Spooky Reads

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haunted house

(photo: Sean MacEntee, creative commons license)

The book-obsessed websites haven’t overlooked the opportunity to capitalize on the scary underpinnings of the Halloween season. A reader poll by the folks at BookRiot yielded this top 10 list, with The Shining scariest of all:

  • The Shining by Stephen King
  • It by Stephen King
  • Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
  • The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
  • Pet Sematary by Stephen King
  • House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
  • The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
  • The Stand by Stephen King
  • Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
  • Bird Box by Joshua Malerman

When you recall that Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son, that family has lock on half the fright mindshare.

Not surprisingly, The American Scholar takes a more high-brow approach to its list of “Spooktacular Books,” with the only overlaps House of Leaves and The Haunting of Hill House.

No time to read whole books? Jonathan Sturgeon, writing for Flavorwire, has assembled 30 of the scariest moments from Western literature—going all the way back to 760 BCE. Once again, Shirley Jackson and Hill House make the bloody cut.

Literary Duds & Decor for Halloween

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Halloween is just another opportunity to strut your literary predilections. Here’s a roundup of clever ideas that have crossed my desk this month.

pumpkin, book art

(photo: Topeka Library, creative commons license)

  • Turn books into Halloween art pieces – pulp fiction, 3-D constructions, collage, bent, torn, printed on—books can do more than sit on shelves
  • Jack o’ lanterns for readers – more Maurice Sendak than Jane Austen, but still . . . you know where the wild things are, and so will the neighbors!
  • Easy-to-challenging costumes – is the need “to die your hair” a bit too Freudian a slip? And for the Lizbeth Salander costume, find someone delicious to draw that dragon on your back!
  • Then check to see whether your costume idea is being overdone in your area with Google’s Frightgeist!
  • Miss Havisham

    “Did you hear that?” asks Miss Havisham.

    It may be more practical to look to short stories for costume inspiration (fewer people have probably read them)

  • But if you’d rather focus your creativity on writing, here’s a list of horror fiction ideas straight from recent news headlines – I have dibs on “Important Ohio bridge infested with thousands of spiders”
  • And a little of everything in this gallery of “literary Halloween” ideas. Love the “Nevermore” wreath.
  • Wearing your best Victorian garb, propping your foot on a pumpkin cushion, settle back to enjoy a “Hyde potion.” Bloody good cocktail, that.

(Thanks to Book Riot, Electric Literature, Pinterest, and HGTV for the inspiration!)

The Witches are Back

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Puritans, Salem witch trials, The Crucible

(photo: Len “Doc” Radin, Creative Commons license)

Right on time for Halloween is a new book about the tragedy of the Salem witch trials. The Witches: Salem, 1692, by Stacy Schiff describes how—at the behest mostly of hysterical young girls—19 men and women in the Massachusetts colony were tried, convicted, and hanged for witchcraft. The punishment for a 75-year-old man was being crushed to death with stones: “More weight,” he legendarily cried. Two guilty dogs also were executed. In other words, plenty of wrongheadedness was going around that has never been satisfactorily explained or completely understood. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, “The Witches is the fullest and finest story ever told about Salem in 1692.”

Schiff’s September 7 New Yorker article about how the Puritans got so far off track focused much attention on the educated members of the colony, who were as caught up in the events as anyone, and especially the role of prominent ministers and intellectuals Cotton Mather and his father Increase, president of Harvard. The two had some different reactions to the hysteria, though Cotton Mather believed “he had made a case for prosecuting the guilty, his father for protecting the innocent. Were they not saying the same thing?”

It will be interesting to read Schiff’s book to find out to what extent she subscribes—if at all—to various alternative theories about the phenomenon, one of which is that a covetous desire for wealthier Salemites property was at its root. Many years ago, I read Joe Klein’s biography of Woody Guthrie, who suffered from Huntington’s disease, a genetic disorder that can cause an afflicted person to writhe uncontrollably and to appear wild and violent in speech and movement. In an afterword, the author reported genealogical research on Guthrie’s family, which he said revealed his ancestors included several of the condemned witches.

