Kristi has been hard at work drawing pictures for our color book Zombie Apocalypse in Ditmas Park. I wish I had something like this when I was a kid. I don’t think I even knew about zombies then—just mummies, courtesy of a drunk GI who wrapped himself in toilet paper and jumped out of a tree in front of me. This book will be especially nice for me because it actually features me and my sister, her boyfriend Ed, and our neighbors and friends.
My mom and dad ordered some books when I was about seven or eight where Kristi and I, personally, were supposed to take part in the story. It was just the Disney version of the Snow White story, and the company involved us in the story by printing Kathleen and Kristine Scheiner as names of the dwarves. I remember that our names were set in a smudgy type font that didn’t look anything like the surrounding text. Even then, I knew it was a rip, and I didn’t particularly fancy myself as a dwarf. Especially a Disney dwarf. So take that, Disney.
And that!
Kristi’s drawing our neighborhood bodega next, Salahi’s, which is featured in our story. This family-run bodega hasn’t shut down in twenty years; they keep it going 24-7 and for sure would have it together during the zombie apocalypse. Mo even let Kristi and Ed take pictures of the bodega for visual references.
We’re hoping to have this particular project done in time for the World Horror Convention in New Orleans this June and have many more ideas in the hopper. Zombie genius takes time, though.
My sophomore year of college, I was taking a class on Virginia Woolf and Henry James, and we were assigned Woolf’s The Waves. It was February, the most depressing month in the Midwest as far as I’m concerned. Thank God, it’s also the shortest, because this was always my bad time, when deep, black depression would come rolling in.
I fell in love with Woolf’s language, her stream of consciousness, and the way she was trying to show how six different personalities were forces of nature—first, young and marshaling their powers, then as they crescendo, and then falling back spent. I got quite obsessed with Virginia Woolf that term, rereading passages, writing about her and what her novel inspired in me, and when kept up by insomnia, I’d lie in bed awake in the dark, pondering the novel’s meaning and, in turn, life’s. I worked myself into an existential crisis.
I thought about The Waves so hard and so often that life got overwhelming, and I holed up inside my apartment and didn’t go to classes for a week because I was so convinced that my art sucked and what was the point of even trying when my imaginings, my ideas of perfection, could never match up to what I produced.
Once I put The Waves back up on the shelf, I slowly recovered and felt on steadier ground with stories that had a firmer structure, and I blamed Virginia Woolf for making me come unhinged. She’s a great writer, but life is very slippery, too slippery, when viewed through her eyes. I thought a lot of people had this affliction—this Virginia Woolf disease. For the longest time, I believed the movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was about that, and I was totally shocked when I watched it and the story wasn’t about how Virginia Woolf made you crazy.
My Achilles’ heel–Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.
I have certain tastes for literature, like mind food, and I get cravings. Sometimes I hanker for a little Stephen King, sometimes I want Flannery O’Connor, and sometimes I want Virginia Woof. The next time I picked up her books, I was wary. I started with a few journals and A Room of One’s Own, and they were quite tasty. I felt strong, I was doing okay. Silly me, I thought. What a crazy thing to think that a writer could make you insane. But then it happened somewhere between The Waves and Between the Acts.
My senses started feeling muffled, like I was wrapped in a layer of cotton batting or living underwater. My insomnia ratcheted up to an uncomfortable level, and I was finding it hard to read or write, which is how I make my living. I talked to a therapist I was seeing at the time, asking her if she had ever heard of the Virginia Woolf disease. The therapist appreciated literature and specialized in helping creative people, so we talked about Virginia Woolf’s life and writing process.
Woolf was a famous depressive and that disease probably stemmed from her rocky childhood. She was extremely bright and devoured books in the library of her intellectual father. However, because she was a girl, not much was expected out of her. She was allowed to read and learn, but she was not formally educated like the boys in her family. Woolf was sexually abused by her stepbrother, and she wrote about those occurrences, attacking them from different angles, I believe, in an attempt to write herself well. This was done at a time when people didn’t talk about such unpleasant realities. The topic of war was okay, but not the violence that goes on inside homes.
