Author: anitadalton

I Got That B-Movie Autism by @frankenart13

Mirabelle loves to curl up with a good ‘zine.

It’s a small relief to discuss another single-page ‘zine after Chris Mikul’s much longer, research-heavy ‘zines.  I Got That B-Movie Autism is the work of an artist who goes by the moniker frankenart13 across various social media platforms. I really enjoy little ‘zines like these. They are artfully folded, reminding me of passing notes in school or carefully constructing cootie catchers so my friends and I could hopefully determine who we would marry or if we would be rich when we grew up. There is an interesting intimacy to these small ‘zines that draw me in, and I have a lot of them. I hope to one day find all the ‘zines I’ve stashed all over my shelves and stuck in drawers and behave as if I am collecting these little ‘zines rather than haphazardly accumulating them.

This ‘zine has a very specific mission:

If you’ve ever wanted to be recommended 3 obscure and amazing cult movies by an autistic queer dude, then this is the zine for you!

The three movies Frankenart13 wants to share are Reanimator, The Devil’s Carnival and Repo! The Genetic Opera, and I won’t spoil why he wants to recommend them in case you want to buy a copy for yourself.

I will, however, note that The Devil’s Carnival and Repo! The Genetic Opera are both directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. I enjoyed both films when I saw them, years ago, and had no clue who directed either, let alone that it was the same man, though it shouldn’t be surprising because the two films are clearly siblings with similar aesthetics and style.

I  know about Darren Lynn Bousman because I became very interested in the Saw franchise last spring. With the exception of Saw 3D, also known as Saw 7 (because, shockingly, it was the seventh Saw film in the series) and Spiral, I found all of the Saw movies strangely compelling and compulsively watchable. I had dismissed the films as being little more than torture porn, and in a way they aren’t much more than that, but the character arcs, the plot twists and the grimy visuals ensured that even when the films were bad, they were still sort of good. I found myself watching tons of YouTube videos about the franchise, ranking the best and worst traps, best and worst deaths, best and worst characters, etc.

Saw II, Saw III and Saw IV were directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. Chris Rock brought him back into the fold after seventeen years away for Spiral, which was the worst film in the franchise, in my opinion, and I am unable to express exactly why it didn’t hit me the same way the other films did. Others tended to agree with my puzzled dislike. But Bousman’s miss was offset by Saw II, a film that some horror aficionados consider the best horror sequel ever made. They may be right, as I can’t currently think of a sequel that was as good as or better than the first movie. Saw II was pretty good, with interesting character development, some really grody traps (Shawnee Smith in that needle pit…), and some excellent twists. Bousman is a director with a very specific style that I never would have associated with The Devil’s Carnival or Repo! The Genetic Opera. I want to rewatch both and then rewatch Saw II for the umpteenth time and see if I can pick out details that are Bousman-like in all three.

Not all ‘zines will cause this cascade of reaction but it’s always fun when they do. This ‘zine is, in the end, just a piece of artfully folded paper but because of it I’m likely going to spend six hours watching films in a search that has nothing to do with the original content presented in I Got That B-Movie Autism. Good times!

Biblio-Curiosa No. 6 by Chris Mikul

There are a lot of reasons to read Chris Mikul’s work. He’s erudite and has a fondness for the strangeness that is the backbone of this site. He is able to look at terrible literature with a kind intellectualism that I would do well to emulate (there are a couple of books I eviscerated on this site that I want to revisit and see how they read with a more generous, less pedantic eye). He’s introduced me to some amazing books, not the least among them The Pepsi-Cola Addict by June Gibbons, which I’ve had in my possession for a while but have yet to read because I’ve wanted to read it for so long that I feel a weird sort of sorrow at the prospect of losing that feeling of joyful anticipation.

One of the best reasons to read him is his deep knowledge of writers who have more or less been lost to time. There are so many excellent and interesting books that for various reasons slip away from the public eye, and Mikul finds a lot of value in researching such books and the authors behind them. His articles that feature books that are lost or nearly lost to modern readers are fascinating, and at times maddening because I can seldom find copies of the books to read for myself.

There are five articles in Biblio-Curiosa No. 6, and I am limiting myself to the cover story, but bear in mind that the remaining four articles are very much worth reading, especially the analysis of William Nathan Stedman, a poet very much in the running for the worst poet ever. I’m discussing the cover piece exclusively because it is such an excellent example of Mikul’s research chops as well as his affection for the topic as he ferrets out information about forgotten authors and their works.

Few know the name Frank Walford these days, and that is a shame because his books were both ahead of their time in terms of content and because the content itself was often completely lunatic. Mikul’s article focuses on Twisted Clay, a delightfully batshit and sordid book about a psychopathic teenage lesbian. This book was initially published in 1933, and contains violence and sexual implication one does not expect to find in pre-WWII literature.

I’ve noticed that people interact with my work more when there is a cat involved. So here’s Mikul’s ‘zine atop my baffled cat, Calliope.

Twisted Clay is narrated by its protagonist, Jean Deslines. She lives in New South Wales with her father and grandmother. She is, as Mikul points out, “sexually precocious,” and at age twelve was already behaving in a very provocative manner, swimming nude in front of neighbors and attempting to seduce the clergyman her beleaguered grandmother asks to speak to her about her exhibitionism (and it sounds like she very nearly succeeded). Jean is primarily sexually attracted to women and sleeps with the housemaid Jenny, and one wonders how her grandmother felt about having two lesbians in her prim household. Later, Jean’s cousin Myrtle, herself a lesbian, tells Jean that she doesn’t like men so she will likely never marry. When Jean pushes her for more details, she tells the fourteen-year-old Jean to look it up.

Jean reads the sexual arbiters of the time (think Freud and Havelock Ellis) and realizes she is a lesbian and is so appalled by this information that she seeks out a boyfriend, sleeps with him and promptly becomes pregnant. Her father arranges an abortion but this does not change Jean much. In fact, she begins to dress in a manner meant to attract men, and it succeeds, because when her Uncle Harry and Aunt Gabrielle come to visit, Uncle Harry develops a sexual attraction to his young niece, a situation that drives her aunt to despair as she tries to make Jean aware of the situation. Jean toys with the woman, fully aware that her uncle wants to have sex with her, but pretends she doesn’t. When she finally feigns understanding, she immediately accuses her of having a dirty mind. When everyone comes to see what the matter is, Jean adds fuel to the already incendiary situation and her aunt and uncle leave the next day.

Jean’s father speaks to the family doctor, Dr Murray, and they discuss what needs to be done with Jean. Insanely, the doctor recommends that she receive a sort of ovary operation to encourage more feminine behavior, as well as psychotherapy. Jean is thrilled at the idea of psychotherapy because she can “mystify the operator by relating imaginary dreams and fictitious incidents!” She is less enthusiastic about the operation, thinking it would kill her personality and that she would be justified in killing her father in defense to avoid such a death. And this is how this strange girl tries to dissuade her father from forcing the surgery:

“Daddy!”

“Yes, Jean.”

“Dr. Murray said, if he owned me, he would thrash me. Why don’t you thrash me, to see if it should do any good?”

“Don’t be stupid. You’re too old to thrash.”

“I’m not, I’m not! See, here’s your walking stick. Beat me with it, beat me hard!”

“Go to bed, child, and don’t talk nonsense.”

With a quick jerk, I stripped off my pyjama trousers, standing before him nude to mid-thighs, clad only in my dangling pyjama coat. “Beat me, Daddy, beat me hard, beat me till the blood flows. I want you to.”

Okay, so by now it should not surprise anyone that some of Frank Walford’s books got banned and that this book is unlikely to end well for anyone involved.