Of course, the practice and perils of the witchhunt haven’t died. Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, in the guise of looking back to the late 1600’s, was written to demonstrate how it can reappear wearing modern-day political garb. A thoughtful reconsideration of 1692, such as Schiff’s book provides, is timely anew.

Steve Jobs

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Steve Jobs

(photo: wikimedia)

This Danny Boyle biopic (trailer), with a screenplay by the rapid-fire Aaron Sorkin, may not be to everyone’s taste, but I left the theater feeling both emotionally wrung out and strangely energized. Jobs was a complicated man, a visionary regarding the gestalt of the digital world and the devices we use to interact with it. He was not a genius engineer or a software developer, and he was totally unsentimental (and unsympathetic) toward company products past their prime and the employees who worked on them. He never threw anyone a sop, or agreed with them just to get along. As a result, the movie delivers, as Village Voice reviewer Nick Schager says, “a blistering barrage of combative dialog.”

The decision to focus this movie around three product launches—rather than the endless quotidian details that led up to them—was, I think, brilliant. Emotions were at their peak, expectations were highest, and the parameters of success or failure clearest. No case of the dwindles here. The first launch—of the Macintosh—came shortly after the revolutionary 1984 Super Bowl spot and the audience arrived pumped with expectations. The Mac was overpriced and failed miserably, and Jobs lost his job. The second launch from Jobs’s new company—the NeXT—was another flop. And the third, the 1998 introduction of the iMac? Well, the third time’s the charm. Yes, he was impossibly demanding and ruthlessly critical, but would another personality, making subtle compromises all along the line have achieved as much?

I did not read Walter Isaacson’s eponymous 2011 biography, so was left with some questions about the balance of information presented. It would be obviously impossible to condense all the arguments, recriminations, and flashbacks we see on film into the final few minutes before a product launch—there wouldn’t be time—but that was cinematic license. What I couldn’t assess was whether his daughter Lisa was actually such a significant part of his life, though I understand the filmmakers’ impulse to humanize him through his interactions with her; nor do I know whether Joanna Hoffman was really his conscience over such a long period of time. If so, I bow down in respect to her. The credits do indicate license was taken in fictionalizing some characters and events.

Despite overall positive reviews—Variety calls it “strikingly literate” and “a brilliant film,” the movie is not doing well at the box office. Perhaps this is because the main character isn’t seen as “likeable”—in direct contrast to the Tom Hanks character in Bridge of Spies, reviewed here yesterday. Perhaps Michael Fassbender is not yet a bankable name, and ditto re Hanks.

Certainly the cast was well up to the task. As Jobs, Fassbender is passionate about product and icy about people; Kate Winslet plays the long-suffering Hoffman with the slightest East European accent; Seth Rogen is the passed over Steve Wozniak; and Michael Stuhlbarg, the oft-berated, yet mostly bouncing back programmer Andy Hertzfeld. Jeff Daniels is John Sculley, who replaced Jobs as a more avuncular head of Apple and who, eventually, was fired himself as the company lurched toward bankruptcy. His departure paved the way for the emperor’s triumphant return.

The script includes some of Jobs’s famous aspirational and inspirational quotes. I have one—not used in the film—over my desk. It says “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” Words he clearly lived by.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 85%; audiences 79%.

Bridge of Spies

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Tom Hanks, Bridge of Spies

Tom Hanks in Bridge of Spies

Stephen Spielberg’s riveting new film (trailer) portrays the real-life events and personalities that led to a historic U.S.-Soviet-East German prisoner exchange in the frozen depths of the Cold War. In 1962, in a divided Berlin, an accused Soviet spy is to be traded for two Americans, if all goes well. An off-the-books U.S. negotiator has led the Soviets and the East Germans separately to the brink of agreeing the exchange, but hostilities are strong, motives are complex, and success is far from guaranteed.