Virginia Woolf.
She married Leonard Woolf, but it was more of a platonic relationship, a marriage never consummated, with Leonard taking care of Virginia when she became mentally unstable. Virginia was attracted more to women and one of those relationships helped her produce Orlando. Virginia always defined herself by writing. Sometimes, though, she was kept from it because people thought that brought on her depressive episodes.
She had a suicide pact with her husband. World War II threatened England, and the Woolfs were terrified of going through this. Leonard was Jewish, and they knew that if England was invaded, they would appear on the list of people to be done away with. This might have been one of the contributing factors to the depression that Virginia found herself slipping into when she took her life. She knew the signs of it and was very clever, pretending to be okay so Leonard, her caretaker, felt he could leave her alone at times. She wrote out her suicide notes, filled her pockets with stones so she wouldn’t float, and drowned herself in a nearby river when she was fifty-nine.
Virginia’s journals and essays can be beautiful, well-thought-out commentary and arguments, but her fiction is something completely different. She’s one of the first to use the stream-of-consciousness technique, where writing imitates a person’s thoughts, racing, loping, interrupting each other, and she wrote and planned her novels like she was painting, thinking in color and composition rather than in rising action, conflict, and character development.
My therapist’s theory is that because Virginia Woolf worked so closely with her subconscious in these novels, she ended up replicating her manic-depressive mind state. And somebody who already has a tendency to go that way, like me, is very sensitive to those impressions. Those people can get caught up in the text, Virginia’s ideas, like the undertow in the ocean. Her recommendation was to monitor my reading and put away the novels when I start to recognize the signs of depression. It doesn’t mean I can never read Virginia Woolf again. I just have to do it carefully.
While waiting for this dreary, awful March to get over with, I picked up The Waves again, wanting a little taste. But I think it might be better to wait until June.
I stumbled across James Smythe’s blog series for The Guardian while having my lunchtime Internet break at work, and I was immediately taken by the concept. Like me and so many others, Smythe has been a Stephen King fan since childhood, rereading his novels over and over again so much that he is intimately familiar with King’s work and recognizes the bigger patterns in it overall.
James Smythe, writer of the Rereading Stephen King series at The Guardian.
King was the author who ushered Smythe into grown-up reading, and the same thing happened to me. My mom was checking in with me when I was eleven years old to make sure that I knew what menstruation was. I let her know that school had pretty much covered this. “Good,” she said. “I just don’t want anything to happen to you like Carrie.” I asked her what Carrie was, and as she told me, my eyeballs got wider and wider, especially when she got to the part about pigs’ blood and prom. I had to read that book! I went to the library to check it out, but Carrie wasn’t there. I settled instead for Salem’s Lot, which kept me awake all night at a Girl Scout sleepover, and I never went back to the juvenile section again. Not when there were so many horrors to be had in the K aisle.
One of the bookshelves holding me and my sister’s well-worn Stephen King books.
