern cozies like WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN go wrong because they don’t truly appreciate the power of the books they mimic.
The Nancy Drew stories are genuine in their naivete and therefore possess a strange tension that is tough to duplicate. Carson Drew is Nancy’s emotionally detached lawyer father. Hannah Gruen is the uber-faithful housekeeper and surrogate mother. Ned Nickerson is the passionless boyfriend, always eager to separate from Nancy and investigate parallel leads. Nancy’s best friend George is a “tom boy,” 1950s code for sublimated lesbian. Everyone gently teases the fat friend Bess, who isn’t really fat at all based on the illustrations. The Nancy Drew world is a brittle construct, wallpaper thin, and if you pushed your fingers through it, you’d wind up in a Phil Dick sci fi novel.
Modern Cozy mysteries can’t reproduce that bizarre magic, because it’s the product of an enlightened reader interacting with an old text. New books assume that the charm is purely intrinsic, and the storylines just need a few modern social references to be fully transferable to a new generation.
That strategy often ends up looking ridiculous.
When young Martin Hale shows up in Athena, Sean assumes he is an addict because he appears twitchy. Other characters instantly worry because it’s a well-known fact that addicts will do anything when they need a “fix.” It’s the kind of superficial thinking satirized in a Seinfeld episode, when everyone thinks Jerry’s financial advisor is a cokehead because he sniffs a lot (he’s allergic to Kramer’s sweater). In fact, young Martin Hale isn’t an addict, and there isn’t any real reason for Sean to make that assumption. It's just a clumsy way to point out that addicts exist in the modern cozy world, something Nancy Drew can’t acknowledge.
I guess you could argue that any expanded social awareness, no matter how sanctimonious, is an improvement. But WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN has other relative deficiencies, compared to old cozies. James’ novel has a weak plot structure, almost completely based on frustrated gossip. Typically, there will be an incident, and then Charlie will retell that incident to every character in the story within a few pages. He discovers the skeleton in the closet. Good. But he has to tell his son Sean about it, his daughter Laura, his boarder Stewart, his supervisor Melba, etcetera, etcetera. Charlie doesn’t have anything substantive to relate because a forensic anthropologist won’t be able to examine the bones for a few days. So, Charlie is essentially repeating the fact that he doesn’t know anything, over and over and over. When the forensic examination finally happens, Charlie trots out the results in another series of conversations. The technique reminds me of reality TV shows where you might see a fight during dinner, then a character gives an immediate recap of what everyone just witnessed: “I can’t believe Miranda just slapped Charles!”
Nancy Drew bops from place to place in her blue convertible following a rather obvious trail of breadcrumbs, but at least it’s physical activity, and she doesn’t phone Ned, George and Bess to constantly caption what is happening.
Hey, some people appreciate a “cozy” world where social interaction isn’t hard work. If a giant Maine Coon cat rubs its head against a person’s calves, they can be trusted; if the cat keeps its distance, the person is not quite right and shouldn’t be invited in for sweet tea. First impressions are always right, and you never have to revise your opinions, regret your actions, or critique privilege.
That’s fine, but modern cozies stumble when they overreach and try to be all things: not just comfortable but self-aware, worldly and modern. A few liberal platitudes can’t undermine an upper-middle-class value system. That’s solid, like an extra helping of cornbread served by a black cook.
June 28, 2025
God's Monsters, by Esther Hamori, 2023
GOD’S MONSTERS was an on-line recommendation by Dan McClellan, a religious academic and podcaster. Esther Hamori is a professor of Hebrew Bible and teaches a class on “Monster Heaven” at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Both McClellan and Hamori are advocates of textual accuracy over dogma and encourage people to appreciate the incredible complexity of the bible, rather than cherry pick passages that support a particular prejudice. McClellan wages a constant on-line battle against Christian Nationalists who claim the bible supports and justifies their hatred of gays, feminists, liberals, foreigners, etc.
McClellan’s mantra is “translation is interpretation.” He believes that much misapplication of biblical texts is due to faulty transliteration of the original Hebrew. McClellan always quotes the original problematic Hebrew passage and explains why a particular English word or phrase is the most appropriate rendering. I have a feeling Hamori’s academic writing is full of similar close textual criticism, but this book is obviously intended for a general audience.
Hamori is sometimes ridiculously colloquial: “Adam and Eve—or as they’re known in my classes, Dirt boy and Life girl . . .” The Freshman-friendly diction can get annoying but her examples are usually easy to follow. She points out instances where a Hebrew word is translated as “evil” when it applies to the actions of demons or people, but the same Hebrew word turns into something more innocuous, like “calamity,” when attached to God. Obviously, a translator has tried to positively spin God’s behavior.
According to Hamori, the Bible has been regularly “sanitized” throughout its history. Hamori's favorite example is the physical appearance of “cherubim.” Modern cherubim are chubby winged babies on Valentines Day cards, but their descriptions in the Bible are quite different. Cherubim are horrific shape-shifting guardians with four faces and multiple sets of wings. They first appear in Genesis as guardians of Eden, wielding fiery twirling swords, after Adam and Eve have been expelled. The cherubim are human antagonists rather than helpful match-makers.
Hamori makes a surprising observation that true angels are NEVER winged in the Bible. The Cherubim and Seraphim have wings, but they are entirely different classes of heavenly creature. True angels can be protectors or good news messengers, but they are also warriors, hitmen, and scourges. An invisible sword-wielding angel hunts Balaam for several days, only failing to kill him because Balaam’s ass desperately dodges the creature. In the book of Revelations, angels pour plagues upon the earth, poison the seas and release demons to torture mankind.
Hamori cleverly notes that Biblical characters are terrified whenever angels appear and she suggests it’s for good reason. It’s impossible to predict if the angels will be helpful or initiate a slaughter.
I like GOD’S MONSTERS partly because it reinforces my own thinking about the Bible. Because I don’t have religious faith, I tend to read the Bible as a marvelous piece of literature, and I like it when characters are complex and contradictory. I don’t feel any compulsion to explain away God’s cruelty and violence when he floods the planet or slaughters first-born Egyptian children. Hamori also sees value in facing “the troubling depictions of God and his entourage.” She says the writers of the Bible “struggled and they speculated, much as we do now.”
Hamori assumes readers are similarly curious and don’t need to be coddled.
I’ve always been fascinated by the book of Genesis because it’s so obvious that the serpent tells Adam and Eve the truth about eating the forbidden fruit, and God lies. God tells the humans they will die if they eat of the tree “in the midst of paradise,” but the serpent says, “you shall not die . . . your eyes shall be opened.” Well, Adam and Eve don’t die, and after eating the fruit they look at themselves and the world differently. God’s reference to death can't be explained as something metaphorical, a warning that Adam and Eve will die EVENTUALLY. God mentions the possibility that Adam might “take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever,” so God’s obviously aware his creations are mortal. God means what he says, that Adam and Eve will die immediately if they disobey. The serpent says otherwise, and the serpent is right.
To me, that’s a really interesting moral inversion, and it makes the story better, not worse. Of course, if you’re a literal-minded religious person who wants clearly defined “good” and “evil,” it’s problematic.
That anecdote in Genesis also provides a good illustration of Hamori’s assertion that the Bible has been sanitized throughout history. My King James Bible (published in 1611) has God say of the tree, “Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.” But my mother-in-law’s beautiful Catholic Bible (1875) has a slightly different version. God has told Eve they should not touch the tree “lest perhaps we die.”
“Perhaps!” The insertion of that word allows a more generous interpretation of God’s veracity; He doesn’t tell a bald-faced lie; he just fatally misleads two innocent people.
Hamori doesn’t use that specific example, it’s something I happened to notice myself. But I think her point is strengthened when an ordinary, unacademic reader can easily find supporting examples for her thesis. Her argument doesn’t depend on a reader’s faith in her esoteric knowledge of Hebraic root words.
I always feel an endorphin surge when I can crawl right into an author’s argument. In VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE, Darwin comments that there are no frogs on Pacific islands, even though those islands have lots of swampy ponds that frogs typically love. According to creationists, when God populated the earth with animals, he placed them in environments where they could thrive. He wasn’t a dick who dropped amphibious creatures in the middle of the desert; there should be frogs in Pacific island swamps. Darwin speculated that the fragile animals, or their eggs, couldn’t survive a long migration over salt water.
Well, I immediately thought of polar bears when I read that. Polar bears are native to the ice-covered seas of the north, but not the south. Why wouldn’t God place polar bears near both the south and north poles? According to religious people, God is wonderful and can do whatever he wants, we just aren’t capable of appreciating the genius of his decisions. According to Darwinists, the equatorial climate posed a barrier to the bears’ migration.
If you’re a creationist, any biology conversation eventually ends with the declaration that God is mysterious, and humans are idiots. If you are a Darwinist, the world is full of interesting zoological puzzles that can be endlessly explored. The conversation is ongoing.
The book of Job is my absolute favorite part of the Bible because it attempts to explain why innocent people suffer, one of the thorniest religious issues. I’m glad Hamori spends a lot of time with Job as well. She observes, as many others have, that God doesn’t really give Job a satisfactory explanation for his torture. Near the end of the book, God appears in a whirlwind and asks a lot of rhetorical questions about the creation of the planet: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth . . . upon what are its bases grounded? Or who laid the cornerstone thereof . . . Hast the rain a father . . . out of whose womb came the ice? Essentially, God says that a being who created a planet out of nothingness and suspended it in space doesn’t owe anyone an explanation.
Fair enough.
But the readers of Job know the backstory. God and Satan (Hamori calls him “the Adversary” in her book. I frankly don’t understand her explanation of Satan’s development as a character) . . . anyway God and Satan conduct a bizarre experiment to see if an upright man will curse God under extreme duress. Satan slaughters Job’s family, then afflicts him with painful boils, and sends “friends” to cruelly suggest Job somehow deserves his fate.
Job quickly admits defeat in the debate with God: “Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” But God is worked up, and taunts Job in a childish way: “Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?”
I've always been a little awed by God's response to Job.
Hamori’s take on the book of Job is different, and really interesting. She itemizes God’s response, his long catalogue of creation accomplishments, and points out that man isn’t part of the list. God mentions lions, ravens, goats, asses, rhinoceros, ostriches, horses, locusts, hawks, eagles . . . God effusively praises two monsters, the Behemoth and Leviathan, describing their marvelous attributes for two entire chapters.
God allowed Job to be tortured, Hamori suggests, because he really doesn’t care that much about humans, they are a trivial part of creation.
It's the best explanation of Job that I've read. Of course, man seemed like the pinnacle of creation in Genesis, but Hamori has demonstrated that God can be very mercurial. As Frank Sinatra said: "That's life, that's what all the people say, You're riding high in April, shot down in May."
What we learn about God from the story of Job is that he may be all-powerful, but he certainly isn’t all-good.
Hamori says, “Rather than discreetly setting those texts aside, we can value them for how they validate the reality of the human experience, as we live our lives in a world that is unpredictable, unjust, and, at times monstrous.”
Some people want easy answers from the Bible, an internet top ten list of what to do and who to hate. But the book is much more than that, and deserves a more intensive, critical reading.
That's what Hamori delivers.
McClellan’s mantra is “translation is interpretation.” He believes that much misapplication of biblical texts is due to faulty transliteration of the original Hebrew. McClellan always quotes the original problematic Hebrew passage and explains why a particular English word or phrase is the most appropriate rendering. I have a feeling Hamori’s academic writing is full of similar close textual criticism, but this book is obviously intended for a general audience.
Hamori is sometimes ridiculously colloquial: “Adam and Eve—or as they’re known in my classes, Dirt boy and Life girl . . .” The Freshman-friendly diction can get annoying but her examples are usually easy to follow. She points out instances where a Hebrew word is translated as “evil” when it applies to the actions of demons or people, but the same Hebrew word turns into something more innocuous, like “calamity,” when attached to God. Obviously, a translator has tried to positively spin God’s behavior.
According to Hamori, the Bible has been regularly “sanitized” throughout its history. Hamori's favorite example is the physical appearance of “cherubim.” Modern cherubim are chubby winged babies on Valentines Day cards, but their descriptions in the Bible are quite different. Cherubim are horrific shape-shifting guardians with four faces and multiple sets of wings. They first appear in Genesis as guardians of Eden, wielding fiery twirling swords, after Adam and Eve have been expelled. The cherubim are human antagonists rather than helpful match-makers.
Hamori makes a surprising observation that true angels are NEVER winged in the Bible. The Cherubim and Seraphim have wings, but they are entirely different classes of heavenly creature. True angels can be protectors or good news messengers, but they are also warriors, hitmen, and scourges. An invisible sword-wielding angel hunts Balaam for several days, only failing to kill him because Balaam’s ass desperately dodges the creature. In the book of Revelations, angels pour plagues upon the earth, poison the seas and release demons to torture mankind.