To avoid going to Europe for the surgery, Jean fakes interest in a grave site in which someone will be buried later that day. Jean’s father takes her to see the grave and she takes him out with a hatchet to the head and pushes him into the grave. But this was a “from the frying pan into the fire” sort of situation because Dr. Murray is given guardianship of her. Jean, once again with her back against the wall, decides to set up Dr. Murray. She senses he is attracted to her so she tries to seduce him and arranges for a policeman to see the good doctor throw himself at her. Alone finally, her father’s ghost appears to her telling her no hard feelings for killing him, but later she hears a voice that tells her she must go to the grave, dig her father up and wrap up his broken skull. She does so but realizes that she didn’t secure her father’s corpse, which could implicate her, so she pretends that she dug her father up because she had overheard Dr. Murray murmur something about killing him. This causes the town to consider Jean a heroine but the voice again speaks up, wanting her to return to bind his wounds a second time. This time Jean’s luck runs out and the police catch her in the act and arrest her. (The plot makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it.)

Sent to a mental asylum, she escapes and turns to prostitution to support herself. She is disgusted by the men she sleeps with but earns a lot of money. Later the voice comes back and tells her to start killing the men who lust after her, and yet again she does what the voice tells her. She runs into cousin Myrtle again, they resume their sexual relationship, but the voice tells her to kill Myrtle, too, and she obliges. Later Jean opens a beauty salon and a gangster takes a shine to her and wants her to join his criminal pursuits. She does and later finds that she is attracted to the gangster and becomes a sort of moll. Life is going as well as it can when one of the policemen who arrested her for killing her father sees her, follows her and manages to get a sample of Jean’s fingerprints. She kills the police officer, but this last murder has her feeling contemplative. She muses about suicide:

Life was not so attractive that I desired to cling to it like a limpet to its rock. I had tasted almost everything but death. Should I…? Why not?

Why not indeed? I leave the reader to wonder what she ultimately does.

This book sounds like a hoot, but the fact that the author was a hoot as well is the icing on the odd cake. Frank Walford was born in Australia in 1882. He was a gifted amateur boxer who could have gone pro had a horse not kicked him in the face, breaking his cheekbones and knocking out a few front teeth. He then decided to purchase a boat and traveled along the Australian coastline and three months later came back to land but the rough company he kept caused him to lose a job with a bank. He then returned to sailing again, and made money fishing and shooting crocodiles. (It’s right about here I need to mention that I am not making any of this up.)

Walton was pretty good with a knife and gun and got to prove his mettle with a knife after a man with a grudge stabbed him in the back, right in his kidney. After he recovered, he challenged the man to a knife fight and severed the tendons in his elbows, ensuring the man would never again stab a man in the back.

He eventually married and had children and began to write. He became involved with a group of writers who called themselves the Blue Mountaineers. Interestingly, the only other member of the group who had some success writing penned a novel that featured an atypical heroine who thinks about suicide when life got too boring. His novel Silver Girl sounds absolutely lunatic. It features a passage wherein a side character realizes his wife gave birth to the protagonist’s child. When the protagonist comes to visit with his new wife, the side character grabs the infant and uses it as cudgel to beat the protagonist’s wife to death.

During WWII, Walford served in the Voluntary Defense Corps and became an avid anti-Communist and continued to write. Mikul observes that it is very difficult to summarize Walford’s style.

He could be coarse…, morbid and willfully perverse, but when he chose to, he could write with great sensitivity and feeling. He had a journalist’s eye for detail, and the settings for his stories are always vividly imagined, no matter how wild the plots became.

I can’t help but marvel that Walford’s work was published, especially Twisted Clay. He really was pushing boundaries, and even now, it seems very likely social media would have come for him and cancelled him had his books been released today. I’ll probably spend the weekend looking for copies of his books and pray they are affordable if I find any.

Check back tomorrow for another Mikul ‘zine before I pivot back to non-Mikul content. Should you decide to purchase a copy, contact Chris at chris.mikul88@gmail.com.

ETA: Holy crap, it turns out that Amazon carries Twisted Clay!

Bizarrism No. 13 by Chris Mikul

Chris Mikul, in addition to authoring several books and the ‘zine Biblio-Curiosa, editions of which I have discussed many times on this site, also authors another ‘zine called Bizarrism. While Biblio-Curiosa focuses on strange or arcane books and the people who write them, Bizarrism is more diffuse, discussing unusual people, places and ideas. For fellow travelers, there is guaranteed to be something in Bizarrism that appeals to their interests.

Before I discuss the content of Bizarrism No. 13, I want to mention how visibly appealing this ‘zine is. Artist Glenn Smith, who has worked with Mikul on other projects, notably his book that documents unusual people, The Eccentropedia, provided illustrations for one of the articles, and Mikul’s photographs from his travels in Singapore are featured in his discussion of Tiger Balm Gardens, as well as on the front and back covers.

Bizarrism No. 13 has nine articles, and five of them earn the description of what I like to call “price of admission,” which means they alone make the ‘zine worth reading. Any piece of media that has one price of admission element gets a thumbs-up, so having five of them in one ‘zine issue is outstanding.

The ‘zine begins with a well-researched article about the fairly famous Somerton Man case, “The Man on the Beach: The Enigma of Somerton Man.” For those interested in unsolved mysteries, they may also know this as the Tamám Shud case. In 1948, a dead man was found sitting back in the sand on a beach in Adelaide, Australia. There were no obvious causes of death and later his death was chalked up to a heart attack. No one had any idea who he was, all possible avenues of identification were either non-existent or led the investigators down labyrinthine paths that never wholly cleared up who he was. Because this man had no clear cause of death, no identification and had taken steps to hide his identity – even the tags and cleaner marks had been removed from all his clothes –  there was some belief that he was a spy from the United States.

Also feeding into this theory was a piece of paper found in his pocket. It was ripped from a library edition of  The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The page had the phrase tamám shud printed on it, which means “it is finished,” with what appears to be an encrypted, very short hand-printed message on the other side. The message has yet to be decoded. Investigation showed links to a woman named Jessica Thomson, a woman who may also have been involved in some sort of espionage, and later her granddaughter, married to researcher Derek Abbott, believed strongly that the Somerton Man had an affair with her grandmother and was her biological grandfather. Later DNA tests disproved this theory, though Jessica revealed in private conversation that she knew the identity of the Somerton Man but would never reveal his name. This article appears to have been written before 2022 because eventually Somerton Man’s identity was discovered and I am not going to spoil this mystery solution here out of respect for any newcomers to this case.

The second article is “A Visit to the Tiger Balm Gardens.” Mikul visited this strange garden in Singapore, filled with bizarre, unsettling sculptures that represented what would happen to certain sorts of sinners when they died. It read like a southeast Asian take on Dante’s circles of hell. For example, one of the statues represented in fairly gory and violent detail how those who engage in selling slaves are cut in half. This was a “price of admission” article for me because I’d never heard of it before and Mikul’s photographs were captivating. In addition to showing his readers this unique and bizarre garden park, Mikul tells the story of the family, specifically two sons, who created this garden after making a fortune selling “Tiger Balm.” Truly a fascinating look at something wholly new to me.

This is followed by a charming, short article called “Nature vs. Nurture.” Here Mikul presents two drawings, one he drew and the other drawn by his father, marveling at the similarity between his and his father’s artistic talents.

The fourth article is another price of admission piece. “Jimmy Savile and the Process Church” was unsettling because it showed that Jimmy Savile left all kinds of little breadcrumbs that if analyzed properly showed who he was and what he was about. For those unfamiliar with Jimmy Savile, he was a British entertainer who had ties to politicians and the royal family, and after his death was revealed to have been a profligate pedophile and necrophile. He spent his life protected from repercussions from his acts, though it seems plenty of people in the British entertainment industry had followed the bread crumbs but couldn’t speak out due to the powerful people who protected Savile.

