The Inugami Curse by Yokomizo Seishi

Yokomizo was encouraged by another classic Japanese mystery writer, Edogawa Ranpo

The Inugami Curse (aka The Inugami Clan) was first published in Japan in serialization from January 1950 to May 1951. The time period of the novel is the 1940s, with the Japanese invasion of Burma forming a backdrop. 

Review

Yokomizo was influenced by Western detective novels, which he hoped to emulate. He especially admired John Dickson Carr; but those unfamiliar with Carr might think of his work as being reminiscent of better-remembered British Golden Age mystery novelists like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Yokomizo's series detective, Kindaichi Kosuke, appeared in 76 novels and has several idiosyncrasies, including a stammer and a tendency to wildly scratch his always-disheveled hair when he gets excited. In The Inugami Curse, Kindaichi hardly does any detective work at all, simply observing events while being as puzzled as everyone else, until everything clicks into place in his mind near the end. As in an Hercule Poirot novel, the final chapters consist of Kindaichi gathering everyone into a room, along with the chief of police, and slowly unravelling the mystery to everyone present, extracting confessions in the process.

The novel begins with the death of the wealthy patriarch of the Inugami clan, Inugami Sahei, "at his lakeside villa in Nasu at the venerable age of eighty-one." The Inugami clan is an unusual family because Sahei never married. Instead, he kept three mistresses (all deceased by the time the novel begins), none of whom he made his legal wife. With them he had three daughters -- Matsuko, Takeko, and Umeko. The three daughters each have a son -- Kiyo (for Matsuko), Take (for Takeko), and Tomo (for Umeko). Takeko and her husband also have a daughter named Sayoko.

Although Sahei died wealthy, he had been born into poverty. Nonomiya Daini, the priest at the Shinto shrine in Nasu, took Sahei in as a young man. He was a penniless drifter (like a stray dog). Daini, in his forties at the time, was married to Haruyo, a young woman in her twenties. The sexual relationship between the priest and his wife was not strong, but the handsome young drifter became the lover of both of them. Sahei eventually moved out, and it was believed that the relationship between Daini and Haruyo became stronger as a result because they soon had a daughter named Noriko, who would herself eventually bear an extraordinarily beautiful daughter named Tamayo. Noriko and her husband both died when Tamayo was young, and the now-wealthy Sahei took her in and saw to it that the granddaughter of his revered master was treated as a special guest on the estate.

Sahei had always treated his daughters with a certain level of contempt, and that attitude extended to their husbands. Upon his death, the reading of the will revealed that Sahei's vast fortune and business empire would not be left to any of them. Instead, most of it would be left to Tamayo, but only if she married one of the three grandsons (Kiyo, Take, or Tomo). The situation was complicated by the fact that Kiyo, the grandson Tamayo favored most, had been hideously wounded in the war. His nose had been cut off and his face scarred beyond recognition.

Is the man in the mask that hides the deformed face really Kiyo? Will Tamayo choose to marry, instead, the brutish Take or the shifty Tomo? Complications ensue, and then complications compound upon complications, as murders and kidnappings take place and hidden identities are revealed.

If your tastes run to modern hardboiled detectives, Nordic noir, or forensic police procedurals, Yokomizo may not be for you. If, however, you enjoy old-fashioned British drawing-room mysteries in which the detective solves crimes mainly by observing and thinking, then The Inugami Curse will be just your spot of tea. Like the tumblers of a lock falling into place, every baffling enigma that has surfaced in the course of the novel is fully explained in the final chapters as private investigator Kindaichi sits the players down in a room and goes over the events with them.

Character development is not a strong suit of the author, at least not in this novel. We basically learn enough about the characters so that their moves around the chessboard are credibly motivated. Many of the details of the crimes committed depend on coincidence to a greater degree than most contemporary readers are likely to find plausible (one chapter is even titled "A Series of Coincidences"), but such contrivances aren't unknown to readers of the classic mysteries of the 30s and 40s that inspired Yokomizo. Those quibbles aside, it's an entertaining read for the cozy reader, not the least because of the glimpses into Japanese culture that few of us in the West are afforded in life. Plot twists and intriguing turns of events come quickly and often enough to keep the reader alert, and the short chapters with their cliffhanger endings make it imperative for that reader to keep turning pages. 

The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism by Matthew Continetti

His conservative bias peeks through from time to time

I've been a liberal and a Democrat ever since I had any political understanding at all. I disagree with Republican policies in general, and I'm on the exact opposite side of the culture war issues that have driven Republican politics for the past fifty years or so. All that said, I never regarded figures like Nixon, Reagan, or the Bushes to be threats to the democratic institutions and procedures of the United States. I may have disagreed with them on the issues, but I took it for granted we were all playing by the same rules. Donald Trump's refusal to concede his loss in 2020, and his subsequent attempts to overthrow the election, changed all that. The continuing refusal by many on the Right to admit that Trump lost the election, nearly two years later, as well as the number of Republican candidates who run for office embracing the "Big Lie," leads me to believe that democracy in the U.S. is in real danger from the Right.

Review

So I thought I would read Matthew Continetti's book The Right to see if it would help me place the Republican party's embrace of Trumpism in the past six years into some kind of historical context. Indeed, now that I've read it, I think the takeaway from this hundred-year (1920-2020) history of the Right in the United States is that the Republican party's current turn toward national populism really is a return to impulses the party has exhibited since the turn of the last century.

