The Store by Bentley Little

Bentley Little rarely makes public appearances.

The Store is the first novel by Bentley Little that I’ve read, but it probably won’t be my last. It reminded me a bit of Stephen King's books, and I’m a Stephen King fan. The King novel that especially comes to mind when you read the description of The Store is Needful Things. Both are about a new store that opens in a small town, offering a full inventory of Evil to the residents. That’s pretty much where the similarities between the two books end, though. 

Review 

While the nefarious store called Needful Things is a small curio shop, the store that comes to Juniper, Arizona, is a Big Box like Walmart or Target. Like Walmart in particular, the corporation behind The Store looks for small towns that don’t have pre-existing competition from other large, national chain stores. When The Store arrives, it’s the biggest thing around, and it quickly begins to drive the independent “mom ’n’ pop” stores and restaurants on Main Street out of business. The Store also quickly becomes the biggest employer in town. (New employees soon learn, however, that The Store’s HR department isn’t exactly up-to-date on enlightened workplace practices.) 

Protagonist Bill Davis is a telecommuting tech writer, so his fortunes aren’t as tied to those of local businesses as is the case with other characters in the story. A least, not that he realizes at first. He repeatedly goes before the town council to express his opposition to The Store’s exemptions from environmental requirements, its predatory practices, and more – but it soon becomes clear that the council is fully in The Store’s pocket. And, despite his opposition to their doing so, Bill’s own daughters take jobs with the store because it pays better than any other employer in town. 

As the story develops, The Store takes over more and more of Juniper, including the schools, the parks, and even the police department. Besides that, you really don’t want to meet The Store’s pallid, emotionless “night managers” because they have a simple solution for dealing with troublesome citizens who resist The Store’s plans. Without going into detail, let’s just say opponents end up becoming night managers themselves. Resistance truly is futile. 

Ultimately, in his effort to stop The Store’s reign of terror and free his daughters from their employment contracts, Bill confronts the owner. Like Leland Gaunt, the proprietor of Needful Things, the CEO of The Store (Newman King) might just be Old Scratch himself, or possibly one of his minions. He offers Bill a deal: take our training, become manager of the Juniper store, and you can do anything you want with it. The deal seems too good to be true, and, of course, becoming manager of his local Store and virtual dictator of his whole town presents Bill with temptations and challenges that make it difficult for him to hold on to his moral core. The devil knows his business. 

The book isn’t without flaws, including some plot holes and character inconsistencies that can be hard to swallow. But overall it’s a fun, fast read, that lingers with you.

The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis

 

The author of The Queen's Gambit considering his next move.

Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell to Earth is about an alien who comes to Earth from the planet Anthea, which sounds a lot like Ray Bradbury’s Mars – an ancient, depleted world that is home to a dying race. The alien, who calls himself Thomas Newton, tells us there are only about 300 Antheans left and that the tiny spaceship he came in was 500 years old. Their world didn’t have enough fuel remaining to allow them to send more than one.

Review

Science fiction is never about the future; it’s about the present in which it is written. It’s important to keep that in mind when reading old science fiction stories. The Man Who Fell to Earth was written in the early 60s, so its depictions of subsequent decades are merely projections of the technologies and cultural trends of the 60s. And Tevis isn’t really interested in trying to imagine the world of the 80s and 90s anyway. He is, instead, far more interested in using his extraterrestrial character to explore the feelings of alienation and existential despair shared by many in the culture of his time.

While the Antheans are different in appearance from humans, they aren’t so different that Thomas Newton can’t disguise himself to pass as human. Eventually, he earns some money and hires an attorney to secure patents for his “inventions.” In truth, Newton invents nothing; he simply adapts existing Anthean technologies. These inventions make Newton rich, which in turn allows him to establish a base of operations for his real goal.  

I wasn’t a fan of the 1976 Nicholas Roeg film, in which Newton’s goal is to transport water to Mars. His motivations in Tevis’ novel are far more complex and interesting. This is a bit of a spoiler, so you may want to skip the rest of this paragraph if that sort of thing bothers you. Newton’s goal is to use Earth’s resources to build an interplanetary ferry that will bring more Antheans to Earth. By disguising themselves, the Antheans will fit into Earth societies, as Newton has done, so that they can eventually gain control of terrestrial governments and militaries. Ultimately, they plan to do two things: save us from ourselves and establish a new homeland (and a future) for themselves.

Tevis wrestled with alcoholism, and so too does his alien. Perhaps the genius of this novel is that it doesn’t depict the sort of extraterrestrial invader that we’re used to, i.e., one that proceeds with superhuman efficiency and determination. Rather, Newton is beset by emotional as well as physical frailties. He suffers from self-doubt, he broods in alcoholic despair, he makes mistakes. And, one more spoiler, he fails. Completely.