Hamori cleverly notes that Biblical characters are terrified whenever angels appear and she suggests it’s for good reason. It’s impossible to predict if the angels will be helpful or initiate a slaughter.
I like GOD’S MONSTERS partly because it reinforces my own thinking about the Bible. Because I don’t have religious faith, I tend to read the Bible as a marvelous piece of literature, and I like it when characters are complex and contradictory. I don’t feel any compulsion to explain away God’s cruelty and violence when he floods the planet or slaughters first-born Egyptian children. Hamori also sees value in facing “the troubling depictions of God and his entourage.” She says the writers of the Bible “struggled and they speculated, much as we do now.”
Hamori assumes readers are similarly curious and don’t need to be coddled.
I’ve always been fascinated by the book of Genesis because it’s so obvious that the serpent tells Adam and Eve the truth about eating the forbidden fruit, and God lies. God tells the humans they will die if they eat of the tree “in the midst of paradise,” but the serpent says, “you shall not die . . . your eyes shall be opened.” Well, Adam and Eve don’t die, and after eating the fruit they look at themselves and the world differently. God’s reference to death can't be explained as something metaphorical, a warning that Adam and Eve will die EVENTUALLY. God mentions the possibility that Adam might “take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever,” so God’s obviously aware his creations are mortal. God means what he says, that Adam and Eve will die immediately if they disobey. The serpent says otherwise, and the serpent is right.
To me, that’s a really interesting moral inversion, and it makes the story better, not worse. Of course, if you’re a literal-minded religious person who wants clearly defined “good” and “evil,” it’s problematic.
That anecdote in Genesis also provides a good illustration of Hamori’s assertion that the Bible has been sanitized throughout history. My King James Bible (published in 1611) has God say of the tree, “Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.” But my mother-in-law’s beautiful Catholic Bible (1875) has a slightly different version. God has told Eve they should not touch the tree “lest perhaps we die.”
“Perhaps!” The insertion of that word allows a more generous interpretation of God’s veracity; He doesn’t tell a bald-faced lie; he just fatally misleads two innocent people.
Hamori doesn’t use that specific example, it’s something I happened to notice myself. But I think her point is strengthened when an ordinary, unacademic reader can easily find supporting examples for her thesis. Her argument doesn’t depend on a reader’s faith in her esoteric knowledge of Hebraic root words.
I always feel an endorphin surge when I can crawl right into an author’s argument. In VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE, Darwin comments that there are no frogs on Pacific islands, even though those islands have lots of swampy ponds that frogs typically love. According to creationists, when God populated the earth with animals, he placed them in environments where they could thrive. He wasn’t a dick who dropped amphibious creatures in the middle of the desert; there should be frogs in Pacific island swamps. Darwin speculated that the fragile animals, or their eggs, couldn’t survive a long migration over salt water.
Well, I immediately thought of polar bears when I read that. Polar bears are native to the ice-covered seas of the north, but not the south. Why wouldn’t God place polar bears near both the south and north poles? According to religious people, God is wonderful and can do whatever he wants, we just aren’t capable of appreciating the genius of his decisions. According to Darwinists, the equatorial climate posed a barrier to the bears’ migration.
If you’re a creationist, any biology conversation eventually ends with the declaration that God is mysterious, and humans are idiots. If you are a Darwinist, the world is full of interesting zoological puzzles that can be endlessly explored. The conversation is ongoing.
The book of Job is my absolute favorite part of the Bible because it attempts to explain why innocent people suffer, one of the thorniest religious issues. I’m glad Hamori spends a lot of time with Job as well. She observes, as many others have, that God doesn’t really give Job a satisfactory explanation for his torture. Near the end of the book, God appears in a whirlwind and asks a lot of rhetorical questions about the creation of the planet: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth . . . upon what are its bases grounded? Or who laid the cornerstone thereof . . . Hast the rain a father . . . out of whose womb came the ice? Essentially, God says that a being who created a planet out of nothingness and suspended it in space doesn’t owe anyone an explanation.
Fair enough.
But the readers of Job know the backstory. God and Satan (Hamori calls him “the Adversary” in her book. I frankly don’t understand her explanation of Satan’s development as a character) . . . anyway God and Satan conduct a bizarre experiment to see if an upright man will curse God under extreme duress. Satan slaughters Job’s family, then afflicts him with painful boils, and sends “friends” to cruelly suggest Job somehow deserves his fate.
Job quickly admits defeat in the debate with God: “Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” But God is worked up, and taunts Job in a childish way: “Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?”
I've always been a little awed by God's response to Job.
Hamori’s take on the book of Job is different, and really interesting. She itemizes God’s response, his long catalogue of creation accomplishments, and points out that man isn’t part of the list. God mentions lions, ravens, goats, asses, rhinoceros, ostriches, horses, locusts, hawks, eagles . . . God effusively praises two monsters, the Behemoth and Leviathan, describing their marvelous attributes for two entire chapters.
God allowed Job to be tortured, Hamori suggests, because he really doesn’t care that much about humans, they are a trivial part of creation.
It's the best explanation of Job that I've read. Of course, man seemed like the pinnacle of creation in Genesis, but Hamori has demonstrated that God can be very mercurial. As Frank Sinatra said: "That's life, that's what all the people say, You're riding high in April, shot down in May."
What we learn about God from the story of Job is that he may be all-powerful, but he certainly isn’t all-good.
Hamori says, “Rather than discreetly setting those texts aside, we can value them for how they validate the reality of the human experience, as we live our lives in a world that is unpredictable, unjust, and, at times monstrous.”
Some people want easy answers from the Bible, an internet top ten list of what to do and who to hate. But the book is much more than that, and deserves a more intensive, critical reading.
That's what Hamori delivers.
June 25, 2025
Death of a Ghost, by Marjorie Allingham
Marjorie Allingham is considered one of the “Queens of Crime,” a celebrated author from the golden age of detective fiction (1920s-1950s). The British Crime Writers’ Association sponsors an annual short story contest named after her. The CWA says submissions should fit her genre definition: “The Mystery remains box-shaped, at once a prison and a refuge. Its four walls are, roughly, a Crime, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an Element of Satisfaction in it.” Marjorie Allingham is famous for stories in “the locked room” tradition. The murder seems physically impossible at first blush, but the reader can theoretically solve it, based on the clues presented. Ultimately, the solution is surprising, because it must address a deliberately bizarre set of crime scene circumstances.
There are informal rules within this sub-genre. It’s simply not cricket to pull an outrageously improbable solution from the back of a patterned sundress. Multiple secret passages, fanciful poisons, and Tom-Swift-like inventions are considered gauche.
But DEATH OF A GHOST breaks Marjorie Allingham’s own rules because it is extremely UNfair: The criminal relies on dumb luck to successfully commit two murders, and the circumstance are only baffling because the murderer is batshit crazy.
“Insanity” seems like a sleazy way for a writer to solve logistical problems. If some aspect of the scenario is absurd or illogical it doesn’t really matter because the criminal is mad, and his actions and motivation can’t be expected to make sense. It seems especially seedy for one of the “queens of crime.”
But that’s why I like this book.
The murderer, Max Fustian, is an art agent who is perpetrating a scam. He represents the estate of John Lafcadio and, according to a provision in the great artist’s will, offers up one new painting per year in a posthumous art-show-and-sale. Before he died, Lafcadio promised twelve paintings for those shows, but only provided eight. So Fustian commissions four copies and passes one off to a frothing crowd of eager art buyers. Fustian murders the two people who know about his fraud: the forger, Tommy Dacre, and a female friend, Claire Potter, who witnessed the fabrication.
Fustian stabbed Dacre with a pair of bejeweled scissors when the gallery lights suddenly turn off; the utilities are hooked up to an old-fashioned coin-fed utility meter. The opportunity is impossible to anticipate, so the murder must have been a quick improvisation. Of course, Linda Lafcadio is suspected because she was a spurned lover, and woman are prone to hysteria.
Fustian’s insanity is interesting in and of itself.
He has a split personality where one fragment is willing to look foolish to deflect guilt, but another fragment is full of braggadocio, and taunts the famous amateur sleuth, Albert Campion. The confident Fustian is hilarious. Even though the snooty art world treats him like a grasping little upstart, confident-Fustian considers himself a celebrity who is universally revered. A painter, Dee Birch, confronts him about an unflattering article he wrote about her: “Fustian, did you write this disgusting piece of effete snobbery?” Before she has a chance to properly berate him, Max says “My dear Miss Birch . . . of course I would be delighted.” He grabs the magazine and autographs his byline photo, hands it to her, then walks away. It would be funny as a calculated insult, but confident-Fustian honestly believes Dee Birch wants his autograph, he doesn’t register her obvious anger and condescension. He even believes people gathered at the Cellini Society’s cocktail party expressly to honor him. “I can’t drink a sherry these days without getting a crowd around me.”
The buffoonish Fustian confesses to murdering Tommy Dacre early in the novel, knowing his story will implode under scrutiny. It's a false bit of chivalry, supposedly meant to protect Linda Lafcadio, but his version of events doesn't match the autopsy facts.
Albert Campion realizes there is something suspicious about the clumsy confession, but he’s powerless to decode the motivations of a person who is genuinely crazy.
I doubt it was an intentional bit of criticism, but the entirety of Allingham’s ultra-conventional British society seems mentally ill.
Her detective, Albert Campion, frequently slips into a depression that seems pathological. Even after Fustian is arrested while attempting a third murder, Campion feels defeated, and moans to police inspector Oates: “He’s beaten us again, Stanislaus, don’t you see it?” Lafcadio’s desire to tease an artistic rival with his posthumous art sales is irrational to begin with, as is the hero worship surrounding the dead painter. Donna Beatrice, the great painter’s old “muse,” delights in the violence that has visited the Lafcadio clan, and thinks it’s a product of negatively colored auras clinging to the persons involved.
But those examples are theatrical, superficial derangement. The real craziness in this society is the separation of characters into two distinct classes.
The novel has a simplistic “Us and Them” division of humanity, where some people are cultured and some are vulgar. The cultured people may be eccentric, pompous, and ridiculous but they are still part of the privileged club. A few members, like the artist John Lafcadio, are geniuses, but most belong because they have the capacity to appreciate genius.
Vulgar people can be immensely talented, but their need to earn a living atrophies their sensibilities. They are bitter, small-minded and resentful, and it’s impossible for readers to sympathize with them, even though that should be a natural affiliation. Claire Potter is a clever artist and teacher but she is poor, and dependent on Belle Lafcadio’s charity. Immediately after she is murdered, Donna Beatrice delivers the ultimate backhanded compliment: “she was so practical.” And Max Fustian, for all his showmanship and success as a critic and agent, is still treated like one of the help.
The patronizing attitude seems to be a factor in Fustian’s insanity. Like all vulgar people, he wants to crash the privileged gates but can’t because he just doesn’t look the part. He tries to mimic the eccentricity of aristocratic fashion by wearing colorful vests but can’t quite pull it off.
All the privileged characters in this book have affectations. Belle Lafcadio wears a Breton bonnet, and Albert Campion carries a decorative cane. One old gentleman has “his gaiters padded,” and Donna Beatrice always looks like she is in “fancy dress.” Those ridiculous mannerisms aren’t indicators of madness, however, because the people are members of the elite. They do whatever they want, without worrying about what others think.
Vulgar people are instantly identifiable because they try too hard to mimic that aristocratic carelessness.
Even Stanislau Oates notices Fustian’s gaffs. “Only yesterday, he went to a party in a scarlet tartan waistcoat. What could be madder than that?”
Well, stabbing someone with bejeweled scissors comes to mind.
There are informal rules within this sub-genre. It’s simply not cricket to pull an outrageously improbable solution from the back of a patterned sundress. Multiple secret passages, fanciful poisons, and Tom-Swift-like inventions are considered gauche.
But DEATH OF A GHOST breaks Marjorie Allingham’s own rules because it is extremely UNfair: The criminal relies on dumb luck to successfully commit two murders, and the circumstance are only baffling because the murderer is batshit crazy.
“Insanity” seems like a sleazy way for a writer to solve logistical problems. If some aspect of the scenario is absurd or illogical it doesn’t really matter because the criminal is mad, and his actions and motivation can’t be expected to make sense. It seems especially seedy for one of the “queens of crime.”
But that’s why I like this book.
