The Gun Man and the Arsonist

Right after I hoisted Don Quixote back to the bookcase, I sprinted to my homely orange paperback shelf and grabbed Gun Man (Fawcett/Ballentine, 1985) by genre veteran Loren D. Estleman. Estleman is known mostly for his crime novels set in Detroit, but he also writes excellent historical western novels that work as both ripping old-style entertainment and historically acute, tough-minded, observant and funny novels with a contemporary edge. His own shelves sag with many awards and he’s even been nominated for a National Book Award (now the American Books Award) for The High Rocks.

Gun Man’s protagonist, John “Killer” Miller, is drawn from the brutal myths of numerous notorious Old West gunfighters, Will Bill Hickok likely among them. His story is bristling, grim, and tersely told. My copy is only 212 pages but, like all the best genre novels, there’s always a sense that here’s more going on beyond the page count. Readers will find a pungent, sophisticated portrayal of the culture and politics of the American Midwest before, during, and after the Civil War, that bloody ground that was the mulch so many murderous American myths (like Jesse James). Action fans will soak up the gunplay; history and political buffs will find plenty to ponder.

But a good novel is more than the tale; it’s also the telling. Estleman, like another genre master
Donald Westlake, rarely puts a word wrong and makes it all seem fresh. Each chapter opens with song lyrics—written by the author—that set the yarn-spinning tone of what follows:

His pa he worked the dirt and dust
a-strainin in the sun;
But John he let the plow grow rust
And practiced with his gun.

Estleman’s stir of history and biography cooks up a bitter, ironic campfire yarn, full of character
and incident. The gun battles are written a terseness that conveys a hard and bleak pity for all
those involved, killer and, in the following passage, victim alike:

“There was no surprise on his face, only a sudden knowing, and in the black eyes a flatness that
was more flat than the flatness that preceded it.”

You can smell the death intertwined with the gunsmoke. This is a tale of a how twisted brutal world creates a twisted mythic life. I’ve liked all of Estleman’s novels that I’ve read so far. He hasn’t done me wrong yet.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

Yes, I do I hate it when swell ideas wind up down the tubes. An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007) sounds like um surefire stuff: a lonely geeky teenager accidentally burns down the home of American poet Emily Dickinson’s, killing two people.

Years later, out of prison, he creates a new respectable life for himself and thinks he’s buried
his past . . . then one day the son of his victims shows up at his door. Not long after, a series
of sudden mysterious blazes consume the homes of other famous New England writers, poet Robert Frost among them (Odd coincidence: Frost’s home was actually recently vandalized by a bunch of dissolute teenagers).

From the typewriter of Donald Westlake, Arsonist’s Guide would have been an ingenious, fast-paced, whooping farce of obsessed, addle-brained characters bumbling their winding way to hell and back. A reader would also be the recipient of witty and graceful insights on the fate of books and literature in a post-literate world where some fear that, as related in a recent New Yorker article, reading may someday become an “arcane skill.”

Unfortunately, we are not in the hands of Mr. Westlake, but of a writer named Brock Clarke of whom I know little and, guessing from this, will likely not learn much more.

The protagonist is a self-admitted, chronic bumbler named Sam Pulsifer. Sam is also a self-obsessed ditherer, which may be why this story never seems to really catch fire, like the houses. Though accused of heinous crimes he didn’t commit, Sam seems more interested in other aspects of his life—namely his tortured relationship with his parents and his nonrelationship with his wife and children--even when taking the wrong action. It’s not that he bumbles the quest to prove his innocence and save his reputation--in a comic novel, he darn well better bumble it—but that this goal seems to be almost a distraction. A bumbler has to bumble like his life depended on it. The idea of being accused of burning down our monuments to our national literature strikes me as a blazing metaphor for something, but that’s not where this book seems to be headed.

Instead, we get long strings of such non-insightful insights as this one:

“Because this is also what it means to be in a family: to have two of its members break the family
and then wait around for a third to make it whole again.”

OK, I guess so . . . but it’s one of many insights that float around in the narrative with no
place to nestle in to. All the characters appear to be listless and poorly motivated. In the end, Sam is revealed to be so disconnected and indifferent to his own guilt or innocence and to the fate of literature that he makes, what strikes me as a pointless unbelievable act of self-sacrifice. If family is what this novel is really about, why burn down Robert Frost’s house to make the point?