This article discusses an interview that Jimmy Savile did with the Process Church in 1968 that was printed in the cult’s SEX edition of the magazine they published at the time. The Process Church, undeniably a cult, is seen as either a font of absolute evil that encouraged the Manson murders and Son of Sam killings (Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil details that belief) or a strange but mostly harmless cult that later became Best Friends animal rescue in Utah. Regardless of what the Process Church is or isn’t, the fact remains that the interview, given what we now know about Savile, is creepy

“Eternal Life – Guaranteed” was my favorite article. It discusses Guy Ballard, a miner who evidently stumbled across an ascended master who inspired him to start his own sect that promised immortality. And it makes perfect sense that he was inspired to create his church, which he called I AM, after meeting that particular ascended master because evidently Ballard canoodled with Comte St. Germain. Ballard borrowed heavily from or was inspired by Helena Blavatsky of Theosophy fame, and a lot of the vocabulary and terms used in her beliefs come up in Ballard’s credo. Ballard and his wife, a genteel-appearing harpist, traveled the country with their son to recruit people to his sect. They called themselves Mommy and Daddy and managed to amass a decent following while making a lot of money, and as we all know, money leads to taxes and debtors wanting their share, which never bodes well. This is a whacked religion mini-masterpiece.

“My Favorite Dictators, No. 7: Gaddafi” was, ironically, my least favorite article in the ‘zine and I don’t know why. It’s not the article’s fault, though, and for the right person, this even-handed synopsis of Gaddafi’s life would be a great entry into studying the late dictator. I just despise Gaddafi to the point that I prefer not to think about him. A lot of people in Scotland feel the same way. Luckily, he’s dead now so… yeah.

“The Fabulous Adventures of Denisa, Lady Newborough” is my second-favorite article in this ‘zine because Denisa was wholly new to me and I adore stories of wild women. Much of Denisa’s life cannot be verified, but Mikul still found evidence that showed that at least some of the time Denisa was telling the truth. Born in Serbia in 1913, Denisa ran away to join a circus at age six and learned to walk the tightrope but two years later a family member recognized her and she was sent back home. She continued to run away, eventually making her way to Budapest where she became a nude dancer. She traveled Europe, taking lovers, amassing jewels and even apartments that wealthy men gave her.

The tales of her travels and activities are a hoot but there are a couple of absolutely batshit claims that I just want to believe are true. One is that after she saw his face on a magazine, she realized the man who tried to sweep her off her feet on a train to Rome was none other than Benito Mussolini. He might have succeeded if only his five o’clock shadow hadn’t scratched her neck. Later she claims that she met Hitler and he was very taken with her, declaring that he wished she were German because her beauty was of the Aryan variety. She met Hitler a couple of times but he bored her, gurned his mouth in a way that she found revolting, and she upset him because she smoked. Mikul tends to think Hitler had no interest in a Slavic woman of questionable virtue, but who knows. He managed to pander to Unity Mitford, a tiresome, pudding-faced woman who wore too much makeup, smoked and loved eating meat. There is so much more to this article that I cannot hope to discuss, and I now need to find a copy of her autobiography.

In “The Venice Biennale – 2013” Mikul shares his dismay when he saw what was considered art in the various countries that submitted work to the show. He says, “Depressing is hardly the word for this parade of absolute rubbish masquerading as art.” The entire experience was a let down and Mikul’s disgust and dismay at the state of contemporary art was a pleasure to read. It’s a known fact that bad excursions generate far better stories than good ones and this was strangely satisfying to read.

The final section reviews several books, the most interesting to me being his take on Eugenia by Mark Tedeschi. Eugenia Falleni was a woman, born in 1875, who assumed a male identity and married a woman with a son. It appears as if the wife discovered that Eugenia, who assumed the name Harry Crawford, was really a woman. She later died under very suspicious circumstances and Harry received the death penalty for the murder. The sentence was later reduced to a life sentence and Harry was paroled in 1933. This book review stood out to me for the stupidest reason – Harry Crawford bore a startling resemblance to disgraced talk show host Ellen Degeneres.

There are a lot of modern magazines that wish they could be as interesting, well-laid out and as visually appealing as this one-man ‘zine (though maybe I should say two-man because Glenn Smith’s drawings add to the value). If you would like to order this or any Bizarrism back issues, contact Chris at chris.mikul88@gmail.com.

A Day in Rennes-le-Château by Chris Mikul

Chris Mikul is a guru of the weird and bizarre and I’ve said before that I want to be him when I grow up.  I probably won’t be able to move to Australia and make a living writing about weird people, odd books and strange places, but I can discuss his work and that’s a decent compromise, I think.

Chris is the author of several books, three of which I’ve discussed here. He also produces amazing ‘zines, notably Biblio-Curiosa and Bizarrism. Because the former deals with odd books and the people who write them, I’ve discussed several editions of Biblio-Curiosa on this site, and this week I finally will discuss a couple of editions of his equally delightful Bizarrism. Today, I want to share with you a one-off ‘zine he published, A Day in Rennes-le-Château. Should you want to order any of the ‘zines I discuss here, contact Chris at chris.mikul88@gmail.com.

This ‘zine is an intelligent and eminently readable synopsis of the ideas that make up the famous conspiracy that authors Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent, and Richard Leigh shared in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which led to Dan Brown’s bestselling book, The Da Vinci Code. A nice bonus are the sketches that Chris Mikul drew when he visited Rennes-le-Château and saw first hand the weirdness that inspired the belief that Christ was married to Mary Magdalen and she bore him children who carried on Christ’s bloodline. Two of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Lincoln was not a party to the lawsuit) tried to sue Dan Brown for using (rather heavily) their research to create his fictional work, but in the end they were hoisted by their own petard. They insisted that their book was a recitation of historical fact, but historical fact cannot be copyrighted, and that was why they lost the lawsuit.

I have to admit that I often get a bit tangled up discussing all the history involved in this conspiracy theory because it is pretty labyrinthine, but Mikul does an excellent job breaking it down. Short version but not really: A priest named Bérenger Saunière in 1891 renovated a completely run-down church in the Languedoc region of France. Inside of what is described as a “hollow pillar” he found four “parchments.” Two had been written by a priest, Abbé Bigou, and the other two parchments were much older. No one knows exactly what was on those parchments, but after the discovery, Father Saunière became wealthy.

As Saunière displayed his new wealth, it caused people to wonder exactly what Saunière found in the old church, leading them to believe one of the parchments told the location of a treasure. Many people began to dig around and under the church to find hidden treasure, eventually causing town officials to ban digging there because there were fears that all the tunnels dug under the town could result in collapse.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail examined the significance of the church’s location in the Languedoc region, where Cathars, a medieval sect of Christianity, were sought out and persecuted, eventually being exterminated in a “mountain top” fortress. Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh believe that a few of the Cathars smuggled out all the Cathar treasures and possibly secreted them at or near Rennes-le-Château.

Alongside the theory that Cathar treasure was the source of Saunière’s sudden wealth, is the Knights of Templar connection. The Knights of Templar was created to protect Christian pilgrims as they traveled to the Holy Land. The group grew in power and wealth and eventually the King of France decided to wipe them out in order to take the group’s land and riches. Some believe the Knights knew they would soon be attacked and made moves to hide and protect their most precious relics. One of those relics may have been the Holy Grail, the cup Christ drank from at the Last Supper. Another was possibly proof that the bloodline of Jesus was represented in the Merovingian dynasty that ended in 679 AD when King Dagobert II was assassinated. The Priory of Sion, founded at the same time as the Knights Templar, maintained in secret the records that purportedly proved Jesus was the patriarch of the Merovingian dynasty.