The murderer, Max Fustian, is an art agent who is perpetrating a scam. He represents the estate of John Lafcadio and, according to a provision in the great artist’s will, offers up one new painting per year in a posthumous art-show-and-sale. Before he died, Lafcadio promised twelve paintings for those shows, but only provided eight. So Fustian commissions four copies and passes one off to a frothing crowd of eager art buyers. Fustian murders the two people who know about his fraud: the forger, Tommy Dacre, and a female friend, Claire Potter, who witnessed the fabrication.
Fustian stabbed Dacre with a pair of bejeweled scissors when the gallery lights suddenly turn off; the utilities are hooked up to an old-fashioned coin-fed utility meter. The opportunity is impossible to anticipate, so the murder must have been a quick improvisation. Of course, Linda Lafcadio is suspected because she was a spurned lover, and woman are prone to hysteria.
Fustian’s insanity is interesting in and of itself.
He has a split personality where one fragment is willing to look foolish to deflect guilt, but another fragment is full of braggadocio, and taunts the famous amateur sleuth, Albert Campion. The confident Fustian is hilarious. Even though the snooty art world treats him like a grasping little upstart, confident-Fustian considers himself a celebrity who is universally revered. A painter, Dee Birch, confronts him about an unflattering article he wrote about her: “Fustian, did you write this disgusting piece of effete snobbery?” Before she has a chance to properly berate him, Max says “My dear Miss Birch . . . of course I would be delighted.” He grabs the magazine and autographs his byline photo, hands it to her, then walks away. It would be funny as a calculated insult, but confident-Fustian honestly believes Dee Birch wants his autograph, he doesn’t register her obvious anger and condescension. He even believes people gathered at the Cellini Society’s cocktail party expressly to honor him. “I can’t drink a sherry these days without getting a crowd around me.”
The buffoonish Fustian confesses to murdering Tommy Dacre early in the novel, knowing his story will implode under scrutiny. It's a false bit of chivalry, supposedly meant to protect Linda Lafcadio, but his version of events doesn't match the autopsy facts.
Albert Campion realizes there is something suspicious about the clumsy confession, but he’s powerless to decode the motivations of a person who is genuinely crazy.
I doubt it was an intentional bit of criticism, but the entirety of Allingham’s ultra-conventional British society seems mentally ill.
Her detective, Albert Campion, frequently slips into a depression that seems pathological. Even after Fustian is arrested while attempting a third murder, Campion feels defeated, and moans to police inspector Oates: “He’s beaten us again, Stanislaus, don’t you see it?” Lafcadio’s desire to tease an artistic rival with his posthumous art sales is irrational to begin with, as is the hero worship surrounding the dead painter. Donna Beatrice, the great painter’s old “muse,” delights in the violence that has visited the Lafcadio clan, and thinks it’s a product of negatively colored auras clinging to the persons involved.
But those examples are theatrical, superficial derangement. The real craziness in this society is the separation of characters into two distinct classes.
The novel has a simplistic “Us and Them” division of humanity, where some people are cultured and some are vulgar. The cultured people may be eccentric, pompous, and ridiculous but they are still part of the privileged club. A few members, like the artist John Lafcadio, are geniuses, but most belong because they have the capacity to appreciate genius.
Vulgar people can be immensely talented, but their need to earn a living atrophies their sensibilities. They are bitter, small-minded and resentful, and it’s impossible for readers to sympathize with them, even though that should be a natural affiliation. Claire Potter is a clever artist and teacher but she is poor, and dependent on Belle Lafcadio’s charity. Immediately after she is murdered, Donna Beatrice delivers the ultimate backhanded compliment: “she was so practical.” And Max Fustian, for all his showmanship and success as a critic and agent, is still treated like one of the help.
The patronizing attitude seems to be a factor in Fustian’s insanity. Like all vulgar people, he wants to crash the privileged gates but can’t because he just doesn’t look the part. He tries to mimic the eccentricity of aristocratic fashion by wearing colorful vests but can’t quite pull it off.
All the privileged characters in this book have affectations. Belle Lafcadio wears a Breton bonnet, and Albert Campion carries a decorative cane. One old gentleman has “his gaiters padded,” and Donna Beatrice always looks like she is in “fancy dress.” Those ridiculous mannerisms aren’t indicators of madness, however, because the people are members of the elite. They do whatever they want, without worrying about what others think.
Vulgar people are instantly identifiable because they try too hard to mimic that aristocratic carelessness.
Even Stanislau Oates notices Fustian’s gaffs. “Only yesterday, he went to a party in a scarlet tartan waistcoat. What could be madder than that?”
Well, stabbing someone with bejeweled scissors comes to mind.
June 14, 2025
Junkie, by William S. Burroughs
I was surprised by how much I loved JUNKIE, considering I disliked EXTERMINATOR! And couldn’t even finish NAKED LUNCH, Burroughs’ supposed masterpiece. I thought both of those books tried too hard to be outrageous and just ended up being ridiculous. I felt the same way about Bukowski’s FACTOTUM at times, thinking he was desperate to further the myth of his status as a dirty old man.
NAKED LUNCH reminded me of “The Aristocrats” joke. If you haven’t heard it, here’s a paraphrase: a man goes into a promoter’s office to pitch a new act. He describes a scene where blood and semen spray all over the theatre, there’s dismemberment, animal abuse, trapeze accidents, sadism, sodomy—a deliberately offensive litany of activities, supposedly performed in front of a paying audience. The promoter asks: “what do you call this act?” and the man answers “The Aristocrats!”
I like the joke a lot, but if it's stretched out long enough, it eventually gets boring. I hit the wall after about 150 pages of NAKED LUNCH. Of course, there were lots of intriguing bits buried in that book. As a long-time Sci Fi fan, I liked characters sleeping with replicas of themselves and a character’s asshole taking over his body, but most of it just seemed silly, two grade eight boys trying to gross each other out.
JUNKIE felt different. It was still extremely weird, but adult-weird, philosophically serious and often poetic. (I disliked the ending, but more about that later)
In JUNKIE, a narrator named Bill Lee describes his life as a Morphine and Heroin addict in the 1940s and early 50s. The book has the feel of personal memoir, probably because Burroughs really was a heroin addict himself.
Drug abuse produces a flattened affect in Lee, so he reports outrageous events in a very deadpan style, as if they were no big deal. An assault: “I was standing over him with a three-foot length of pipe I found in the bathroom. The pipe had a faucet on the end of it . . .” A man is beaten with “the faucet end” of the makeshift weapon until his brains are exposed and blood spurts with every heartbeat.
Lee isn’t the assailant in this anecdote; it’s a character named Jack. But Lee offers no judgment when he re-tells the odd story. To my mind, the pipe-with-faucet weapon is random and unwieldy; it is familiar yet repurposed in a nightmarish way. The climax of the story seems to be Jack’s girlfriend calling him “a coldblooded killer” afterwards. Jack laughs so hard he can barely get those words out. He seems to be appreciating a private joke, although it’s hard to imagine what it is. Maybe there was some brain-damaged comic juxtaposition of a cold-water supply pipe and his girlfriend’s use of the phrase “cold-blooded,” but his laughter isn’t explained, just reported: Jack “laughed until his face was purple.”
You quickly get the impression Bill is moving through a very dangerous environment, one that doesn’t respect normal physical laws like cause and effect, or chronological progression.
I think what I like most about the book is its description of drug addiction as a condition of survival, rather than euphoria. Doctors and cops are mystified by addiction and can’t believe anyone would choose the degradation and filth that defines an addict’s life. They want Lee to explain himself. He can’t put it into words, so he tells them what they want to hear “it’s a good kick.” Really, addiction has changed the addict’s body at “the cellular level,” so that Junk isn’t a choice at all, and most of the time, it isn’t even fun.
There is only one brief passage where the act of drug-taking is attached to a positive comment: “If God made anything better, he kept it for Himself.” Usually, the codeine, morphine, heroin, Benzedrine, nembies, weed or booze, merely ward off the junk sickness, “the horrors” of hallucination and wracking physical pain.
The filth and humiliation that accompanies withdrawals and “cures” is a precursor to descriptive passages in TRAINSPOTTING.
There’s certainly nothing glamorous about drug use: “the paper gave off a sickening odor of menthol. Several people nearby sniffed and smiled. I nearly gagged on the wad of paper but finally got it down. Mary selected some gone numbers and beat on the table with the expression of a masturbating idiot.”
Lee undergoes several cures, and it seems like a sensible thing to do, given the unpleasant depiction of an addict’s life. But he always gets hooked again. And it isn’t in response to any particular trauma; someone asks Lee if he wants to shoot up and he says “okay.”
It’s easy to understand the power of addiction, once it’s established, but it’s harder to understand the impulse to begin the process. Lee’s first Morphine injection is an initial “relaxing wave,” but it is immediately followed by hallucinations of a waitress carrying a skull, an intense fear of dying, then a protracted spell of vomiting.
It doesn’t seem sufficiently pleasurable to make a second injection worthwhile.
I assume that Lee and the other addicts are so profoundly disaffected in their PRE-drug lives, they can easily abandon them.
A drug-free visit to New Orleans is particularly depressing: “a complex pattern of tensions, like the electrical mazes devised by psychologists to unhinge the nervous systems of white rats and guinea pigs, keeps the unhappy pleasure seekers in a condition of unconsummated alertness . . . the residents are surly, the transient population is completely miscellaneous and unrelated, so that you never know what sort of behavior to expect from anybody.”
Stoned or sober, Lee's life is full of superficial social interactions without any real intimacy. Lee’s wife is never named, for example, which seems especially odd.
The characters are emotionally empty, but there is poetry in the book, itself: “The feel of junk is still there. It hits you at the corner, follows along the block, then falls away like a discouraged panhandler.” And there’s lots of acidic insight: “pushing weed looks good on paper, like fur farming, or raising frogs.”
But the wit and sarcasm are always focused outward: “Fags are ventriloquist dummies who have moved in and taken over the ventriloquist.” Lee has frequent homosexual liaisons yet still heaps abuse on “fags.” There’s little introspection.
And that’s why I dislike the ending of the book. After brilliantly debunking the notion that drug addiction is all about the “kick,” Lee is determined to continue searching for an idealized high: “Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke, Yage may be the final fix.”
It reminds me of Robert Crumb’s underground cartoon “Where it’s at,” where stoners fruitlessly search for something external to validate their lives. Hippies latch onto heroes like Bob Dylan or Timothy Leary and adopt counter-culture lifestyles like surfing or dropping acid, but none of it is “where it’s at.”
The characters just keep mumbling the worn out catch phrase.
NAKED LUNCH reminded me of “The Aristocrats” joke. If you haven’t heard it, here’s a paraphrase: a man goes into a promoter’s office to pitch a new act. He describes a scene where blood and semen spray all over the theatre, there’s dismemberment, animal abuse, trapeze accidents, sadism, sodomy—a deliberately offensive litany of activities, supposedly performed in front of a paying audience. The promoter asks: “what do you call this act?” and the man answers “The Aristocrats!”
I like the joke a lot, but if it's stretched out long enough, it eventually gets boring. I hit the wall after about 150 pages of NAKED LUNCH. Of course, there were lots of intriguing bits buried in that book. As a long-time Sci Fi fan, I liked characters sleeping with replicas of themselves and a character’s asshole taking over his body, but most of it just seemed silly, two grade eight boys trying to gross each other out.
JUNKIE felt different. It was still extremely weird, but adult-weird, philosophically serious and often poetic. (I disliked the ending, but more about that later)
In JUNKIE, a narrator named Bill Lee describes his life as a Morphine and Heroin addict in the 1940s and early 50s. The book has the feel of personal memoir, probably because Burroughs really was a heroin addict himself.
Drug abuse produces a flattened affect in Lee, so he reports outrageous events in a very deadpan style, as if they were no big deal. An assault: “I was standing over him with a three-foot length of pipe I found in the bathroom. The pipe had a faucet on the end of it . . .” A man is beaten with “the faucet end” of the makeshift weapon until his brains are exposed and blood spurts with every heartbeat.
Lee isn’t the assailant in this anecdote; it’s a character named Jack. But Lee offers no judgment when he re-tells the odd story. To my mind, the pipe-with-faucet weapon is random and unwieldy; it is familiar yet repurposed in a nightmarish way. The climax of the story seems to be Jack’s girlfriend calling him “a coldblooded killer” afterwards. Jack laughs so hard he can barely get those words out. He seems to be appreciating a private joke, although it’s hard to imagine what it is. Maybe there was some brain-damaged comic juxtaposition of a cold-water supply pipe and his girlfriend’s use of the phrase “cold-blooded,” but his laughter isn’t explained, just reported: Jack “laughed until his face was purple.”