Smythe has grown up to be a writer himself, and he has set himself the task of rereading all of King’s work, aiming to post a blog entry on each work about every two weeks. He estimates this will take him about two years. This is an incredibly ambitious project considering some of the gigantic tomes that King has put out—It (1104 pages), The Stand (original version—823 pages; uncut—1200 pages), Under the Dome (1088 pages), 11/22/63 (880 pages), to name a few. Just rereading one of these books in a week or two’s time is almost a full-time job, and that doesn’t include the writing, research, or critique time that Smythe puts in. Each one of his King entries (he’s at Week Seventeen so far) draws many comments from readers, and Smythe gets down in it with them, arguing the finer points, coming up with Top Ten Favorite King Books and Least Favorite Five King Books as readers ask for such lists. And though he is a King fan, he realizes there are some real clunkers in King’s oeuvre and does not hold back in his reviews. He also mentions his first feelings about reading the book as a child or teen and how he views the work differently now as he rereads, and he is not afraid to change his mind about what he now considers King’s best. Sometimes, the entries get clogged with literary references, especially the short story collections where there are so many tales to cover and quite a few of them feed into King’s novels. How can you not cover them? Also, Smythe is a huge Dark Tower/Randall Flagg fan, which I never quite got into, and he points out appearances all the time. I’d probably like these parts of the blog better if I was in on the joke, and I might give the Dark Tower series another whirl so I can decide how I feel about this omnipresent character. So far Smythe has reviewed most of King’s good work, but I can’t wait to read his critiques of the really bad works, like The Tommyknockers, Dreamcatcher, and Black House (which I couldn’t even finish after reading one hundred pages of the narrator flitting around from scene to scene, “setting” the story). I only wish that it was easier to read these entries one after another. However, this is the book blogs section of The Guardian, so I have to page through or click on links in the sidebar and then go somewhere else to find readers’ comments, which is a big part of the fun with this series. Already, though, I’m envisioning this project as a book, and I hope Smythe does, too, and puts this out in a more user-friendly format. This far in, I can see Smythe having a nice pile of summary, criticism, and memoir that will be book length by the time he’s done. I’m happy to take this trip since King has been such an important influence in my personal and literary evolution. He’s been the backbeat for most of my life, and reading the blog posts and other readers’ comments, I can see that I’m not the only one. Smythe gives me ideas, too, for my own literary odyssey. I believe my lady, Joyce Carol Oates, has written even more than Stephen King. What if I read and reread all of her works in the order they were published? I think I would need more than two years, though, to complete this task, and a Medici-like benefactor to support me during all of this reading and writing.
Another shelf holding our King books–the pages are falling out of our favorite ones.
The last couple of Joyce Carol Oates books that I read I haven’t loved (Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You and My Sister, My Love), and one from last year, Mudwoman, I couldn’t even finish. I had been particularly looking forward to Mudwoman because it was billed as a horror novel, my favorite, but I got one hundred pages in and nothing had really happened—I hated it—so I had to put it away. I was disheartened and did not immediately put her newest titles on hold because I was afraid of being disappointed. Oates has been my favorite writer for about twenty years, and I didn’t want anything to threaten her status. But then I heard what Daddy Love, her newest, was about—familiar JCO territory—and I had to read it.
Daddy Love starts off with every parent’s nightmare, their child being abducted, but instead of being a slam, bang beginning, the novel starts incredibly slow with the abduction being told and retold three times by the mother with slight variations. I knew that Oates had a purpose for this—she’s an experimental writer—but I don’t think today’s editor would have the patience to let a first-time writer get away with this. Those three chapters would probably be labeled repetitive, and if the writer wanted to be published, he or she would have to cut these and beef up the more seamy material in the book.
Daddy Love represents the whole horrific experience of a child abduction. A parent who has a child ripped from his or her arms would most likely repeat that last memory with the child over and over again, trying to figure out how the event could have been prevented (if they allow themselves to remember it). These three repeating chapters and the cover of Daddy Love serve as fair warning to how dark the material of this novel is, and there’s plenty of time for the reader to get out of it.
Once the mother has exhausted herself, trying to figure out how she could have prevented the abduction of her five-year-old son, the novel jumps to Daddy Love, a charismatic part-time reverend who pedals his good looks and women’s attraction to him in order to get them to cater to him and his sons. Daddy Love carefully hunts for each of his victims, believing that God reveals the special boy to him and he is saving the child from an awful parent. The child must be old enough so he can take care of his needs, but he must be young enough so he’s attractive to Daddy Love and his mind can be molded. Daddy Love’s latest son Deuteronomy has become too old, and that’s why the reverend got rid of him and sought out Robbie, who Daddy Love renames Gideon after carefully breaking him through one of many tortures. The problem with Daddy Love is that the torture never ends.