So, no, this isn’t a rollicking sci-fi adventure. It might be more accurate to describe it as something more like a Raymond Carver story by way of Kurt Vonnegut (but not as fun as the latter). Tevis didn’t describe any future that came to pass, but his description of the heart in conflict with itself remains pretty true.

Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola

I recently read Stephen King's new novel, Billy Summers, and was intrigued by the incidental fact that Billy was reading a novel by Émile Zola called Thérèse Raquin. King never describes the novel, but he mentions it several times, as if inviting you to take a look at it for yourself, So, I did. 

Review

If you distilled Thérèse Raquin down to its essential plot points, you could almost turn it into an EC horror comic. Thérèse, through no agency of her own, is married to a sickly, boring young man named Camille. One day, Camille makes the mistake of introducing his wife to a robust, virile former schoolmate of his named Laurent, In time, Thérèse and Laurent become attracted to each other and begin to have an affair behind Camille's back. Eventually, they decide Camille is the one thing keeping them from complete happiness, so they plot his murder. The murder itself is played out in horrific, violent detail as Laurent drowns Camille in the Seine while Thérèse watches.

The lovers succeed in making the murder look like a boating accident, preempting any suspicions of foul play. Since it takes a while for the body to turn up because it had been pushed down into the current, Laurent takes to visiting the morgue each day, hoping to identify the body and help the police close the case. These visits, described in chapter thirteen, turn into a bit of Grand Guignol as Zola describes the corpses in vivid detail. We learn, along the way, that visiting the morgue is an entertainment for many.

Sometimes gangs of small boys came in, mere children of twelve to fifteen. who rushed along the windows and only stopped in front of female corpses. They leaned on the glass with their hands and ran their impudent eyes over the bare breasts, nudging each other and passing smutty remarks, learning vice in the school of death. Young louts have their first women in the Morgue. 

With Camille finally buried and their crime unsuspected, the lovers decide to avoid each other's embraces for a while to further divert any thought that they might have had anything to do with it. They depend on mutual friends to ultimately suggest that perhaps the two of them should get together, which was also part of the plan all along. But each of them has become haunted by guilty visions of Camille's corpse. By the time they are joined in matrimony, each is repulsed by the other, and they are no longer able to experience the pleasure they felt when they were together illicitly. What follows is a gradual descent into hallucinatory madness, physical abuse, and vicious recriminations. The final paragraph of this nasty little novel is a masterpiece of degradation and spite that would, as I indicated earlier, have been at home in a pre-Code horror comic. 

I have, of course, left out important developments and characters in this short summary, but it should be enough to let you decide if this is the sort of thing that interests you. I found the first half of the novel to be compelling reading, but it began to drag in the second half as the author prolonged the suffering of the two lovers. Nevertheless, I admired the unflinching way Zola examined the motives of his characters. In the beginning, when Thérèse falls for Laurent, Zola makes it clear that she does so for the physical pleasure of sex -- there's no mincing of words here. Even Laurent is a bit frightened at first by how much she enjoys it.

Reactions to this novel are fairly mixed. In its day is was famously described as "putrid" by one critic. While Zola held it up as a study in naturalism based on the interplay of character types, the novel is definitely overheated and "over the top" in all sorts of ways. Others have pointed out the similarities to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. While I don't see any similarities to Billy Summers, I can certainly see why Uncle Stevie thought Thérèse Raquin worth bringing to his readers' awareness. 

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.

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. 

A Killing in Kiowa by Lewis B. Patten

Patten was the author of more than a hundred western novels. 

Review

A Killing in Kiowa by Lewis B. Patten was first published in 1972 and won the Spur Award for best western novel published that year. The book is a taut, 144-page Signet paperback that covers twenty-four eventful hours in the life of Sheriff Matt Wyatt. It starts with four teenage boys trying to rape a prostitute as she's walking home from work at one in the morning and then beating to death a man who tries to stop them. The boys flee from the scene, and the intended rape victim yells for help. Before he dies, the man names two of his assailants to the doctor who arrives on the scene first. The sheriff learns the two names from the doctor and sets out to arrest the boys. Once they are in jail, he quickly learns the names of the other two from their accomplices and rounds them up as well, though bringing in the last one -- a rancher's boy -- proves to be difficult. 