You quickly get the impression Bill is moving through a very dangerous environment, one that doesn’t respect normal physical laws like cause and effect, or chronological progression.
I think what I like most about the book is its description of drug addiction as a condition of survival, rather than euphoria. Doctors and cops are mystified by addiction and can’t believe anyone would choose the degradation and filth that defines an addict’s life. They want Lee to explain himself. He can’t put it into words, so he tells them what they want to hear “it’s a good kick.” Really, addiction has changed the addict’s body at “the cellular level,” so that Junk isn’t a choice at all, and most of the time, it isn’t even fun.
There is only one brief passage where the act of drug-taking is attached to a positive comment: “If God made anything better, he kept it for Himself.” Usually, the codeine, morphine, heroin, Benzedrine, nembies, weed or booze, merely ward off the junk sickness, “the horrors” of hallucination and wracking physical pain.
The filth and humiliation that accompanies withdrawals and “cures” is a precursor to descriptive passages in TRAINSPOTTING.
There’s certainly nothing glamorous about drug use: “the paper gave off a sickening odor of menthol. Several people nearby sniffed and smiled. I nearly gagged on the wad of paper but finally got it down. Mary selected some gone numbers and beat on the table with the expression of a masturbating idiot.”
Lee undergoes several cures, and it seems like a sensible thing to do, given the unpleasant depiction of an addict’s life. But he always gets hooked again. And it isn’t in response to any particular trauma; someone asks Lee if he wants to shoot up and he says “okay.”
It’s easy to understand the power of addiction, once it’s established, but it’s harder to understand the impulse to begin the process. Lee’s first Morphine injection is an initial “relaxing wave,” but it is immediately followed by hallucinations of a waitress carrying a skull, an intense fear of dying, then a protracted spell of vomiting.
It doesn’t seem sufficiently pleasurable to make a second injection worthwhile.
I assume that Lee and the other addicts are so profoundly disaffected in their PRE-drug lives, they can easily abandon them.
A drug-free visit to New Orleans is particularly depressing: “a complex pattern of tensions, like the electrical mazes devised by psychologists to unhinge the nervous systems of white rats and guinea pigs, keeps the unhappy pleasure seekers in a condition of unconsummated alertness . . . the residents are surly, the transient population is completely miscellaneous and unrelated, so that you never know what sort of behavior to expect from anybody.”
Stoned or sober, Lee's life is full of superficial social interactions without any real intimacy. Lee’s wife is never named, for example, which seems especially odd.
The characters are emotionally empty, but there is poetry in the book, itself: “The feel of junk is still there. It hits you at the corner, follows along the block, then falls away like a discouraged panhandler.” And there’s lots of acidic insight: “pushing weed looks good on paper, like fur farming, or raising frogs.”
But the wit and sarcasm are always focused outward: “Fags are ventriloquist dummies who have moved in and taken over the ventriloquist.” Lee has frequent homosexual liaisons yet still heaps abuse on “fags.” There’s little introspection.
And that’s why I dislike the ending of the book. After brilliantly debunking the notion that drug addiction is all about the “kick,” Lee is determined to continue searching for an idealized high: “Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke, Yage may be the final fix.”
It reminds me of Robert Crumb’s underground cartoon “Where it’s at,” where stoners fruitlessly search for something external to validate their lives. Hippies latch onto heroes like Bob Dylan or Timothy Leary and adopt counter-culture lifestyles like surfing or dropping acid, but none of it is “where it’s at.”
The characters just keep mumbling the worn out catch phrase.
May 19, 2025
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Jack Finney (1954)
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS is an interesting title because it’s both effective and completely inaccurate. It has the instantly recognizable kitschy appeal of 1950s and 60s horror, but the story itself really has nothing to do with “invasion” “or body snatching.”
Plant pods drift through space for millions of years and land on Earth like dandelion spores might land on your lawn. There’s no intentionality to this “invasion,” it’s purely happenstance. And the pods don’t really “snatch” bodies, in the sense that they are taken somewhere to be used for a nefarious purpose. Humans provide templates for a cloning process, but their bodies have no intrinsic value beyond that and turn into piles of fluff like laundry lint once they have been successfully reproduced.
Everyone knows that stories about monsters and aliens and robots and ghosts are really stories about what it means to be “human.” The various Jekyll and Hyde counterparts just provide literary scope for that discussion. The big take-away from INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS is that being human really has nothing to do with one’s physical body, the thing that distinguishes us from the aliens is “emotion.”
As it’s defined in the book, “emotion” is the urge to write books, not just read them—to be creative, rather than a passive sponge.
Of course, the remarkable human achievements that easily distinguish us from animals and robots and aliens etc., belong to very few individuals. Most people fall into the category of “readers” rather than “writers.” There’s a clever scene in the movie version of I ROBOT where detective Spooner taunts a robot by asking if it’s ever written a symphony. The robot responds, “have you?”
“Humanity” obviously isn’t restricted to a set of ultra-talented individuals, but INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS has the same struggle crafting an inclusive definition as most sci fi books and movies. To me, the best attempt occurs at the very beginning of the novel when some characters have a creeping suspicion that something isn’t right in Mill Valley: a close relative acts strangely, but the change is hard to pinpoint.
Originally, just a few people are cloned by the space pods, and they are physically identical to the original templates down to the tiniest scar. They also have the same stock of memories, so they don’t reveal themselves through interrogation. But some sensitive family members know these simulacra are different, and they intuit that the change isn’t benign, it’s dangerous and frightening.
So, what makes us “human” is a hardwired ability to recognize members of our own species, even if interlopers are cleverly camouflaged. But that skill doesn’t clearly differentiate us from other animals. Darwin’s finches had a similar ability.
And that’s where sci fi stories struggle, trying to find “human” qualities that might appear on a taxonomic key, something as clear and obvious as arachnids having eight legs and insects only six.
One of my favorite efforts, Phil Dick’s DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, focuses on the lack of empathy in androids. There is an underlying selfishness and cruelty to replicant behavior that won’t let them bond with others, even other androids. That's what trips them up when they try to pass as humans. But the novel is also full of biologically human psychopaths who have lost the ability to care for others. Deckard and Iran must connect themselves to a Penfield mood organ to stimulate arguments and affection. Animal ownership is an attempt to foster empathy but it isn’t successful. People choose pets like sheep, snakes and owls, creatures that don’t readily bond with humans. The educative effort is sabotaged from the start because no one understands the end goal.
The characters in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS are similarly clumsy when they try to find reasons to defend their autonomy as persons. Theodora tries to joke about it: “I could use a duplicate of Jack. One of them could moon around the house as usual . . . and maybe the other would have time to talk to me, and even help with the dishes once in a while.” But Theodora is talking about what would make a "better" human, someone who is more considerate, not what defines a human in the first place. It’s missing the point, much like “help” with the dishes misses the point of feminism because it still assumes housework is a woman’s domain.
Wilma describes the disturbing clone behavior in her uncle Ira as the “pretense” of emotion, feeling “by rote.” The pod clones are actors playing roles; they have lost the ability to spontaneously generate feelings.
But that’s more an indictment of the human condition than an attempt to define it. In SHAWN OF THE DEAD, people turn into zombies because they already shuffle through their everyday lives like mindless puppets. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS describes a suburban world that was afflicted by malaise even before the space pods arrived. Mill Valley is full of “toy houses” with the stereotypical “white picket fence” and banal conversations and missed romantic opportunities. The cloned townspeople who distribute space pods wear different colored civic booster buttons, that’s the only thing distinguishing them from the vapid originals.
Generally, sci fi does such a great job lampooning society that it's a little difficult to rally behind humans and declare that they are wonderful and worth saving. Miles has a flash of creativity when he fools the pods by offering up a medical skeleton for cloning, rather than his actual body. But that’s not the quality that saves humanity in this book.
Miles and Becky escape from downtown Mill Valley and scramble through some woods and fields, trying to reach an uninfected area. On the way, they encounter a fresh crop of pods and try to burn them, knowing that it’s a futile gesture, that they will inevitably be captured, cloned and lobotomized. But this is where the book differs from the famous 1978 movie version. Instead of overwhelming the world, the remaining pods float upward and leave the Earth seeking a less hostile planet.
The thing that saved humanity was a passive aggressive stubbornness amongst a number of individuals like Miles and Becky, an unwillingness to give up, even against insurmountable odds. In fact, it was a thoughtless, pod-like, tropism that defeated the aliens, not a creative impulse.
So, what does it mean to be a human?
Sometimes, it means acting like a space vegetable.
Plant pods drift through space for millions of years and land on Earth like dandelion spores might land on your lawn. There’s no intentionality to this “invasion,” it’s purely happenstance. And the pods don’t really “snatch” bodies, in the sense that they are taken somewhere to be used for a nefarious purpose. Humans provide templates for a cloning process, but their bodies have no intrinsic value beyond that and turn into piles of fluff like laundry lint once they have been successfully reproduced.
Everyone knows that stories about monsters and aliens and robots and ghosts are really stories about what it means to be “human.” The various Jekyll and Hyde counterparts just provide literary scope for that discussion. The big take-away from INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS is that being human really has nothing to do with one’s physical body, the thing that distinguishes us from the aliens is “emotion.”
As it’s defined in the book, “emotion” is the urge to write books, not just read them—to be creative, rather than a passive sponge.
Of course, the remarkable human achievements that easily distinguish us from animals and robots and aliens etc., belong to very few individuals. Most people fall into the category of “readers” rather than “writers.” There’s a clever scene in the movie version of I ROBOT where detective Spooner taunts a robot by asking if it’s ever written a symphony. The robot responds, “have you?”
“Humanity” obviously isn’t restricted to a set of ultra-talented individuals, but INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS has the same struggle crafting an inclusive definition as most sci fi books and movies. To me, the best attempt occurs at the very beginning of the novel when some characters have a creeping suspicion that something isn’t right in Mill Valley: a close relative acts strangely, but the change is hard to pinpoint.
Originally, just a few people are cloned by the space pods, and they are physically identical to the original templates down to the tiniest scar. They also have the same stock of memories, so they don’t reveal themselves through interrogation. But some sensitive family members know these simulacra are different, and they intuit that the change isn’t benign, it’s dangerous and frightening.
So, what makes us “human” is a hardwired ability to recognize members of our own species, even if interlopers are cleverly camouflaged. But that skill doesn’t clearly differentiate us from other animals. Darwin’s finches had a similar ability.
And that’s where sci fi stories struggle, trying to find “human” qualities that might appear on a taxonomic key, something as clear and obvious as arachnids having eight legs and insects only six.
One of my favorite efforts, Phil Dick’s DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, focuses on the lack of empathy in androids. There is an underlying selfishness and cruelty to replicant behavior that won’t let them bond with others, even other androids. That's what trips them up when they try to pass as humans. But the novel is also full of biologically human psychopaths who have lost the ability to care for others. Deckard and Iran must connect themselves to a Penfield mood organ to stimulate arguments and affection. Animal ownership is an attempt to foster empathy but it isn’t successful. People choose pets like sheep, snakes and owls, creatures that don’t readily bond with humans. The educative effort is sabotaged from the start because no one understands the end goal.
The characters in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS are similarly clumsy when they try to find reasons to defend their autonomy as persons. Theodora tries to joke about it: “I could use a duplicate of Jack. One of them could moon around the house as usual . . . and maybe the other would have time to talk to me, and even help with the dishes once in a while.” But Theodora is talking about what would make a "better" human, someone who is more considerate, not what defines a human in the first place. It’s missing the point, much like “help” with the dishes misses the point of feminism because it still assumes housework is a woman’s domain.
Wilma describes the disturbing clone behavior in her uncle Ira as the “pretense” of emotion, feeling “by rote.” The pod clones are actors playing roles; they have lost the ability to spontaneously generate feelings.
But that’s more an indictment of the human condition than an attempt to define it. In SHAWN OF THE DEAD, people turn into zombies because they already shuffle through their everyday lives like mindless puppets. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS describes a suburban world that was afflicted by malaise even before the space pods arrived. Mill Valley is full of “toy houses” with the stereotypical “white picket fence” and banal conversations and missed romantic opportunities. The cloned townspeople who distribute space pods wear different colored civic booster buttons, that’s the only thing distinguishing them from the vapid originals.
Generally, sci fi does such a great job lampooning society that it's a little difficult to rally behind humans and declare that they are wonderful and worth saving. Miles has a flash of creativity when he fools the pods by offering up a medical skeleton for cloning, rather than his actual body. But that’s not the quality that saves humanity in this book.