Based on the 2010 Giles Whittell book of the same name, the story centers around the intertwined fates of William Fisher, born Rudolf Abel, a British-born KGB agent whom the FBI arrested in New York; Francis Gary Powers, U.S. pilot of a super-secret U-2 spy plane shot down while flying over Russia; and Frederic Pryor, an American graduate student who finds himself on the wrong side of the new Berlin Wall and in the hands of the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious secret police.

Spielberg tells these men’s stories, but centers on the role of U.S. insurance attorney James Donovan in the negotiations. Donovan’s role initially is to defend Abel in his trial on espionage charges. He takes on this thankless task, even though everyone in the country, including the judge in the case, believes Abel is guilty. However, American legal processes need to be followed, if only to show the world that every prisoner receives a fair trial (an ironic punctiliousness half a century later). Inevitably, Abel is convicted, but at least Donovan persuades the judge not to invoke the death penalty. It’s a controversial choice for Donovan to decide to appeal the verdict, and one that puts himself—and perhaps his family and career—in some danger.

When Powers’s plane is shot down, the possibility of a prisoner swap is immediately seized upon by the CIA. They want Powers back. He knows too much. Donovan is asked to negotiate an Abel-Powers trade, unofficially. What he encounters on all sides in wintry Berlin is stubborn resistance salted with suffocating paranoia. He also hears about the unlucky American student and insists he be part of the deal, which the CIA rejects. They’re not interested.

The acting is terrific, especially Tom Hanks as Donovan and Mark Rylance as Abel. In smaller roles, the CIA agents and Soviet and East German negotiators are suitably opaque and blustering. Amy Ryan, Donovan’s wife, is always excellent. They have the benefit of working from a strong script by Matt Charman, Ethan Coen, and Joel Coen. I particularly liked how, whenever Donovan asks Abel if he is worried about some particular outcome, Abel responds, “Would it help?”

The look of the film is exactly right—cold, forbidding—and the Glienicke Bridge, site of the hoped-for exchange is a desolate place. Spielberg’s handling of Donovan as “the standing man,” underscoring a metaphor introduced by Abel, works. If only he’d resisted a few message-heavy Hollywood touches (East Germans versus U.S. children scrambling over a wall, for example), it would have been perfect.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 92%; audiences 91%.

*****Clockers

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The Wire

Larry Gilliard, Jr., as D’Angelo Barksdale, second from right, on his perch, running his game in The Wire

By Richard Price – When I read Richard Price’s new crime novel The Whites earlier this year, I knew I needed to loop around and read his 1992 classic, widely considered his “best.” It really is knock-your-socks-off. In alternating chapters, it adopts the point of view of Strike, a young crack dealer in the housing projects of fictional Dempsey, New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan, and homicide detective Rocco Klein.

Strike is a lower-level dealer who wants to get out of it, but without even a high school education, he can’t see any other path forward. Rocco is a seen-it-all investigator working in the county prosecutor’s office. What brings these two together is the murder confession by Strike’s straight-arrow brother Victor. Strike was supposed to make the hit, and didn’t, but he doesn’t think Victor did it either, and he wants to save his brother whatever way he can. Rocco figures Strike for the shooter, but can’t get Victor to change his story.

It’s a story about poor people, mostly black, and lost fathers, in which a few heroic mothers struggle to maintain family order. Strike’s cocaine- and crack-fueled world (he himself never uses the product) is under constant yet ineffectual harassment by federal, state, and local police, housing police, and narcotics officers. The homicide detectives, who are a little higher on the law enforcement pecking order, are less frequent visitors to this milieu. They have their own agenda and sometimes cooperate with the other authorities, and sometimes not. Strike can never be sure where loyalties lie, even those of his own runners (the “clockers,” because the drug market operates 24/7), who may ally with rival drug lords at any time. He certainly can’t trust Rocco, who is always playing games of his own.