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For you writers who read this blog, John Hodgman, the guy you root for in those Apple v. PC commercials and who appears on the Daily Show viewers, also blogs on this service too, and has provided a link to this You Tube video by a Minneapolis writer named Dennis Cass that provides a hilarious illustration of the perils of the literary fame I so cravenly crave. Mr. Cass has published a book called Head Case. Judging by the video, I will probably buy it as soon as certain ships dock. But I will not stop my vain and ruthless quest to get you all to buy my book.

Don Quixote, No Broadway Tears

[WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND IN THE FOLLOWING MOST EXCELLENT AND HONORABLE EXEGESIS!]

My New Year’s resolution for 2008 was to start reading one great classic novel a year. Reading and writing genre fiction is no excuse not to seek insight and inspiration from writers in different worlds than mine. Done wrong, of course, this can lead to creative paralysis (“Oh God, I’m never gonna write Moby Dick!”) or a warped and pompous ambition (“I’ll show the bastards! I’ll be the next Herman Melville!”). But done right, it may make me a better writer, maybe a more interesting person at certain cocktail parties.

And so I’ve read my Great Book for 2008: Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes. Like so many old canon classics, this novel is more remembered than read. Our image of it these days seems mostly to derive from the 1965 Broadway musical Man of La Mancha by Dale Wasserman, Joe Darion, and Mitch Leigh, a celebration of the romantic liberal idealistic knight errant tilting at the windmill, which represents the unjust, corrupt, cynical and ignorant world. The song "The Impossible Dream" is now an annoying standard. The musical is stapled on the marquees of community theaters across the United States. I saw the 1972 movie starring Peter O’Toole, James Coco and Sophia Loren. Even as a love-struck college student, my heart remained unmelted, except for the scenes where Ms. Loren bends over.

Nevertheless my lazy memory of the musical and lazier assumptions about the book were more or less one: the novel would be a long-winded exercise in gauzy gooey bathos. Then a couple of years ago, a New Yorker review of the most recent translation (by Edith Grossman, Ecco, 2003) strongly indicated that this opinion might be like the old Don’s vision of the windmills that are the book’s central metaphor—a delusion.

The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha was first published in Spain in 1605. A contemporary of Shakespeare’s, Miguel Cervantes (1547—1616) was a frustrated playwright and poet, a soldier who lost an arm fighting real battles for the Spanish Armada and then later became a POW. Late in the 1500s, he became a tax collector for the Spanish crown and was jailed for apparent discrepancies in his accounts. It was while in jail that he first conjured the idea for what would be both his masterpiece and a founding work of modern western literature.

Judging from his life and this novel, Cervantes appears to have a been a man who knew how the world worked. Don Quixote is called the first “modern” novel: Among other innovations, it overthrew the traditional novels of its day, which were chivalric novels: romantic, heroic and non-realistic tales of dashing medieval knights and their loyal assistants (or squires) battling dragons and rescuing damsels. L’Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory is a most illustrious example. Chivalric novels are still very much with us in such volumes as The Mists of Avalon. (You could write a decent essay about the link between novels of chivalry and the modern hard-boiled detective novel, too). By the time Cervantes, soldier and prisoner, came along, the genre had crumbles into piles of cliché.

So Don Quixote, on its surface, is a spoof and is considered to be the first “comic novel.” Its humor and satire rips the armor off the chivalric novel and shows people as they actually are, not as we wish them to be. The errant knight is not a selfless hero, but a vain, egotistical, hypocritical fool. In one episode, he saves a young peasant from a savage beating by his master, only to blithely gallop away leaving the young man to suffer an even worse beating from his boss. It’s like watching The Lone Ranger and Tonto break up a bank robbery, only to neglect to jail the robbers, leaving them free to burn down the rest of the town. Not strong on follow through.

Here's another signal that this is a “modern novel”: More than one author is employed in the telling of this “history” and they’re a mysterious and slippery gang, grossly impressed with their own sagacity rather than the Don’s fruitless sacrifices, another sure sign that we are in modern literature's world of often unreliable narrators. Cervantes also inserts novels within the novel: One is a fairly straightforward and exciting fictionalized account of his own adventure as a POW.