Miles and Becky escape from downtown Mill Valley and scramble through some woods and fields, trying to reach an uninfected area. On the way, they encounter a fresh crop of pods and try to burn them, knowing that it’s a futile gesture, that they will inevitably be captured, cloned and lobotomized. But this is where the book differs from the famous 1978 movie version. Instead of overwhelming the world, the remaining pods float upward and leave the Earth seeking a less hostile planet.
The thing that saved humanity was a passive aggressive stubbornness amongst a number of individuals like Miles and Becky, an unwillingness to give up, even against insurmountable odds. In fact, it was a thoughtless, pod-like, tropism that defeated the aliens, not a creative impulse.
So, what does it mean to be a human?
Sometimes, it means acting like a space vegetable.
May 11, 2025
Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, by Paul Tremblay (2015)
I picked up Paul Tremblay’s DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK because I really liked his narcoleptic detective stories, THE LITTLE SLEEP and NO SLEEP TILL WONDERLAND. In those books, Mark Genevich solves complex mysteries while getting nagged by his mother, dodging guilt about his head injury, and losing consciousness at inconvenient times. Those books are an homage to noir classics like THE BIG SLEEP, as well as other oddball genre tributes like Richard Brautigan’s DREAMING OF BABYLON (which is one of my all-time favorite books).
Paul Tremblay is probably better known for his horror stories; he’s a Bram Stoker award winner and a juror for The Shirley Jackson Awards.
DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK, has an obvious affinity with Jackson’s work because Tremblay’s families and communities are similarly fragmented.
A thirteen-year-old boy, Tommy Sanderson, goes missing after a late-night rendezvous in a deserted park. The word “disappearance” in the title is significant because adults immediately distrust thirteen-year-olds, they are inscrutable little human clones. Sure, Tommy might be injured or abducted, but he might also be a runaway.
It's a sad to think that a mother could be blindsided to that degree, and not realize her child is so deeply disaffected. But Tommy’s father, William, disappeared eight years ago and Elizabeth didn’t see that coming, either. She wonders if her son is following a family tradition.
Because this is a horror story, the Sanderson family breakup has a supernatural twist: Elizabeth sees a ghostly simulacra of her son the day after he vanishes, and then diary pages torn from Tommy’s journal mysteriously appear in the middle of the living room floor.
Elizabeth, her mother Janice, and daughter Kate Immediately accuse each other of surreptitiously introducing the pages, then lying about it. They know they should trust each other but can’t, because other possibilities (like a stranger sneaking in, or Tommy’s ghost delivering the cryptic messages) seem more outlandish than a family member psychologically crumbling from stress and grief. After a painful argument, “the kitchen is all quiet tears and quick breathing.”
There are many paranormal red herrings in the book, but the most important take-away seems to be that destructive family-disconnect. The problem isn’t routed in specific instances of abuse (at least, not in the Sanderson household) just typical suburban self-absorption. A repeated catchphrase in the novel is “I just can’t do this right now.” In stressful situations, characters tend to turtle and offer the lame excuse that they’re having a bad day. But when pressed, characters are perfectly capable of enduring awkward or painful confrontations. Elizabeth doesn’t shirk from identifying Tommy’s body, for example, reading police interview transcripts about the night he disappeared, or attending the killer’s trial.
Unfortunately, a habit of constant low-grade deflection has already done the damage.
Kate tries to address the problem at the end of the novel as she and her mother move out of their house. Kate wants to leave a couple of Tommy’s blank journal pages in his empty bedroom. “There’s none of his drawings on the pages because we’re taking him with us. And it means no more secrets. That’s what we’re leaving behind us. The secrets.”
Good advice, but it’s difficult to break habits of a lifetime. Elizabeth immediately lies about needing to go to the bathroom, returns to the house and removes the pages.
DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK is painful to read at times because it presents such an accurate picture of what it’s like to be a thirteen-year-old boy. I remember the loneliness, insecurity, and idiocy of growing up, and the experience is a little like visiting Niagara Falls: both wonderful and sleazy, but not something I want to do every day.
The novel also powerfully describes adult angst faced with the potential loss of a child: Elizabeth is “empty of hope and couldn’t be more disappointed in herself that it simply isn’t there . . . she’s terrified of the yawning void of life of life without Tommy, but also terrified of the microfuture, of the horrors of the truth about what happened . . .” I liked the differentiation of grief, both over-arching despair and tiny triggers. Russell Banks’s characters similarly deadened themselves in THE SWEET HEREAFTER, to cope with the tragic school bus crash.
That psychology strikes me as realistic but, like the literal transcriptions of teenage conversations, it’s not particularly enjoyable. It feels “like” “totally” “hardo” “catchphrase” “wicked bad.”
Maybe it’s a valuable exercise in humility, revisiting frailties that one ordinarily tries to sublimate. All the same, I find horror stories like DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK frustrating because of the cringey character behavior. I’m not talking about people who wander into basements even though movie audiences scream at them to stop. My reservation is more related to a character saying, “I just can’t do this right now,” when they obviously can.
There is a horror story tradition of characters being consumed by grief. In FRANKENSTEIN, Victor falls into a “brain fever” and is completely incapacitated for six months after the monster kills his friend Clerval. The theatrical response is supposed to reflect the depth of his affection. Horror stories understand that small slights, like careless middle-school glances, can be extraordinarily painful. They assume, then, that events like family deaths must be exponentially worse.
I’m not sure the emotional math is correct. People devastated by the loss of a pet often deal with the death of a parent with great dignity. People are sporadically fragile and resilient, but horror stories sometimes force those puzzle pieces into the wrong spots.
And when I find the behavior of horror story characters to be ridiculous, it’s difficult to remain fully immersed in the story I usually balk when I’m expected to accept something just because it’s theoretically possible.
The behavior of the three young boys in DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK is a good example. They sneak out of the house to drink beer in a park. They are a little young, but that’s still easy to believe. One of the boys, Tommy, just runs away from the group for no reason and is lost in the woods. That’s harder to believe. But Josh and Luis immediately protest that they weren’t teasing him, so readers assume there probably WAS some middle school bullying. Again, that’s reasonable. Later, we discover that the three boys have been befriended by a creepy adult who has been feeding them beer and convincing them that he is a “seer.” They don’t mention this suspicious individual, Arnold, even though their missing friend is in obvious peril and everyone is scrambling for clues. In an era of stranger-danger, that’s harder to believe. The psychological explanation is just barely plausible: the boys are embarrassed that they have been so easily manipulated by a conman. Then we learn that the three boys were taunted into killing Arnold’s abusive uncle by pushing shards of broken glass into his chest.
That’s where my credulity taps out. I know that people can do horrible things for trivial reasons, but just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s likely. Even if I managed to accept that these particular boys were seduced into committing murder, and they jammed glass into a man’s chest without the shards breaking or deflecting off ribs, I can’t accept the fact that they kept it a secret.
These boys are weak; they have been softened up by a lifetime of parental nagging and would have cracked the first time a police officer lowered an eyebrow. But the slow unspooling of creepy events depends on this implausible inversion of moral strength and weakness. Boys who can be manipulated into murder could just as easily be manipulated into admitting it in an interrogation. Their spasms of weakness and strength feel wrong, and that’s off putting. Given their vivid characterization, it seems far more likely that the boys would have resisted the temptation to commit murder and wilted under interrogation.
I don’t think horror fans share my reservation though, given the book’s popularity. And overall, I liked the book, particularly its depiction of “evil.” Arnold explains that the devil is someone you don’t see directly, only out of the corner of your eye, and that certainly matches Elizabeth’s experience of the flitting shapes that haunt her peripheral vision after Tommy disappears. The implication is that if you are not “direct” or forthright in your dealings, the devil will exploit that flaw and infiltrate your life with flanking movements.
Tremblay's Puritan forebears would have been proud.
I also like Kate’s symbolic struggle to integrate her fragmented personality. After Tommy’s diary pages mysteriously appear, Elizabeth buys a motion activated security camera to see if someone is sneaking them into the house. The camera is controlled by a phone app, and Kate deliberately wanders into camera range so she can watch her own ghostly presence on her phone screen. The fascination with doppelgangers reminds me of Phil Dick’s A SCANNER DARKLY where a police detective becomes psychotic and spies on himself by watching hours of recorded security camera footage from his own home.
Kate recognizes that something is wrong within herself, and she has an impulse to make it right, but doesn’t know exactly how.
How many of us do?
But Kate tries, exhibiting a combination of character strength and weakness that I find compelling.
Paul Tremblay is probably better known for his horror stories; he’s a Bram Stoker award winner and a juror for The Shirley Jackson Awards.
DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK, has an obvious affinity with Jackson’s work because Tremblay’s families and communities are similarly fragmented.
A thirteen-year-old boy, Tommy Sanderson, goes missing after a late-night rendezvous in a deserted park. The word “disappearance” in the title is significant because adults immediately distrust thirteen-year-olds, they are inscrutable little human clones. Sure, Tommy might be injured or abducted, but he might also be a runaway.
It's a sad to think that a mother could be blindsided to that degree, and not realize her child is so deeply disaffected. But Tommy’s father, William, disappeared eight years ago and Elizabeth didn’t see that coming, either. She wonders if her son is following a family tradition.
Because this is a horror story, the Sanderson family breakup has a supernatural twist: Elizabeth sees a ghostly simulacra of her son the day after he vanishes, and then diary pages torn from Tommy’s journal mysteriously appear in the middle of the living room floor.
Elizabeth, her mother Janice, and daughter Kate Immediately accuse each other of surreptitiously introducing the pages, then lying about it. They know they should trust each other but can’t, because other possibilities (like a stranger sneaking in, or Tommy’s ghost delivering the cryptic messages) seem more outlandish than a family member psychologically crumbling from stress and grief. After a painful argument, “the kitchen is all quiet tears and quick breathing.”
There are many paranormal red herrings in the book, but the most important take-away seems to be that destructive family-disconnect. The problem isn’t routed in specific instances of abuse (at least, not in the Sanderson household) just typical suburban self-absorption. A repeated catchphrase in the novel is “I just can’t do this right now.” In stressful situations, characters tend to turtle and offer the lame excuse that they’re having a bad day. But when pressed, characters are perfectly capable of enduring awkward or painful confrontations. Elizabeth doesn’t shirk from identifying Tommy’s body, for example, reading police interview transcripts about the night he disappeared, or attending the killer’s trial.
Unfortunately, a habit of constant low-grade deflection has already done the damage.
Kate tries to address the problem at the end of the novel as she and her mother move out of their house. Kate wants to leave a couple of Tommy’s blank journal pages in his empty bedroom. “There’s none of his drawings on the pages because we’re taking him with us. And it means no more secrets. That’s what we’re leaving behind us. The secrets.”
Good advice, but it’s difficult to break habits of a lifetime. Elizabeth immediately lies about needing to go to the bathroom, returns to the house and removes the pages.
DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK is painful to read at times because it presents such an accurate picture of what it’s like to be a thirteen-year-old boy. I remember the loneliness, insecurity, and idiocy of growing up, and the experience is a little like visiting Niagara Falls: both wonderful and sleazy, but not something I want to do every day.
The novel also powerfully describes adult angst faced with the potential loss of a child: Elizabeth is “empty of hope and couldn’t be more disappointed in herself that it simply isn’t there . . . she’s terrified of the yawning void of life of life without Tommy, but also terrified of the microfuture, of the horrors of the truth about what happened . . .” I liked the differentiation of grief, both over-arching despair and tiny triggers. Russell Banks’s characters similarly deadened themselves in THE SWEET HEREAFTER, to cope with the tragic school bus crash.
That psychology strikes me as realistic but, like the literal transcriptions of teenage conversations, it’s not particularly enjoyable. It feels “like” “totally” “hardo” “catchphrase” “wicked bad.”
Maybe it’s a valuable exercise in humility, revisiting frailties that one ordinarily tries to sublimate. All the same, I find horror stories like DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK frustrating because of the cringey character behavior. I’m not talking about people who wander into basements even though movie audiences scream at them to stop. My reservation is more related to a character saying, “I just can’t do this right now,” when they obviously can.
There is a horror story tradition of characters being consumed by grief. In FRANKENSTEIN, Victor falls into a “brain fever” and is completely incapacitated for six months after the monster kills his friend Clerval. The theatrical response is supposed to reflect the depth of his affection. Horror stories understand that small slights, like careless middle-school glances, can be extraordinarily painful. They assume, then, that events like family deaths must be exponentially worse.
I’m not sure the emotional math is correct. People devastated by the loss of a pet often deal with the death of a parent with great dignity. People are sporadically fragile and resilient, but horror stories sometimes force those puzzle pieces into the wrong spots.