Daddy Love turned into a freezer book for me. I got to a part of the novel where I knew what was going to happen, but I couldn’t face it for a week. This wasn’t cliché, it was just what inevitably had to occur based on how Oates portrayed Daddy Love and Gideon’s relationship.
Here’s where I had to stop for a while:
“In some of the watercolors, which were more brightly colored than the drawings, and less ominous, the boy was in a canoe-shaped vessel that floated above the earth. All about him, stars and moons in a nighttime sky.
Inside the canoe-like vessel with the boy was an animal resembling a dog. Sandy-colored, with erect ears and a long curved furry tail.
A friendly animal! This was a relief. This was in contrast to the sinister tone of the drawings.
…Gideon called her ‘Missy.’ Gideon loved loved loved Missy.
Missy was Gideon’s responsibility, utterly. Gideon fed her twice daily and kept her plastic food-dishes clean. He kept her water-dishes filled with fresh water. He brushed her coat, which was a warm beautiful sand-colored coat that tended to snarl, with a special dog-brush. Especially, Gideon was zealous about keeping her from barking at the wrong time.”
I think the most powerful part of the book is the ending, where what should be a happy resolution of a child being reunited with his parents isn’t. Robbie/Gideon has suffered irreparable damage at the hands of Daddy Love, and the return to his parents is rocky and filled with anxiety for son, mother, and father. A huge vacuum was left in Robbie’s parents’ lives after his abduction, but once he’s returned their days are filled with moving households, therapy, and questions: Who is Robbie now? What’s he thinking? What does he remember of his early life? and Will he ever be the same? And whatOates conveys is that these abducted, abused children are marked for life if they’re lucky enough to escape their captors.
When Kristi and I were growing up and had just come back from Germany, we were spoiled for a couple of years because we had access to MTV. But then we moved to a small town where we had cable but no MTV for the first year we lived there. Luckily my resourceful sister had taped the best heavy metal videos from Headbangers Ball, which takes a real knack because you don’t want to record commercials or crappy videos. Her transitions were seamless, and that VCR tape was the loop and soundtrack to some angsty teenage years. We would watch that tape every day and I still remember the order of the videos. It started with Quiet Riot’s “Bang Your Head (Metal Health)” and then segued to KISS’s “I Love It Loud.”
We still have that tape. One day I’m going to get that transferred to DVD, and then we will be the happiest sisters in all the world. Sometimes we stay up late and play a game on YouTube, where we surprise each other by dialing up metal videos, which the next person has to feed off, and so on. But I’d still like to listen and look at old Metal Music—666—My Shit.
Now I’m working on my heavy metal novel (about twenty thousand words in), and one of the first things I do when I’m writing is compose a playlist that thematically relates to what I’m working on. Here’s the first playlist I’ve come up with, and I’d like to have about four more so nothing gets stale. I’ve put up the music on 8tracks—my heavy metal valentine to you—and Kristi lettered and decorated it à la high school heavy metal and horror, which is what my story’s about.
Sadly I wasn’t introduced to the awesome pairing of horror director Dario Argento and heavy metal band Goblin until after college, but all good things can wait. I would have probably died of the awesomeness if I saw their work too young.
Vixen was a lady metal band put togeher like some of the boy bands of the eighties and nineties, N’ SYNC and New Kids on the Block, and the only prerequisite was that a member be a female and hot. That’s something I’ve struggled and thought a lot about with metal—why did the ladies always have to be so tarted up?—and an issue I find myself writing about.
Whitesnake introduced what was probably the first video vixen—Tawny Kitaen—who was the epitome of the metal chick in the eighties, but she was always featured as an accessory to the band. First she dated the guy in RATT, then she made the rounds with Mötley Crüe and Whitesnake, until she went batshit crazy and beat her ex-husband with a shoe.
I do include Joan Jett on my list, though she spans many genres—punk, hard rock blues—and might not be considered heavy metal by some. She embraced the bad, tough girl ethos, though, which was what it meant to be a heavy metal lady and taking what you wanted.