If you're like me going in, you probably don't know much about Republican Warren Harding's campaign to defeat Democrat Woodrow Wilson's successor, but it entailed disavowing internationalism, rolling back progressive domestic policies, installing strict constitutionalist judges, opposing immigration, and recognizing the importance of "religious piety." All of this sounds familiar in the context of today's political dynamics. It should also be noted that the Harding/Coolidge administration (Harding died in office) saw the rise of the second Ku Klux Clan and the Tulsa race massacre on "Black Wall Street." For what it's worth, his campaign pledge had been to bring back a "return to normalcy."

Then as now, political philosophies were divided between the elites and the populists. The 1920s saw the rise of intellectual groups such as the New Humanists and liberal theologians who promoted what they called the Social Gospel. At the same time, a religious group who called themselves Fundamentalists came to prominence. They saw the Social Gospel (i.e., a Christian social justice movement) as back-door Marxism. Liberalism, they said, is inherently opposed to religion. Cue the Scopes "Monkey Trial."

In 1930 a group of Southern writers wrote a defense of agrarianism, conservatism, and religiosity, which were values embodied by the Old South that they romanticized. The group became known as the Southern Agrarians, and today, they are regularly lauded in conservative media. The Agrarians, unsurprisingly, failed to reckon in any way with Black slavery or the need for Black civil rights in their lament for the loss of traditional Southern culture. Continetti further writes: "Agrarians flirted with another danger implicit in radical critiques of America: an openness to authoritarianism."

Continetti gives short shrift to the Hoover's one-term presidency, which coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt defeated him by a landslide and inherited the depths of the Depression along with a brewing war in Europe. The Right maintained its isolationist stance. Meanwhile, members of the even-farther Right held a rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 to express their support for Hitler. The America First Committee was formed in 1940 to oppose the U.S. taking an active role in World War II. Its most prominent member, Charles Lindberg, spoke about the divided loyalty of Jews, who were in his estimation "not American." Pearl Harbor would, however, put an end to the Right's isolationist stance for a while.

After World War II, recognizing that withdrawal from world affairs wasn't tenable, the Right found its raison d'etre for the next forty years in fighting "godless" Communism at home and abroad. "Anticommunism provided a shelter where free marketers, traditionalists, foreign policy realists, and Cold Warriors united to oppose Communist activities and bureaucratic centralization. Eventually all of these groups would find themselves on the side of the GOP," writes Continetti.

When Roosevelt died in office, his vice-president Harry Truman served out the remainder of his final term and won the succeeding election in 1948. Truman presided over the beginning of the Cold War, as well as a hot war in Korea. Truman's firing of Douglas MacArthur led to calls for his impeachment from then-Senator Robert Taft (son of the former Republican president William Howard Taft). Robert Taft would become a thought leader in the Republican party whose influence is felt to this day. The unpopularity of Truman's handling of the Korean conflict had a lot to do with the election of his successor, Republican war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. But Eisenhower also opposed the isolationist attitudes of Taft, who was against NATO. Eisenhower was also a moderate who continued the New Deal policies of his predecessors. Thus, you don't hear a lot of conservatives today citing him as a hero of the movement. ("Movement conservatives" are those who argue that big government is the root of all problems. Reagan was the first movement conservative to be elected president.)

Eisenhower was certainly anti-Communist, but he wasn't a rabid "red-baiter" like his vice president Richard Nixon or the Senator from the great state of Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy. In time, McCarthyism would come to be seen by most Americans as the real threat to liberty and the rule of law in this country. "McCarthy's demagogy pushed the political system to the limit," says Continetti. "He fed off conservative alienation from government, from media, from higher education."

After the death of Robert Taft and the censure of Joe McCarthy, an emerging conservative thinker named William F. Buckley Jr saw that the Republican party needed intellectual grounding. For that purpose, he founded National Review in 1955. Throughout the rest of the book, besides looking at the political fortunes of prominent politicians such as Barry Goldwater, Pat Buchanan, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, Continetti also devotes a lot of space to the internecine struggles of conservative writers and thought leaders such as Russell Kirk, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, Jeane Kilpatrick, Leo Strauss, and his father-in-law Bill Kristol in the pages of magazines such as National Review, the Weekly Standard, Claremont Review, and others. Along the way, he touches on the many divisions within conservative thought, including movement conservatism, new conservatism, neoconservativism, paleoconservativism, nationalism, populism, constitutionalism, fusionism, traditionalism, libertarianism, reform conservatism, and so on, and so on. If I have a criticism of this book, it's that you sometimes feel that you're reading lots of names of people and publications and political philosophies without really getting a clear grasp of them.

Did The Right answer my questions about fitting Trump into a historical context? In many ways, I believe it did. The chapter dealing with Trump's presidency is titled "The Viral President," which works on many levels. Trump seized upon those pre-War themes of the Republican party going back to Harding and Coolidge: isolationism, protectionism, and immigration restrictions. But he was also a populist demagog who used the power of the modern "attention economy" and social media to whip up anger and backlash among self-proclaimed anti-elitists in red states and rural areas. Theocratic law professor and Trump appointee Adrian Vermeule wrote that the Right should now embrace a common-good constitutionalism whose object is "to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well." Evangelicals, always a force in American politics, seized on Trump as their Cyrus. Meanwhile, as Continetti notes, "In some precincts on the right, Trump, Brexit, and Muslim immigration contributed to a reevaluation of strongmen." In their embrace of Orban, Putin, Salvini, and other rightwing autocrats, some Republicans today are beginning to conjure memories of the 1939 rally in Madison Square Garden that extolled George Washington as "America's first fascist."

