Book Review: A Book of Tongues

A Book of Tongues by Gemma Files (Chizine Publications, 2010)

This first novel from long-renowned short-fiction writer Gemma Files reads like Deadwood by way of Tim Powers, William Burroughs, and Clive Barker.  Like Powers's pirate novel On Stranger Tides, A Book of Tongues melds fantasy and history (Files includes the real-life figure of Allan Pinkerton as one of the characters in her tale of magic-wielding outlaws in the post-Civil-War American West).  Like Burroughs's The Place of Dead Roads (a phrase that Files employs in her novel), this genre-bending work features homosexual gunslingers in its cast.  And like Barker's The Hellbound Heart, the book involves a love quadrangle, numerous betrayals, and a trip to the underworld that leaves one man skinless.

But all this is not to suggest that A Book of Tongues is simply derivative.  Files exhibits incredible originality, particularly in the system of magic-making that she maps out.  Mages aren't built for peaceful coexistence, given their vampiric hunger for each other's power--a situation that creates some spectacular conflict between characters.  Also, one of the ways a person's latent talent for "hexation" can express itself is as a result of suffering a grievous bodily harm.  The Confederate soldier/preacher Asher Rook undergoes such growing pains when he survives a hangman's rope and transforms into a formidable hexslinger.  His pocket Bible is now his "Bad Book," whose words he literally spreads, to deadly effect: when he blows on the opened tome, "the text lift[s] from those gilt-edged pages in one flat curl of unstrung ink, a floating necklace of black Gothic type borne upwards on a smoky rush of sulphur-tongued breath."

Get 'Em While They're Young!

This weekend I was browsing in the local B&N, and just happened to stop and take a look at the books stacked atop the Summer Reading tables.  I was surprised by some of the selections, to say the least (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters?!), yet also delighted in discovering that so many of the books assigned to students this summer qualify as American Gothic.

--There were books about serial killers both fictional:

(The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold)








--And nonfictional:

(The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson)







--A dark and twisted family saga:

(If There Be Thorns/Seeds of Yesterday by V.C. Andrews)








--A classic of Southern Gothic literature:

(To Kill a Mockingbird: 50th Anniversary Edition by Harper Lee)







--And Southern Gothic plus bloodsuckers:

(Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice)









--A novel of Boarding-School Gothic:

(A Separate Peace by John Knowles)









--A novel of racially-charged crime and punishment (that also riffs on Poe's "The Black Cat"):

(Native Son by Richard Wright)








--Even a book featuring a real-life descent into a labyrinthine underworld:

(The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City by Jennifer Toth)







All in all, quite a macabre curriculum.

Those lucky kids.



Venture back tomorrow, when I'll be reviewing a book that I can confidently say will never be deemed suitable material for a high school English class.

Countdown: The Top 20 Stephen King Works of American Gothic Short Fiction--#19

Next up on the Countdown (if you've missed a previous entry, just click on the "Top Twenty Countdowns" label in the right sidebar):

#19. "Rest Stop"

While driving home late at night from a Florida mystery writers group meeting, John Dykstra ponders his double life as a "literary werewolf" (by day he is an urbane professor of English at FSU, but he moonlights as an author--under the pseudonym "Rick Hardin"--of a series of crime novels featuring the "urban warrior" hitman-character, the "Dog").  This duality comes into play when a pressing need to relieve himself leads Dykstra to pull off at a highway rest stop.  At first he is paralyzed when he overhears a man brutally beating his pregnant girlfriend inside the women's room, but then Dykstra finds the courage to intervene by turning to his Hardin alter ego.

The only problem is, "Hardin" proves more vigilante than knight in shining armor, using excessive force to subdue the abusive male, Lee.  Hardin is surprised by his own actions after giving the prostrate figure a sharp kick in the hip, but what dismays him even more is "that he wanted to do it again, and harder.  He liked that cry of pain and fear, could do with hearing it again."  And then he can't help but wonder "how hard he could kick old Lee-Lee in the left ear without sacrificing accuracy for force."  When first approaching the rest stop, Dykstra's writerly imagination pictures a lone missile command silo somewhere in the American heartland, "and the guy in charge is suffering from some sort of carefully-concealed (but progressive) mental illness."  The final turn of the screw in King's story, though, is that such burgeoning craziness might be an apt description of Dykstra/Hardin himself.