And then, of course, we have the reigning highnesses of metal—Lita Ford and Doro Pesch. They’re the real-life versions of the warrior woman from Heavy Metal magazine.
Kristi and I are ripe with plans right now as we write (me) and draw (Kristi) our upcoming zombie color books. When we were kids we were always into the spooky things, but sadly, color books never really reflected our interests. I think my best one was a Scooby Doo coloring book that had a happy-looking ghost in it. We had to make do with what we had, and still being coloring fans to this day that sometimes involves subtly changing preexisting color books. Hee-hee. Check out this bastardized color book page by Kristi.
Well, now we’ve decided we need to help out the youth of America and coloring fans everywhere by putting out some scary-themed color books. And first up, we’re doing our favorites—zombies!!! We’re hard at work writing and drawing and coming soon will be Zombie Apocalypse in Ditmas Park and Zombie Pet Parade.
I like to look at the book ads on the subway, and every once in a while I’m rewarded with the marketing campaign of one of the books I worked on. I can sit on the subway bench basking in pride, thinking, I worked on that; I helped make that book. Other times I’ll see a book advertised that I feel like I have to check out. That was the case this summer, when I was enjoying the air-conditioned breeze of a subway car, and my eye wandered to the subway ad for Chase Novak’s horror novel Breed, with this blurb from Stephen King: “The best horror novel I’ve read since Peter Straub’s Ghost Story.” Now, I trust Stephen King’s recommendations; through him I’ve been introduced to Shane Stevens and Peter Abrahams, and he also has a healthy appreciation for my lady Joyce Carol Oates.
Breed’s a beautifully designed book. The cover is all black with a simple red squiggle that at first glance seems to be an abstract design, but as I read the story, the more it revealed itself to be a line drawing of a pregnant woman, the subject matter that the novel deals with. On the surface, Breed is a very simple story, a Grimm’s fairy tale almost. What gives this story its heft is how it’s translated into modern-day Manhattan.
The Twisdens really do have the perfect life. Alex is the last living heir of an old-money New York family, like the Astors. He has a family manor near Central Park filled with antiques and oil portraits of blubbery-faced Twisdens of yore. He married Leslie, a youngish editor, who he met outside his mansion as she admired it. The two have been together for a few years with beautiful evenings out, the right entertainment and gifts to mark occasions, but they are childless and can’t get pregnant despite all their money. Leslie is ready to adopt, but Alex wants a genetic Twisden to inherit his estate. They have started going to couples’ infertility meetings because Alex believes that is where they will first hear about cutting-edge treatments that might not quite be legal. And then one day they run into one of those infertile couples who are now hugely pregnant and smug with their secret.
Alex trades favors with the father to be, and he and Leslie end up on a trip to Eastern Europe to see Dr. Kis, a researcher who uses unorthodox treatments but has phenomenal success rates. After a series of painful injections that both Leslie and Alex have to endure, they share a weird but passionate night, surprised by the animal-like lust that came out of them. The day after on the plane ride home, Leslie knows she’s pregnant—she just feels it. Leslie and Alex now find themselves prisoners of their bodies—some of it is good, like the confirmed pregnancy and twins at that, but they find they are very different from what they once were.
“Before the visit to Dr. Kis, most, if not all, of his emotions were mixed. Even the blackest sorrow had somewhere within it dark blue shimmers of hope; even the greatest joys held within them consciousness of joy’s inevitable ebbing. His emotions were like hot-air balloons, and each of them carried the ballast of memory and knowledge. But now the ballast is gone and everything he feels is total, and practically overwhelming. He is not ever merely hungry—he is ravenous. He is not annoyed—he is in a seething rage. He is not feeling romantic—he is overcome with lust.”
Chase Novak, pseudonym of the novelist Scott Spencer.
