Category: Books

Books

Joyce Carol Oates at Her Scary Best with Daddy Love

by horrorfeminista6 Comments on Joyce Carol Oates at Her Scary Best with Daddy Love

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 what Oates conveys is that these abducted, abused children are marked for life if they’re lucky enough to escape their captors.

Joyce Carol Oates and cat.
Joyce Carol Oates and cat.
Books, Music, Personal

A Heavy Metal Valentine

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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.

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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.

A Heavy Metal Valentine

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.

Books, Crafting, Personal

Evil Genius to Produce Zombie Color Books

by horrorfeminista4 Comments on Evil Genius to Produce Zombie Color Books

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.

JesusAsPaulStanley

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.

Books

Breed Showcases Genetically Engineered Horror

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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.
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.

Books

Lippman Opens Up New Territory in And When She Was Good

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In And When 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.

Books, Movies

The Ruins Is Scarier as a Book than a Movie

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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.

Books, Music

Osbourne’s Voice Comes through Loud and Clear in “I Am Ozzy”

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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.

Books, Horror, Uncategorized

Damien Echols’ Life After Death Is a Heartbreaker

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I had never heard about Damien Echols and the West Memphis Three before reading the memoir Life After Death. Somehow I completely missed this case in the 1990s when three teenagers were sentenced to life—and in the case of Damien Echols, to death—based on no real evidence to speak of except for a coerced confession. This is the case that started a slew of reactionary stories in the media about cults and satanic worship among teens. This was just not true, though, in the case of the West Memphis Three—Jessie Misskelley, Jason Baldwin, and Damien Echols—and these guys lost almost twenty years of their lives behind bars, not to mention suffering the unspeakable torture that occurs in jails.

Echols starts his memoir with two definitions of magick, which appear to have been the guiding principles for much of his life. He says, “The first is knowing that I can effect change through my own will; and the other meaning is more experiential—seeing beauty for a moment in the midst of the mundane.” Echols’s view of life was probably his saving grace in jail, and he describes how much of the population there was batshit crazy—if not before they went in, they came to that point after a few years behind bars.

Echols had simple memories of the eighteen years of free life he experienced before he was sentenced to death. He grew up mean poor—not a little poor with family meals of Ramen noodles, but really poor with no running water at times or heat. Despite that, he carried treasured memories—the feel of the different seasons and an appreciation for nature, the meaning of music in his life and what it felt like, and real affection for his friends and family. In jail, he had to ration his memories and only take them out every once in a while so they wouldn’t get used up. Often, he talks about having to deny himself things while in prison, because otherwise there was nothing to break up the monotony. He had to keep experiences from himself so they would remain special.

I’ve never had a clear picture of what jail is like, I don’t think, until reading Life After Death. The idea I had probably came from Stephen King’s novel and novella The Green Mile and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, and in those stories, there are saving graces—a mouse that becomes a pet, decent guards who look out for their prisoners no matter what they’ve done, and adequate access to books. Echols’s experiences in jail have destroyed whatever notions I might have held, and I believe he could school Stephen King (who Echols learned the art of writing from) in giving a more realistic portrayal of what life is like behind bars.

Echols is taken off his antidepressant cold turkey once he’s on death row because there’s no point in fixing a guy who’s going to die anyway. When he’s beaten by guards and his teeth sustain nerve damage, he’s given the option of having them pulled out and replaced by dentures because fixing them is too much trouble for a guy who’s supposed to die anyway. Echols is never allowed outside to see the sky. He’s in his cell most of the time, and when he’s allowed to walk, he must be shackled and can then pace back and forth in something akin to a grain silo.

The list goes on and on, but what seems most cruel is when the author is suddenly slapped with something he did not realize he had lost. With startling comparisons, Echols writes, “God, I miss the sound of cicadas singing. I used to sit on my front porch and listen to those invisible hordes all screaming in the trees like green lunacy. The only place I hear them now is on television. I’ve seen live newscasts where I could hear them screeching in the background. When I realized what it was I was hearing I nearly fell to my knees, sobbing and screaming a denial to everything I’ve lost, everything that’s been stolen from me. It’s a powerful sound—the sound home would make if it weren’t a silent eternity from me.”

Damien Echols.

 

What scares me the most about this story is that it ever happened at all. After reading Life After Death, I became obsessed with the case and watched the documentaries that brought the West Memphis Three to the public eye—Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, Paradise Lost: Revelations, and Paradise Lost: Purgatory. The footage taken of West Memphis during 1993 makes the town look like a doppelgänger to the one where I attended high school; it’s eerie how similar the landscapes are. The teenagers put on trial for a supposed satanic ritual murder of three children could have been the friends I hung out with in high school with their long hair, Metallica T-shirts, and taste for horror movies and literature. And it just seems crazy and impossible how these trappings of youthful rebellion, heavy metal/goth style, could be twisted into a case about cult ritualistic murder.

