WARNING: This review contains spoilers. Read on at your peril.

The book opens with a young man named Robert Holt tramping around in the rain looking for work. He’s rejected by the last workhouse in the area, and in desperation he shimmies through an open window into a seemingly abandoned house. Here he meets the villain:

“I saw someone lying in front of me in a bed. I could not decide if it were a man or a woman. Indeed at first I doubted if it were anything human. . . His age I could not guess; such a look of age I had never imagined . . .

There was not a hair upon his face or head, but, to make up for it, the skin, which was a saffron yellow, was an amazing mass of wrinkles. The cranium, and, indeed, the whole skull, was so small as to be disagreeably suggestive of something animal. The nose, on the other hand, was abnormally large; so extravagant were its dimensions, and so peculiar its shape, it resembled the beak of some bird of prey. . . The mouth, with its blubber lips, came immediately underneath the nose, and chin, to all intents and purposes, there was none . . .

His eyes ran, literally, across the whole of the upper portion of his face- remember, the face was unwontedly small, and the columna of the nose was razor-edged. They were long, and they looked out of narrow windows, and they seemed to be lighted by some internal radiance, for they shone out like lamps in a lighthouse tower. Escape them I could not, while, as I endeavoured to meet them, it was as if I shrivelled into nothingness. Never before had I realised what was meant by the power of the eye. They held me enchained, helpless, spellbound. I felt that they could do with me as they would; and they did.”

Our villain puts the young man in a trance, and makes him undress:

“‘Undress!’

When he spoke again that was what he said, in those guttural tones of his in which there was a reminiscence of some foreign land. I obeyed, letting my sodden, shabby clothes fall anyhow upon the floor. A look came on his face, as I stood naked in front of him, which, if it was meant for a smile, was a satyr’s smile, and which filled me with a sensation of shuddering repulsion.

‘What a white skin you have- how white! What should I not give for a skin as white as that- ah yes!’”

Hoo boy. Yellow skin, a foreign accent, and an appreciation for pasty Englishmen? Why, he must be the villain! And now, a thirty second recap:

The Beetle puts the whammy on Mr. Holt and makes him steal some letters from Statesman Paul Lessingham’s desk. (Why the Beetle makes Mr. Holt commit the burglary stark naked except for a cloak is unclear, but we’ll chalk it up to artistic direction.) Reading the letters,  the Beetle discovers Paul is in love with Miss Majorie Lindon; the Beetle professes hatred for them both. Inventor Sydney Atherton is a rival suitor for Marjorie’s hand, and mostly hangs around for people to explain the plot to him. The Beetle kidnaps Miss Majorie, and Paul and Sydney hire a private detective to track her down.  Then the book ends in the most anti-climactic ten pages I’ve ever read.

*Spoilers!* *Spoilers!*

How do our heroes get rid of the hypnotic, undead menace of the Beetle and rescue the girl? They don’t. The bad guys get on a train that promptly crashes, squashing the villains while sparing Miss Marjorie. A detached narrator, for whom we care nothing, informs us that various people marry other people. To say that this is unsatisfying is an understatement– my reaction was to yell: “Whaaaat? That’s the ending?”and throw the book at the wall. Your mileage may vary.

If Other Books Used Random Accidents for an Ending:

• Frankenstein’s monster stomps his way into a sinkhole.
• Dr. Fu Manchu poisons himself with the wrong syringe.
• The Wolfman blunders into a barber shop and is never heard from again.
• Captain Nemo gets a fatal case of the bends.
• Professor Moriarity is jailed for non-payment of income tax, gets shivved by a random guy in the lunch line, and dies of Hep C.

Are these events more realistic than a mano-a-mano duel with our heroes? Maybe– but when you have heroes in a story, you expect them to do something to thwart the villains. “Waiting around for bad karma to, like, kick in” does not count as doing something. Plus, now you have characters that can’t change or evolve, since they never get a chance to confront their fears, confess their love, etc. Let’s run down the cast of characters, shall we?

Our Heroes: Or, People Who Don’t Fight the Villain or Save the Girl

1. Robert Holt

He’s hypnotised by the Beetle, steals papers from Paul Lessingham, and dies in the same state we met him: poor, cold, starving, and miserable. He never truly escapes from the Beetle’s influence. And since he’s the first character the readers meet, we have a vested interest in his health and well-being– only to be disappointed when the author drops his narrative (and character) like a brick half-way through the book. His whole arc seems like it’s going to be how he can resist the Beetle’s unholy influence, as seen in this paragraph from page 28:

“‘For you are my slave- at my beck and call- my familiar spirit, to do with as I will- you know this- eh?’
I did know it, and the knowledge of my impotence was terrible. I felt that if I could only get away from him; only release myself from the bonds with which he had bound me about; only remove myself from the horrible glamour of his near neighborhood; only get one or two square meals and have an opportunity of recovering from the enervating stress of mental and bodily fatigue; – I felt that then I might be something like his match, and that, a second time, he would endeavour in vain to bring me within the compass of his magic. But, as it was, I was conscious that I was helpless, and the consciousness was agony.”