What makes the book so powerful are the deep portraits of the characters. Both the main players are both strong and weak, the reader likes and loathes them in almost equal measure. Supporting characters—Rocco’s partner Mazilli and Strike’s boss Rodney, especially—are fully drawn and absolutely believable. The writing, including the characters’ dialog, is pitch-perfect.

Price was one of the writers for the best-tv-ever series [!!], The Wire, and reading this book after seeing the show, I certainly saw echoes of some of its notable characters: D’Angelo sitting on his perch in the projects, managing a team of young runners; Omar, the invincible hit-man cut down by a child; Officer Thomas Hauc, the violent and racist enforcer. Spike Lee made it into a movie in 1995 starring Mekhi Phifer, Harvey Keitel, John Turturro, and Delroy Lindo.

Even though the narcotics picture has changed in the past 23 years, this remains a riveting book because of the strength of its story and the social dysfunctions it lays bare, which are still, by and large, unresolved.

More Philadelphia Outdoor Art Magic

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Isaiah Zagar, Philadelphia

(photo: Rob Wanenchak, creative commons license)

Although Philadelphia street-art may be most famous for its astonishing array of some 4000 public murals and several world-famous sculptures, the city is also home to a quirky collection of outdoor mosaic art by Isaiah Zagar. He has covered storefronts, purpose-built walls, doorways, and the fully mosaicked gallery spaces and labyrinth sculpture garden called “Magic Gardens” at 1020 South Street. Online resources include a map of the locations of Zagar’s mosaic installations in his Center City neighborhood.

Philadelphia-born Zagar assembles his elaborate designs from broken pottery, pieces of mirror, bottles, and even unexpected materials like bicycle wheels. They are a sprightly addition to the area’s staid colonial architecture, and on a sunny day wink at passersby with their color and shine. In order to make art more accessible to wider audiences and to engage more people in artistic creation, the Magic Gardens hold monthly Mosaic Mural Workshops and Family Jams.

Isaiah Zagar, Philadelphia

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

Zagar’s work is included in the permanent collections of a number of prominent museums, and he has received numerous awards. He says his work makes reference to other visionary artists from around the world who have created memorable public art environments, such as those here. (If Philadelphia isn’t near you, perhaps the work of one of these other eccentric creatives is!)

Zagar’s son Jeremiah made a well regarded “warts and all” film about the family and Isaiah’s artistic ambitions, In a Dream.

 

Enlarging Your Travel Circle:

  • Philadelphia is less than 50 miles away when you’re visiting Wilmington (33 miles)
  • About 100 miles away when you’re in New York (96) or Baltimore (101) and
  • Only 140 miles away when you’re in Washington, D.C.

Phoenix

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Phoenix, Nina HossWhat is identity? Is it who we are or who others think we are? A scenario capable of stripping people of their selfhood greater than the Holocaust is hard to imagine, and German filmmaker Christian Petzold puts his protagonist Nelly, played with great subtlety by Nina Hoss, in that predicament in Phoenix (trailer). A Jewish former cabaret singer, she’s somehow survived the concentration camp and is determined to return to Berlin to find her husband Johnny among the piled-up post-war debris and psychological ruin. Her stalwart friend Lene doesn’t trust Johnny, but Nelly won’t be deterred.

She was horribly disfigured by her concentration camp experience and, aided by Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), undergoes extensive reconstructive surgery, pleading for the Swiss doctor to return her face to exactly the way it looked before, though he warns her that may be impossible. In Berlin, still bearing the bruises of her extensive plastic surgery, she re-encounters Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld). His belief that Nelly is dead is so strong, he ignores signs that this woman, who calls herself “Esther” (“There aren’t too many Esthers left,” he says), and his wife are one and the same.

In her job, Lene finds people among the dislocated and helps them get them to Palestine. She plans for them both to go there, a future she believes in whole-heartedly, but which interests Nelly not at all. The endless poring over the lists of the murdered takes its toll, and Lene finally says she feels more kinship “with our dead than with the living.”