 

All three were convicted of the crime based on the flimsiest of evidence and served seventeen years before somebody finally overruled the original trial judge, David Burnett, who shut down all of their appeals, and the Arkansas Supreme Court agreed to allow new evidence that could set them free. Thank God, those materials still existed. With the amount of bungling that happened in this case, I would have expected for the evidence to have been destroyed or “accidentally” thrown away. But it didn’t, and during those seventeen years in jail, Echols taught himself how to write so he could give us this dark jewel. I’ve gobbled up everything I can read and watch about the case and now just have to wait for the Peter Jackson-produced documentary West of Memphis to come out at Christmas to put a cap on this. Echols is a powerful writer, and I’m curious to see what he puts out next now that the West Memphis case is over. I’m hoping for a horror story—a fictional horror story.

Books

Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You Is Pretty Forgettable

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Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You is Joyce Carol Oates’s latest young adult offering, and I always feel like these novels are attempts by her to make sense of new technology. In Oates’s young adult novels, Internet searches, instant messaging, and texting take up great chunks of the book and are important plot points compared to her adult novels and short stories. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I often have to ask younger kids how to do something on the computer. They’ve grown up always used to one while I had to learn in my last few years of high school. I know Oates got a new iPhone a while ago and was enamored with the photo function. Lots of cat pictures followed, which is very teenage girl, and I can’t help thinking that maybe this novel coincides with her acquisition.

A recent cat portrait by Joyce Carol Oates.

 

In this novel, the story is told through two perspectives, Merissa Carmichael, a triple-A personality who’s been accepted early to Brown, and Nadia Stillinger, an insecure, curvy girl who’s been told she’s fat so many times that she now believes it (she’s five foot four and weighs 119 pounds at her heaviest). The unifying factor between these girls is that they were part of an inner circle that all received a last cryptic text from the boldest of them, Tink Traumer, before she committed suicide. The two different viewpoints didn’t really work for me. They felt uneven, but I guess the point of them is to show how Tink’s strength, ever after her death, helps these two girls when they are at their worst points and quite close to suicide to themselves.

Tink Traumer came to their school a few years earlier, a short, slight girl with an exotic past. Her mother is a television actress and very glamorous to Tink’s friends, and Tink herself was a child actress for several years on the same drama series as her mother. Now, Tink wants nothing to do with the world of acting and refuses to answer any questions about that time period. Tink’s not much to look at. She has red hair that she shaves off, is covered in freckles, and wears the same clothes day in and day out, but she makes up for that with her bravery. She’s a gifted artist and quite lippy, challenging teachers and adults when she feels it’s needed. Her friends are part of a popular clique, and all have their problems from the Perfect One, Merissa, whose home life is breaking apart and copes by cutting, to the weakest member, Nadia, who’s so eager for others to like her that she ends up sexually abused and the victim of cyberbullying.

 

Both Merissa and Nadia have strong fathers who only seem to care about their daughters as far as how much of a credit they are to them. Merissa’s father is proud of her prize-winning essay that’s posted on the Scientific American website, but he doesn’t have time to read it, and he’s thrilled that she’s won the coveted part of Elizabeth Bennet in the school theater production of Pride and Prejudice but doesn’t understand her reasons for quitting, or resigning her role, as Merissa puts it. Nadia’s father puts her in the best school possible—she’s nearly as recent as Tink to the high school—and her job is to not embarrass him. (She’s the baggage left over from his first marriage; he’s on his third now.) After a sexual experience happens that she doesn’t remember because she was drugged, Nadia is the subject of many rumors at school and is mercilessly harassed by the boys. She develops a crush on one of her teachers, Mr. Kessler, and after some bad decisions, her father is after him, accusing Mr. Kessler of something that he didn’t do. Nadia’s father doesn’t listen to his daughter; he just wants to punish what he perceives as a slight against him.

This isn’t a terrible book; I finished it. But I like Oates’s other young adult titles better. This just felt like a list of teen problems to me: suicide, check; cutting, check; and oh yeah, body image. I’m puzzled about what the novel’s big message is. The girl who is apparently the strongest in the clique commits suicide and then her spirit helps others who are having problems? Or is the message as simple as appearances are deceiving? I have no takeaway from the book. I reflected for a moment on cutting and body image, but the teens of today are coming up with their own solutions like the Butterfly Project and petitions to teen magazines to stop photoshopping models, making unrealistic images. I’m not sure that they would have much use for the girls presented in Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You.

