Saturday, July 10, 2021

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel by Quentin Tarantino

Same story, different take

Review

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is not, strictly speaking, a "novelization" of the film Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.* The back cover of the book describes it as "The new novel based on the film," and that's an accurate description. Based on. The novel includes many scenes from the film, but it tells the story its own way -- leaving some things out, adding others, and indulging in digressions into Hollywood lore at even greater lengths. I'm going to assume that you've already seen the movie and won't worry about spoilers.

Like the movie, the novel follows events in the lives of TV actor Rick Dalton and his stuntman Clint Booth in the summer of 1969. The year is important because the entertainment business is changing. Rick has made a reasonably successful career of acting -- in manly, heroic roles -- in westerns and World War II movies. But, as the 70s approach, those kinds of movies and those kinds of roles are giving way to the influences of the counterculture. Bounty Law, the popular TV western in which Rick once starred, has been off the air for a few years, and he has been reduced to villainous guest-star roles on other TV shows. Thus, the novel opens with an agent encouraging Rick to takes roles in Italian "spaghetti" westerns to regain his status as a leading man. Again, as in the movie, Rick's worries over his fading status in Hollywood are an underlying current throughout the novel. Rick's interior monologue, as he ruminates on the recent past, gives Tarantino ample grist for digressions on movies, directors, and actors. While these digressions are interesting in themselves, they seriously impede the forward motion of the narrative, stalling it out at times to the point that you forget what's happening. 

Rick's guest-star role on Lancer (a real-life TV show from the late 60s) is expanded upon in the novel to the point that it becomes a more-or-less fully fleshed western within the greater novel. No such episode ever existed, but it would have been a marvel if it had -- a Tarantino movie in the context of a 60s TV western! The real-life actor James Stacy, who played Johnny Madrid/Johnny Lancer on the show was portrayed by Timothy Oliphant in the movie and becomes a more fully developed character in the novel. (As an aside, I recommend the Wikipedia article on James Stacy if you'd like to learn more about his strange, tragic life and death.) 

Besides the Lancer western, the other main story line in the novel -- as in the movie -- is that of Charles Manson, the Family, and the events that led toward the fatal night in August at the home of Roman Polansky and Sharon Tate. We also learn more about Cliff, his past as a war hero, and the fact that he's a three-time murderer. (Yes, he killed his wife; that was no boating accident.) Cliff's meeting with the Manson girls and his trip to the Spahn Movie Ranch play out fairly closely to the way they are depicted in the film. Perhaps the most surprising divergence from the movie is that the novel does not end with the hyper-violent, blood-soaked battle with the Manson Family in Rick's home that we saw at the end of the movie. Early in the novel we're told that it happened, and that it made Rick a cultural hero among right-wingers who hated "dirty hippies." Blink and you'll miss it, though, because the novel never circles back around to that melee.

The novel, instead, ends with Rick having a late-night conversation with his young co-star on the Lancer show, going over their lines, getting ready for their big scene together the next day. It's a much more reflective fade out that avoids the suspenseful buildup and final, explosive release that we have come to expect from Tarantino's films. (I'll also note, as another aside, that Tarantino inserts his own step-father into the story near the end and has him tell Rick that his son Quentin is a big fan.) I enjoyed reading this book, but I'm not entirely sure it works on its own as a novel. It really functions as a companion piece to the movie and as an amusing extra for die-hard Tarantino fans. If you fall into that camp, I recommend it. Otherwise, you'll probably want to pass. 

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*Note that the posters for the movie read Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood, whereas all official copy related to the film reads Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. Maybe it's because I'm a former editor, but this sort of inconsistency drives me nuts. The title of the novel foregoes the ellipsis altogether.

The Magic of My Youth by Arthur Calder-Marshall

Calder-Marshall hard at work on a novel

Review


This memoir was originally published by the venerable firm of Rupert Hart-Davis of 36 Soho Square, London, in 1951. In the author's foreword, Arthur Calder-Marshall thanks Rupert (later Sir Rupert) for encouraging him to complete the work. The book opens with an anecdote, a tale told to the author by a friend about an unlikely, seemingly coincidental encounter related to the occult magician Aleister Crowley. Looking back, Calder-Marshall notes that, once you've heard Crowley's name, you tend to hear it everywhere. Indeed, "The Beast," as he was known, becomes a touchpoint whose name recurs throughout the book. 

Calder-Marshall writes about he and his older brother growing up in the small, southern England town of Steyning in the 1920s. Central to this narrative is the friendship the two brothers developed with a local eccentric whom they called Vickybird. The boys' father strongly disapproved of Vickybird, calling him "a crank. And I'm willing to bet you anything you like he's introspective." A former poet who wrote no more, owner of a small press, Vickybird (and his wife Kathleen) lived in penury but were great sources of fascination for the boys. Though never mentioned in the book, Vickybird's real name was Victor Benjamin Neuberg. As poetry editor of a newspaper called Sunday Referee, he had been the first editor to publish Dylan Thomas. Years later, on learning of Neuberg's death, Thomas said, "Vicky encouraged me as no one else has done." Neuberg was also, in his youth, a collaborator with and lover of Aleister Crowley. (Also spelled Vicky Bird, the nickname referred to his halting, birdlike gait.) 