Still, the experience of actually reading Don Quixote doesn't always feel modern. This is sixteenth-century Spain, after all. The literate class of that time was also a leisure class with more time on their hands and fewer distractions (they must also have been shocked to find themselves drawn into a world so earthy, gritty and boisterous). Like other works of its time, this is a long book. Twenty-first century readers with two-second attention spans may still find it long-winded and extremely dense. If there’s a way for a character to say something more than once—especially if it’s Sancho Panza—then it shall be said. The Don delivers many lectures on points of chivalry—some of which actually do contain wisdom. Meanwhile, Sancho Panza (who might be a distant ancestor of Gabby Hayes') speaks a delightful stew of old folk wisdom, much of it irrelevant, much of which has found its way into our modern vernacular.

On the other hand, the book's many chapters are all short. And Don Quixote is packed with as much violent slapstick as a Road Runner cartoon. No matter how often the old Don and his squire are splattered over the plains of Spain, they always peel themselves off the ground (or the floor, or the rock, or a wall) like Wile E. Coyote to fight on. In the gallery of great comic archetypes, Don Quixote (like Stephen Colbert) is the Man Who’s Completely Confident . . . and (Almost) Completely Wrong.

At the same time, though, this big, baggy novel, is as arch, witty and pointed as anything written by Noel Coward. It’s observations of the broken society through which the Don and Sancho ride ring true and are extremely pointed. Don Quixote not only satirizes romantic novels, but skewers the whole idea of romantic love. Like the bones of the dead, broken hearts litter this landscape, many done in by violence and death. A stark episode, near the beginning, tells the tale of a lovesick shepherd who dies of longing for a beautiful, but allegedly heartless, shepherd girl. At his funeral, she appears and rises to her own eloquent defense:

. . .but I cannot grasp why, because it is loved, the thing loved for its beauty is obliged to love the one that loves it. . . . . Why do you want to force me to surrender my will, obliged to do so simply because you say you love me?

Episode after episode, brings to mind that J. Geils song: “Love Stinks.” And with it comes the whiff of tragicomedy.

Vladimir Nabokov, who published a whole series of lectures on the novel, believed Don Quixote to be a “crude old book full of peculiarly Spanish cruelty.” I know relatively little of Spain, but I agree on this: Cervantes’ novel really is full of peculiar cruelty. Four hundred years cannot hide the sense that there’s hardly a sentimental bone in its dense body. Reality, not only in the sense of the physical world, but of the people—peasants and lords, priests and criminals alike—beats hell out of Don Quixote and his squire. Even Sancho’s minor victory, when he’s fraudulently given the governorship he spends most of the novel yearning for, ends in farcical heartbreak.

The odd thing though, that while treating his characters with such mind-boggling cruelty, Cervantes' comic wizardry creates an alchemy that ends up making the poor foolish Don sympathetic. In a bitter ironic sense, he does become heroic even when he finally surrenders to reality. In the end, we understand that he was one with his dreams. Without them, he’s forced to renounce Chivalry. And without that faith—and I think faith is an important idea here—he dies. I was left with the feeling that a life without faith, in a fallen world, just might be impossible to live for many, if not all of us.

In its bland reassurances, the Broadway musical drains all this away, leaving marshmallow. No wonder I don't like the damned thing.

Charlie, Not Jackie

Chang Apana: The Real-Life Charlie Chan

Humble apologies for going missing last week, but a major editing project turned out to be harder than expected: a 600-page book about Jesuit missionaries that was a whole lot more interesting than, say, The Mission, but burdened with 84 pages of bibliography and over a hundred pages of footnotes that had to be cross-referenced, line by line: By the time I was done, my brain felt like a bag of crushed peanuts.

But now you may all doff your sackcloth and ashes and rest your hoarse and sorrowful cries. I have returned to once more guide you to my snug—maybe a little too snug--cozy den of iniquitous vintage literature.

I finished reading that Charlie Chan mystery novel, The Black Camel by Earl Derr Biggers, I alluded to in a recent posting on the differences between reading literary and genre fiction. Verdict: Not bad. Not bad at all.

Most of us remember Charlie Chan from the forty-four movies that were produced during the 1930s and 1940s. You may also be aware of the modern controversy over their racism, most of it, as I see it, due to the failure of the studios to cast a Chinese-American actor in the role. (Come now: would that have been so hard?)

One main effect of the Charlie Chan movies seems to have been to bury the original novels in obscurity. This may be too bad. I read one of them, Behind That Curtain, too many years ago to reveal without embarrassment and now remember nothing about it. But The Black Camel does a much better job of sticking in the memory.