And when I find the behavior of horror story characters to be ridiculous, it’s difficult to remain fully immersed in the story I usually balk when I’m expected to accept something just because it’s theoretically possible.
The behavior of the three young boys in DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK is a good example. They sneak out of the house to drink beer in a park. They are a little young, but that’s still easy to believe. One of the boys, Tommy, just runs away from the group for no reason and is lost in the woods. That’s harder to believe. But Josh and Luis immediately protest that they weren’t teasing him, so readers assume there probably WAS some middle school bullying. Again, that’s reasonable. Later, we discover that the three boys have been befriended by a creepy adult who has been feeding them beer and convincing them that he is a “seer.” They don’t mention this suspicious individual, Arnold, even though their missing friend is in obvious peril and everyone is scrambling for clues. In an era of stranger-danger, that’s harder to believe. The psychological explanation is just barely plausible: the boys are embarrassed that they have been so easily manipulated by a conman. Then we learn that the three boys were taunted into killing Arnold’s abusive uncle by pushing shards of broken glass into his chest.
That’s where my credulity taps out. I know that people can do horrible things for trivial reasons, but just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s likely. Even if I managed to accept that these particular boys were seduced into committing murder, and they jammed glass into a man’s chest without the shards breaking or deflecting off ribs, I can’t accept the fact that they kept it a secret.
These boys are weak; they have been softened up by a lifetime of parental nagging and would have cracked the first time a police officer lowered an eyebrow. But the slow unspooling of creepy events depends on this implausible inversion of moral strength and weakness. Boys who can be manipulated into murder could just as easily be manipulated into admitting it in an interrogation. Their spasms of weakness and strength feel wrong, and that’s off putting. Given their vivid characterization, it seems far more likely that the boys would have resisted the temptation to commit murder and wilted under interrogation.
I don’t think horror fans share my reservation though, given the book’s popularity. And overall, I liked the book, particularly its depiction of “evil.” Arnold explains that the devil is someone you don’t see directly, only out of the corner of your eye, and that certainly matches Elizabeth’s experience of the flitting shapes that haunt her peripheral vision after Tommy disappears. The implication is that if you are not “direct” or forthright in your dealings, the devil will exploit that flaw and infiltrate your life with flanking movements.
Tremblay's Puritan forebears would have been proud.
I also like Kate’s symbolic struggle to integrate her fragmented personality. After Tommy’s diary pages mysteriously appear, Elizabeth buys a motion activated security camera to see if someone is sneaking them into the house. The camera is controlled by a phone app, and Kate deliberately wanders into camera range so she can watch her own ghostly presence on her phone screen. The fascination with doppelgangers reminds me of Phil Dick’s A SCANNER DARKLY where a police detective becomes psychotic and spies on himself by watching hours of recorded security camera footage from his own home.
Kate recognizes that something is wrong within herself, and she has an impulse to make it right, but doesn’t know exactly how.
How many of us do?
But Kate tries, exhibiting a combination of character strength and weakness that I find compelling.
May 3, 2025
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
What a marvelous first sentence. In a way, it seems a playful justification for the frivolous ghost story that follows: it’s a healthy diversion, an antidote for a stressful life. But the wording is awkward rather than inspirational and “absolute reality” sounds like some sort of dangerous limiting factor like “absolute zero.” The phrase “live organism” is suspiciously broad, too. In fact, the sentence doesn’t just refer to people who need a break, “even larks and Katydids” must dream, and dreaming is a matter of survival. Reality is a malevolent force that inevitably crushes sanity.
As the novel progresses, we see that the category “live organism” includes things like the spirits inhabiting Hill House, and even the physical structure itself.
There is a lot of paranormal busywork going on within Hill House, as if those strange organisms were desperately trying to shake off an oppressive “reality.” It doesn’t work, however; the beings can’t rest in peace. The house is “not sane,” and that’s a remarkable descriptor for a building.
Imagine a real estate ad for the property: “Beautiful rural setting. Whimsical circular room layout. Ornate Victorian furnishings. Interesting history. House not quite sane.”
The ghosts (or poltergeists) in Hill House drive Eleanor Vance mad, but life circumstances certainly softened her up before she even set foot in the building. Eleanor nurses her miserable dying mother for eleven years, then further sublimates her own personality by moving in with a grudging sister and brother-in-law. The two sisters share a car but when Eleanor wants to drive the vehicle to Hill House, it isn’t allowed. “I don’t think we can see clear to letting you borrow my car,” the sister says. When Eleanor insists “It’s half my car,” the fact of her ownership is completely ignored. “I’d never forgive myself, Eleanor, if I lent you the car and something happened.” In Carrie’s home, Eleanor has already become a ghost.
Eleanor sneaks into the garage and takes the car anyway. It’s an act of rebellion that is both healthy and destructive. She feels good about finally asserting herself but also has spasms of paranoia and delusion that seem pathological. Her behavior reminds me of schizophrenics: wondering if other people are secretly talking about her, hearing voices that no one else hears, fits of giggling at private jokes, constructing complex lies about herself. Eleanor frequently adopts a slightly amused expression when she interacts with others, as if she is observing a completely different species.
THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, like much of Shirley Jackson’s work, is about the dangers of introversion. Great stories like “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” “The Possibility of Evil,” and “The Lottery” all feature characters who become fatally untethered from their communities. True, the communities in those stories are largely at fault because they are violent and judgmental but hiding in one’s room or castle isn’t a healthy defense strategy. When every character is solely concerned with their own individual well-being, they aren’t an “aggregate” (to use construction terminology) rather a collection of pebbles.
One of the creepiest incidents in literature occurs when little Davy Hutchinson is given a handful of rocks to help stone his mother to death in “The Lottery.” In THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, that imagery is echoed in a paranormal event where a storm of pebbles inexplicably rains down on Eleanor’s house. (That’s why Dr. Montague invites her to Hill House in the first place, she is presumably receptive to psychic phenomena.) Eleanor’s mother inexplicably blames the bizarre event on neighbors, as if they had all gathered, Lottery-style, outside the house.
The literary rock throwing probably comes from a Hajj tradition, tossing pebbles at three enormous pillars. I think that’s supposed to represent stoning the devil, since Iblis was “pelted” from heaven in The Chapter of S (my favorite part of the Koran). It also recalls the Christian text: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
Well . . . characters in Jackson’s stories are certainly eager to “throw stones,” and their preferred targets are females. They don’t see any downside to being punitive and judgmental; they are introverted rather than introspective.
Since THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE was published in 1959, there have been a lot of popular ghost stories and movies, so some of its plot events feel overly familiar. There is a patch of inexplicable cold at the threshold of a nursery, mysterious knocking on doors, messages scrawled on walls and blood poured on clothing. There is communication with spirits through a “planchette,” or Ouija board. The house is maze-like and suffocating, there are creepy servants who move like automatons. The group meets in Hill House expressly to study the paranormal but get much more than they expect . . .
It’s not “The Ghost and Mister Chicken” or “Thirteen Ghosts,” however. Jackson is a master at creating character groups who are supremely disaffected and fragmented. People in her stories WANT to be sociable but are incapable of meaningful connection, even if ghosts were to be removed from the equation. There is playful banter and sociable drinks when the sun crawls over the yardarm, but everyone knows that the group will separate when the assignment at Hill House is over. Romance, even homoerotic romance, lurks, but it never reaches the status of a casual summer fling. The characters can’t even work themselves up to that level of interconnection.
In its disaffection, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE reminds me of science fiction more than other ghost stories. It’s like Phil Dick’s “Explorers We” where Martians desperately want to be human but keep screwing up because they are elementally different. It’s like Stanislaw Lem’s SOLARIS where the human astronauts come to prefer ghostlike simulacra drawn from their own thoughts to actual people.
Jackson pretends there is an exterior villain: “Hill House itself, not sane, stood against its hills holding darkness within.” But the real problem is a psychological tendency for characters to get lost within themselves. In fact, the most important word in the novel is the last one: “whatever walked there, walked alone.”
Alone.
What a marvelous first sentence. In a way, it seems a playful justification for the frivolous ghost story that follows: it’s a healthy diversion, an antidote for a stressful life. But the wording is awkward rather than inspirational and “absolute reality” sounds like some sort of dangerous limiting factor like “absolute zero.” The phrase “live organism” is suspiciously broad, too. In fact, the sentence doesn’t just refer to people who need a break, “even larks and Katydids” must dream, and dreaming is a matter of survival. Reality is a malevolent force that inevitably crushes sanity.
As the novel progresses, we see that the category “live organism” includes things like the spirits inhabiting Hill House, and even the physical structure itself.
There is a lot of paranormal busywork going on within Hill House, as if those strange organisms were desperately trying to shake off an oppressive “reality.” It doesn’t work, however; the beings can’t rest in peace. The house is “not sane,” and that’s a remarkable descriptor for a building.
Imagine a real estate ad for the property: “Beautiful rural setting. Whimsical circular room layout. Ornate Victorian furnishings. Interesting history. House not quite sane.”
The ghosts (or poltergeists) in Hill House drive Eleanor Vance mad, but life circumstances certainly softened her up before she even set foot in the building. Eleanor nurses her miserable dying mother for eleven years, then further sublimates her own personality by moving in with a grudging sister and brother-in-law. The two sisters share a car but when Eleanor wants to drive the vehicle to Hill House, it isn’t allowed. “I don’t think we can see clear to letting you borrow my car,” the sister says. When Eleanor insists “It’s half my car,” the fact of her ownership is completely ignored. “I’d never forgive myself, Eleanor, if I lent you the car and something happened.” In Carrie’s home, Eleanor has already become a ghost.
Eleanor sneaks into the garage and takes the car anyway. It’s an act of rebellion that is both healthy and destructive. She feels good about finally asserting herself but also has spasms of paranoia and delusion that seem pathological. Her behavior reminds me of schizophrenics: wondering if other people are secretly talking about her, hearing voices that no one else hears, fits of giggling at private jokes, constructing complex lies about herself. Eleanor frequently adopts a slightly amused expression when she interacts with others, as if she is observing a completely different species.
THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, like much of Shirley Jackson’s work, is about the dangers of introversion. Great stories like “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” “The Possibility of Evil,” and “The Lottery” all feature characters who become fatally untethered from their communities. True, the communities in those stories are largely at fault because they are violent and judgmental but hiding in one’s room or castle isn’t a healthy defense strategy. When every character is solely concerned with their own individual well-being, they aren’t an “aggregate” (to use construction terminology) rather a collection of pebbles.
One of the creepiest incidents in literature occurs when little Davy Hutchinson is given a handful of rocks to help stone his mother to death in “The Lottery.” In THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, that imagery is echoed in a paranormal event where a storm of pebbles inexplicably rains down on Eleanor’s house. (That’s why Dr. Montague invites her to Hill House in the first place, she is presumably receptive to psychic phenomena.) Eleanor’s mother inexplicably blames the bizarre event on neighbors, as if they had all gathered, Lottery-style, outside the house.
The literary rock throwing probably comes from a Hajj tradition, tossing pebbles at three enormous pillars. I think that’s supposed to represent stoning the devil, since Iblis was “pelted” from heaven in The Chapter of S (my favorite part of the Koran). It also recalls the Christian text: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
Well . . . characters in Jackson’s stories are certainly eager to “throw stones,” and their preferred targets are females. They don’t see any downside to being punitive and judgmental; they are introverted rather than introspective.
Since THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE was published in 1959, there have been a lot of popular ghost stories and movies, so some of its plot events feel overly familiar. There is a patch of inexplicable cold at the threshold of a nursery, mysterious knocking on doors, messages scrawled on walls and blood poured on clothing. There is communication with spirits through a “planchette,” or Ouija board. The house is maze-like and suffocating, there are creepy servants who move like automatons. The group meets in Hill House expressly to study the paranormal but get much more than they expect . . .
It’s not “The Ghost and Mister Chicken” or “Thirteen Ghosts,” however. Jackson is a master at creating character groups who are supremely disaffected and fragmented. People in her stories WANT to be sociable but are incapable of meaningful connection, even if ghosts were to be removed from the equation. There is playful banter and sociable drinks when the sun crawls over the yardarm, but everyone knows that the group will separate when the assignment at Hill House is over. Romance, even homoerotic romance, lurks, but it never reaches the status of a casual summer fling. The characters can’t even work themselves up to that level of interconnection.
In its disaffection, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE reminds me of science fiction more than other ghost stories. It’s like Phil Dick’s “Explorers We” where Martians desperately want to be human but keep screwing up because they are elementally different. It’s like Stanislaw Lem’s SOLARIS where the human astronauts come to prefer ghostlike simulacra drawn from their own thoughts to actual people.