Click to see a larger image.

The Merovingian angle was the crux of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, but later that thesis was disproven when it was shown that the records the Priory of Sion were protecting were forgeries. But even with that revelation, there were still plenty of things left to ponder, chief among them: how did the penniless Saunière acquire his wealth (probably by selling Masses)?

The best part of this ‘zine is Mikul’s discussion of his trip to see Rennes-le-Château, where he made sketches of the church and the weird stuff inside of it. For example, Saunière installed a giant statue of Satan that held the fount of holy water. The statue of Satan at one point held a pitchfork but it was removed for safety reasons. Painted on a wall near the statue is Christ ministering to followers with a bag of money on the ground. The signs of the cross were arranged counter-clockwise. Statues of Joseph of Arimathea and Mary, standing side by side, are each holding an infant. One depiction of Jesus shows him wearing Scottish plaid, and there is a depiction of Jesus being taken into the tomb at night rather than the afternoon as the bible describes.

Mikul goes on to outline various problems in Saunière’s story, softly debunking the story of Jesus’ descendants without being as pedantic about it as I would be had I written this ‘zine.  Even so, I find the Merovingian Jesus theory interesting and entertaining, and thoroughly enjoyed reading this ‘zine. Mikul included a “further reading” list, and I’ve read them all. The most entertaining of them all is Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail. Rat Scabies, the former drummer for The Damned, goes to France to hopefully dig up the Holy Grail. He even procured a metal detector for the search. The book caroms from one ridiculous situation to another and you should probably read it.

More Chris Mikul gems will pop up this week. See y’all soon.

CRY; or Where Did I Get This and Why Did I Buy It?

At times it is unsettling how many books, magazines and such that I have that I absolutely do not remember buying. Sometimes the media is something Mr OTC purchased that ended up in my various shelves and stacks, but this is not one of those times because CRY is definitely not something he would be interested in. He’s ex-military. He has very little interest in human carnage. While I have less and less interest in the visceral nature of violence, I suspect the hook was the synopses of accidental and lonely deaths rather than the violent and sexually disturbing collages that make up half the content in the ‘zine.

Don’t ask why there is a pig reading a cell phone while using the toilet in our true crime section. I don’t know the answer to that either.

This is a provocation ‘zine, a descendant of very shocking provocative ‘zines that drew me in when I was much younger. Opinions will vary but the apex of provocation ‘zines was during the eighties and through the mid-nineties. Though a lot of provocation ‘zines are still a thing, the fact is that the early generation used images that were genuinely shocking. Late Boomers and Gen-Xers had a lot of fears – nuclear war, AIDS, the specter of shorter lifespans and worse economic fates than our parents experienced, the sudden rise of serial killers, among them – but we didn’t have the non-stop barrage of horribleness that has become common today. ‘Zines that showed us horrible images alongside horrible text, be it fiction or non-fiction, still had the power to shock.

The shock often came from a place of incompleteness. For instance, I had of course seen victims of the Holocaust in movies and knew there were CIA-funded wars happening in Central America. But I had never seen photos of bulldozers pushing emaciated corpses into pits or naked men being attacked by dogs while members of the SS garrison stood watching and laughing. I had not seen the broken and buried bodies from the El Mozote massacre. But ‘zine makers had access to such photos (and how some of them got their hands on some of the rarer photos is still a matter for discussion) and they shared how it is that even the most shocking violence is almost always far worse than we could imagine and that there is an ocean of cruelty, misery and horror we don’t know about. Provocational ‘zines were how I learned about the ways animals are treated in the food industry, and those pictures of torture I could barely imagine then haunt me to this day.

Such shock is useful to the reader. It was certainly helpful to me. It was part of becoming an adult, of raising the curtain and seeing what is really happening.

In the case of CRY, I don’t find much that is helpful, probably because I’ve reached the point to where I’ve seen every sort of atrocity outside of child pornography so it’s pretty hard to provoke me.  However, it is important to remember that sometimes even provocative ‘zines are less a desire to punch the audience in the face than an attempt to communicate inner turmoil or to share links between social phenomena that few others can see.

The purpose of this ‘zine is unclear to me and that I don’t know who created it doesn’t help. Google “cry” and “‘zine” and let me know how it goes for you.  I do know the ‘zine was released after 2015 because the first collage featured in the ‘zine contained stills from a video that became notorious in gore and criminal justice spheres online. In 2015, a fourteen-year-old girl in Rio Bravo, Guatemala was brutally beaten by a mob and then set on fire. Townsfolk believed she was involved in the murder of a taxi cab driver, but whether or not she was really involved is still open for debate. The two men she was with fled and left her behind to deal with the angry mob. The creator of this ‘zine opened with images of her, without any explanation, so clearly her story has some larger purpose grounding this ‘zine.

The Rio Bravo images are followed by a disturbing collage that incorporates human faces and spiders, which itself is followed by another collage, featured in black and white on one page and in color on the other. The images in this collage are from gonzo and humiliation porn, with images of snarling dogs, genital torture and, most disturbingly, the face (and only the face) of a little girl. The women in these images are vomiting, dressed as barn animals, covered in feces, and screaming. The title of the piece is “Smile for the Camera.” This brutality is followed by a two-page color collage of a woman’s face covered with what appears to be an aborted baby.

After the collages are four news-style stories about death. Minimal research of the names involved lead me to believe all these deaths were made up, which makes the meaning in them all the more important. The stories are about a father who accidentally ran over his daughter when she fell off the boat he was driving, a father and son who died drowning while on vacation, a nightcrawler who ended up recording his own death in a car accident, and a man whose suicide isn’t noticed for weeks.

Since the author created these sad stories, they aren’t just sad stories about unexpected death with a heavy emphasis on parents who wished they could have saved their children. Where I run aground is trying to marry the four stories with the collages that come before them. Is the theme the notion that parental love cannot stop atrocity, be it saving a child from drowning, from mob violence, or from being abused in extreme porn? If so, it’s sort of a tenuous link.

Outside of that shot in the dark, I am unsure what the creator was going for. And the hell of it is, maybe he or she had no greater goal than to present upsetting images and stories that show the futility of existence, or perhaps there is no greater idea behind the desire to shock or upset, a valid goal for reading such ‘zines. In the end I have no idea. Which is sort of fitting since I have no idea who made this ‘zine, where I got it, and why I bought it.

But also in the end, artistic endeavor has value in itself outside of the meaning people like me ferret out of it. That’s a hard pill for me to swallow because my life is dedicated to ferreting out meaning but however I look at it, CRY forced me to interact with the content, and that has a value to it as well.

Next week expect some Chris Mikul ‘zines to be discussed as I gather steam to tackle the very intense and wordy Q-Anon-ish ‘zine that I both dread and am strangely excited about reading. Wish me luck.

Catsploitation: A Zine Celebrating Horror Fans & Their Cats

It’s interesting how many of my more recent ‘zine purchases are strangely sweet. During my own ‘zine heyday back in college and shortly after, most of the ‘zines I purchased were decidedly dark. I know there were some very sweet ‘zines available during that time, but I guess I didn’t come across them or I myself was in a place mentally and socially wherein I sought out harsher fare. The ‘zines I have bought in the last ten years have strands of cuteness or charm that run through them. I have some darker ones to share this month, but I guess what I am saying is that it may be true that we mellow when we age.

Today’s offering is the amusing Catsploitation from 2017. I do not recall where I got it, but it’s published by a guy named Matt and you can contact him via catsploitation@gmail.com. Insanely, again the only place I could find to purchase it was on Etsy and it was awesome to see that there is a part two and a part three available. The first and second editions are only available in digital form, but part three, which is devoted to black cats, is still analog and I bought it as soon as I saw it.