The Black Camel was published in 1931, and is set in late-1920s Honolulu, Hawaii. Taking a third-person point of view, Biggers sets the stage by gracefully introducing readers to the murder victim—a fading Hollywood star—and the large cast of suspects, most of whom have one motive or another for fading out her career even faster.

As in all mystery fiction, it’s the character of the problem solver who’s the draw, and problem solver Mr. Charlie Chan enters the mystery early on, fortunately. Said to be inspired by the real-life Chang Apana, (pictured above) a legendary detective in the Honolulu Police Department, the literary Chan is a true pip and stands favorably apart from the somewhat mummified Mandarin screen persona.

The literary Charlie Chan is as witty as he is wise and a little bit edgy, too. “By heaven,” one character melodramatically swears. “I’ll get him if it’s the last act of my life!” “I have similar ambition,” Chan drolly tells him, “though I trust the accomplishment will not finish off my existence.” The humor cuts others cruelly: “If you return with a pretty picture,” he seethes at a hapless assistant, “I will personally escort you back to private life.”

He’s also a man upon whose large shoulders the world hangs heavy. There’s no stereotypical serenity about him; his famous sense of humility also arises from his own errors—more literary detectives need to screw up from time to time--and his lot in life, as it comes from ideas about Chinese cultural tradition. Unlike a lot of fictional detectives, Charles Chan has a home life, but not necessarily a happy one: he's overwhelmed patriarch of a noisy, self-absorbed brood of a dozen-plus offspring that anyone who’s parented in the last eighty years might recognize. Like the fount of them all, Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan finds true happiness only when he’s on the hunt.

Biggers creates a portrait of a brilliant man who is beset by serious anxiety attacks and doubts about his own considerable skills. Clearly, Charlie Chan is the smartest man in the Hawaiian Islands, but Biggers wisely makes sure that Chan himself doesn’t absolutely share that opinion and so keeps him human, rather than having him floats Buddha-like over everything. His humility, of course, also serves as a tool to dupe his quarry, who is revealed in a reasonably satisfying and surprising ending.

Biggers is not a racist. A remark about “a heathen race” inspires Charlie to sneer, “Yes, a heathen race that was inventing the art of printing at moment when gentlemen in Great Britain were beating one another over head with spike clubs.” I did look in vain for any allusions to American colonialism (In fact, significantly, Native Hawaiians seem hardly to appear at all).

Well-crafted and entertaining as it is, The Black Camel doesn’t transcend its genre origins, though Chan’s character has more to him than most other fictional gumshoes of the era. The author’s description of 1920s Honolulu are aromatic, but he occasionally strains to gild those Hawaiian blossoms and it’s not a pretty sight. The dialogue, at times, is dated and execrable: True, Asian people may very well have spoken in pidgin English, but it still makes contemporary reading ears cringe. The story’s romantic leads are an annoying and cloying couple of white-bread gee-whizzers I hoped would either turn up dead . . . or turn out to be the bad guys.

Earl Derr Biggers wrote only six Charlie Chan novels before dying of a heart attack in 1933. The Black Camel is said to be among the best of them. But the most surprising aspect of this Grosset & Dunlap edition for me was this volume's its back pages. As it turns out, The Black Camel was not quite the rare first edition I’d hoped I’d snapped up cheap, but a reprint: the back matter catalogs many other books that were for sale, including the subsequent Chan novels. Most of the catalog listed writers long and profoundly forgotten—the Western novels for sale back then are mind-boggling: How could any bibliophile pass on William MacLeod Raine’s Oh, You Tex! and Chip of the Flying U by B. M. Bower? Hey! According to Albris Books, the second of those two lost classics is available for purchase! Now . . . how do I explain this one to Elizabeth?

Readers: Their Subspecies and Behaviors

A good book is a good book is a . . .

A couple of weeks ago, the online magazine Slate hosted a celebration and discussion of the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. During this online roundtable, book critic Meghan O’Rourke made this observation: “I tend to imagine that Jack Kerouac didn't approve much of literary criticism, avid reader though he was.” (Italics mine).

That term “avid reader” made me ask, what other kinds of readers are there? There are of course, the non-readers: some of them are indifferent to reading and books; and then those others who wouldn’t open a book if  had instructions on how to save their own lives. “I never took that up that habit!” one sneered at me as though I were shooting heroin in front of the children.