King has gone the "unruly pseudonym" route before (cf. The Dark Half), but never as succinctly as he does here in "Rest Stop" (incidentally, in the notes at the end of Just After Sunset, King explains that the story was drawn from a similar experience inside a Florida rest stop, a situation that forced him to think, "I'll have to summon my inner Richard Bachman here, because he's tougher than me.").  The story points to the savagery always lurking just beneath the surface of human civility; Dykstra realizes that "under the right circumstances, anyone could end up anywhere, doing anything."  Besides drawing on the Jekyll-and-Hyde archetype, the story utilizes the time-honored motif of the "wrong turn" (while facing the predicament of how to deal with the ruckus inside the women's room, Dykstra deems his stopping off at that particular rest area "the evening's great mistake").  But perhaps what truly distinguishes this work of American Gothic is King's depiction of the rest-stop setting.  Even at the best of times, these way stations have a forlorn air about them; after all, they are designed to facilitate transience (an appropriate ad banner might be "Eat. Excrete. Retreat.").  And when encountered in their desolate, late-night state, they can be downright ominous.  King seems well aware of this as he transforms a rest stop on the open road between Jacksonville and Sarasota into a Gothic locale, complete with missing children posters papering the walls and alligators presumably lying in the building's swampy perimeter. 

So next time you're out riding the highway in the wee hours of the morning and you feel nature calling you as you come up on a rest stop, just remember: good things come to those who wait until they get home.

Book vs. Film: The Killer Inside Me

"Oh, the book's always better than the movie."

Well, the recurring feature Book vs. Film aims to put that maxim to the test.  I'll compare the novelistic and cinematic versions of a narrative, noting what each does better than the other, and concluding by offering a comparative ranking. (A word of warning: unlike standard book and movie reviews, this feature presumes the audience is already familiar with the subject being discussed.  Plot spoilers could be included in the commentary.)

The ranking will be done on a 10-points-total system.  Imagine that there are ten gold coins to be placed on the opposing arms of a scale.  If both the book and film were considered to be on the same level quality-wise, then the coins would be distributed evenly and the final result would be 5-5.  If the book was deemed slightly better than the movie, the scoring might be something like 6-4 (tilting the imaginary scales to the left); if the film version totally outshined the novel, then a 2-8 or even a 1-9 slant could result.

First up: the 2010 adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1952 crime novel The Killer Inside Me.

Interview: Rich Ristow

Rich Ristow is a Rhysling Award-winning poet whose books include Into the Cruel Sea (Skullvines Press), Binge and Purge (Skullvines) and Wood Life: A Poem (Snuff Books).  He's edited the soon-to-be-released Death in Common: Poems from Unlikely Victims, and has plans for many other anthologies (Rich is the Managing Editor of the Needfire Poetry imprint of Belfire Press).  In 2004, he earned a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

This past week Rich graciously agreed to do an interview with Macabre Republic.  We discussed his own writerly and editorial projects, as well as his thoughts on the present state of the art of "horror" poetry.

Macabre Republic: Hello, Rich, and welcome to Macabre Republic.  I'd like to start by talking about your book-length poem, Wood Life.  I was really impressed by the range of the verse, in terms of the poetic modes adopted and structural patterns employed.  From section to section of the poem, the verse seemed as varied as the mental/emotional states of your tormented speaker.  How conscious were you of matching form to content in Wood Life?  Also, in terms of the composition process: did you find there are any special challenges in writing a book-length poem?

Rich Ristow: Charles Olson and Robert Creeley both believed that content is but an extension of form, and I have to agree 100%.  Basically, what you say and write is shaped by how you say or write it.  This is why, for example, a sonnet in iambic pentameter sounds absolutely different than the drunken free verse of Charles Bukowski; one sounds lofty and elevated, and the other like the guy sitting one bar stool over--and I'm not saying that one is better than the other.  Poetic forms are basically tools to achieve a desired end.  For example, one wouldn't use a scalpel to do the job of a hacksaw; so, one wouldn't write a villanelle to achieve the minimalist juxtaposition of haiku, senryu, and tanka.

That's a wordy preamble to my answer, filled with name dropping, I know.  However, it's what was going through my mind when writing Wood Life.  Psychology is messy at times, and I wanted the form to be as fragmented and unpredictable as the speaker's psychosis and moral crisis.  So some days, he thinks linear, which translates into ordinary lines, and other days, the writing scatters across the page in a jumbled mess with gaps and blank spots.  This is also why the book looks so rough with orphaned lines carrying over to blank pages, a few typos, and incorrect capitalization.  The challenge, however, is to not only capture this sort of chaotic mind onto paper, but to also make it readable to a general reader.  A lot of postmodernist poetry, while wonderful and challenging, will not appeal to the average genre fiction fan.  It will appeal to people like myself, who have spent many years studying poetry, and that's about it.  So it was something I spent a lot of time thinking about, and in organizing the book, I tried to keep most of the sections slightly different than what came before.