Fast-forward ten years and we are introduced to Alex and Leslie’s twins Alice and Adam, who are crippled with the terrifying secret of their parents. The mansion has fallen into ruin with most of the antiques sold to finance the family now that Alex and Leslie can no longer hold down jobs because of their more animal-like natures. The twins are locked in their bedrooms each evening with no way to escape; even their windows have elaborate locking mechanisms, fire codes be damned. But the twins sense that this is more to keep them safe from their parents than anything else. With each year, Alice and Adam’s parents are becoming more and more forgetful about things like keys, and one night, the twins plan a great escape. The rest of the book ends up being a long chase sequence set mostly in Manhattan, with long, extended scenes set in the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park, gentrified areas of the city where you don’t expect to see kids running in terror from their rich parents.
The second part of the book has a few scenes and descriptions that border on grand guignol, but I found them compelling too. There’s one death scene that is quite grisly, but at the same time, it’s beautiful and redemptive. Lots of tantalizing details pushed me to keep turning the pages—wolflike teenagers who are older versions of Alice and Adam, warning of a change during puberty, and parents who are restrained by these children in unusual ways. But then these details are left behind and the ending is roomy and wide-open…for another book in the series.
I wish I’d known that this was a series book before I began it. I suppose this tendency toward series is just the evolution of literature. I’m rereading Frankenstein right now, and it seems so old-fashioned with an introduction to the material via letters from a third party who’s completely outside of book’s main story. Maybe stand-alone novels are going the way of the epistolary form.
In AndWhen She Was Good, Laura Lippman gives us Helen/Heloise. Helen comes from an unhappy home where her father was emotionally and sometimes physically abusive and her mother always sided with him, leaving Helen to fend for herself. As a teenager, Helen ends up in a bad relationship, and in dealing with it and trying to extricate herself, she falls into prostitution. Though she’s under the control of a wrathful pimp, whom she also loves, Helen finds she’s got quite a talent in the industry. Most girls burn out quickly, but Helen manages to stay afloat and even thrive. She’s on a quest to better herself and sneaks books to read, going to impressive lengths in order to get herself a library card.
Then she finds out that she’s pregnant and that changes everything. It’s incredibly difficult and expensive to raise a kid in today’s world, and in Helen’s case, it’s even harder as she has no education or real work skills to fall back on. And of course, she wants her son to have the best of what she never had. Once her pimp is in jail and Helen has him safely off her back, she sets up a business under his guidance, where she provides an upscale escort service to Washington DC and Baltimore’s elite.
It’s illegal, but Helen has done this before and carefully assembles this business to make a new life for herself. She changes her name to Heloise, selects a beautiful house in the suburbs to live in, and engages in the compartmentalization that seems so necessary for sex workers—a Sandy in real life but Starr onstage and when in the club, with different personalities to match. This is the part that I find so interesting, because though we live in a world where, theoretically, everyone is equal and should be able to earn equal pay for the same skills, a woman can almost always make more money using her body rather than her mind. It’s an equalizer, I guess, if a woman is blessed with looks and at ease with her body, but even that power has been taken away from her since prostitution is only legal in Nevada and there is such a taint to the world’s oldest profession.
According to Heloise, prostitution is one of those crimes that are incredibly hard to prove, perhaps because so much of the supposed crime is based on nuance. It all depends on how you say it and if you name the act, which the smart madams and their employees never do. Where madams have been busted before is in filing their taxes. Lippman’s character Heloise is obsessive about her taxes, receipts, and records, and the process of how Heloise deals with the financial side of her business is described in loving detail. I hate taxes and anything to do with finances, so an author that can actually write about this in a profound way and use it as an important plot point is pretty impressive. The amount of information given almost seems like a good how-to for madams-to-be who want to get into the business.