There are the non-avid readers, the professionals of all stripes who read because their livelihoods depend on it, but once that chore is done, it’s off to Sunday NFL or Doom or the Sims. (One exception: President Cheney’s assistant who, last year, engaged in the odd practice of “Competitive” reading with that former White House aide who looks like a giant infant; I lay odds that both their retention rates were pretty low).

Now, let’s step up to the third level of readers, and back to the first clause in Ms. O’Rourke’s sentence: “Jack Kerouac didn’t much approve much of literary criticism, avid reader, though he was.” (Again, italics mine). This seems to imply that avid readers are those who also pay serious attention to literary criticism, but I think Ms. O’Rourke may be wrong. She may have meant another subcategory: those readers who do approve of literary criticism and take it with the utmost seriousness: Let’s call them “serious readers.”

Webster’s 11th defines “avid” as one who is “characterized by enthusiasm and vigorous pursuit.” It may also mean someone tolerant, adventuresome, and maybe even free-spirited. They may not pay much attention to “literary criticism” and when they do, it’s because they’re looking for a signpost or two to point them to their next destination or to keep track of a favorite author or genre.

I’ve not read On the Road and the Slate discussion doesn’t say what Kerouac’s reading tastes were, but I will lay a humble wager that, judging from his celebrated novel’s subject matter and setting, this avid reader and legendary author may well have been on a nodding acquaintance with  the Western novel, one of the more despised genres. As an avid reader, he may very well have devoured many genre novels—western, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction or classic. He may very well have wandered the world of fiction on the wings of the same free spirit that set him out on the open road.

Not so with most “serious readers” as I’ve known them. These folks are as discriminating as I am about the scotch I drink. For them, it’s high-minded novels only: the works of Trollope, Dickens (except for A Christmas Carol), Proust, Joyce,  Larry Woiwode, Ann Beattie, Francine Prose, among others. They can be as hot-headed as John McCain, as strict as a Christian mullah. Recently, Ruth Franklin, another Slate book reviewer, excoriated Pulitzer Prize Winner and genre champion Michael Chabon for trying to “drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.”

Clearly, Michael Chabon isn’t a “serious” reader, either and we can safely bet that Ms. Franklin never poisons her eyes with a mystery novel and if she does, she probably keeps it hidden with the porn.

You readers, of course, know which subspecies I am. Do I oppose “serious literature?” like one of those knuckle-dragging reverse snobs (“Ha! I only read Shopping-and-Fucking Novels! Ha! I stare down from the balcony of my nose upon you miserly snobs!”)

Of course not. I’d be the blindest of fools and a worse hack than I am now if not for reading The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, Ulysses, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Pale Fire, Gravity’s Rainbow, A Bend in the River and many more. I love books that “are good for me.” The sheer challenge of many of them is an inspiration in itself. Bring on Don Quixote! Bring on War and Peace!

Just last week, I snapped shut Elmore Leonard’s 1950s western The Bounty Hunter with a happy smile and whipped right around into Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel Mary (which promises to be the start of a long-lasting obsession with Nabokoviana). I did this without a blink. I suffered no helium swell of nobility. And I read both these books with an equal amount of attention (but not, I emphasize, the same kind.)

The puzzle for serious readers is how do I stand the cognitive dissonance? It’s not that there is no difference between “serious” literature” and “genre” literature (sadly, I haven’t the time, nor you the patience, for that discussion.) Because Leonard’s world, and his way of writing it, differs so much from Nabokov’s, (except for the employment of stream of consciousness; yes, it’s true.), his best books call on a different corner of my consciousness, call on me to exercise different brain muscles. I respond to Elmore Leonard with different thoughts and emotions, and different set of no-less
stringent standards. Genre readers can be as discriminating as any New York Review of Books critic.

To avid readers like myself, it’s not the categories that count, although I’m aware of them, but the specific work itself on its own terms. Call us anarchists, if you want. Genre hopping is an act of near-absolute freedom. It’s the freedom to turn from the crystalline world of homesick exiled Russians in 1920s Berlin to, say, the corkscrew supernatural Liverpool of horror master (and passionate Nabokov reader) Ramsey Campbell that inspires us. We seek new worlds, always, whether it be the Wild West or a windswept moor.