At times the story feels more like a crime noir novel than a traditional western. As soon as the sheriff has the boys in custody, the rancher and the banker (another of the boys' fathers) begin to bribe and intimidate witnesses. When it looks like that might fail, the rancher gathers his hands to help stage a jailbreak. The murder victim's brothers and friends, meanwhile, begin to threaten that justice will be done by any means necessary -- even if it results in "stringing up" the boys. Sheriff Wyatt has to try to keep a lid on the pressure cooker that the town becomes as the two sides get ready to go to war with each other.

The story is so tightly plotted that not a word is wasted. Every one of the sheriff's moves makes perfect sense, and even so the situation becomes more and more volatile, out of control, and potentially deadly. Adding to the complications for Sheriff Wyatt are the facts that one of the boys is the son of his deputy and the brother of his girlfriend. But he never wavers from trying to do his duty or to confront the violence that is relentlessly headed his way. The ending is fast and the resolution satisfying.

Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey

 

Pearl Zane Grey gave up a promising career as a dentist

Review

If you do any online searches to find out what are the best classic western novels, three books show up on pretty much every list: Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident, Owen Wister's The Virginian, and Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage. Perhaps because Zane Grey's books were all over the paperback racks when I was a kid, I expected Riders of the Purple Sage to consist mostly of pulp-style action. I was surprised to discover that it's really pure melodrama. Western-style action does figure in the novel -- in the form of shootouts and horseback chases -- but the story leans far more heavily on romance, suppressed emotions, dark secrets, and long declarations of love complete with "palpitating" bosoms. The writing is old-fashioned and often repetitious. The long-delayed revelations (of which there are many) are, more often than not, painfully obvious. The intricate web of relationships borders on the absurd. And yet... and yet... I loved this book! 

Early on, the main narrative bifurcates into two almost separate stories. In one, the Mormon woman who has inherited her father's ranch must, with the help of a mysterious lone gunman, defend it from ruthless men who will take it from her by any means necessary. In the other, a young man comes of age as he rescues a beautiful girl and builds a life with her in a hidden valley he discovers that's literally a lost world. (How many genre staples did you count in that description?) The villains of this work have the blackest hearts you've ever encountered, and the twist is that they are all high-ranking Elders of the Mormon church. Indeed, I had decided that Zane Grey must have hated Mormons, but a little research afterwards told me that his feelings were mixed.* 

If you get past the archaisms and give yourself over to the story, you'll find yourself turning pages late into the night to find out what happens next, and what happens after that, and then what... Zane Grey doesn't stint on incidents right up to the very end. On top of that, his descriptive writing (especially in the hidden valley) can be first rate, and his insights into human nature are at times quite profound. There's a reason this particular title makes it onto all the classics lists.

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* See Zane Grey in Zion: An Examination of His Supposed Anti-Mormonism by Gary Topping (https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1918&context=byusq)

The Cowboy and the Cossack by Clair Huffaker

Review

If the cattle drive in the far-better-known Lonesome Dove, from the Rio Grande to Montana, was long, the drive in Clair Huffaker's The Cowboy and the Cossack is far, far longer. The cowboys in this novel must cross an ocean with their beeves, to Vladivistok, Russia, and then push on deep into Siberia with them.

Once on Russian soil, however, the Slash-Diamond outfit is met by a Cossack named Captain Rostov who informs the cowboys that his own men will drive the cattle onward from that point. The outfit's leader, Shad, refuses, insisting that they will complete the job they were hired to do themselves. Thus begins a prickly alliance between the cowboys and Cossacks who will make the grueling trek together to a starved town called Bakaskaya.

Told entirely from the point of view of the youngest cowboy in the outfit, Levi (whose parents named him after the jeans), the novel is a traditional coming-of-age story. It's also an out-and-out men's adventure story. The only women in the tale are glimpsed while serving food and drinks in one of the rare towns but always remain remote, mysterious, and yearned for.

But as manly adventure yarns go, it's a corker. The men of two worlds, suspicious and hostile to each other at first, develop mutual respect and even friendship as they battle weather, imperial soldiers, wild animals, and even wilder men in the form of Genghis Kharlagawl and his Tartars. Adding to the complications, Shad and his men eventually learn that they were brought to Russia under false pretenses.

Much of the fun, of course, derives from our learning about the world of 19th century Russia through the young protagonist's eyes. This is not the Russia of War and Peace or Anna Karenina, though; it's the remote outposts of Eastern Russia and the no-man's land of the Mongolian border. I have no idea how much Russian history Huffaker may have studied to pull this off, but it comes across with complete believability. The writing is clear and compelling, pulling you through the 300 or so pages in a flurry.

Huffaker was a successful novelist, writing mostly Westerns in the 50s and 60s, and a sought-after screen writer with more than a dozen movies credited to him. Many of his Western novels were turned into movies, though, oddly, not the one that was undoubtedly his best.