Jackson pretends there is an exterior villain: “Hill House itself, not sane, stood against its hills holding darkness within.” But the real problem is a psychological tendency for characters to get lost within themselves. In fact, the most important word in the novel is the last one: “whatever walked there, walked alone.”
Alone.
April 24, 2025
Only to Sleep, by Lawrence Osborne (1918)
Apparently, Lawrence Osborne was approached by Raymond Chandler Ltd and asked to write a Phillip Marlow novel in the iconic crime-writer’s style.
I was curious to see how it would work out, because I really like Chandler, but I’m also aware of the casual racism, homophobia and misogyny that marble his work and make it distasteful to modern readers. Would it be possible, I wondered, to excise the rotten bits, or are they integral to the noir package?
For the most part, Osborne delivers a successful update. Partly, that’s due to the novel’s premise: Marlow is 72 years old in ONLY TO SLEEP and has adapted to the modern PC values swirling around him. To a certain extent, he’s a typical grumpy old man who doesn’t understand why Madonna is popular but, mostly, creeping mortality has grabbed him by the lapels and forced him to notice the beauty around him. The world is still a grubby, dangerous place, there are plenty of murdered drug dealers lying in the tall grass. But now, “telltale clouds of butterflies” mark the spots where they fell.
Marlow is dragged out of retirement by two insurance company bureaucrats to investigate a suspicious claim. A heavily insured older man died on a midnight swim and his young widow immediately cremated the remains and cashed in. The company sought out Marlow because he is old, and therefore unobtrusive. He is also fluently bi-lingual and the fraud, if it occurred at all, took place in Mexico.
In the original Marlow books, the detective called Spanish “a beautiful language,” even as he denigrated Mexican characters as “greaseballs” or “spicks.” With age, Marlow has stopped the childish name-calling and allowed generous, long-buried impulses to flourish. He now loves Mexico. Even the roads curve “with operatic courage” and the hummingbirds that flit around breakfast tables are reincarnated spirits of Aztec warriors.
The transformation from jaded tough-guy to slightly-sentimental-old-man feels natural to me, partly because I’m going through similar age-related changes myself. But I also feel it’s a reasonable character development, given the starting raw material. In THE BIG SLEEP, Marlow works through chess problems, alone, when the case stalls. And the novel ends very philosophically: “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower . . .”
Marlow was always more intellectual than the legion of Mike Hammer clones, but he wasn’t a Sherlock Holmes style detective, either. Holmes notices tiny clues overlooked by the police and uses his giant brain to collate scraps of data. Marlow tends to have flashes of psychological insight, which he pursues with Cockroach-like persistence. Marlow keeps intruding into peoples’ lives until they get frustrated and beat him up, more or less advertising their guilt.
ONLY TO SLEEP follows that pattern. Donald Zinn, the elderly insured guy, has always been a grifter, and Marlow immediately suspects his “death” is just another scam to avoid mounting debt. When Marlow interviews Zinn’s beautiful young wife, Delores, that first impression is fortified. So, Marlow follows Delores, knowing she will eventually hook up with her husband to resume their luxurious, parasitic pattern of living. Eventually, Delores gets tired of seeing Marlow every time she looks over her beautiful shoulder and offers to pay him off.
Sure enough, that’s when Marlow gets the crap beaten out of him. He agrees to accept the incriminating payment in a deserted house and is assaulted by a knife-wielding underling. As in the original Marlow books, the violence is a type of psychosis where the henchmen derive a perverse pleasure from their work.
Here, Marlow barely escapes death because he has a sword hidden within his cane. But he’s lost a lot of blood and convalesces in a shady private hospital where he is held prisoner, reminiscent of an episode in FAREWELL MY LOVELY.
Marlow IS like Sherlock Holmes in one respect: they both value their personal sense of justice over conventional law. Several times, Holmes lets a murderer off the hook, if there is an understanding that he will leave England. In ONLY TO SLEEP Marlow doesn’t particularly care that an insurance company has been cheated, and he has no intention of jailing Delores for her part in the crime. (Donald Zinn gets what he deserved when his body is mutilated and stuffed in a sack). Marlow solves the case but doesn't recover the company's cash. He just extorts enough money from Delores to make a restitution payment to Paul Linder’s father. (Paul Linder was the unfortunate person who provided the corpse for Zinn’s insurance scam.)
Marlow feels a sense of closure, helping out another old man who spends his time fishing in a canal that doesn’t have any fish.
Like I said, Osborne successfully eliminates the homophobia and racism that mars Chandler’s work (you need a shower after reading FAREWELL MY LOVELY.) The only complaint I have about this novel is a lingering misogyny. Marlow wasn’t particularly interested in the case until he realized that Zinn’s wife, Delores, was Hollywood-gorgeous—she elevated a stupid, sordid crime into “a beautiful fraud.” I’m not sure why Marlow and other hardboiled detectives can’t be interested in women who are merely attractive in the way ordinary people are attractive; the female leads must be spectacularly, outrageously, jaw-droppingly stunning.
But there’s more to it than mere silliness. When Marlow first meets Delores, her eyes have “the level interest in something new that a leopard has. While it decides whether you can be killed or not, its eyes are remarkably gentle and serene.”
As in Chandler, that type of description is a backhanded compliment. Women are beautiful and exotic, but they are also a different (predatory) species, something to be admired from a safe distance, like animals in a zoo.
They aren't quite human.
If you want realistic depictions of women in a noir setting, you have to read Dorothy Hughes.
I was curious to see how it would work out, because I really like Chandler, but I’m also aware of the casual racism, homophobia and misogyny that marble his work and make it distasteful to modern readers. Would it be possible, I wondered, to excise the rotten bits, or are they integral to the noir package?
For the most part, Osborne delivers a successful update. Partly, that’s due to the novel’s premise: Marlow is 72 years old in ONLY TO SLEEP and has adapted to the modern PC values swirling around him. To a certain extent, he’s a typical grumpy old man who doesn’t understand why Madonna is popular but, mostly, creeping mortality has grabbed him by the lapels and forced him to notice the beauty around him. The world is still a grubby, dangerous place, there are plenty of murdered drug dealers lying in the tall grass. But now, “telltale clouds of butterflies” mark the spots where they fell.
Marlow is dragged out of retirement by two insurance company bureaucrats to investigate a suspicious claim. A heavily insured older man died on a midnight swim and his young widow immediately cremated the remains and cashed in. The company sought out Marlow because he is old, and therefore unobtrusive. He is also fluently bi-lingual and the fraud, if it occurred at all, took place in Mexico.
In the original Marlow books, the detective called Spanish “a beautiful language,” even as he denigrated Mexican characters as “greaseballs” or “spicks.” With age, Marlow has stopped the childish name-calling and allowed generous, long-buried impulses to flourish. He now loves Mexico. Even the roads curve “with operatic courage” and the hummingbirds that flit around breakfast tables are reincarnated spirits of Aztec warriors.
The transformation from jaded tough-guy to slightly-sentimental-old-man feels natural to me, partly because I’m going through similar age-related changes myself. But I also feel it’s a reasonable character development, given the starting raw material. In THE BIG SLEEP, Marlow works through chess problems, alone, when the case stalls. And the novel ends very philosophically: “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower . . .”
Marlow was always more intellectual than the legion of Mike Hammer clones, but he wasn’t a Sherlock Holmes style detective, either. Holmes notices tiny clues overlooked by the police and uses his giant brain to collate scraps of data. Marlow tends to have flashes of psychological insight, which he pursues with Cockroach-like persistence. Marlow keeps intruding into peoples’ lives until they get frustrated and beat him up, more or less advertising their guilt.
ONLY TO SLEEP follows that pattern. Donald Zinn, the elderly insured guy, has always been a grifter, and Marlow immediately suspects his “death” is just another scam to avoid mounting debt. When Marlow interviews Zinn’s beautiful young wife, Delores, that first impression is fortified. So, Marlow follows Delores, knowing she will eventually hook up with her husband to resume their luxurious, parasitic pattern of living. Eventually, Delores gets tired of seeing Marlow every time she looks over her beautiful shoulder and offers to pay him off.
Sure enough, that’s when Marlow gets the crap beaten out of him. He agrees to accept the incriminating payment in a deserted house and is assaulted by a knife-wielding underling. As in the original Marlow books, the violence is a type of psychosis where the henchmen derive a perverse pleasure from their work.
Here, Marlow barely escapes death because he has a sword hidden within his cane. But he’s lost a lot of blood and convalesces in a shady private hospital where he is held prisoner, reminiscent of an episode in FAREWELL MY LOVELY.
Marlow IS like Sherlock Holmes in one respect: they both value their personal sense of justice over conventional law. Several times, Holmes lets a murderer off the hook, if there is an understanding that he will leave England. In ONLY TO SLEEP Marlow doesn’t particularly care that an insurance company has been cheated, and he has no intention of jailing Delores for her part in the crime. (Donald Zinn gets what he deserved when his body is mutilated and stuffed in a sack). Marlow solves the case but doesn't recover the company's cash. He just extorts enough money from Delores to make a restitution payment to Paul Linder’s father. (Paul Linder was the unfortunate person who provided the corpse for Zinn’s insurance scam.)
Marlow feels a sense of closure, helping out another old man who spends his time fishing in a canal that doesn’t have any fish.
Like I said, Osborne successfully eliminates the homophobia and racism that mars Chandler’s work (you need a shower after reading FAREWELL MY LOVELY.) The only complaint I have about this novel is a lingering misogyny. Marlow wasn’t particularly interested in the case until he realized that Zinn’s wife, Delores, was Hollywood-gorgeous—she elevated a stupid, sordid crime into “a beautiful fraud.” I’m not sure why Marlow and other hardboiled detectives can’t be interested in women who are merely attractive in the way ordinary people are attractive; the female leads must be spectacularly, outrageously, jaw-droppingly stunning.
But there’s more to it than mere silliness. When Marlow first meets Delores, her eyes have “the level interest in something new that a leopard has. While it decides whether you can be killed or not, its eyes are remarkably gentle and serene.”
As in Chandler, that type of description is a backhanded compliment. Women are beautiful and exotic, but they are also a different (predatory) species, something to be admired from a safe distance, like animals in a zoo.
They aren't quite human.
If you want realistic depictions of women in a noir setting, you have to read Dorothy Hughes.
March 28, 2025
Dr. Bloodmoney, by Phillip K. Dick
There are a lot of Phil Dick movie adaptations: the Bladerunner films, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck. There’s also a beautiful 10-episode British TV series based on his short stories called “Electric Dreams.”
Apparently, there is even a film version of RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH, about a US president (Ferris F. Freemont) who embraces conspiracy theories, tramples civil liberties and is a Russian asset. I’ll have to check that out.
I’m a big Dick fan (you know what I mean) and my favorite novel is an especially weird one: DR. BLOODMONEY.
The title character is a floridly psychotic physicist who believes he has the power to destroy the earth using mind-power alone. Dr. Bloodmoney thinks people blame him for a disastrous high-altitude atomic bomb test. He worries that angry people will try to kill him, and powerful self-defense mechanisms will kick in, and his brain will scatter-bomb the planet.
It sounds crazy, but he really does have that power. Dr. Bloodmoney wipes out the planet’s infrastructure by initiating a world war, and survivors are forced to rebuild tiny primitive communities. He attacks the planet again, seven years later, but a phocomelus with strong telekinetic powers dashes his brains out before damage is too extensive.
I’d never encountered the word “phocomelus” before reading this book. It refers to a person afflicted with the extreme birth defects associated with the anti-nausea drug, Thalidomide, in the 1960s. “Hoppy” Harrington is repeatedly referred to as “the phocomelus” or “phoc.” He was born without arms or legs, and moves in a crappy, battery-powered government-issue cart with mechanical limb extensions. You’d think Hoppy’s situation would invite sympathy or pity, but it doesn’t. He’s childish and vindictive and people both fear and despise him.
That part of the book reminds me of a famous Sci Fi story called “It’s a Good Life,” by Jerome Bixby. In it, three-year-old Anthony Fremont has God-like powers and everyone in his town desperately tries to placate him, so they won’t be tortured or mutated. Phil Dick was likely influenced by that story, since he echoes the name (Freemont) in RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH. And Dick’s smiling, nervous townspeople remind me of Anthony’s family, walking on eggshells near the powerful little person. In DR. BLOODMONEY, a delegation calls on Hoppy to officially thank him for killing the physicist, and they hope he will be satisfied with their offerings of herbal cigarettes and counterfeit whiskey.