And then the poor guy dies of starvation a few pages from the end of the book. What a waste.

2. Paul Lessingham

Paul Lessingham is a master orator and statesman in Parliament, where he is branded a ‘Radical’ (something about wanting to help unfortunate peoples, but that’s never really spelled out). He wants to marry Marjorie Lindon over her father’s objections. In the end, after the villains are squished by the Convenient Train of Doom, Lessingham marries the girl and continues on his promising political path. So why do I hate him so much? Possibly because he is one of the greatest tools I’ve ever encountered in Victorian fiction.

When he was 18, Paul went to Cairo instead of college. This was a mistake, since  he was promptly kidnapped, roofied, and raped for over two months by the cult of Isis. And you thought your summer vacation was rough. It gets worse:

“I saw, on more than one occasion, a human sacrifice offered on that stone altar, presumably to the grim image which looked down on it. And unless I err, in each case the sacrificial object was a woman, stripped to the skin, as white as you or I- and before they burned her they subjected her to every variety of outrage of which even the minds of demons could conceive.”

Young Paul escapes from his prison and wanders around with aphasia in a ‘semi-imbecilic state’, gets mental counseling for a few years, and promptly goes into politics. The attentive reader will note the “find and destroy murderous cult” step is missing. Paul defends this rather obvious omission like so:

“I wish to point out, and to emphasise the fact, that I am not prepare to positively affirm what portion of my adventures in that extraordinary and horrible place, was actuality, and what the product of a feverish imagination. Had I been persuaded that all I thought I saw, I really did see, I should have opened my lips long ago, let the consequences to myself have been what they might. But there is the crux. The happenings were of such an incredible character, and my condition was such an abnormal one- I was never really myself from the first moment to the last- that I have hesitated, and still do hesitate, to assert where, precisely, fiction ended and fact began.”

In other words: “I can’t be sure I remembered everything correctly, so I’m going to do absolutely nothing.” Let’s do the math: Paul was held for over two months and saw human sacrifice on ‘more than one’ occasion. So lets say the cult kills at least a woman a month– that’s 12 missing white girls each year. Are we expected to believe no zealous Cairo constable looked around and said: “Where the white women at?” Even if Paul isn’t quite sure what he saw, don’t you think he should go back to Cairo and find some people to investigate whether women are being kidnapped and set on fire on a regular basis? Anyone? Anyone?

Paul doesn’t tell his fiancee’ about this little escapade, either. I know that even in these modern times it’s unwise to go into gory details about your past relationships– but when your past involves ritual sacrifice and years of mental illness, perhaps the gentlemanly thing would be to give the woman a head’s up.

Then there’s his blatant hypocrisy when his fiancee’ Miss Marjorie Lind0n is kidnapped. Here his friend Sydney is trying to buck him up; note that Sydney is the narrator:

‘Let us hope that, with the exception of being a trifle scared, she [Marjorie] will be as sound and hale and hearty as ever in her life.’

‘Do you yourself believe that she’ll be like that- untouched, unchanged, unstained?’

Then I lied right out- it seemed to me necessary to calm his growing excitement.

‘I do.’

‘You don’t.’

‘Mr Lessingham!’

‘Do you think that I can’t see your face and read in it the same thoughts which trouble me? As a man of honour do you care to deny that when Marjorie Lindon is restored to me- if she ever is! – you fear she will be but the mere soiled husk of the Marjorie whom I knew and loved?’

Unstained? Mere soiled husk? And get a load of the ‘loved’– in the past tense! Paul Lessingham: What. A. Prize. Especially since he himself was ‘outraged’ and driven mad and still considers himself worthy of her hand. If he can recover from his soiled huskitude, why not Marjorie? I wish someone would set *him* on fire. Paul also suffers from PTSD any time anyone says the phrase: “The Beetle!” and spends most of his time cringing in the corner and dabbing his forehead with his handkerchief.  He never overcomes this reaction, never challenges the villain, and doesn’t rescue the girl. What a guy.

3. Sydney Atherton

Sydney Atherton is an inventor, snappy dresser, childhood friend of Marjorie Lindon, and rival for her hand. Marjorie rejects him in favor of the odious Paul Lessingham (see above).

Sydney is a completely wasted character. For one thing, he professes his undying love for Marjorie up to the end of the book:

‘You are hard on me, Lessingham, harder than I deserve- I had rather have thrown away my own life than have suffered misadventure to have come to her.’

‘Yours are idle words. Had you not meddled this would not have happened. A fool works more mischief with his folly than of malice purpose. If hurt has befallen Marjorie Lindon you shall account for it to me with your life’s blood.’

‘Let it be so,’ said Sydney. ‘I am content. If hurt has come to Marjorie, God knows that I am willing enough that death should come to me.’ (p. 274)

So you can imagine my surprise when he marries someone else at the end. We find out about this on the last page in the hilarious sentence: “By-the-bye, Sydney Atherton has married Miss Dora Grayling.” Well, okay then! But why? “Her wealth has made him one of the richest men in England.” Oh, I see. But are they happy? “She began, the story goes, by loving him immensely; I can answer for the fact that he has ended by loving her as much.” Thanks for clearing that up, random narrator guy. It would have been nice to, you know, see some of this complete change in affection in the actual novel.