When Arthur went off to study at Oxford, Vickybird insisted that the younger man call upon an old friend known as "Auntie Helen," another aging eccentric who had, through Vickybird, become enamored with magic. The author recounts amusing tales of Auntie Helen, including his own strenuous efforts to keep her ahead of the bill collectors. Her philosophy when it came to borrowing on credit was always "go big," an attitude that eventually forced her to leave town in a hurry. 

The author's musings include the story of former Oxford student Raoul Loveday's suspicious death while staying at Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù. Loveday's wife, Betty May, followed him to Sicily, where she engaged in a "struggle with The Beast for the possession of her husband's body." Ultimately she lost that battle. Loveday's death may have been accidental, or it may have been Crowley's sacrifice to Adonis with the complicity of the victim. 

Betty May was, herself, quite notorious, and her autobiography Tiger Woman is still in print. I think it admirable that she did try to kill Aleister Crowley in revenge for her husband's death, but her first shot missed and the gun jammed on the second try. 

I won't recount all the stories told in The Magic of My Youth, but I will describe one more if you'll forgive my wordiness. A fellow student founded the Oxford University Poetry Society (at an earlier date than is currently claimed on the OUPS website), and Arthur Calder-Marshall became its Secretary. Having learned from Betty May that Crowley had returned to London, Calder-Marshall arranged to meet him at a restaurant and was surprised to find "a bald and elderly stockbroker, apparently working on the back of a menu calculations" which turned out to be a shopping list with estimated costs. Calder-Marshall invited The Beast to come to Oxford to deliver a lecture to the Poetry Society. Crowley astutely ridiculed the idea that the University would ever allow it, but Calder-Marshall convinced him to accept. Of course, in the end, the Oxford authorities forbade the lecture. Crowley demanded that it at least be printed or else he would sue. Calder-Marshall subsequently arranged with the Oxford Mail to have it printed as part of an exclusive-to-the-Mail story about the banned event. "You don't expect me to print this trash," protested the Mail editor when he read the lecture. But he had promised and was compelled to print five hundred copies, of which Calder-Marshall estimates about fifty were sold. 

Crowley was impressed enough with Calder-Marshall's initiative that he asked the younger man to visit him at Knockholt. "There are Matters of Grave Import we should discuss together..." The author and his wife met The Beast and his lover, an exotically dressed Brazilian woman, in a modest, borrowed cottage that was filled with Crowley's recent paintings of "trance states." What followed was a tremendous test of wills in which Crowley tried to banish the author's wife, who was of no interest to him, and persuade Calder-Marshall to spend the night and become his new assistant. In the end, Calder-Marshall managed to pull back and to eventually conclude that The Beast was "little better than a pedlar of spells as phony as quack medicines." 

There's more, but I've already gone on at great length describing this slight tome. Arthur Calder-Marshall wrote lovely prose full of insight and wit, and I plan to look for more of his work. (Orson Welles optioned one of his novels to turn into a movie but, as happened all-too-often with Orson, the financing for it fell through.) The Magic of My Youth provides a charming glimpse into a time and place far removed for most of us, along with a small sense of some of the minor actors in the drama that surrounded the famous occultist who was once known as the wickedest man in the world.


Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia

 

Moreno-Garcia's master's thesis was on women
and eugenics in Lovecraft's works

As I was reading
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the one thought that kept running through my mind was, "My, God! This woman writes beautifully!" She crafts her sentences with such limpid clarity that the book is a pleasure to read on that level alone. That's helpful because the story develops very slowly for fully two thirds of the novel's length, carefully putting each element in place, before the full horror is finally revealed.

Review

Reviewers often mention Rebecca and Wuthering Heights when reaching for comparisons to Mexican Gothic, and they could also invoke My Cousin Rachel for the plot device that motivates our heroine Noemí Taboada to visit High Place. The real progenitors of this novel aren't so much gothic romances, though, as they are gothic horrors like Bram Stoker's Dracula and Matthew Lewis's The Monk, as well as weird tales like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space. For the record, Moreno-Garcia cites the stories of Horacio Quiroga and the horror films of Carlos Enrique Taboada as influences, though I confess to being unfamiliar with them.

The evil patriarch of High Place is Howard Doyle, the name being a bit of a tribute to Howard Philips Lovecraft and Conan Doyle. Howard Doyle's "enormous jawline," of course, evokes Lovecraft's unusual appearance. Discredited theories of eugenics play an important role in this novel (a reference to Lovecraft's racist beliefs), as do the legacies of colonialism, racism, and misogyny in Mexico.

But the real villain of this piece is Virgil, a Dracula-like seducer if there ever was one. The mounting disquiet that Virgil invokes draws you into the narrative as Noemí finds her mind gradually slipping. The eventual denouement does not disappoint. With suddenly escalating tension, disgusting rituals, and the revelation of a loathsome abomination in the catacombs below, this is gothic horror at its finest. 


Friday, July 9, 2021

The Forgotten Island: A Horror Novel by David Sodergren

David Sodergren loves his pug

Short Review

David Sodergren's The Forgotten Island won't win any literary prizes for skillfully drawn characters or plausible sequences of events, but it is a fast-paced yarn that pulls you along with mounting suspense. And, best of all, it takes you to a "lost" tropical island that's infested with scary-ass monsters. If you like good, old-fashioned monster stories, this will scratch that itch. It's just begging to be turned into a low-budget, creature feature by a budding young Sam Raimi or George Romero wannabe. If I were Joe Bob Briggs, I would have tallied up the dead bodies and bare breasts for you. I didn't, but -- trust me -- there are plenty.