Black cat lying on an orange and blue blanket, with a purple 'zine next to her.
Clio’s expression tells me she knows the black cat edition is on its way and I better have a salmon Churu waiting after her next photo shoot.

 

 

This ‘zine is one of those “my people” ‘zines. You pick up the ‘zine, flip through it, and realize you are among your own kind.

Catsploitation contains photos of horror lovers and their cats, next to interview questions they answered. I think the best way to illustrate what I mean is to reproduce the main questions and answer them myself.

Your top 5 favorite horror/cult movies: Near Dark, Dark Song, May, Halloween, Beyond the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (Saw franchise and Pan’s Labyrinth are close behind them)

What horror title best describes your cat(s): Clio is the most endearing, silly cat and I can’t think of a film with a horror plot that features a beautiful young woman with a five second attention span who is always ready to sit on your shoulder.

Calliope can best be described by As Above So Below because she mirrors her sister when they sit on a cat tree, occupying the space on the level directly under her. Clio on top, Calliope right underneath, in the same pose.

Pretty Polly Puddin’ Pants is easily described by Drag Me to Hell because that’s what you feel is happening to you when she uses the litter box.

Boo Radley is best described by It Follows because he is always right behind you.

Mirabelle embodies The Lurker because she’s often around corners, peering at you, watching your every move.

What iconic horror villain does your cat act like: Clio is most like Dracula as played by Nicholas Cage in Vampire’s Kiss because she is insane and likes to eat bugs.

Her sister Calliope is most like Michael Myers from Halloween because she never speaks and seldom makes any noise.

Pretty Polly Puddin’ Pants reminds me of the very elderly vampire in the movie version of What We Do in the Shadows because she is old and wants to be left alone.

To Kill a Mockingbird is not a horror movie but needless to say, Boo Radley reminds me of Boo Radley, who isn’t a villain but still…

Mirabelle doesn’t really act like a horror villain. She’s just a tiny little calico cat who really likes treats. If there is a female horror villain who is cute and aloof and adheres to a rigid snack schedule, then that’s who she is like.

What do you think the connection is between loving horror (movies/art) and loving cats: I think cats are perfect little murder machines. They play with their prey before killing it. They even kill just for sport. They are fast, sleek and you can often be alone with a cat in a room and not know it is creeping up on you until it jumps up and hogs the blanket. They can tiptoe across a dresser without moving a thing. Were cats human and humans their prey, we’d all be dead. But they aren’t. They’re furry creatures we can smooch on the head and dress in little hats, and there’s something heady about having these little murder muffins purring when you feed them and curling up next to you for a nap. It’s like owning chaos.

I hope there is a Catsploitation 4 in the works and I also hope Matt sees this and invites me to participate. But until then I will cherish my copy of number three when it comes in. Clio can nap easy… for now.

Revisiting Lost Things via Frightening Trees

Have you ever had a slump that lasted far longer than seems possible? Like for years? And you’re unsure why the passions that meant the world to you for decades became pale and wavering, weary symbols of a better self you feel is dead and gone?

But then you find yourself tearing your office apart to find a roll of sticky dots to affix to the back of a piece of plastic that you press against your shower tiles to hold up your razor but you can’t find them? And as you are digging around in the back of your filing cabinet, you find a stack of old ‘zines that reminded you that once you were a person who constantly found interesting things to share with people? That once the world was a fascinating place full of interesting people with interesting ideas doing interesting things and you somehow forgot? Has that happened to you?

Just me?

Regardless, I never found the sticky glue dots but found a cache of ‘zines, some old, some more recent, and as I was looking through them, I felt something similar to the feeling I had when I launched this site. There is a world of fascinating, interesting people making fascinating, interesting things and I found myself wanting to talk about my stack of ‘zines. I have stacks of interesting things all over this house that I want to share.

It’s kind of weird, how a micro ‘zine about dangerous trees can be the fuel that rekindles your desire to salvage your fifteen-year-old site, but in a way it makes perfect sense.

It’s a piece of paper. It truly is a micro ‘zine. But in that piece of paper, someone organized data, arranged it artfully, folded it carefully and shared their passion for savage trees. It’s a labor of love spurred on by a sort of incredulous awe that we live in a world wherein there are trees that are suicidal. Trees that explode. Trees that can kill you 100 years after they are dead.

Arboreal Nightmares discusses six horrible trees that a city-dweller like me has never encountered and never would have imagined existed. This is the stuff of dark fairy tales. These are the trees that remind you that the world is so much more than it appears to be, and even when it appears to be awful, it’s still very interesting if we pay attention. Interesting and awful beats the numb status quo every time.

My favorite tree in Arboreal Nightmares is hura crepitans, or the “fruit grenade.” Here’s what you need to know about this tree that really should be used in a horror movie sometime soon:

First, the benignly named Sandbox Tree is covered in large, vicious black spikes. Second, it produces fruit grenades. Upon ripening, the fruit of the Sandbox Tree explodes like a hand-grenade. The force of the explosion can send seeds 100 feet away at 150 mph. Anything or anyone in the way will not come away unscathed…

How can I stop writing about the things I read when I now know there are trees that can kill me with their exploding fruit? I realize this sentence may not make sense to a lot of you, but if it does, then you are the target audience for this site and I should create some sort of newsletter.

So I’m going to dig around in my ‘zines and write until October comes when we’ll take a sharp turn into horror territory. I’m worried that I can’t find my copy of Blow My Colon, the shitty convenience store job edition, but I did find my copy of Johnny Marr’s Murder Can Be Fun, the children edition. I’ve got hardcore Q-Anon proclamations, lots of horror movie analyses, old-school artistic shock, and so much more. I also ordered some new ones because I was so delighted at how just seeing this little bit of folded paper reignited my desire to talk to people about the odd stuff that comes across my radar.

I don’t have Arboreal Nightmares‘ author’s name, but if you are interested, you can find your own copy here.

I checked out the other little ‘zines this store offers and am pretty sure I will need to get a copy of the lighthouse murders and the reviews of various pumpkin-flavored foods.

See you here tomorrow when we’ll have a look at cats and horror films!

The Ghosts of My Friends, created by Cecil Henland

Book: The Ghosts of My Friends

Creator: Cecil Henland

Type of Book: Autograph book, novelty

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it’s just such an interesting intersection between sentimentality, Rorschach’s test, and the turn of the century interest in klecksography.

Availability: This is a vintage book. I cannot seem to find the date this book was published but the earliest signed signature in my copy is in December, 1907. There were two editions from London and New York.  The copy I bought from a rare book shop on Abe Books, is a London edition, published by Dow & Lester, and at this moment there is no genuinely vintage edition of this book from either printing for sale on any of my go-to shops for interesting books.

Comments:  I have been doing a lot of genealogy research lately and have been beating my head against a wall where one branch of my family tree is concerned. I simply cannot find proof that the man who may be one of my seventh great-grandfathers had a son with the name of one of my actual sixth great-grandfathers. It is unlikely this research block will be solved by DNA testing yet I spat in a tube for half an hour and mailed it off anyway. I’ve also been cleaning up and reorganizing some bookcases and came across my copy of this delightful little book. I sat down for a moment to flip through it and look at the little ink blot signatures and with several ancestry research sites open on my computer, I decided to plug in the names because it seemed like a reasonable thing to do at the time.

I didn’t discover that a famous or notorious person signed this copy of The Ghost of My Friends but the amount of time I spent looking into the people who signed and the history of the book, I realized I should probably write about it.