The second reason Sydney Atherton is a waste of space is because he’s an inventor whose current research involves poisonous gases and explosives. He uses his scientific prowess to . . . kill a cat. The context is worth quoting in full. Note that Sydney speaks first, his friend second:

‘Then the cat shall have it.’

‘Let the poor brute go!’

‘The poor brute’s going- to the land which is so near, and yet so far. Once more, if you please, attention. Notice what I do with this toy gun. I pull back the spring; I insert this small glass pellet; I thrust the muzzle of the gun through the opening in the glass box which contains the Apostle’s cat- you’ll observe it fits quite close, which, on the whole, is perhaps as well for us. – I am about to release the spring. – Close attention, please. -Notice the effect.’

‘Atherton, let the brute go!’

‘The brute’s gone! I’ve released the spring- the pellet has been discharged- it has struck against the roof of the glass box- it has been broken by the contact- and, hey presto! the cat lies dead- and that in face of its nine lives. You perceive how still it is- how still! Let’s hope that, now, it’s really happy . . . -Reflect! think of a huge bomb, filled with what we’ll call Atherton’s Magic Vapour, fired, say, from a hundred and twenty ton gun, bursting at a given elevation over the heads of an opposing force. Properly managed, in less than an instant of time, a hundred thousand men- quite possibly more! – would drop down dead, as if smitten by the lightning of the skies. Isn’t that something like a weapon, sir?” (p. 117)

This guy is the hero? But what’s a little animal cruelty and lust for mass murder among friends? What’s even worse is that the poison and explosives are never mentioned again, even though they would be somewhat useful in, say, killing the villain. What is the point of having one of your heroes be a mad inventor if he never uses his inventions? Say it with me, now: What a waste!

4. Marjorie Lindon

Miss Marjorie Lindon is a fine character and  the epitome of a spirited female, right up until she’s kidnapped by the Beetle, when she leaves the narrative almost completely. At the end, the narrator states:

“Her restoration was, however, not merely an affair of weeks or months, it was a matter of years. I believe that, even after her physical powers were completely restored- in itself a tedious task- she was for something like three years under medical supervision as a lunatic. But all that skill and money could do was done, and in course of time- the great healer- the results were entirely satisfactory.”

Let’s recap what exactly happened to her post-kidnapping: the Beetle cut her hair short, dressed her in men’s clothing, and put her on the train in a hypnotic state. I do that every day: it’s called commuting. You don’t see NJTransit customers under medical supervision as lunatics (although you could make a case for it). Marjorie does absolutely nothing to try to escape, and in fact her narrative completely disappears for the last third of the book, leaving her only as The Potential Soiled Husk. What a waste! Now, if she were actually brought to Cairo and trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey on an altar, about to be sacrificed– then I could understand her needing an apartment with padded walls to recover. But as it is? Weak sauce, Miss Marjorie.

5. Miss Dora Grayling

Miss Dora Grayling is rich, pretty, and head over heels in love with whack-job Sydney Atherton. She offers to fund his expensive research in mass murder, but he plays coy with her (remember: this is still part of the 99% of the book when he’s professing his love for Marjorie). And then she disappears for the rest of the book, only to pop-up at the end and marry Sydney. At the risk of repeating myself: What a waste!

The Villains

1. The Beetle

Oh, the Beetle. The Beetle starts off saffron yellow, wrinkly, with an enormous nose and no chin, but over the course of the book loses most of the wrinkles, some of his nose, and gains a chin. I guess plastic surgeons will take anybody. Each narrator makes a big deal about not being sure whether the creature is male or female– although Sydney sees it naked, and confirms ‘it’ is actually a woman. The Beetle’s powers involve amazing hypnotism and the ability to transmogrify into a, well, beetle and back again. The Beetle might not actually do much in the course of the novel, but at least she brings us the following exchange between Sydney and Paul; Sydney goes first:

‘Are you not aware that at present there is in London an individual who claims to have had a very close, and a very curious, acquaintance with you in the East?’

‘I am not.’

‘That you swear?’

‘That I do swear.’

‘That is singular.’

‘Why is it singular?’

‘Because I fancy that that individual haunts you.’

‘Haunts me?’

‘Haunts you.’

‘You jest.’

‘You think so?’

Tonight the roles of Abbot and Costello will be played by a cowardly politician and a mad scientist. Keep your day jobs, guys.

Where the Beetle loses me is with her motivation. It turns out that before Paul Lessingham fled the cult of Isis, he choked the living daylights out of his tormentor, a young mesmerist with some generic title like ‘Woman of the Songs.’ Apparently Ms. Song survived, and instead of using her hypnotism for petty things like money, power, or fame, she chose to wait twenty years and then run around London giving Paul Lessingham the frights. This seems a waste of ability. At least try to take over England while you’re at it, no?

What’s so special about Paul Lessingham, anyway? According to Sydney, Paul is:

‘The fellow’s lithe and active; not hasty, yet agile; clean built, well hung – the sort of man who might be relied upon to make a good recovery.’