In this crowded world that seems to be turning more and more toward murderous and authoritarian absolutes, art and literature are likely the last bastions of freedom our souls can ever hope to find. It’s sure looking that way to me. The last thing us avid readers need is the hectoring of high-strung critics.

Gotta go, now. I hear a Charlie Chan mystery calling!

(Redited 3/13/13)

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield is the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, Scribed and at the Red Room bookstore. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, and reads at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

 

Old Media Department: Mailer and His Demon

As a genre fiction enthusiast and sometime World War II buff, I couldn’t help but be intrigued to find that yet another highbrow mainstream author has swum through the dark pool of the horror genre. This time, from these deeps, rises an interesting hybrid of historical novel and Gothic tale, this one excavating the childhood of Adolf Hitler. That book is The Castle in the Forest. The author is Norman Mailer.

Before you litterateurs wince, here’s a plain fact: Practically every major literary writer (except maybe Hemingway) has at least one horror tale lurking in their oeuvre. Young Tennessee Williams wrote for Weird Tales. Truman Capote spun several contributions to the genre. No less a novelist than John Updike, in The New Yorker awhile back, picked James Joyce’s The Dead as the finest ghost story ever. (We may disagree, but we won’t argue.) One of my favorite gothic horror novels is Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates: a perennial Pulitzer and Nobel Prize nominee and winner of the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Award.

If you know Mailer’s work or reputation (I’ve only read The Naked and the Dead, An American Dream, and his very useful book on writing, The Spooky Art) it might be as one of the most ultra-macho of American writers. Mailer has gone to extremes few would dare, often at serious costs to his reputation (Supporting Jack Henry Abbott. Stabbing his wife. Head-butting Gore Vidal. Mailer has never seemed to need a full moon to become a werewolf in his long public career.)

The Castle in the Forest is told by a wandering demon who occupies the body of one Dieter, an S.S. man under the stick of Heinrich Himmler. But the Demon’s true Fuehrer is a certain “Maestro” who may—or may not—be Satan Himself.

Hitler’s roots have always been mysterious, even to Hitler. Fearful that “Jewish blood” might swirl through his veins (likely not, per the best evidence), he orders “Heini” Himmler to investigate. Himmler is passionately curious about the origins of his beloved “Superman” (and is one of the best pointers for the theory that Nazism was primarily a religious movement.)

It so happens that, once upon a time, Little Dolfie was a “client” of the Demon’s who was given this job by the Maestro. It is this Demon who sweeps us back to misty nineteenth century rural Hapsburg Austria and into the brutal humble life of Hitler’s father: one Alois Schicklgruber (and don’t we all wish he’d kept that name!? Say it out loud: “Heil Schicklgruber!” O, for the want of a nail!)

Through his Demon, Mailer points the finger of blame, not at Alois’ parenting skills (which, while often harsh in the manner of his time, appear mostly inconsistent and fumbling), but at his marriage to Anna Ploezl, Adolf’s mother. History has documented this kind, naïve and devout woman as Alois’ blood niece, but, claims the Demon, the couple was actually much much closer than that. He concludes that it was their incest that created the monster who stirs our nightmares still.

This theory of the origins of Hitler's evil is as plausible as others. (The sole source for the myth that it was all Hitler’s Daddy’s Fault is Hitler: like we can believe him!) But once this revelation passes, Mailer’s narrative seems to lose traction, though it’s always interesting and superbly written. It’s full of interesting ruminations: swipes at “popular writers;” a long treatise on apiculture; an eventful side-trip to the chaotic coronation of Tsar Nicholas II; and Satan’s love for all fundamentalists, religious and secular.

I like how Mailer handles the supernatural elements: Demonic power is purely psychic. Demons prefer to worm their way into the troughs dug by dreams where they plant their nefarious notions. (Since he’s a sociopath born of incest, little Dolfie has the richest soil.) Mailer conjures many disturbing and chilling moments. He’s a little less successful with the setting: much of the best horror writing is deeply evocative of place, and landscapes like this—the ground of Grimm’s Fairy Tales—beg for more vivid treatment.

Much of the narrative follows Alois’ and Anna’s hard struggle to make a life together; how the taboo they share remains buried in their subconscious, while shaping their lives as they innocently shelter the child of evil they have borne together. It makes for a story of strong pathos, but its true horror can only be found beyond this tale’s end. Stirring traditional horror into real history is a difficult recipe to pull off, but Mailer comes closer than most.

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.