Trump's support among the faithful never wavered, but COVID came along and Americans began to die, the pandemic brought down the economy, and Charlottesville and the BLM protests spread unrest across the country. Biden won the election. But it's important to remember that he won Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin by a total of fewer than 45,000 votes. The nationalist populists who once embraced Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace, are waiting to lift Donald Trump back up onto his pedestal again. I fear we may not recover if they do.

Revival by Stephen King

King pays tribute to the Weird Tales writers

There are some mild spoilers in this review. I'll touch on a several major events in the novel, though I won't go into detail.

Review

Early in the novel, a shadow falls across a boy named Jamie who is playing in the dirt with his toy soldiers. The boy looks up to discover that the shadow belongs to a young minister named Charles Jacobs who has come to town to serve at the First Methodist Church of Harlow, replacing the retiring lay preacher Bill Latour. Charlie, as he likes to be called, is the sort of friendly adult who gets down in the dirt to help out with the fortifications.

Charlie Jacobs has a lovely wife named Patsy and a sweet young son named Morrie. The Jacobs fit right into the community and are liked by everyone. Charlie and Patsy start a Methodist youth group that Jamie and his brothers and sister join, along with several other kids in their small town. Besides the Bible lessons, they sing songs with Patsy on piano, and Charlie wows them with electrical experiments he has devised. (Reverend Jacobs is obsessed with electricity.) The reverend even heals Jamie's older brother Conrad of a case of laryngitis using electricity, though he confides to Jamie later that the cure was mostly psychological -- the power of suggestion.

But soon enough, something terrible happens. Patsy and Morrie are maimed and killed in a horrifying automobile accident. In the aftermath, Reverend Jacobs loses his faith. This is, of course, a grim reality that anyone who is raised in a religious faith and believes in a just and merciful God must face. How can it be that such a God can allow innocent people, even little children, to be maimed and killed, even abused and tortured in some cases. After taking several Sundays off, Reverend Jacobs returns to his church and preaches a final sermon, which comes to be known by his parishioners as the "Terrible Sermon," in which he rubs their faces in the meaningless evil and injustice of the world, finishing with, "Believe what you want, but I tell you... there is nothing but a lie."

Unsurprisingly, Reverend Jacobs is asked to leave. Jamie assumes this is the last he'll ever see of the reverend. Many years later, however, Jamie crosses paths with Jacobs again. Jamie has reached a low point in his life -- broke, homeless, jobless, and addicted to heroin. He wanders into a carnival looking to score, but what he finds instead is a sideshow in which Charlie Jacobs, now known as Dan Jacobs, is amazing the rubes with his electrical magic. Jamie is so wasted he passes out and next awakens in Jacobs' trailer. Jacobs cures him of his heroin addiction using what he calls "secret electricity" and hires Jamie as an assistant for a while. He even helps Jamie back on his feet by getting him a job that turns out to be Jamie's long-term calling in life.

Many years go by, and the next time Jamie becomes aware of Jacobs he's a television and tent-show evangelist who specializes in healing. Jamie knows it's a grift because Jacobs lost his faith in God a long time ago and remained cynical about religion. Through research, Jamie learns that many of the people who are healed by Pastor Danny have severe "after effects." Some go crazy. Some commit suicide. Jamie confronts Pastor Danny with this, but Jacobs shrugs it off. After all, he points out, even doctors and surgeons have a certain percentage of failures.

Eventually Jacobs gives up the faith healing racket and retires to an estate where he continues to work on his so-called secret electricity experiments in private. He asks Jamie to be his assistant, but Jamie refuses. Jamie knows there's something off about Jacobs' secret electricity and he wants no part of it. But, eventually, Jacobs gains a hold over Jamie that forces him to become a part of his ultimate experiment. While Jacobs no longer believes in the Bible, he's sure there's something beyond death -- and he's determined to find out for certain where Patsy and Morrie are now. And we slowly realize the title of the book has nothing to do with religious services calling sinners to repent.

The novel meanders along for nearly five hundred pages and touches on all aspects of its protagonist Jamie's life, from childhood to old age. That's all fine: as any reader of Stephen King knows, there's often more fun in the journey than in arriving at the destination. The novel is somewhat elegiac in tone as it devotes a lot of space to ruminating on the experiences of growing old. You really don't know where Revival is going until close to the end, and, unfortunately, it felt as if King were trying to graft on a part that really didn't fit. I was surprised by how very Lovecraftian the story becomes in the finale, though the early mention in the story of the forbidden book De Vermis Mysteriis (a fictional grimoire created by Robert Bloch and incorporated by H. P. Lovecraft into the the Cthulhu Mythos) gives the astute reader a clue as to what is afoot.

Jamie's journey is entertaining and often moving, but, overall, the story was a bit shaggier than it needed to be; and the Lovecraftian ending didn't really work for me.


Postscript: 

Total ripoff!