Wait, ‘well hung’? In context I’m assuming Sydney means  . . . actually, I’m at a loss for a non-dirty explanation. Honestly, Beetle– there are plenty of fish in the sea, and all that. If pale young men are what you’re after, why not take the hypnotism show on the road? That way you get fame, money, invitations to some nice parties, and you can always put the whammy on any pretty boys who want you to sign their autograph. Heck, if you get famous enough, you won’t have to put the whammy on anyone– the boys will be lining up at your dressing room asking for a piece of that hot, hot scarab action. Sigh. Villains these days. No vision.

An interesting fact is that the Beetle and Paul Lessingham never meet face-to-face. Of course, it’s not necessary for your heroes and villains to meet at all if you’re going to dispatch the villains off stage. Why are we reading this book again?

2. The Cult of Isis

Is blown up off stage under unknown circumstances. No, really:

“During the recent expeditionary advance towards Dongola, a body of native troops which was encamped at a remote spot in the desert was aroused one night by what seemed to be the sound of a loud explosion. The next morning, at a distance of about a couple of miles from the camp, a huge hole was discovered in the ground . . . in the hole itself, and round about it, were found fragments of what seemed bodies; credible witnesses have assured me that they were bodies neither of men nor women, but of creatures of some monstrous growth. . .

That the den of demons described by Paul Lessingham, had, that night, at last come to an end, and that these things which lay scattered, here and there, on that treeless plain, where the evidences of its final destruction, is not a hypothesis which I should care to advance with any degree of certainty. . . “

This is unsatisfying, to say the least; although it does cement Paul Lessingham’s status as Most Useless Politician Ever.

What Should Have Happened

It should be obvious by now that Richard Marsh suffered from the dreaded Please God Let This End disease, which afflicts writers of popular fiction when they reach the 300-page mark (or, in Stephen King’s case, when he’s unable to lift the manuscript above his head). Writers suffering from this ailment reach for whatever plot device will wrap everything up the quickest, regardless of realism or emotional satisfaction; like, say, having a train crash kill the villains off stage while a mysterious explosion destroys the cult, also off stage.

What should have happened is this:

• The Beetle kidnaps Marjorie, disguises her as a boy, and takes her to Cairo. Robert Holt (remember him?) is also along for the ride, hypnotised and hating it.
• Paul Lessingham, Sydney, and Miss Dora Grayling go to Cairo in hot pursuit. (Miss Dora may or may not be a stowaway. I don’t insist either way.)
• Dora offers herself as bait, and, being a white woman and all, the cult members promptly kidnap her from her hotel.
• Sydney and Paul follow in a thrilling chase, aided by some locals who are unhappy about  the human sacrifice bringing down property values (not to mention the smell)
• They discover the underground cavern where the cult is busy tying up Miss Marjorie and Miss Dora in preparation for their transformation into soiled husks.
• Sydney uses a small smoke bomb as a distraction, and Robert Holt snaps out of his trance long enough to stab the Beetle with the nearest pointy object.
• In the struggle with the cult members another bomb goes off by accident, and Sydney only has time to save one of the girls from the deadly fumes– but which one? He looks into Doras’ ‘dove-gray eyes’ and realizes what he felt for Marjorie was but a shadow of what he feels for good old Dora, and rescues her.
• Paul Lessingham is hit on the head and is as useless as ever, but recovers just in time to save Marjorie.
• But wait! The Beetle’s not dead! Robert Holt dies a heroes’ death by flinging himself and the Beetle into the sacrificial flames.
• The cavern decides that now would be a good time to self-destruct.
• Our heroes drag the girls out into the sun with the help of some locals.
• The cavern explodes, killing all the cult members and burying the evidence forever.
• The End.

Of course, this would probably take at least another hundred pages, maybe two hundred if you stop to describe what everybody’s wearing. But it’s a darn sight better than the way things are now.

In short (too late!), avoid The Beetle. If you really want to learn about the cult of Isis, try Bram Stroker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars.

It’s a dark and stormy night in Gotham City (or a reasonable facsimile). A man tells an overworked blonde he wants to take a break from their relationship– over the phone. Classy, Nameless Male Person. The blonde responds by running into the middle of the street sans umbrella, hollering into her cell phone about rearranging the front page. Here’s where things get weird: the camera zooms in on a muddy footprint– presumably of a creature following the blonde home. I think about five X-Files episodes started like this. Run, lady, run!

The blonde runs into her large, dreary apartment furnished by the All Beige Decorators of America. (Want a colored throw pillow? Too bad! Those Union regulations are no joke.) She phones Nameless Male Person and apologizes for not calling in a while. The conversation is worth repeating in full:

Man: Long day?
Woman: [nervous laughter] It’s not over yet.
Man: It’s never going to change, is it?
Woman: Can we please not have this argument now?
Man: It’s always work.
Woman: What are you saying?
Man: You’re not the same person I fell in love with.

Because  the woman he fell in love with was unemployed? “Remember playing footsie at the Welfare Office? We never do that anymore!” And way to be a jerk over the phone, Nameless Male Person. Maybe if you showed up in person your relationship would go further. Just sayin’. The blonde presses her skinny, pale hand to her forehead in the Universal Gesture of Womanly Despair.

