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D.H. Lawrence once wrote that "one loses one's sickness in books." I don't know if that's quite right. I read like a champ, yet I'm a fairly boring guy with few kinks that I'm willing to admit to. I have never killed a man. I have never had anonymous sex with multiple partners (my loss... I guess). I have never even faced off against Ultimate Evil armed with only my wits, a flashlight, and a roll of duct tape. Consequently, the sicknesses I have to lose are easily handled by massive infusions of alcohol and by a strict program of yoga, emetics, and curmudgeonly behavior. Okay, I might be a huge fan of "Gilmore Girls" and vegetarian cookbooks, but those aren't as much signs of sickness as of postmodern metrosexual wimpery.
No, I usually go to books to find my sickness. I tend to prefer works that simultaneously attract and repel with an aplomb rarely found in standard "horror" fare. So, in tribute to this season where all America goes in search of their sicknesses and usually comes back with nothing more than a cheap torn costume and a bellyache, I have decided to offer up to you, gentle reader, a highly personal list of my favorites of what my wife recently dubbed my "awful" books.
There are no horror novels on this list, because they bore me to tears. Instead, the selections run the gamut from autobiography to experimental fiction. Yet these are the ones that gave me nightmares, or at least ruined my week admirably. At the root of this list are two questions: why do people choose to read a book they know will upset them; and what does it accomplish? Luckily, I'm no philosopher, so I can only offer pat answers. I like such books because I have an active imagination yet little ambition to be an Airborne Ranger or ninja, and what they accomplish is to allow me to satisfy the kinky parts of said imagination without actually getting down in there in the muck. They let me be a tourist rather than a resident.
So, without further ado, puffery, or hijinks, the list:
- James Ellroy, My Dark Places. James Ellroys mother was murdered near their home in Los Angeles when James was a young boy. Years later after a life of homelessness, depression, general unpleasantness, and incredible crime fiction, Ellroy hired a retired L.A. detective, Bill Stoner, to revisit the case. My Dark Places is Ellroy's autobiographical account of his mother's murder and the subsequent investigation carried out by him and Stoner in the 1990s. Written in Ellroy's signature staccato prose, the book is unflinching in its depiction of his mother as a flawed woman and equally unflinching in dealing with James' own Oedipal obsession with her death. Ellroy is brutally honest as he lays bare the wellspring for the darkness that underlies his novels. All the standard plot elements he uses in his fiction are here: random acts of mayhem; a preoccupation with avenging violence against women; corrupt and incompetent cops; Los Angeles as a living thing in its own right; and underneath it all, a ten year old boy madly in love with his dead mother.
- Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me. Have you ever seen those Faces of Death movies where they string together footage of people dying horribly and charge ten bucks admission? I hate them. Yet, I really dug this book. The Killer Inside Me is the story of a small-town deputy named Lou Ford, a quiet man who everybody likes just fine: normal, good neighbor, nice enough guy, until the sickness comes out and people suffer and die. The breakthrough that makes this novel transcend Thompson's average prose and heavy-handed plotting is that Thompson wrote it in the first person, making sure the reader is along for every bit of torture, murder, and cruelty. This one made me feel dirty, yet I found it too entertaining to stop reading. Of all the books on this list, I can't honestly recommend this one without reservations. But if you are a fan of American hard-boiled crime fiction, I suggest you test your mettle and see how much you really like it.
- Charles Bukowski, Ham On Rye. Bits of Bukowski's writing keep surfacing in my psyche at opportune times. Usually it's when I'm hanging on by a thread, say, living in my car, or drinking alone in a basement in Queens. What qualifies Bukowski for this list is not anything intrinsic to this book, but his ability to self-mythologize even the worst parts of his life in a way that appeals to those (e.g. the younger me) who doubt and sometimes hate themselves but never have it in them to actually rebel, escape, or rise above. Like so much of Bukowski's fiction, Ham On Rye is thinly veiled autobiography. In this case we explore Buk's young life in California, including his first encounter with alcohol (thumbs up!), his monstrous father, his high-school stint in the ROTC, several fights, some unpleasantness with women, and numerous trips to the doctor's office to have his boils lanced. Although other Bukowski works could have made this list, this is in my opinion his best-written novel, and the one that keeps coming back on me.
- William Burroughs, Naked Lunch. It took four or five reads to figure out that there was a plot underneath all the weirdness. Naked Lunch is like a "Where's Waldo" book, except it's called "Where's The Plot?" and features multiple deaths by heroin, purple-assed baboons, totalitarian social experiments, an obsession with bodily functions, and more homoeroticism than professional wrestling. I approve! Despite the aforementioned obsession with bodily functions, Naked Lunch lives up to its legendary status and makes the grade as Burroughs' best novel. All his experimental prose elements are working, his imagery is vivid, and I cannot for the life of me get the image of the Willy The Disc sucking the junk out of some poor dying junkie's body out of my head. A random flip through its pages reveals the following wisdom: "Deteriorated schitzos sometimes refuse to move at all" "Initial proptosis and the inevitable purulent discharge" "which may pass unnoticed in the shuffle is followed by stricture of the rectum requiring intervention of an apple corer or its surgical equivalent" "Bedpans full of blood and Kotex" "The President he is a junky but can't take it direct because of his position
sometimes have to slip my penis under his left eyelid" "'Cut him down, Mark,' she screams. Mark reaches over with a snap knife and cuts the rope" "The centipede is rushing about in agitation."