Joyce Carol Oates and cat.
Books

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl Is a Nasty Treat

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Since this book was touted as having a real nasty female character, the “gone girl” of the title, I’ve been looking forward to reading it all summer. I’ve always liked a bad girl, so I was completely surprised to find this one almost too nasty to take.

Gone Girl is told from two perspectives in a failing marriage. There’s Nick, a likable guy from Missouri, who was living the dream in Brooklyn. He writes about pop culture for a well-known magazine, and then he meets Amy, a girl almost too good to be true, at a writers’ party. He loses her number, but somehow fate means for these two to be together, and he runs into her again at a Park Slope deli. He doesn’t make the same mistake again. After a perfect courtship, the two marry, living in a beautiful apartment that’s been bought and paid for with Amy’s money, because as well as being perfect, she’s rich.

Amy is the only child of two psychologists, who have pretty much documented her entire child- and adulthood in a series they co-wrote called Amazing Amy. Amy is a writer as well, though maybe viewed as a minor one compared to her husband (or in his opinion, anyway). She writes the quizzes that appear in the pages of women’s magazines, so a reader can find out how far from or close to perfect she is. As Amy goes about her life, the text is riddled with these self-designed quizzes while she tries to figure out what to do next. She always knows the perfect way to act even if she’s not feeling the genuine emotion behind the act.

Things have been going well in their New York City world until the recession of 2008 hits and the field of publishing is decimated. First, Nick loses his job, and then Amy’s goes. They’re left bouncing off of each other in their apartment, lounging in their pajamas past noon and reading every page of the newspaper. Then Nick’s parents start failing. His mother has a late stage of cancer and is dying while his father (who Nick has conflicting feelings about) appears to have been struck with some form of Alzheimer’s. Nick’s twin sister Mo has moved back to Missouri from New York to care for their parents, and Nick decides to put a stop to his inertia and what he sees as the first frayings of his marriage by moving back to help out.

Amy’s parents experience a downturn in their fortunes and Amy is no longer as well off as she one was, but she allows much of her last money to be invested in Nick’s new venture, a bar that he opens with his sister called The Bar. Amy hates the McMansion that she and Nick now live in and makes digs about it all the time, and Nick retreats to The Bar—which has become more like his clubhouse, his home away from the one he doesn’t like so much—as his marriage disintegrates.

On the day of his fifth wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing in what looks to have been a violent confrontation in their home. Nick acts shady from the start, not having a believable alibi for the time he was supposedly away from the house and lying to the cops about other things as well. Then evidence starts to creep up that seems to implicate Nick in what looks more and more like the murder of his wife.

Amy is a lover of games and presents her husband with a very special one that she designs herself for each of their wedding anniversaries. She had been disappointed with Nick’s capacity to understand and get her anniversary treasure hunt in the past, so she dumbs down the fifth-year hunt, and Nick goes clue to clue, trying to figure out what happened to his wife.

Nick grows more and more distasteful as the story progresses, and my fingers itched to move ahead in the story and find some sort of nice instead of being infected by the millions of hurts that these people inflict on each other in what has become a pus-filled marriage; I didn’t, though. I read the story sequentially and started to think about two other writers who had a contentious marriage: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. It’s somewhat of a mystery how their marriage actually ended since Sylvia committed suicide after Ted left her, but Ted said the affair he was having was really nothing and Sylvia knew he was coming back to her. Her journals from that time period were burned by Ted because he said they were so unbelievably ugly that he didn’t want his children ever to see them. I can believe this. Sylvia had a mean streak that came out in her journals (the published ones), and I’m sure that being a scorned woman would bring this out even more. But what if Sylvia had acted like Amy, and Ted had acted like Nick in this modern story of a marriage gone bad? I started thinking of Gone Girl in this light and found the story much more palatable. Gone Girl is a well-written book with eerily observed insights into the human psyche, such as this passage, where Nick finds his wife’s condescension even creeping into his writing:

“Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don’t work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women’s hat makers, or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was done. Three weeks after I got cut loose, Amy lost her job, such as it was. (Now I can feel Amy looking over my shoulder, smirking at the time I’ve spent discussing my career, my misfortune, and dismissing her experience in one sentence. That, she would tell you, is typical. Just like Nick, she would say. It was a refrain of hers: Just like Nick to…and whatever followed, whatever was just like me, was bad.)”

I think that’s why I found the story so disturbing. It’s too easy to see this as being real life and not fiction.