Now it gets creepy again. A child’s voice whispers: “Sometimes, we have to lose ourselves to find ourselves.” Low-level shot of someone’s bare feet walking in the blonde’s apartment oh my god the creature is inside the house. The blonde lies in bed, eyes closed, deathly pale. The creature reveals itself to be . . . an androgynous child. Androgynous Child leans over the blonde’s pillow and whispers: “Sometimes, you need to go Walkabout.” The blonde opens her eyes.  Now, I’m a New Yorker. If an androgynous child broke into my apartment and whispered in my ear, I would a) jump about thirty feet in the air yelling bloody murder and using every karate move known to man, and b) call the police and/or child protective services. This lady, however, just holds out her hand. The Androgynous Child takes it. Uh-oh. Now I’m concerned about the child.

Androgynous Child drops a handful of dirt into the blonde’s hand. Now I’m calling the carpet cleaners in addition to protective services, but the blonde doesn’t seem to mind. Suddenly, there’s water, water everywhere, and an underwater shot of the blonde swimming that looks a lot like the opening of Jaws. Is the Androgynous Child going to swim up and bite her? But wait! The blonde is not swimming alone! Nameless Male Person is there, too– although his face is blurred out. (Maybe he’s in the Witness Protection Agency?) The happy couple surface, surrounded by red rocks. Nameless Male Person says: “I’m glad you’re back.”

Shots of red rocks, waterfalls, red rocks, a river, and red rocks. What is this, a Martian spa? Small white text reads: “She arrived as Ms K Matthieson, Executive VP of Sales.” Shot of smiling blonde lady. “She departed as Kate.” Title: AUSTRALIA.

That’s right, ladies! Come to Australia because let’s face it, you’re not getting any younger, and if you don’t get that rock NOW you’re doomed to be MS. Executive VP of Sales forever. You’ll never get an Androgynous Child of your own that way. Don’t you want a Nameless Male Person to belittle you long-distance forever? Of course you do. True, he won’t come over unless you buy him expensive plane tickets halfway around the world, but that’s a small price to pay. Mary says he only wants you for your money, but what does she know? She’s divorced. Take my word for it– you won’t land a man with a fancy career, missy. In fact, if you don’t go to Australia right this minute you might as well kill yourself.

Egads, Baz Luhrman. All this commercial is missing is a bad perm, shoulder pads, and a saxophone solo to drag it back to the 80′s. Think before you direct, man!

Or so the media would have us believe. Honestly, if I have to read one more article on how we need to get  house cleaning tips from The Grapes of Wrath and dress in plastic grocery bags to atone for our collective sins, I’m going to scream. And considering my day is already full of eye rolling, breast beating, garment rending, and teeth gnashing. I just don’t think I can fit screaming into the itinerary.

Fortunately, the internet is there to distract us from our ensuing economic twilight. Here for your pleasure and amusement are some Things I Like:

• Baby’s Named a Bad, Bad Thing– Hilariously snarky commentary on the inadvertently awful names some parents choose for their offspring. Free sample: “This is for my niece, Dawn. She is expecting a baby girl in September. I suggested that they name her Dusk. What does everyone think? I think her grand-daughter Nighttime would not approve. Or her grand-neices Afterhours and Graveyardshift.”
• This is Why You’re Fat– Pictures of the gastronomically vile. Or totally awesome, depending on how you look at it. Sample heading: Chicken-fried Bacon with Gravy. Mmmm.
• Gallery of Regrettable Food-- Speaking of unfortunate foods, be lucky we’re not in the 50′s. You haven’t lived till you’ve seen the horror that is meat-filled jello molds. You heard me. Sample snark: “One of the more popular cuts: pressed shank braised with smoker’s phlegm. It may take a few tries to get Uncle Hank to hack up enough Lucky sauce, so be patient.”
• Cockney rhyming slang– Did you know ‘Emma Freud’ was slang for ‘hemorrhoids’? You do now! Adam and Eve it.
• 15 Unfortunately Placed Ads– The title says it all, I think.
• Worst Romance Covers-- I’ve linked to 2003, but if you do a little searching you can find the rest. Here’s 2004, and it’s a doozy. I know, I know, authors and agents don’t really get a say over the covers, it all depends on the whims of an overworked, understaffed team of artists, etc. etc. But all is forgiven, because these covers are hilarious.

As luck would have it, I’ve read two books whose jacket copies promised me nightmares: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and House of Leaves by Mark Danielwski. Only one book fulfilled its promise. (Dun dun dunnnn.) The winner in the literary spook-off is Ms. Jackson, whose 1950′s tale of a lonely, repressed 30-ish woman getting ghostly attention from a house of pure horror kept me up at night. Shirley Jackson’s prose is tight and evocative, and I found myself lying in bed remembering the scary parts. Not that the book is a gore-fest; in fact, there’s very little blood at all. Ms. Jackson uses her incredibly sympathetic but slightly unbalanced protagonist to get you sucked into the atmosphere of the Eeeeeeevil House. Plus, the book is short (a couple hundred pages) and eminently re-readable. After I’d finished, I wanted to go back and re-read it. And the parts I flipped through again were still creepy. Plus, the ending was appropriate, satisfying, and inevitable. I would give this book as a gift to my friends, and I can think of no higher praise.