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow. Otherwise known as "the one nobody got through." Well I did get through it, twice in one cruel summer. My payback? Twisted dreams in which I pursued the V2 rocket through the alleys and sewers of wartime Germany accompanied by Donald Duck and a talking typewriter. Here's the plot, as much as one can be discerned. Tyrone Slothrop is a member of the US Army working intelligence detail during World War II. As a young child, Slothrop was subjected to psychological experiments in which his sexual urges were displaced onto objects. As a consequence, the map of Slothrop's sexual conquests in London corresponds to a map of rocket hits on the city. This unique connection with the rockets provides Slothrop with a sort of homing ability, and he is set loose in Germany to locate a new German super-weapon, the V2 rocket. As Slothrop moves deeper and deeper into Germany in search of the V2, his world becomes populated by malevolent soldiers, cartoon characters, mad scientists, and human weapons. At that point, things get kind of weird. If you have a couple months to kill and no pressing obligations, you can do much, much worse than hide yourself away with Gravity's Rainbow and the Companion to same.
- Art Spiegelman, Maus. This graphic novel tells two stories: the history of the Holocaust as experienced by Speigelman's father; and the story of the strained relationship between father and son as Spiegelman deals with his father's aging, his mother's suicide, and the writing of the novel itself. The central conceit is so simple - the Jews are mice! The Germans are cats!- and yet the novel achieves great power and complexity. I read both volumes in the same week I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., and Maus made the things I saw there more comprehensible, more complete. Maus is all the more horrible because everything in it is true.
- Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native. A left-field choice for a list of this sort, but just read the book! The wild landscape of the English moors is as much a character as any human in this story of love, greed, betrayal, and loss. Briefly, Eustacia Vye is about to be married to Damon Wildeve and settle down unhappily for a quiet life in the grim countryside. But she remembers a young childhood on the seacoast, and longs for escape. When Clem Yeobright comes back home from France (the returning native of the title), Eustacia sees her ticket out of town. As a result of her machinations, several people end up ruined, and the lucky ones end up dead. Hardy, who's a pretty bleak writer by any measure, delivers a tragic story of characters caught up in destinies they created but cannot control. It makes this list by virtue of Hardy's seeming belief that the innocent are born to suffer and the incredible restraint and power Hardy demonstrates in recounting such a standard, simple, classic plot.
- Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air. The true story of an expedition to climb Mount Everest and the amazing feats of strength, mulishness, and self-delusion necessary to pull it off. About the time that one gentlemen is left for dead near the peak and staggers back into camp several hours later with his arm and shoulder frozen solid is about the time I question the sanity of people who go to such extremes. I'm also looking forward to reading Krakauer's Under The Banner of Heaven which no doubt will further erode my faith in the essential reasonableness of mankind.
- Mo Yan, Red Sorghum. Hands down the most disturbing book I have ever laid my eyes on. Red Sorghum interweaves the brutal story of the Japanese invasion of China with the equally brutal story of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Set among the sorghum fields of Shandong Province (Mo Yan's home), this intensely visual book is packed with scenes of incredible beauty and unbelievable horror. I read Red Sorghum before I encountered of Zhang Yimou's films, but when I finally saw the over-saturated colors and gorgeous imagery of Raise The Red Lantern, Farewell my Concubine, and Ran my mind and eyes went "Ah!" Many of the key images from the book are burned on my brain: blue skies against the red fields of sorghum, streaked with the blood of Chinese peasants and soldiers; Uncle Arfat screaming as he is skinned alive by the Japanese; a goat seeming to shit ammunition as its tied-shut anus is cut open to expel the contraband bullets hidden within; dead mules floating down the river, their bodies bursting in putrid green pools. They come back to me like unwelcome memories and taint my happy times. What pushes this over the top from nauseating spectacle to one of my favorites is this: Mo Yan populates his novel with people who commit acts of unimaginable cruelty and self-interest, and these impulses throb just below the surface of their daily existence. Yet he creates characters, who, in all their cruelty and kindness, are quintessentially human. More than anything else I've ever read, Red Sorghum claims to reveal the savagery that infuses civilization.
And there you have it. This is my list, and mine alone. If you dig Dean Koontz, Steve King, or Danielle Steele, prefer Women to Ham on Rye or think I'm a total candy-ass for including Thomas Hardy on a list of my favorite "awful" books, by all means please make your own list and leave me be. But aside from that caveat, I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks. If you have any suggestions, please - my "to read" shelf is getting pretty bare.
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