Those toy soldiers Jamie is playing with at the beginning of the novel are from a comic book ad that was very common in my childhood (and King's) for 100 Toy Soldiers "Packed in This Footlocker!" all for roughly a buck and a quarter. Jamie loves these toy soldiers and plays with them all the time. I'm here to tell you that I was one of the kids who sent in his five quarters. What I got were one hundred tiny, barely three-dimensional soldiers packed in a cardboard box that was slightly smaller than a typical kitchen matchbox. You couldn't get them to stand up, and they were utterly useless -- a total ripoff! I quickly tossed them into a corner of the closet and never played with them again, as I suspect most other kids also did. We certainly didn't play with them for months like Jamie. I assume Stephen King couldn't con his parents out of the buck and a quarter and always longed for that footlocker of soldiers. You were better off without them, Stevie. Trust me. I know.

Pamela Colman Smith

 

"Pixie" illustrated the most popular form of the tarot deck

I came across this photo on Mary K. Greer's blog and wanted to save a copy for myself. Here's what Mary had to say:

I just discovered this previously unknown photo of PCS by her friend, the well-known photographer, Alice Boughton. The source is The Literary Digest, July 4, 1908. Enjoy.

--marykgreer.com

Firestarter by Stephen King

Bad things happen to kids in Stephen King land

Firestarter (1980) is a fairly early King novel -- the eighth counting ones he wrote under the Bachman pseudonym. I'm not a fanatical Stephen King fan, but after finishing Firestarter I wondered just how many of his books I've read. I found an online checklist, and it turns out I've now read 29 of them, which is probably more books than I've read by any other single author. Still, he's written 80 and is at work on more, so I've got a long way to go if I want to catch up.

I've never seen either of the two movie adaptations of this novel, so I went into it not knowing anything other than the fact that it's about a little girl who can start fires with her mind. In the book, this power is call "pyrokinesis." The critic S.T. Joshi claims the correct coinage should be "telepyrosis," but I believe that Joshi's version would mean heartburn from a distance. Pyrokinesis sounds just fine to me anyway since it sounds like you're throwing fire.

Review

Stephen King starts this one with the tried-and-true technique of dropping the reader into the middle of the action. Seven-year-old Charlene (better known as Charlie) McGee and her father, Andy, are on the run from government agents who have killed her mother, Vicky. A pair of agents had already taken Charlie captive by the time the narrative starts, but Andy managed to catch up with them and use his own mental powers to neutralize them. The secretive agency known only as "The Shop" has plenty more agents, though, and they will keep coming until they have Charlie in their clutches.

In flashbacks we learn that Andy and Vicky met in college. The psychology department was running an experiment where a dozen student volunteers would be paid $200 each to take a mild hallucinogenic drug called Lot Six while being monitored. They both could use the money and ended up doing it together to provide each other a little moral support. As it turned out, the experiment was a sketchy operation being run by The Shop, and some of the students who took part died or were mentally impaired afterward. Vicky and Andy experienced what seemed to be telepathy with each other. As a result of the experience, they grew closer, eventually marrying and having a child. Vicky and Andy also each retained weak psychic abilities. Vicky could use telekinesis to move objects, while Andy's ability allowed him to "push" other people into doing what he asked them to do, like a very strong case of post-hypnotic suggestion.

This is where I have to say that I had expected that this would be a story about an adolescent girl slowly discovering her awakening psychic powers and having to learn to control them. While the latter does come into play, the surprise for me was that Charlie had her pyrokinetic ability from infancy. This brought to mind the Superman comics of the 1960s that I read when I was growing up, where Ma and Pa Kent were always amusingly having to deal with and/or hide the fact that their baby could lift the farmhouse off its foundation if he was looking for a lost toy. Raising a baby who could cause random spontaneous combustion events didn't come across nearly as funny as Superbaby's antics, though.

To sum it up, without going into much more detail, I will note that Firestarter falls into three well-defined acts. In the first, Andy and Charlie are desperate and on the run until they are finally captured by The Shop's implacable Native American superagent, Rainbird. In the second act, the two are prisoners of The Shop, where they are drugged into submission. Psychological techniques are used to gain their trust. The Shop wants to understand the extent of Charlie's powers (which she refuses to show them at first) with the idea of perhaps developing a eugenics program using parents who have been doped with Lot Six to produce superpowered mutants. All of this is being done in name of national security, of course. In the third act, Charlie and Andy finally gain some agency of their own and manage turn the tables on their captors. The climax is unputdownably exciting and cathartic. The denouement that follows provides a satisfying sense of closure.

I never read at the beach. I don't even understand why anyone would. But this is a great book to read on an airplane or anywhere else that you want the hours to fly by unnoticed.

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith

Her House is haunted by ghosts and monsters

Published in 2021 when she was 32 years old, Build Your House Around My Body is Violet Kupersmith's first novel. Her mother fled Vietnam in 1975 following the fall of Saigon. Violet, who is half white and grew up in Pennsylvania, spent a year teaching English in Vietnam on a Fulbright scholarship in 2011. All of those experiences feed into this astoundingly well-written debut novel. 

Review

Having just finished the book, I feel as if I would probably only fully appreciate it if I were to go back and read it again -- though it isn't at all hard to follow on first reading. The story stretches across several decades (from the days of French Indochina until 2011) and is told in a non-linear fashion, jumping back and forth across the years and recounting events in the lives of characters whose relationships to each other aren't clear at first. (The author says she was inspired by David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.)