The signatures in this book may initially bring to mind the Rorschach ink blots used to make personality determinations based on what it is people see when they view a symmetric, but otherwise random image. However, for the purposes of this discussion I think it’s best to look at the 19th and early 20th century fads around ink blots, and this decision has everything to do with the fact that I have spent far too much time lately investigating the administration of the Rorschach test to be able to speak about it in under five thousand words or so.* There was a surprising amount of interest in seeing images in ink blots prior to the creation of the Rorschach test in the 1920s, and while those fads certainly influenced Rorschach, they are interesting in and of themselves.

One such example was the work of a poet called Justinus Kerner, who was also a medical doctor, entry-level occultist and first identified botulism (people had a lot more free time back then because there was no Twitter). Due to failing eyesight, Kerner often marred his paper with ink blots, and one day, after examining some of the crumpled pieces he thought were ruined, he noted that when folded in half the ink made an interesting pattern. He decided to make more ink blot art and used those patterns to illustrate a book of poetry called Kleksographien, which you can and should look through in its entirety, and it is believed that Rorschach had access to the book. The title, translated into English, is “klecksography” and that literally means “making ink blots.”

Klecksography became a popular pastime for children during the late 1800s. I found references on Wikipedia and across various blogs to one klecksographic game called Gobolinks or Shadow-Pictures For Young And Old, which amazingly has been reprinted. You can also thumb through the original version on Project Gutenberg. The game encouraged children to make monsters out of ink blots, which in turn were used to stimulate their imagination by creating stories about those monsters, the so-called “gobolinks.” This book is a descendant of such games, rather than a tool meant to genuinely analyze behavior or personality.

The Ghosts of My Friends was the creation of Cecil Henland, and I can find very little out about her life. In fact, I found out more concrete information about her husband than I did about her. The most I could come up with about her was from a message board devoted to fountain pens. User cercamons discovered that Cecil was a woman, something that is good to know before one writes a long article making assumptions about the implied gender of the name “Cecil.” Cercamons discovered that Cecil was a “founder of a nursery school system in England and the widow of Lt. Col. Arthur Jex-Blake Percival, who was killed in battle in November 1914.” Click on the image for the larger version to see all the very interesting books Cecil Henland created, including Hand of Graphs. I can find out nothing about Hand of Graphs yet I somehow know I want this book very badly.

The first page offers some useful instructions and it’s interesting to note that later entries are less distinct than earlier ones, lacking the smudging and theatricality of earlier blots. I lack the will to determine if fountain pen technology improved from the 1900s through the 1930s but one presumes that it did. Perhaps the parts of the pen that control how the ink funneled down into the nib became more refined. Regardless, anything that improved ink flow and prevented ink from spotting the page affected the drama of ink blot ghosties. You can see this play out in one of the ghosts from 1932. Not enough ink leaked out to leave a proper image on both sides when the paper was folded.

 

Now for the ghosts!

The first page is signed by C.W. Fendick on December 1907. Because Ancestry.com exists, I easily tracked down the Fendick family in a 1911 census record. This is the pater familias, one Charles William Fendick. He was 42 or 43 when he signed this. He was married to a woman named Selina, and in 1911 they had five children: Margaret Selina, Charles Percy, Edith Helen Alice, Sidney Walter, and Reginald Stanley. I’m glad people printed their names but I also wish I could unsee the printed name until I tried to decipher the signature. But when the printed name is illegible, it’s just as bad because most of the time I need the printed name to discern the name in the signature ghost. So there you go.

Were I to hazard a guess, I would say this book belonged to Margaret Selina Fendick. There is no inscription to prove this, but later in the book, on December 26, 1930, we see the ghost of a man named Arthur Mayn. Margaret married an Arthur Mayn on October 20, 1923. It looks like this little book was signed mostly around the holidays. I can’t help but think that Margaret was reminded of this book around the holidays in 1930 – her father, mother and brother Sidney signed it again on December 12, 1930 – and she signed it with her married name and got her husband to sign it, too. Margaret Selina would have been 15 or 16 years old during the first volley of signatures. It seems like this novelty book would have been a fun gift for a teen girl. Something else that lends credence to the idea that this book belonged to Margaret Selina is that one of the first signatures in the book belongs to “Edith Vickery.” I found an Edith Vickery in Essex who would have been about 14 or 15 years old when she signed, making her the right age to be a school friend of Margaret’s. Other surnames appeared in the book as well, like Poole and Cooper, but I did not research them because at some point even I know when I have gone on far too long.

The book is fairly fragile so we did not scan every autograph in the book. We grabbed the “ghosts” who seemed most interesting to us. I’m including my two favorites in a larger size but you can click on any image to get a closer look.

If you don’t see a teddy bear peeking up at you over the top of the signature, can we even be friends?

One cannot help but feel that within young Edith Vickery was a butterfly waiting to burst forth from this adorable caterpillar.

There is something very Creature from the Black Lagoon about Jack’s signature.
There’s something a bit sinister yet cute in this ghost. This is from Sidney Fendick. To me the top half looks a bit like a small demon jumping for joy.
I see something bunny-ish in Edward Bonner’s tentative ghost.
Here we see that improved fountain pens reduced leaking, which in turn made it hard to transfer excess ink when the paper was folded. Mr. Poole was unable to make a ghost at all.

One thing I really found interesting in this book was that people re-signed the book, often with over two decades between signatures. That means we can see how the “ghost” changed over time. I’m including examples from Margaret’s parents, CW Fendick and Selina Fendick, as well as Margaret herself.

Today’s entry has been brought to you by enormous AI-generated ancestry databases and late Victorian fountain pens. I wish I had more reason to write with pen and ink. If I tried to do an ink blot ghost signature, it would likely look like a large A followed by random squiggles, and the only ghost one would see would be that of my muscle memory for handwriting. Though this book cost far more than was likely reasonable, I’m glad I grabbed the copy when I saw it. I don’t think I know how quickly time is passing and the recent past becoming relic until I stumble across books like these.

 

*I have been researching Rorschach tests because of the work I am still doing on my book about failed assassin, Arthur Bremer. I am indeed still working on the book, I suspect I will always be working on the book in some manner, but hope the actual work anyone would be interested in reading will come to an end this year. Arthur played hilarious games with earnest psychiatrists who asked him to describe what he saw in ink blots. Yeah, he shot four people and was sort of a proto-but-largely-benign-incel, but his therapeutic chicanery made me feel very fondly toward him.

Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Book: Tender Is the Flesh

Author: Agustina Bazterrica

Type of Book: Fiction, horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: I had to read it twice to really get it, and when I got it, I felt compelled to write this monster of a discussion. Anything that inspires this much of a reaction has to be a bit odd.

Availability: Originally published in 2017 by Scribner, the English translation was published in 2020 by Pushkin Press. I read the Kindle version, but you can also get a paper version here:

*some links in this book discussion may be affiliate links to Amazon*

Comments:  Before I begin, let me be very clear on two points: this will be a very long discussion and I will be spoiling the novel entirely. If you have not read this book yet, and want to experience it fully, read this discussion after you have finished the novel.

So many people have discussed this novel in depth, paying a lot of attention to the dystopian nature of ecological destruction, the presciently eerie notion of a virus completely changing how the world lives, the repulsive brutality and cruelty that parallels American husbandry and slaughter of animals, and the notion of how fascism can quickly other entire sections of the population. These are unavoidable themes in this book, and so much happens in this short novel that it’s shocking how hard it can be to focus in on one area to discuss. Initially I was taken by the comparisons between modern butchery of animals and the ways humans designated as “special” meat in the novel are treated. However, when I reached the end, it was so brutal and stunning that I wondered if it was an unfair conclusion. I felt like the author had placed behavioral red herrings throughout the novel, forcing the reader to believe that the protagonist was a much different man than he really was.