I really wanted to like this book wholeheartedly and there are parts of it I adore. In the end, though, I found that the subplot of a murdered madam and former sex worker muddied what was an exceptional character study. Maybe some of my disappointment is because there is no easy solution or answer for sex workers and so their stories will always feel incomplete and unfair. Reading And When She Was Good, I couldn’t help but get het up about issues that the book raised: Why is prostitution illegal but what semi-celebrities have done by dropping sex tapes to secure their fame and fortune is not? And what is a happily ever ending for a sex worker? The only stories I know end badly—Heidi Fleiss ends up in prison, then addicted to drugs and on Celebrity Rehab. There’s Boogie Nights, where everybody’s screwed up by the end. And I don’t feel like I can count Pretty Woman as a contender for a real-life story about a prostitute. So though the ending of And When She Was Good doesn’t ring true for me, I still think it’s an important book about women, women’s issues, and prostitution.
There’s a Friends episode where the characters Rachel and Joey exchange their favorite books to show each other how great their choice is. Joey’s favorite book is Stephen King’s The Shining while Rachel’s is Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Both end up enjoying the other’s pick, but there’s a funny scene where Rachel has to put The Shining in her freezer because it’s so scary. That’s what Scott Smith’s book The Ruins always reminds me of—a freezer book—because it is just that scary. The first time I read that novel, I would have to close the book at times and physically put it away from me to keep me from reading more. It wasn’t because the book was bad or the plot was lagging; it was because the story was so scary that I would need a little recovery time.
I’ve avoided watching the movie version of The Ruins for a while. Smith’s first book A Simple Plan was made into a devastating movie of the same name that was directed by Sam Raimi, one of my favorite moviemakers. Both of those works have the power to depress me for days after reading or seeing it, and I think that shows how well Smith is able to tap into the human psyche and show the darkness that exists within. Maybe I was afraid the same would happen with The Ruins, but that instead of depression, I would just experience pure adrenaline from fear for days on end. Or maybe I was just frightened that the movie wouldn’t live up to the book.
In The Ruins, a pair of American boyfriends and girlfriends (the girlfriends are best friends) are on vacation in Mexico, after graduating from college. It’s their last hurrah before settling down to jobs or graduate school and the serious task of being a grown-up. While on vacation, they meet people of different nationalities but similar age and become a loose-knit group that parties together. The German among them has lost track of his brother, with whom he came on vacation. They had a fight, and his brother chased after a female archaeologist that he became infatuated with and followed her to a dig site at some ancient Mayan ruins. He wants to go find his brother. The Americans decide to help their German friend find his brother, along with another who they simply call the Greek in the movie (real Greek, not fraternity Greek), and they think maybe they’ll have a little adventure along the way.
What makes the book work so well is the idea of a stranger in a strange land and what can happen when the strange land doesn’t play by the same rules as the strangers. When the Europeans and Americans go to the Mayan ruins, which are looked over by bloodthirsty plant life, they lose their usual tools—cell phones and other technology—and the plant life actually ends up using those against them. They also come across ancient rites and rituals that they don’t understand and fall subject to without knowing about them. In the movie version of the book, this concept is muddy and comes out wrong. Rather than the group coming across as naïve innocents who stumble into becoming a sacrifice, they’re portrayed as—well, spoiled Americans. At one point in the movie version of The Ruins, one of the characters says with righteous indignation, “Four Americans on vacation don’t just disappear,” and immediately I didn’t want to root for these people.
Another big flaw in the film, I think, is trying to physically portray the evil plant life, a vine with poppy-like flowers that creeps and uses mimicry to play the characters off one another, dividing and conquering. The special effects don’t come off as very terrifying—instead, the vines end up looking silly, like they were taken from a scene in the 1970s’ version of the TV series Land of the Lost. This is too bad because the plant is horrific in the book version; it’s what made the book so scary and eerie.
One of my young life regrets is that I never got to see Ozzy Osbourne in concert, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I remember having tickets to his concerts twice, but both times they were canceled and I was left feeling bitterly disappointed. This was in the late eighties when Ozzy was struggling with addiction (actually, when has he not?), and I believe both of those times he was shipped directly to rehab. Then I read I Am Ozzy and found out that the infamous bat head incident happened in Iowa, where I ended up doing time in high school.