Mr. Danielewski’s House of Leaves didn’t live up to the hype–maybe because he was fool enough to quote someone saying Pynchon, Wallace, and other postmodern geniuses would be “kneeling at the feet” of the author in awe. (Don’t worry, folks. Pynchon’s reputation is safe.) Mr. Danielwski gets props for his conception–that of a crazy tattoo artist/lothlorio junkie discovering the papers of a dead blind guy; the papers describe a critical examination of a movie that doesn’t exist. Yeah, it’s one of those. The non-existent movie is about a family whose new house is larger on the outside than the inside, revealing a cold, deadly labyrinth. The text is half academic blather and half descriptions via footnotes, appendices, latin fragments in translation, an index (!), etc. I give Mr. Danielwski full points for cleverness– to get some important clues to the story, you need to know morse code, acrostics, aviation flags, and a working knowledge of Derrida. He also makes the text resemble parts of the story (it winds around pages like the actual labyrinth, gets smaller, gets bigger, changes colors, etc.). (I also have to mention the academic critique of the non-existent movie doubles as an excellent satire of Ivory Tower publications. Some of the footnotes are laugh-out-loud funny.)

Where the book falls down is in its ambition. The book also tries to be all things to all people: the house is meant to be a real construct AND a Big Metaphor, the multiple unreliable narrators are meant to be real characters AND a statement on the difficulty of proving authorial intent, and on and on and on. I spent some time spinning my wheels, trying to determine WHICH craaaaaaazy character wrote the book, and whether they imagined all the other characters, or if the other characters really existed and just loved huge coincidences. Then I realized the book had enough ‘evidence’ to be interpreted a bunch of ways, and was banking on that as an excuse to, you know, not have a real ending. I fell asleep pretty quickly after that. No nightmares, either. But even though I had trouble getting frightened by lengthy academic discussions of the Myth of Echo, I had to give the author credit for the sheer effort the whole thing took– in typography, big ideas, and themes. It’s nice to see a book stretch the boundaries, even if it ultimately detracted a bit from the story.

P.S. Hey, authors of books over 700 pages: please end your stories properly. If you can’t think of something original, please remember that burning down the house/laboratory is a well-loved literary trope for a reason. You can even tack on the epilogue where you’re not sure if the evil has returned in a far-off location. It’s okay, really. We won’t mind. Because the alternative is to stop writing and call it an ending, and that’s just unsatisfying.

All of Zhang Yimou’s movies use color marvelously (‘Hero‘ was practically built around color palettes), and this movie does not disappoint. If you want to calibrate your TV’s yellow gradient, ‘Golden Flower’ is the movie for you. The sets are a riot of gold: gold hairclips, armor, crowns, pajamas, walls, doors, tables– you name it, it’ll set off a metal detector. And what’s not gold is silk or multi-color jade. Here’s a picture, courtesy of the http://outnow.ch site:

Gong Li Sets Off Metal Detectors All Over China

The plot revolves around an Imperial family reunion in the Forbidden Palace. Empress Gong Li feels rather ill every time she takes Emperor Chow Yun-Fat’s special tea, and starts putting two and two together. Meanwhile, their three sons start to re-evaluate the line of succession. And that’s not even going into the incest and ninjas. But the dishy, soap opera-y plot takes a backseat to the overwhelming awesomeness of the set design. Here’s another picture, and keep in mind the tiny size can’t do it justice.

They Just Don't Make Homes Like They Used To

Here’s the trailer, which shows the kung fu bits more than the juicy overacting, but is okay overall:

In short, this movie is a very diverting two hours, and well worth giving a spin.

A nutty question, perhaps, but bear with me. Those unwilling to hear philosophical blather about ficitonal characters who wear their underwear on the outside might want to skip this post. Like a good chunk of American youth, I saw The Dark Knight movie this weekend. And “Dark Knight” is right. It could have been called “The Really Dark, Pitch Black, Look On My Movie and Despair Knight.” Near the end of the movie, a bad guy puts a gun to a kid’s head–and I really thought the kid was going to die. I thought the PG-13 (side note: what is the MPAA smoking?) summer blockbuster by Warner freaking Brothers was going to show a kid getting snuffed.  That’s how dark the rest of the movie was. The previous two and a half hours had innocent people killed by the truck-load in a parade of gruesome murders via grenades, bombs sewn in the gut, rabid dogs, knives, bazookas, poison, car bombs, falling from a great height, and being just plain old exploded by gallons of gas. It’s not just the sheer amount of casualties, though, it’s the WAY people die: begging for their life, screaming in pain, knowing they’re going to die but unable to do anything about it. That scene with the kid was prefaced by a good five minutes of the parents begging the bad guy not to kill their son. That’s not entertainment, in my book. That’s just sadism. There’s a scene 3/4 of the way through where the Joker blows up a hospital with people in it, and I thought: “Why am I watching this movie?”