I reread the book with the ending in mind and realized that was far from the truth. Bazterrica’s work has been translated into English, so there is no way that I can assert that what I read was exactly as Bazterrica wrote, but the translation neatly shows how wrong I was to think the ending came out of nowhere. As I reread I paid attention to the way the protagonist, Marcos, interacts with the women in the novel. Through his interactions with them, he shows the reader who he is, what he genuinely believes, and how his hypocrisies may uncomfortably mirror our own. This isn’t a feminist analysis but this is a novel that revolves around fecundity, sterility, and the ultimate separation between the good woman and the bad, the Madonna and the whore, domesticity and wilderness, and Marcos’s character is best revealed through the women in this book.

A short(ish) summary is needed before I discuss Marcos and the women who show who he is. This novel takes place in a dystopia in the not-too-distant future where a virus fatal to humans is found in all known terrestrial animals and birds. These animals are hunted almost as close to extinction as possible, but the need for meat causes society to slowly begin to rationalize, then legalize cannibalism. Those selected for meat are marked and branded and their lives and fertility are controlled in order to maximize meat production, while less ethical uses of these humans in hunts and terrible medical experiments are also legal. Marcos, our protagonist, lives alone in the country. His wife has gone to live with her mother after their infant son died in his sleep. Marcos is the right hand man for the owner of a meat processing facility, and his job is taking a terrible mental toll on him. One day he is given a female head (as in head of cattle, and note that when the terms “female,” “male” or “specimen” are used in direct quotes from the book, as well as “head,” the subject is a human being used as livestock) because a head supplier is trying to curry favor with Marcos. The arrival of this female sets in motion the events in the novel, set alongside the complete degeneration of human decency, because even if human meat isn’t cheap, life itself is and entire subclasses of people struggle to survive.

Marcos has reached a place of disgusted acceptance of his job and his life. He trains people to effectively and hopefully humanely stun and slaughter head, but also rejects and blacklists those whom he considers little more than serial killers or violent sadists looking to channel their urges into a paid job. He is forced to interact politely with companies and people who buy head in order to hunt them or perform terrible experiments on them, and he despises those people for purchasing the very product he sells. He holds in contempt those who refuse to engage in the social niceties that permit and absolve blame for legalized cannibalism, but also hates those who wholly engage in the social narrative. It’s hard for those around him to match his own back and forth, but those who do are treated far better than those who are complete outliers from the cognitive dissonance that governs his behavior.

There are six female characters in this novel who characterize Marcos. Mari is a secretary at Krieg and has worked there for years, for so long that she even knew Marcos’ father, who was also in the meat processing industry. Dr. Valka is a medical researcher who runs an appalling lab devoted to torture. Spanel is a woman who runs her own butcher shop and is utterly without empathy or sentimentality. Marisa is his sister, a vapid, shrill woman with social aspirations and very little in the way of maternal feeling for her two children. Cecilia, his wife, is a nurse and is emotionally devastated after they lost their baby, Leo, following years of fertility treatment. Finally, the most and strangely the least important woman in the novel is a female head who is eventually named Jasmine.

Tender Is the Flesh doesn’t necessarily bring anything new to the table. Media has offered a lot of movies and books about cannibalism in recent years. If you’ve read Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopic Never Let Me Go, you’ve gone down a path parallel to the one this book travels. Human beings are able to jump through some mighty twisty hoops to be able to justify our own craven desires. We tolerate abuses to other classes of living creatures that we would never stomach for our own. But Bazterrica does not focus on the people who are ill-used, as Ishiguro did. She shows the carnage and acrobatic moral relativism through the eyes of a man who seems like he is fairly resolute in his revulsion for the human meat market. We like Marcos because he seems more like us than anyone else in this novel’s hellscape. But the ending puts into question whether or not Marcos is a man dealing with the hand he has been dealt or if he is a plotting, opportunistic monster, and if that is the case, what does the novel tell us about ourselves? We are rooting for the best villain in a novel fairly teeming with them.

My very long analysis continues under the cut.

Continue Reading “Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica”

Workplace Horrors: a Quick Look at Matías Celedón and Christopher Fowler

Books/Authors: The Subsidiary by Matías Celedón and “Wage Slaves” from the Christopher Fowler* short story collection, Personal Demons

Types of Books: Celedón: fiction, art novel, conceptual novel, horror /  Fowler: fiction, horror, short story collection.

Why Do I Consider These Books Odd: Celedón’s work is odd because it encapsulates the plot of any number of two hour horror films into one 197-page book that has 1000 words or less, all written with a hand stamp and a pad of black and red ink. Fowler’s work is odd because his early work is so criminally under-known in the United States.

Availability: The English translation of The Subsidiary was published in 2016 by Melville Books and you can get a copy here:

Personal Demons was published 1998 by Serpent’s Tail, and appears to be out of print. You can try to score the occasional used copy here, though frankly I found all of my copies of his older works in used book stores:

Comments: I really adore the work of Christopher Fowler, and he’s a master of city horror, especially the terrors one encounters in office buildings. I don’t recall exactly when I began reading him but I know it was roughly around the time I learned about “sick building syndrome.” Sick building syndrome is the phenomenon wherein accidental design flaws result in very poor air circulation, causing workers to not only spread illness quickly, but also causes CO2 overload combined with inhalation of volatile compounds released by furnishings, cleaners and building materials themselves. That toxic soup leaves some workers feeling ill  an hour or so after arriving to work, and the miserable ventilation in modern office buildings demonstrated how sick buildings could fuel contagions of illness, like Covid, due to a lack of healthy ventilation.

Getting trapped in city structures is a common horror trope.  P2 tells the story of a woman trapped in a parking garage, and ATM features a trio of office workers who get stuck in an ATM kiosk (both are alternative Christmas movies too, if you’re tired of Die Hard). But in both of those films, the protagonists are stuck because a killer or maniac has decided to entrap them.  In a similar vein, 2017 film Mayhem neatly wove disease with authoritarian building lock downs into a building horror when the CDC closed off an office building infected with a short-lived sickness that causes everyone who gets it to become homicidal. The Belko Experiment, also from 2017, is a gladiatorial contest wherein workers are locked inside their office building and forced to engage in murder sprees in order to survive.

The Subsidiary approaches building horror in the same vein as The Belko Experiment, in that the employees are trapped in their workplace without consent or warning. However, it has more in common with Blindness by José Saramago in that confinement brought out the worst in some of those locked in the building, causing them to prey on the weak.  No one knows why the Subsidiary turned off the power and locked all the employees inside, but the Subsidiary ominously warns them that the first lockdown is coming, the Subsidiary takes no responsibility for any damages, and all employees are to remain at their workstations. The darkness begins on June 5, 2008 and ends on June 18, 2008. At the beginning shouting is heard as the power is shut off, the phones killed and the doors locked, but soon it becomes quiet. The first day is filled with TEDIUM and almost predictably, a fly left inside dies.

An unnamed clerk in the office uses his stamps and ink to make a record of what is happening to him and his coworkers, who all have names that seem a bit… on the nose. The Mute Girl. The Blind Girl. The Deaf Girl. The One-Legged Man. And so on. After the first day things start getting weird. The Deaf Girl slices his arm and licks the blood. Our clerk is evidently known for his pill habit and his coworkers come to pester him for drugs. There is very little food.

Somehow a lost child was found in the building and The Lame Man had to bathe him, whatever that means in an office building with no light or electricity. Somehow he manages to teach the child to read. We later realize that the child really should not be left with The Lame Man, and before long no one is safe from attack. In a terrible sexual attack in the bathrooms, The Blind Girl is left dead. She died naked and is quietly carried away, but soon the men, whom the clerk calls “animals,” come back.