The way Kupersmith structured the novel is impressive as narrative revelations always seem to come at just the right time no matter how out of temporal sequence they may be. My one small criticism of this novel is that, in her assiduous determination to weave together every character's relationship to the others, it gets a little tedious in the final third. The conclusion is quite satisfying, though.

The first character we meet is Winnie, who arrives at the airport in Saigon from the U.S. planning to stay with a great aunt and teach English at a small language school. Even though the novel features an ensemble cast of characters, Winnie will remain central because every chapter is situated, not just in its geographical location, but also in relation to the day she disappeared. So, as you are reading the book, you are constantly reminded that something (presumably bad) is going to happen to Winnie. She is, however, not a sympathetic character. She's lazy and doesn't even try to be a good teacher. She'll do whatever she must to get by with the least amount of effort. She's dishonest and slovenly -- kind of a rat.

Winnie's brother, Thien, pesters her to meet up with an old friend of his from medical school who is living in Vietnam now. "He'd be more than happy to show you the ropes." Winnie finally accedes to her brother's request and meets Dr. Sang. It turns out that Sang set up his practice in Saigon because it's a place where he can pursue his "other interests," besides being a doctor. Drug dealing is one of those interests. Human trafficking is another. During their brief time together, Sang takes Winnie to the snake house at the zoo where he shows her a two-headed cobra that he himself donated to the zoo. That cobra and many others will play a crucial role in later developments.

Winnie will eventually visit the Café Max, which is the headquarters of the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co. We're told that Vietnam is rife with ghosts, so chasing them away is a sought-after service. The company is headed by the Fortune Teller, who is helped by his (possibly clairvoyant) First Assistant and (bumbling) Second Assistant. The Fortune Teller is good at fortune telling and removing ghosts, but he is somewhat embarrassed by his affliction, which is that he is possessed by a monster. The Fortune Teller once encountered a young girl named Binh and two boys (Tan and Long) who were her accomplices in a graveyard extortion scheme, but he scared them off by unhinging his jaw and opening his mouth wide enough to swallow them all. Binh, Tan, and Long will all become involved with Winnie in different ways.

Kupersmith writes beautifully, and her fecund imagination weaves complex and convincing backstories for her characters. She also departs from mimesis and imbues the novel with supernatural elements. A copper-colored smoke monster roams throughout this novel, inevitably bringing to mind the smoke monster in the TV show Lost. We're told it has no memory because it is itself a memory. Once it takes possession of you, it gives you the ability to move from one body to another. 

Maybe that's a metaphor for the way that reading a well-written novel lets you move from one life to another. Kupersmith certainly accomplishes that here, and I can only imagine the heights to which she'll ascend in future works. 

The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith

Not sure why but this is my favorite picture of Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith's 1962 novel The Cry of the Owl provokes anxiety in the reader from the outset, and that feeling doesn't let up until the very end. You may find that it doesn't even let up for a while after the end.

Review

Robert Forester has moved from New York to a small town in Pennsylvania where he has taken a job as a draftsman for an aeronautical engineering company. Robert is getting divorced from Nikki. It was a short, unhappy marriage, and he feels depressed, lonely, and at loose ends living in a strange town. One night he happens to drive past a house where he glimpses a pretty young woman in her kitchen. For reasons he doesn't quite understand, he's so taken with the scene that he turns his car around, parks down the block, and walks over to stand in the shadows and watch her through the window. 

As time goes by, Robert becomes addicted to watching the woman (and her boyfriend) through the front windows of her house. The young woman's name is Jenny; her boyfriend is Greg. They've been together for a while and seem to be moving toward a formal engagement. Robert has no intentions toward Jenny. He doesn't want to hurt her or have sex with her or even meet her. Just watching her gives him a sense of calm and well-being. More than once, however, when he's moving around in the shadows he accidentally makes noises that lead her to think there may be a prowler outside. Sometimes she sends her boyfriend out to search the property; but Robert always manages to avoid getting caught.

After a while, Robert realizes he has to stop peeking into Jenny's house. If he gets caught, he would likely be arrested. He could lose his job. His soon-to-be-ex-wife would ridicule him. One evening he goes over to Jenny's house for what he tells himself will be the last time. As he watches, Jenny comes out of the house with some trash that she dumps into a container and sets on fire. As she stands there contemplating the blaze, Robert falls into a reverie watching her... until he realizes Jenny is looking right at him. He awkwardly spreads his hands and says hello. She asks him if he is the prowler she keeps hearing. He admits he is but promises he'll leave and not come back. A conversation ensues, and Jenny eventually invites him into her house. They talk for a long time and lay the first foundations of a friendship.

As time goes by, Jenny confesses that she's not sure she loves Greg enough to marry her. Robert understands but impresses on her that he is not interested in a romantic relationship; nevertheless, she begins to fall in love with him. Greg doesn't take well to being dumped. When Jenny can't explain how she met Robert, Greg becomes convinced that Robert was the prowler and that he's some kind of dangerous kook. As he goes through various machinations trying to scare Robert away, Greg eventually gets in touch with Nikki to try to learn more about him. Nikki, not to put too fine a point on it, is a perverse narcissist who takes pleasure in destroying other people's lives. So, of course, she gleefully feeds Greg everything he wants to hear. 