And there’s nothing to alleviate the darkness. Batman, the supposed hero, arrives five minutes too late to do any good in all but one or two cases. What good is a hero if he’s incompetent? Harvey Dent seems like the real hero until he, uh, flip-flops. The Girl character isn’t on screen long enough to root for. Which leaves only the Joker–and he’s brilliantly played by the late Heath Ledger as a total pyschopath. Ledger makes Jack Nicholson’s interpretation look like Bozo the Clown. Brrrr. But he’s so evil even the most hardened of hearts wouldn’t root for him. So who is the audience supposed to root for, I ask you? A lot of reviewers are interpreting this kind of confusion as moral ambiguity, a sure sign the movie is “deep” and “mature.” I say darkness is different from profundity. Nobody laughs in this movie, except maniacally. Nobody smiles, except through permanent scars. There’s no real love, and friendship is a brief thing best used for leverage in the War on Terror. If this is Gotham, sign me up for a one-way ticket to Metropolis.

Clearly, director Chris Nolan slept with a copy of Frank Miller’s seminal 1986 comic The Dark Knight Returns by his bed. Both Nolan’s movie and Miller’s comic focus on Batman’s violence as a response to the chaotic, corrupt culture around him. According to this logic, only Man’s Will, as expressed by his Fists, can restore Order to a world gone Mad. The will of the people can be easily ignored, as people are stupid, weak, jealous, cowardly sheep. Society and its agents, including cops, the military, and government of all stripes, can be safely ignored: they are either corrupt or useless. Only the individual has any moral standing, and only a group of individuals willing to use whatever means necessary has the right to action. Any sign of hesitation or mercy is perceived as weakness–except for the one bright line Batman refuses to cross. He won’t kill you. He will, however, beat you to a bloody pulp with his bare hands, cut you with knives, and drop you off a (small) building. Dark, sure. Violent, yes. But fascist? Maybe.

According to the Wikipedia article on fascism, a good definition comes courtesy of Robert O. Paxton:

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. — The Anatomy of Fascism

Frank Miller’s Batman comes the closest to this definition. In Miller’s version, Batman comes out of retirement to fight a pyschopathic gang of violent punks, and ends up the leader of group of fellow vigilantes who restore order to the city after a nuclear event. Clearly, Miller thinks Batman is justified in his use of violence against his enemies, though Batman doesn’t kill anyone. Miller’s also coy enough to have Batman question his own mental health (something I’ve done for years). But “redemptive violence,” “community decline,” and victimhood? Describes Bats to a T.

And Nolan’s Batman isn’t much better. He angst a bit about what he’s going to “have to become” to defeat the Joker and his terrorist ilk, but when it comes down to it Batman drops a mobster off a small building, breaking his legs. Batman uses a city-wide surveillance program that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. He beats up cops if they get in the way. The only way he’s NOT fascist is that he’s not setting himself up as the leader of a Brave New World– he values the individual above the state in all things. Which makes him more like Ayn Rand’s philosophical brother than Mussolini’s long-lost cousin.

But is being Ayn Randian any better? That’s another discussion, but the short answer is: NO, it really doesn’t. Batman’s a pseudo-fascist, then. Like The Watchmen, another seminal 80′s graphic novel that discusses the rights of the people versus the ubermensch. But that’s for another post. Man, I feel depressed. Time to watch some Spider-Man 2 or Hellboy 2 or Iron Man or something to see heroes who actually enjoy life. Egads.

You can tell “Moon Warriors” is going to be awesome because it has a village wiped out in the first minute, ninjas in the first five minutes, and the immortal line: “Your majesty is so kind, and the villains are so cruel” in the first 10 minutes. And how cruel are the bad guys? The main bad guy cuts someone’s head off with his BOWSTRING, shoots an arrow into the airborne head, and then jumps up and kicks the head into the fire. That’s how you punish your lackeys old-school, people. The new generation just doesn’t know how it’s done.

The plot has something to do with a young Andy Lau protecting the good king from his evil brother– while macking on the king’s bethrothed, a girl named Moony. (No kidding about the name. I’m sure it sounds less goofy in Cantonese.) But the plot in these movies is not really the point. The point is to see people making speeches about righteousness before kicking some ninja butt. And at that, “Moon Warriors” excels.

Also, this movie features Shamu kung-fu. That’s right– at some point in the film a killer whale dishes out fishy vengeance on the bad guys. Everyone calls the whale “Sea-Wayne,” because that’s the only name he answers to. (I guess Killer Whales don’t approve of method acting.) There’s also a love scene with a rainbow, wild flowers, baby bunnies, and soulful flute music. Saying “Moon Warriors” is over the top is kind of beside the point. It’s a mess, but it’s a glorious mess. Highly recommended.

A word of warning if you’re not used to the genre: EVERYBODY DIES. Well, almost everybody. Which leaves the awkward question of who inherits the throne. (I think it’s the Killer Whale.) It’s not a spoiler because EVERYONE DYING is a genre convention; I just put this here to warn us Western folk who are addicted to happy endings. I’m also warning you because the ending is kinda random. It’s like the director said: “Oh no, we only have ten minutes to wrap things up. Okay, big fight, everyone dies. Roll credits.”