A new order crosses the clerk’s desk because the men are filing a requisition: they’re looking for another girl. A woman near the clerk begs him to save her, whichever woman it is. This image reflects the clerk’s response to her request, and I frankly am not entirely sure what this means. Shortly after the clerk places his stamp on the request, the lights come back on.

I bought this book presumably because it seemed to be akin to Christopher Fowler’s works about urban horror. I had no idea it was a conceptual piece more than an actual book. It takes about 10 minutes, max, to read, and it is substantially enhanced by the memory of other works, like the aforementioned Blindness and Mayhem. Because I enjoy the unusual, I wasn’t put off by the fact that this somewhat pricey hardcover turned out to be an art experiment in story-telling using archaic office stamps, but I can imagine that this book requires a very specific kind of reader to enjoy it.

Even though I took the concept in stride, there is an interesting problem I had with the book. The use of the rubber stamps necessitates truncated story-telling, but the story being told is very expansive, including a section that causes the reader to wonder if any of this is really happening because the clerk may be a very unreliable narrator. This concept would have been far more effective had it been stamped into stony reality, using this unusual method of story-telling to make a specific and unwavering point. The almost-allegorical use of descriptive names also signals something that I don’t entirely pick up on because there simply is not enough in the book to explain why it is that these names signify something particular about the person. In such a heavy story, these nursery-rhyme names surely have meaning and it’s irritating that I don’t know what they signify.  Add to this that there are so many high-minded utterances like “ALL NEGLIGENCE IS DELIBERATE” makes it all the more almost pointlessly artistic. And these last few sentences may make it seem like I didn’t enjoy the book, but I did find it interesting. Sometimes a fresh or ambitious approach is itself enough to praise (however faintly) a book.

Personal Demons is far more accessible and far less ambiguous, which may seem like points against its favor, odd-wise, but Fowler’s impeccable characterization and creation of technological ideas that seem possible even though they are from the not-too-distant-future more than make up for a lack of outright oddness. “Wage Slaves” tells the story of Ben Harper, a disgraced 26-year-old teacher (he encouraged his students to engage in protests that were categorized as “insurrection”) who falsified his CV so he could get a corporate job, and his realization that his new office is probably going to kill him.

His possible death is foreshadowed in the first few paragraphs of the story, but at that moment the reader does not know yet why Mr Clark, the head of PR, has beaten his subordinate, Mr Felix, to death with a cricket bat. He could just be a garden variety corporate psycho. But it doesn’t bode well for Ben.

Within an hour of being on the job, a co-worker named Marie, who had been canoodling with the late Mr Felix, pegs Ben as a poser with no corporate experience. She blackmails him into meeting her for lunch on pain of her telling everyone he is a fake. Marie is very concerned that there is something wrong at her place of work, Symax, whose motto is “the future is now.” She takes him to a restaurant outside of the building because everything done inside the Symax building is recorded and can be used to fire them. Or worse.

Poor hapless Ben who just wants to keep his new job of a few hours, is openly dismayed that Marie is dragging him into a potential conspiracy. Over lunch he passively pleads for her to back off.

“The secretaries are always off sick. They say there’s something in the air that makes you ill. At this height the windows can’t be opened because of the wind. Then there are the phone lines. They randomly switch themselves around like they’ve got poltergeists or something.”

“It’s my first day,” he pleaded.

“The staff can sense that there’s something wrong even if the management can’t, but no-one – NO-ONE – is willing to talk about it.”

“The suit is brand new, Marie. And the tie.”

Mr Clark quickly becomes suspicious of Ben. It hardly matters that he and Marie met outside the building because the office monitors everything and soon it is clear Ben is snooping around.

Mr Clark glowered at him. “I don’t like you, Harper? Why is that?

“You haven’t tried my cooking yet?”

The rest of the office receives an email warning them about Ben but it speaks to the increasing chaos inside Symax that no real action is taken. What Ben discovers about Symax is unnerving. Symax’s headquarters is a “smart” building. It reacts instantly to all input, attempting to keep a continual state of static equilibrium. Doing so creates constant change. For example, if clouds pass over the sun, the building immediately brightens the indoor lights, which causes computer screens to adapt their brightness. This is one small chain of events to keep the building in a specific state of being perfectly lit. Imagine all the chains of events needed to keep the place clean, temperate, with moderated sound and so on. Even empty the building would be constantly working to overcome any deviation from its main programming objectives.

But what happens when you add people to the mix? Well, as the architect of the building explains to Ben:

“A building is not just a box made out of bricks. It’s organic. Shaped by the needs of the people within. This building responds. People cause disorder, no matter how well controlled they are. The Symax system is responding to human chaos with counter-balancing chaos. Action, reaction. People break down – what happens to buildings?”

Mr Clark, who was a career asshole before the continual electromagnetic shifts in the Symax building exacerbated the worst of his tendencies, eventually fires Ben, but not before dragging out of Ben the reasons why a man so desperate for work that he would lie about his experience would so quickly trash the opportunity by becoming a spy for a disgruntled coworker.

Ben thought for a moment. “Human nature.”

It would have been better for Ben had Mr Clark fired him a couple of days earlier. Mr Clark had the entire company working non-stop and overnight for a big deadline and the building had gone as insane as the people inside of it. Clocks ran backward, Biro pens spun clockwise when placed on their sides, water coolers created typhoons inside the plastic until it exploded, and the electronics that controlled the place began to malfunction in such a way that the electromagnetic waves caused an executive to swan dive out of his office building window while other people had complete nervous breakdowns.

Never fear, though, the smart building has a smart solution for when things get as out of control as they were getting at Symax. Fowler leaves the gory details to our imagination.

I’ve always maintained that I am not as visually oriented as I am a fan of the word. I can appreciate the experimental, artistic nature of Celedón’s building horror, but appreciate more Fowler’s humorous attempts to demonstrate the real horrors of working in a closed off space with a lot of unstable people. All that’s missing in the real life office is the sentient building waiting to correct everything, but then again I have not worked in an office in a very long time, so maybe we’re closer to experiencing Fowler’s dystopian office building than I know. All I know is I’m really suspicious of that Alexa things.

I’m glad I don’t have to deal with offices anymore. I had a fear of door handles that predated the fear of fomites Covid brought us temporarily. People are gross, and it’s daunting being around them in poorly ventilated spaces where the windows can’t be opened and there is a heavy reliance on elevators. Christopher Fowler neatly pokes at this nervous fear of contamination and confinement very well in his urban building horror, and that’s why his work is so effective for me. His short stories take the tiresome nature of grocery shopping, the worries of what you may really be eating when you order fast food, the potential for use of little nooks and crannies in downtown buildings, things so many people in the West experience daily in our lives, and reminds us that so much can go wrong in our orderly lives and how there is still the potential for discovery in even the busiest cityscape.

Celedón’s work is probably only worth it for the story if you can get it on sale, though people into interesting artistic conceits may disagree. Fowler, however, is worth it for me at any price. Unfortunately so much of his work is out of print, especially his early short story collections, like City Jitters, The Bureau of Lost Souls, and Sharper Knives. If you are a fan of that sort of humorous, witty, familiar horror, Fowler’s early works may delight you as much as they did me. He can also slide into deep human emotion, dabbles at times in deep horror and gore, and handles body horror in a way that still haunts me to this day. Grab his work if you can get it.

Do you have any building horror pieces that you enjoyed? City terrors? Share. And if you’ve read any Fowler, let me know what you think of him.

 

*Christopher Fowler died in early March, 2023. I’ve been more or less offline for five years, and am filled with regret that I never interacted with him on his blog or on Twitter. He was a kind, funny, accessible, extremely talented man, and one of the best horror/mystery/slipstream writers of the late 2oth century and early 21st century. I need to write about him more in the future. His memoirs will be published posthumously and I’ll be sure to discuss it here, whether it’s odd or not.