This happened before I moved there, and Ozzy was doing a show in Des Moines (which he remembers how to pronounce to this day). His concerts had become known as free-for-alls where members of the audience would bring various things from home—a pig’s head, snakes, and in this case, a live bat—and throw them onstage while he performed. During this show, Ozzy caught the bat, and he thought it was one of those rubber jobs you can buy at a toy store or 99-cent store. So he did what any self-respecting rock star would do and bit its head off. The noxious taste let him know his mistake immediately, and afterward, he had to get a full course of rabies shots while on the road touring. The public will never let him forget this, and after that I don’t think Ozzy has pleasant associations with Iowa, so I guess I forgive him for canceling those shows.
In I Am Ozzy, Ozzy digs deep, going back to his early childhood in England where he played in bombed-out ruins and lived in a house with an outhouse in the yard and one bedroom that the next-oldest sibling would graduate to after the eldest flew the coop (he was one of six children). Ozzy had terrible learning disabilities that were overlooked in school, and he was just told that he was stupid. He was also bullied by his headmaster, but there Ozzy learned a trick that’s served him well to this day. He would pull crazy stunts and tricks to make people laugh, especially those that he admired or who were big bullies. Once he got that laugh, he knew he was in and then their attributes and protection would rain down on him.
Where he grew up, Ozzy saw the men go into work every day and toil away at the most boring industrial jobs (not calling in was a point of pride), and then once these men retired, they didn’t know what to do with themselves. Many of them died shortly after they retired, including his father. As a teen, Ozzy did a stint testing car horns and working in a slaughterhouse (he says he has bad animal karma from this time in his life and that’s why his family has so many pets now), but he knew this wasn’t what he was meant for. He just couldn’t do it, and so he found another way—what some people would think the least likely way—and became a rock star.
Ozzy credits his early success to his father who for some unknown reason lent his son money to buy an amp. An amp was a luxury in those days, and anybody who had one, whether they were a musician or not—well, that made them immediately in the band. With his amp, Ozzy advertised himself as a singer and that’s how he landed in the band that became Black Sabbath. It’s amazing when he recounts how the band cranked out some of their classic albums with only a few hours’ worth of studio time. When you have limited time and a budget, you do what you have to, to get things done. Black Sabbath caught on pretty quickly, but there were a few hiccups along the way, like the time they were booked because club owners thought they were an all-black band. I would love to have been present at that club date!
With success and money, Ozzy’s appetite for booze and drugs grew. Where before he could only drink until he ran out of money, now he had a limitless supply, so he would go to the pub and be gone for literally days. During this time Ozzy was in his first marriage, but he was in full addict mode and did things like shoot all the chickens that his wife bought for him to take care of and almost killed the town vicar by accidentally feeding him cake laced with a potent dose of hash.
His first marriage failed, and he was kicked out of Black Sabbath, because while everybody was drinking and drugging, they felt Ozzy’s was too out of control and interfering with the band. That’s when Sharon came into the picture and became Ozzy’s manager. She was determined to turn him into a solo act, and with a few unplanned stunts by Ozzy, his career took off brilliantly. They also became something more, the match made in heaven that we all know now, and started a family on the road.
Some people complain that they can’t understand Ozzy when he talks, like in this infamous interview where he scrambles some eggs in his leopard-print bathrobe:
But when he sings, all of Ozzy’s lyrics are comprehensible, and if you really try, you can understand him. If you don’t want to try, his voice and humor come through loud and clear in I Am Ozzy. A lot of his stories are laugh-out-loud-funny, and I get the feeling that Ozzy is much more clever than he lets on. I think part of his appeal is that he plays the part of the fuckup, the ne’er-do-well, but by doing that he gets what he wants. My grandpa used to do the same thing by pretending to be deaf. Eventually people would get so frustrated with him that they would give him whatever he wanted just to get rid of him. It’s fun to think of my grandpa having a little bit of Ozzy in him.