One night Greg runs Robert off the road in a lonely stretch of highway that goes by the river. They get into a fight, and, although Greg is the bigger of the two, Robert has had military training and holds his own. At one point they tumble down the bank into the river, where Greg apparently hits his head on some rocks and becomes groggy. Robert pulls him out of the water and leaves him sitting on the river bank. He drives away to meet Jenny, and he tells her what happened.

This is the point at which the story makes a big turn. Greg's abandoned car is found by the river the next day, but Greg never shows up. Robert goes to the police and tells them what happened. But days and weeks go by, and Greg is never seen again. Suspicion falls harder and harder on Robert that the version of the story he told isn't true, that Greg ended up in the river drowned. Maybe it was manslaughter; maybe it was deliberate murder. In his efforts to break up Jenny and Robert, Greg had told the prowler story to anyone and everyone who would listen. People begin to wonder about Robert's character. Even Jenny begins to wonder. Weeks later a badly decomposed body washes up downriver. Robert's life spirals more and more into a hell of uncertainty and suspicion, and even attempts on his life. 

Throughout the book, Robert remains a decent person. He isn't a good man turned bad, like, say, Guy Haines in Strangers on a Train. Instead, he's an innocent who keeps unintentionally causing bad things to happen to innocent people, who has enemies who want to destroy him for no good reason, and who almost everyone comes to regard with hostility and distrust. Because Highsmith has done a brilliant job of putting you in Robert's shoes, you squirm anxiously with every twist and turn of the narrative.

Paradoxically, you race from chapter to chapter just to find out how much worse things can get. Robert comes off as a two-dimensional character, but I believe Highsmith made him that way to emphasize the idea that the universe is fundamentally indifferent to our moral character. 

As for how it all works out, I will only say that the book does finally climax in a glorious Grand Guignol blood fest that is quite satisfying. 

Parts of this book are a bit mystifying. You may feel some sympathy toward Robert even as he becomes a Peeping Tom because you understand his loneliness and pain. But when he inadvertently gains Jenny's love, inexplicably he doesn't want it. He just wanted to admire her from a distance, nothing more. He seems almost asexual. He's coming off of a bad marriage, but his ex-wife Nikki wasn't just a bad match for him. She is actually one of the most hateful characters in literature. Her vindictiveness and cruelty exceed all limits of rationality, making Medea seem placid in comparison. 

Unlike Roland Barthes, I think knowing a few details about the author's life can sometimes help you appreciate a book. Here are a few tidbits via biographer Joan Schenkar. 

Highsmith was once smitten by a pretty young blonde and spied on her voyeuristically. As her misanthropy increased, Highsmith eventually found that she enjoyed looking at pictures of attractive women but had no interest in actual relationships with them, just as Robert enjoyed admiring Jenny in the window but wanted nothing else from her.  

Highsmith had a two-year affair with another author, the lesbian pulp fiction writer Marijane Meaker, who wrote under the pen name Vin Packer. Highsmith was extremely bitter over their breakup, and the hideous Nikki is probably a projection of Highsmith's feelings about Meaker. 

Mine by Robert McCammon

McCammon turns the suspense up to 11

The author dedicates this book "to the survivors of an era when the whole world was watching." He is, of course, echoing the chant of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in 1968, and some aspects of the book probably resonate best with those of us who remember the unrest of that era. Nevertheless, it's a gripping thriller, lacking in any of McCammon's usual supernatural elements, and the core story could easily happen today.

Review

Mine is the story of two women. The first, Mary Terrell, is a former left-wing, violent radical who has been wanted by the FBI since 1969. Back then she was called "Mary Terror" because she was an effective soldier in the war to take down the system, an enthusiastic participant in bombings and shootings. She was also in love with a charismatic radical leader they called Lord Jack. She even became pregnant with Jack's child but miscarried during a violent shootout with the feds. 

Twenty years later, Mary is living a marginal life under an assumed name, one in a series of false identities. She's good at disguises, good at acting, having taken drama classes in college, though she can never hide the fact that she's six feet tall. Mary has become more and more divorced from reality, however, as time has gone on. She's paranoid and schizophrenic. She has a closet full of mutilated baby dolls that she "raises" as she fantasizes of returning to Jack with their baby and living out the idyllic hippie marriage to him she had always imagined. They're mutilated because her violent temper always overcomes her, and she ultimately "murders" each of the dolls.

Laura Clayborne, the other woman in this story, is 36 years old and pregnant for the first time. Laura had been a bit of a hippie herself back in the day, but now she's a senior reporter and book reviewer for the Atlanta Constitution's lifestyle section. Her husband Doug is a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. She drives a BMW; he drives a Mercedes. From the outside they have a good life. They don't really love each other any more, but they have a baby boy on the way and maybe that will make things better. (Doug is having a secret affair, though.)

After an evening of dropping acid and having sordid sex, Mary comes across a cryptic message in the back of Rolling Stone she'd bought earlier that day. "Mr. Mojo has risen. The lady is still weeping. Does anybody remember? Meet me there. 2/18, 1400." Mary instantly recognizes these as coded terms used by her group, Storm Front (a hyper-violent offshoot of the Weather Underground). The author of the message is proposing that the old team get back together on February 18 at 2PM. Twenty-six days from now! Mary knows where the "weeping lady" is. And she is doubly sure the writer is Lord Jack himself. Mary is going to reunite with the love of her life, the man she still thinks about every day, after twenty years. And, she decides, she's going to bring their baby back to him. Mary is happy and begins to lay plans.