P.S. Shamu kung-fu!

The chart below demonstrates why:

Can you:

• Stab it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Shoot it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Sit on it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Drop it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Freeze it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Soak it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Bury it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Scratch it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Put it near magnets? Books Y, E-readers N
• Put it near children? Books Y, E-readers N
• Put it near cats? Books Y, E-readers N
• Squash bugs with it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Use it for exorcisms? Books Y, E-readers N
• Leave it in your attic for 40 years and know people will still be able to use it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Burn it? Books N, E-readers N

The score? Books 14, E-readers 0. We have a winner. Seriously, though, in college I was lucky enough to touch a page of the Gutenberg Bible. It was a very, very awesome experience. The page was in such great shape because printers used to make paper out of cloth: they would pay beggars for their rags, and the printers would bleach and chop up the rags into pulp. The longer the fiber of the pulp, the longer the page lasts. Any medium that can survive hundreds of years gets my vote. Try reading something from a 8″ floppy disc today. Now try reading a page from a Shakespeare folio. That’s right–paper kicks butt.

Midnight (1939) stars Claudette Colbert as a penniless showgirl who wanders around Paris in a gold lame’ gown. She connects with charming taxi driver Don Ameche but runs off to crash a fancy soiree’–only to run into drunken nobleman John Barrymore. Barrymore backs up Ms. Colbert’s bid to pass herself off as a Countess in exchange for her wooing a rich guy away from Barrymore’s wife. And then the taxi driver shows up, determined to find the girl he loves. The movie has a bit of a slow start, but once everyone shows up at Barrymore’s place in Versailles the situation gets increasingly complicated. This movie is also one of the few to have the heroine explain *why* she wants to choose money over love (hint: her poor parents? Not happy.) Elegant and effortless, this one coasts more on a Continental charm than whip-smart bon mots–though the situation twists at the end are great. Recommended.

Easy Living (1937) stars Jean Arthur as a magazine writer who runs into a streak of luck when a Wall Street tycoon drops a fur coat on her from a great height. She tries to return the coat, but Mr. Wall Street refuses to take it back–and she’s seen walking around with him. Naturally, everyone assumes she’s his mistress. Add in a swank hotel owner who wants to drum up his failing business with a celebrity and a hilarious side-plot involving insider stock trading, and you have the most market-accurate screwball ever. Also, Mr. Wall Street’s son Ray Milland hangs around trying to make it as a waiter. Naturally, he falls in love with Jean Arthur and complications ensue. There are some great scenes involving a hobo free-for-all at an automat (an old-fashioned restaurant with food in little microwaves) and our heroes trying to find out how to work a fancy bathtub. And the apartment Jean Arthur gets is just enormous. It makes a Brooklynite like myself drool. The more I think about it, the sweeter the movie seems. Highly recommended, but if you want sharper repartee’, look to Preston Sturges’s later works.

What’s with all the incest as literary devices in hard-boiled detective stories? I just finished Ross Macdonald’s “Find a Victim” (hint: he found many) and James Ellroy’s so-hardboiled-it-falls-through-the-concrete-and-lands-in-the-sewers “White Jazz”–and to my surprise, both feature incest as a shorthand for predicting violent behavior. It seems odd to use the old “Father Knows Worst” chestnut as a lynchpin to justify murder. But considering how sorry I felt for the murderers in both books, maybe that proves the tactic works.

A word of caution here for readers of a gentle nature: you might not like “White Jazz.” If the phrases “my standard post-murder shakes” and “I broke his wrists and took the heroin” leave you recoiling and clutching your pearls, please find your way to the nearest exit. Those with strong stomachs and a high tolerance for sentence fragments, however, should soldier on. Underneath the novel’s amphetamine-paced shotgun narrative beats the heart of a corrupt, violent, sister-loving cop. Considering how many people the protagonist mows through during the course of the novel, I should feel apalled–but such is the power of Ellroy’s narrative that you can’t help rooting for the psychopathic son-of-a-gun. Of course, Ellroy cheats: almost everyone else in the novel is even worse. (I’ll certainly never think of eyeballs the same way again.) The incest angle works here because the cop yearns for his sister, but never actually goes through with it–that tension gives him a teeny smidgen of complexity.

Ross Macdonald’s “Find a Victim” doesn’t fare quite as well. Mr. Macdonald isn’t going for a po-mo experiment in how many grammatical parts you can remove from a sentence before it loses all meaning–he’s playing it straight. So when The Murderer turns out to be a survivor of an incestuous household and keeps saying things like “my father– I mean my husband”, it seems like a bit of a, well, cop-out. It reminds me a bit of the “Chinatown” spoofs that were all the rage in the 80′s, where the cop would smack the Faye Dunaway character so she’d change her story: “She’s my sister! My daughter! My brother! My second cousin on my father’s side!”

I’m not a big fan of serial killers, so I haven’t been dipping into modern detective novels as much as I probably ought. Does anyone know if the “incest as justification for moider” angle is used in the non-noir titles?