“It’s a Good life” ends with Anthony radically altering the climate after his simple-minded Aunt Amy complains about the heat. Most of the community’s crops are destroyed in the ensuing blizzard, but people still smile and say, “it was a good day,” for fear of something even worse.
In DR. BLOODMONEY, Hoppy doesn’t win; he is killed by someone with even greater telekinetic powers. Bill Keller is a tiny, unborn putative twin who can communicate with the dead. Hoppy recognizes that Bill is a threat and so teleports him from his parasitic lodging in his sister’s abdomen. Floating outside of sister Edie’s body, Bill is quite vulnerable, and he is almost immediately swallowed by an owl. But Bill is a determined little lump. Once the owl vomits him up (it’s what owls do) Bill rolls into Hoppy’s home and forces the phocomelus to swap bodies.
Like I said, it’s an odd book.
DR. BLOODMONEY is mostly concerned with the human stresses of post apocalyptic survival. Bonny Keller sleeps with every man in her community, thinking she is keeping up appearances with a sham faithful marriage. Other people tolerate the behavior because she is so beautiful. Admittedly, standards are low—Bonny Keller is one of the few people who still has her own teeth—but the world is now such an ugly place that any example of beauty is highly valued.
Stuart McConchie used to sell Television sets but after the bombing he sells intelligent vermin traps that can follow mutated cats, dogs and rats into their dens. Psychologically, Stuart is insulated by his old-fashioned salesman’s patter, and his dreams of hitting the big time, if only he can find the right gizmo to sell.
My absolute favorite part of the book is Stuart McConchie’s dazed acceptance of his post apocalyptic world. He goes to San Francisco to buy salvaged electronic parts and casually chats with an army veteran about animal mutations. The veteran says, “I got a pet rat . . . he’s smart; he can play the flute . . . it’s practically an Asian nose flute like they have in India.” But Stuart isn’t impressed by something as mundane as a musical rodent. “I bet you had to make the flute, he couldn’t construct it himself.” Later, Stuart mentions a rat that “worked out a primitive system of bookkeeping.” Now THAT'S first rate.
There’s no fuel for motorized vehicles so Stuart rides a horse named Edward Prince of Wales. Stuart locks the horse’s legs together with a device like a “club,” so people can’t steal him when he’s left unattended. Unfortunately, when Stuart returns from his short boat trip across San Francisco Bay “someone had killed and eaten his horse, Edward Prince of Wales. All that remained was the skeleton, legs and head.”
The horse’s death upsets Stuart, but he isn’t entirely sure why. At one point, he says he “loved” the horse, but he essentially treated it like an inanimate object, a bicycle that could be ignored if it was properly locked up.
And that’s the essence of any Phil Dick book. Characters desperately want to “care” about something or someone, and want to be cared for, in turn, but they don’t know how to do it. In several novels, including his most famous, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, Dick’s characters are compelled to own animals because they are supposed to be empathy starter-kits. The hope is that people will eventually learn to care for each other if they are forced to care for an animal. It generally doesn’t go well. Characters are automatons (sometimes in a figurative sense, sometimes in a literal one) and seem to be missing components necessary to activate the feeling.
When Mr. Hardy, Stuart’s boss, learns about the horse’s death at the hands of homeless army veterans he says, “Somebody ought to drop a cyanide bomb under that pier; they’re down there by the hundreds.” Mr. Hardy is one of the nicer characters because he is generous to his employees, but even he doesn’t see a significant difference between masses of unfortunate people and wharf rats. He has momentary impulses to care, but can’t sustain them.
Another likeable character in the book, Andrew Gill, abandons his wife and family just minutes after the first wave of bombs fall. An initial twinge of guilt is quickly dispatched. “What if Barbara and the boys are dead? he asked himself. Oddly, the idea carried with it the breath of release.” Within a few minutes, Andrew Gill “began to whistle with relief and glee.”
Bonny Keller also abandons her family and travels to San Francisco with Stuart McConchie and Andrew Gill. The novel ends with Bonny looking out Mr. Hardy’s window, watching “mutations of bulldogs,” one animal pulling “a sleigh-like platform . . . loaded with various valuable objects.” The intelligent, tool-making animals seem to be engaged in a type of business, hawking product, much like Andrew Gill with his ersatz cigarettes and Stuart McConchie with his vermin traps.
Bonny notices that the mutant bulldogs are being pursued by one of those intelligent automated traps and her reaction is to “smile.” “The business of the day had begun. All around her the city was awakening, back once more into its regular life.”
In a way, it’s a happy ending because people survive a nuclear disaster, and civilization is slowly rebuilding. But if society returns to the way it was before, to its “regular” robot-eat-dog routine, what has been gained?
After the first wave of bombs, Stuart McConchie hides in the TV shop basement, eats raw rat, and plays chess with a dying radiation burn victim. His situation is pathetic, but he can’t help but think that the old world wasn’t that great, either. His current despair is just “the same old problem that the bomb attack had not created but merely brought to the surface. Now the gulf was wider; it was obvious that he did not actually comprehend the meaning of most activities conducted around him.”
That’s science fiction in a nutshell; the genre’s not really about the future, it’s about the present day, exposing our problems by exaggerating them, offering story arcs with a “wider gulf.”
Phil Dick’s contribution to the genre is a talent for creative absurdity, featuring a revolving cast of androids, mutants, aliens and time travelers—and “normal” people like Stuart McConchie who don’t really know why they’re alive.
Apparently, there is even a film version of RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH, about a US president (Ferris F. Freemont) who embraces conspiracy theories, tramples civil liberties and is a Russian asset. I’ll have to check that out.
I’m a big Dick fan (you know what I mean) and my favorite novel is an especially weird one: DR. BLOODMONEY.
The title character is a floridly psychotic physicist who believes he has the power to destroy the earth using mind-power alone. Dr. Bloodmoney thinks people blame him for a disastrous high-altitude atomic bomb test. He worries that angry people will try to kill him, and powerful self-defense mechanisms will kick in, and his brain will scatter-bomb the planet.
It sounds crazy, but he really does have that power. Dr. Bloodmoney wipes out the planet’s infrastructure by initiating a world war, and survivors are forced to rebuild tiny primitive communities. He attacks the planet again, seven years later, but a phocomelus with strong telekinetic powers dashes his brains out before damage is too extensive.
I’d never encountered the word “phocomelus” before reading this book. It refers to a person afflicted with the extreme birth defects associated with the anti-nausea drug, Thalidomide, in the 1960s. “Hoppy” Harrington is repeatedly referred to as “the phocomelus” or “phoc.” He was born without arms or legs, and moves in a crappy, battery-powered government-issue cart with mechanical limb extensions. You’d think Hoppy’s situation would invite sympathy or pity, but it doesn’t. He’s childish and vindictive and people both fear and despise him.
That part of the book reminds me of a famous Sci Fi story called “It’s a Good Life,” by Jerome Bixby. In it, three-year-old Anthony Fremont has God-like powers and everyone in his town desperately tries to placate him, so they won’t be tortured or mutated. Phil Dick was likely influenced by that story, since he echoes the name (Freemont) in RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH. And Dick’s smiling, nervous townspeople remind me of Anthony’s family, walking on eggshells near the powerful little person. In DR. BLOODMONEY, a delegation calls on Hoppy to officially thank him for killing the physicist, and they hope he will be satisfied with their offerings of herbal cigarettes and counterfeit whiskey.
“It’s a Good life” ends with Anthony radically altering the climate after his simple-minded Aunt Amy complains about the heat. Most of the community’s crops are destroyed in the ensuing blizzard, but people still smile and say, “it was a good day,” for fear of something even worse.
In DR. BLOODMONEY, Hoppy doesn’t win; he is killed by someone with even greater telekinetic powers. Bill Keller is a tiny, unborn putative twin who can communicate with the dead. Hoppy recognizes that Bill is a threat and so teleports him from his parasitic lodging in his sister’s abdomen. Floating outside of sister Edie’s body, Bill is quite vulnerable, and he is almost immediately swallowed by an owl. But Bill is a determined little lump. Once the owl vomits him up (it’s what owls do) Bill rolls into Hoppy’s home and forces the phocomelus to swap bodies.
Like I said, it’s an odd book.
DR. BLOODMONEY is mostly concerned with the human stresses of post apocalyptic survival. Bonny Keller sleeps with every man in her community, thinking she is keeping up appearances with a sham faithful marriage. Other people tolerate the behavior because she is so beautiful. Admittedly, standards are low—Bonny Keller is one of the few people who still has her own teeth—but the world is now such an ugly place that any example of beauty is highly valued.
Stuart McConchie used to sell Television sets but after the bombing he sells intelligent vermin traps that can follow mutated cats, dogs and rats into their dens. Psychologically, Stuart is insulated by his old-fashioned salesman’s patter, and his dreams of hitting the big time, if only he can find the right gizmo to sell.
My absolute favorite part of the book is Stuart McConchie’s dazed acceptance of his post apocalyptic world. He goes to San Francisco to buy salvaged electronic parts and casually chats with an army veteran about animal mutations. The veteran says, “I got a pet rat . . . he’s smart; he can play the flute . . . it’s practically an Asian nose flute like they have in India.” But Stuart isn’t impressed by something as mundane as a musical rodent. “I bet you had to make the flute, he couldn’t construct it himself.” Later, Stuart mentions a rat that “worked out a primitive system of bookkeeping.” Now THAT'S first rate.
There’s no fuel for motorized vehicles so Stuart rides a horse named Edward Prince of Wales. Stuart locks the horse’s legs together with a device like a “club,” so people can’t steal him when he’s left unattended. Unfortunately, when Stuart returns from his short boat trip across San Francisco Bay “someone had killed and eaten his horse, Edward Prince of Wales. All that remained was the skeleton, legs and head.”
The horse’s death upsets Stuart, but he isn’t entirely sure why. At one point, he says he “loved” the horse, but he essentially treated it like an inanimate object, a bicycle that could be ignored if it was properly locked up.
And that’s the essence of any Phil Dick book. Characters desperately want to “care” about something or someone, and want to be cared for, in turn, but they don’t know how to do it. In several novels, including his most famous, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, Dick’s characters are compelled to own animals because they are supposed to be empathy starter-kits. The hope is that people will eventually learn to care for each other if they are forced to care for an animal. It generally doesn’t go well. Characters are automatons (sometimes in a figurative sense, sometimes in a literal one) and seem to be missing components necessary to activate the feeling.
When Mr. Hardy, Stuart’s boss, learns about the horse’s death at the hands of homeless army veterans he says, “Somebody ought to drop a cyanide bomb under that pier; they’re down there by the hundreds.” Mr. Hardy is one of the nicer characters because he is generous to his employees, but even he doesn’t see a significant difference between masses of unfortunate people and wharf rats. He has momentary impulses to care, but can’t sustain them.
Another likeable character in the book, Andrew Gill, abandons his wife and family just minutes after the first wave of bombs fall. An initial twinge of guilt is quickly dispatched. “What if Barbara and the boys are dead? he asked himself. Oddly, the idea carried with it the breath of release.” Within a few minutes, Andrew Gill “began to whistle with relief and glee.”
Bonny Keller also abandons her family and travels to San Francisco with Stuart McConchie and Andrew Gill. The novel ends with Bonny looking out Mr. Hardy’s window, watching “mutations of bulldogs,” one animal pulling “a sleigh-like platform . . . loaded with various valuable objects.” The intelligent, tool-making animals seem to be engaged in a type of business, hawking product, much like Andrew Gill with his ersatz cigarettes and Stuart McConchie with his vermin traps.
Bonny notices that the mutant bulldogs are being pursued by one of those intelligent automated traps and her reaction is to “smile.” “The business of the day had begun. All around her the city was awakening, back once more into its regular life.”
In a way, it’s a happy ending because people survive a nuclear disaster, and civilization is slowly rebuilding. But if society returns to the way it was before, to its “regular” robot-eat-dog routine, what has been gained?
After the first wave of bombs, Stuart McConchie hides in the TV shop basement, eats raw rat, and plays chess with a dying radiation burn victim. His situation is pathetic, but he can’t help but think that the old world wasn’t that great, either. His current despair is just “the same old problem that the bomb attack had not created but merely brought to the surface. Now the gulf was wider; it was obvious that he did not actually comprehend the meaning of most activities conducted around him.”
That’s science fiction in a nutshell; the genre’s not really about the future, it’s about the present day, exposing our problems by exaggerating them, offering story arcs with a “wider gulf.”
Phil Dick’s contribution to the genre is a talent for creative absurdity, featuring a revolving cast of androids, mutants, aliens and time travelers—and “normal” people like Stuart McConchie who don’t really know why they’re alive.