Johnny wants Nelly to masquerade as his wife to gain the fortune she’s inherited after the deaths of her entire family. This leaves her with the mind-bending quandary of pretending to be someone pretending to be who she really is. In truth, neither of them can “see” the other.

Based on a somewhat simplified version of the French novel Return from the Ashes, it’s a story about the crumbling of trust and how illusions—Nelly’s and Johnny’s equally—blind us to reality. A powerful film whose conclusion is a shattering confrontation with the truth. Excellent performances by Hoss, Zehrfeld, and Kunzendorf. Kurt Weill’s haunting “Speak Low” is heard throughout in different versions.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating an unequivocal 99%! Viewers 81%.

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****Midnight in Europe

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Guernica, tapestry, Picasso

(photo: copyright by Ceridwen, creative commons license)*

By Alan Furst – A new Alan Furst book in my to-read stack is a temptation hard to resist. His ability to evoke the thickening clouds of dread gathering over Europe in the 1930s is unsurpassed, while we, with the benefit of hindsight, would like to reach into the story and propel the characters into different directions and decisions.

This thriller concerns efforts to get weapons to the anti-Fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that gave the Nazis a chance to flex their military muscle on the side of Francisco Franco. The war served as a grim prelude to World War II. This is the Spain of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and the short stories of Julian Zabalbeascoa, the most recent, “Gernika,” published in the fall 2015 Glimmer Train.

In Furst’s novel, a Spanish lawyer working in Paris agrees to help in the arms-buy arrangements, which isn’t easy, as several countries have embargoed munitions shipments to Spain, and spies are everywhere. A little romance, too. I particularly like how Furst takes ordinary people—by that I mean people whom readers can identify with, who don’t know all the secrets of arcane martial arts or who in college did not letter in six grueling sports, including sharpshooting, of course, or who aren’t alumni of elite undercover military units—and puts them in situations that test their wits and their nerve.

I’ve read all of Furst’s books and know how he works. Yet putting myself in his hands remains an absorbing and tension-filled ride through an ominous and bitter historical time.

*This tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s famous anti-war painting “Guernica,” created in response to the Spanish Civil War is interesting in itself. It is on display here in The Whitechapel Gallery, the only British venue to exhibit the painting in 1939. According to the gallery, “The original work is now too fragile to leave Madrid; this tapestry was loaned to the gallery, for its re-opening, by its owner Margaretta Rockefeller. Normally it hangs in the United Nations in New York where in 2003 it was controversially veiled prior to a speech by Colin Powell on the eve of the Iraq war.”

Song for the Disappeared

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Song for the Disappeared

Vivia Font & Christina Nieves in “Song for the Disappeared”

This new 90-minute play promised to dramatize several of my painful reads of the past year regarding the vulnerability of people caught, often through no fault of their own, in the ultra-violent wars of the Mexican narco-cartels. These issues have been painfully explored in both fiction (The Cartel) and non-fiction (Down by the River) exposés reviewed here.

Song for the Disappeared, by Tanya Saracho, probes the problem of fractured loyalties and the inability of even the wealthy to distance themselves from the consequences of operating within a totally broken system. The family patriarch is an honorable man, apparently, but his uprightness provides him and his family no protection; his recently returned daughter has pursued her literary aims, but only her naiveté allowed her to believe her novel about a narcotraficante family would be regarded as fiction; her ex-fiancé, now the father’s only trusted aide, has turned to religion for protection; and the father’s young wife, viewed by the others as a complete airhead, has her own demons.

When the play begins, the family heir Javier has disappeared. The family reunites at its remote Texas ranch, where everyone’s vulnerabilities are exposed, and no one is sure how to proceed or what will come next. Their struggles are symbolized in the actions of the younger daughter, slightly deranged and struggling to save the smallest and most vulnerable creatures she finds. Meanwhile, the wild dogs circle every more closely.

The all-Latino cast in the Passage Theatre production does a fine job. Even in Passage’s tiny venue, it is an engaging theatrical event, directed by Alex Correia. On stage until October 25.