Doug is with his girlfriend the night Laura's water breaks. She knows because she followed him. But now she has to get herself to the hospital fast. It is a difficult delivery. When it is over, Laura leaves a message for her husband on the home answering machine, knowing it is over between them. Her baby, David, is only two days old and resting on Laura in the hospital bed when a tall nurse enters the room and tells her she needs to take him to be weighed. Mary has used her skill in deception to case the hospital, modify a nurses' uniform to match theirs, and take the baby out a back door with a disabled alarm. She wasn't after Laura's baby in particular, but stealing a boy baby is a real bonus. She knows Lord Jack will be pleased to have a son!

Mary begins her cross-country trek to find Lord Jack. Laura is at first hysterical with fear, rage, and grief, but she pulls herself together and develops a steely resolve to get her baby back. And thus begins the chase. The cops are useless and her husband is out of the picture, so Laura takes matters into her own hands, chasing down the clues to Mary's past, ferreting out the surviving members of her terrorist group, and following her trail. Mary Terror is no easy target, however; she's already left several people dead in the wake of her journey, and more will die before it's over. All the while, the newborn baby in her possession pushes the levers of her violent temper with his crying, raising the specter of those mutilated dolls even as Mary tries to remember that she's doing it all for Jack. 

Mine consists of 400 pages of nerve-wracking suspense interspersed with nail-biting scenes of violent conflict and gore, parallels, reversals, and twists. If that sounds good to you, I'd suggest starting it on an evening when you don't have to get up early the next day.

The Keep by F. Paul Wilson

F. Paul Wilson was a practicing doctor throughout most of his writing career

The Keep by F. Paul Wilson was published in 1981 and became an immediate bestseller. A movie based on the book was released two years later. (We'll come back to that.) It's easy to see why the book hit the bestseller lists. It has all the right elements, including an intriguing premise, spooky supernatural happenings, a passionate romance, and a fast-paced, easy-to-absorb narrative style. Wilson says his inspirations for the novel were the works of Robert Ludlum, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft. As unlikely a mixture as that may sound, all of those influences are clear in the text.

Review

As the story begins, the young Sturmbannführer (Major) Erich Kaempffer, of the SS, has been chosen for an important post in Romania. He'll be in charge of opening a death camp in Ploiești -- a real feather in his cap! But before he can take up his post, the German High Command wants Major Kaempffer to look into (and resolve) a small issue of some concern. Captain Klaus Woermann, of the regular German army, has been posted to a small castle-like structure in the Carpathian Mountains, where he and his men are to guard a strategic pass from the Russians. Woermann's men, however, are being killed, one by one, each night, and he can find no answer to what's causing those deaths. The Captain has, therefore, asked permission to move his men out of the keep. This is unacceptable to High Command, and, therefore, Major Kaempffer has been tasked with investigating the matter and putting an end to the killings.

Kaempffer finds this annoying for two reasons. First, it delays him from taking up his real work, which will advance his position in the party. Second, he has a history with Captain Woermann, whom he dislikes. The two men's distaste for each other adds an extra level of conflict throughout the book.

Back when Woermann arrived at the tiny village in the Dinu Pass, he discovered that the keep was maintained by a caretaker named Alexandru and his two sons. Alexandru warned the Captain that he and his men would not be able to stay in the keep. When asked why, the caretaker told him that bad dreams drive people out. Woermann, of course, found this amusing, dismissed the warnings, and had his men begin setting up electrical lights and generators, weapons emplacements, and barracks in the keep. As for who owns the keep and pays for its maintenance, Woermann could find no answers.

It is at first assumed that some kind of resistance movement must be behind the deaths of the German soldiers in the keep. When Kaempffer arrives, he uses brutal SS tactics to terrorize the villagers into giving up the rebels. But it becomes obvious that something else is in play when Kaempffer is confronted one night by the animated corpses of two of his own men.

Woermann and Kaempffer learn from the local innkeeper Iuliu that a Jewish scholar from the University of Bucharest, Professor Theodor Cuza, is an expert on the history of the region and may be able to help them figure out what's behind the killings. Although Kaempffer is unhappy with relying on a Jew, the dying Professor Cuza and his daughter Magda, who takes of him, are quickly brought to the keep against their will.

Cuza is highly resistant to the idea that he can help the Nazis in any way, but he becomes intrigued despite himself when he is brought a cache of books that had been found hidden in a small chamber in one of the walls. This is one of my favorite parts of the book, though it may pass right by non-fans of H.P. Lovecraft. As an in-joke on the author's part, all of the books and manuscripts that are brought to professor Cuza are directly taken from Lovecraft's work or other writers who participated in the Mythos-related writings. For those who are interested, here's the list:

• The Book of Eibon "du Nord translation" (from Clark Ashton Smith)
• De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludwig Prinn (from Robert Bloch as Mysteries of the Worm)
• Cultes des Goules by the Comte d'Erlette (from Bloch)
• The Pnakotic Manuscripts "in scroll form" (from H.P. Lovecraft)
• The Seven Cryptical Books of Hasan (from Lovecraft)
• Unaussprechlichen Kulten "by von Juntz" (from Robert E. Howard as Nameless Cults)
• Al Azif (from Lovecraft, original Arabic name for the Necronomicon)

The Ludlum influence becomes obvious at this point in the narrative. When Molasar, the evil presence trapped in the keep, reveals himself to Cuza, he asks questions about the Nazis who have invaded his domain and soon proclaims his desire to drive them from Romania and to kill their leader, Hitler, in Germany. Of course, Cuza becomes eager to ally himself with Molasar and to help him escape the keep. F. Paul Wilson does a masterful job of compounding lies with deceits with trickery and then slowly opening the reader's eyes to what's really going on.

Meanwhile, as these events transpire, in Portugal a red-haired man called Glenn has undertaken an arduous journey over land and sea to the Carpathian Mountains. In the course of his journey, it becomes clear that Glenn has not only an implacable will but superhuman strength. When he arrives at the keep, his mission is clouded in secrecy. He forms an uneasy alliance with Magda (who is a scholar in her own right), and eventually the two of them fall in love with each other. Together they will stand against Molasar (and Magda's father) in a battle with the highest stakes possible.

Wilson isn't afraid to make use of some horror movie tropes that may make you shake your head at their cheesiness, but nobody said this was high literature. If you're in the mood for a good thriller with a side helping of the supernatural, this is a fun read. And, spoiler, don't worry, the Nazis in the keep all come to a hideous end. 

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After reading the book, I decided to rent the movie on Amazon Prime because I was curious to see how it made the transition from page to screen. As I watched, I kept thinking F. Paul Wilson must have felt like he'd been stabbed in the heart. Michael Mann, who wrote and directed the film, threw out almost everything that was good about the book and turned it into a disjointed, incomprehensible mess. Avoid it at all costs. 

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

 

African-American noir in a fast-moving car

Blacktop Wasteland is a heist novel that centers on the wheel man, the getaway driver, like a more realistic version of Edgar Wright's Baby Driver but just as exciting. I don't know anything about S.A. Cosby, but I assume he must be a car enthusiast because his descriptions of engine mechanics and driving seem to come from a place of personal knowledge rather than just research. 

Review

Cosby builds the novel on the classic crime noir setup. Beauregard "Bug" Montage, got off to a bad start in life doing petty crimes as a teenager until a job gone wrong ended him up in juvenile detention. By the time Bug got out, his father, Anthony (aka "Ant), had disappeared, never to be seen again. The only thing Ant left Bug was the souped-up Plymouth Duster they both loved. Bug turned it into a legendary street-racing machine and had the chops to drive it like no one else could. 

After the stint in juvie, Bug went straight. He bought an old garage and turned it into an auto repair shop. He remarried. (The first marriage had long since dissolved; they were both teens at the time.) And he had a successful business until a rival shop run by a franchise called Precision moved into town and undercut his prices. 

Because he couldn't beat Precision's prices, he lost customers and fell behind on his mortgage payments. Meanwhile, his son Darren needs glasses. His other son Javon had to get braces. His daughter Ariel, from the first marriage, is smart enough she could go to college and make something of herself if only she could afford the tuition. To top it all off, his mother is in a convalescent home, and he's just learned that there's a discrepancy with her Medicaid policy for which he now owes the government $48,360.

Bug is in desperate straights financially when Ronnie Sessions shows back up in his life. Ronnie is a redneck drug addict and career criminal who's always looking for the next score. He's also the screw-up who masterminded the job-gone-wrong that put Bug in juvenile detention way back when. But this time he's got a foolproof scheme. Ronnie's girlfriend Jenny is working at a jewelry store that is going to be temporarily holding $500,000-worth of uncut diamonds, and with her help they are going to take advantage of that window of opportunity to steal the diamonds. Reggie knows a guy who can fence the goods, giving them a clean $250,000 which Ronnie, Bug, and the gunman on the team, Quan, can split three ways. Eighty thousand dollars would go a long way toward solving Bug's problems.

But he quit the life. He has a wife and two sons he loves, a daughter he rarely sees but cares about, a difficult mother to take care of, an employee (and childhood friend) named Kelvin... he can't blow it all by getting caught or killed in a holdup. Bug's wife Kia tries to convince him, instead, to sell the beloved Duster, which is legendary in the county and would bring a very high price. Bug can't let go of that link to his father, though. So he tells himself that if he fully takes charge of the job, checks out everything personally, makes sure absolutely nothing can go wrong, then it's just one last job, and he'll be out of the life for good. 

You know this story, right? The "one last job and then I'm out" story? It's a good one. A classic, in fact. 

Ronnie and Quan both promised Bug they would stay away from coke for the duration of the job, but they lied. Ronnie also lied about the value of the diamonds, which was really more like $3,000,000. (If you were smarter than Ronnie, it would make you wonder why jewels that valuable would be passing through a rinky-dink, small-town jewelry store and who would be behind it.) In fairness to Ronnie, though, there's no way he could have known the fat lady who was Jenny's boss at the store was also a stone-cold killer. I won't tell you anything about what happens next except for the one thing you already know -- once the robbery starts, everything goes to hell big time, real fast. 

S.A. Cosby is a terrific writer. With this novel, he's already in the realm of the likes of Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos. The story is peopled with a fully realized cast of characters, the small-town Georgia settings feel lived in, the action sequences and tense encounters are white-knuckle stuff. If you like hard-boiled noir fiction, this one's for you.