Kenneth Robeson - The Man of Bronze (1933)

 

I'm not going to make a habit of this because there are millions of these fucking things, but since reading Devil on the Moon I'd been on the look out for the very first book in the Doc Savage series, mainly in the hope that it might answer a few questions which the later title failed to answer. As is doubtless obvious, I've found a copy at last, and as hoped it does indeed give some account of Doc Savage's origin, although there isn't much to tell which is probably why they didn't bother repeating it in subsequent books; and I still have no idea why he's described as the Man of Bronze. I appreciate that it's because he has bronze skin and even golden eyes, but there's no accounting for why he should appear so beyond that it's because he's amazing. I'm therefore letting it go.

Doc Savage seems a more obvious precursor to the modern superhero than Philip Wylie's Gladiator. He's muscular, athletic, knows absolutely everything, enjoys punching bad guys, and he doesn't spend the entire novel agonising over the misery of being able to bend steel bars with his bare hands. He's on a mission to make the world a better place - in so far as it's possible to do so by punching bad guys - his first name is Clark, and he has a Fortress of Solitude specifically identified as such somewhere above the arctic circle. He's a character to which we might aspire, and he travels the world with a group of five pals, each of whom brings some specialist knowledge or ability to the whole and so - it could be argued - serving as a template for the superhero team-ups which were to come.

We join the story just as Savage's similarly adventurous and muscular father is murdered by an enemy, leaving Clark to continue his legacy, with the first item on the agenda being an assassination attempt which leads the gang to the jungles of the Yucatan and the miscreant who had Pop whacked.

The Man of Bronze is cautiously set in the Republic of Hidalgo where our guy encounters a lost tribe of Maya, still building those temple platforms, and unknown to the outside world. This is usually the point at which it goes tits up for me, but Robeson - or at least Lester Dent lurking behind the authorial pseudonym - bothered to do just enough homework to make it readable, keeping in mind that this amounts to a veneer of authenticity applied to the sort of narrative which had done so well for The Shadow and arguably reached its most vivid expression in Universal serials such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and others. Dent apparently missed the footnote identifying Kukulkan as the Mayan translation of Quetzalcoatl meaning they were the same individual rather than two distinct Gods, but that's probably forgiveable.

Anyway, these Maya are entirely civilised and are afforded more dignity than one might expect of a jungle adventure written in the thirties. The Princess is of course ravishing and in love with Doc, and the story spins on these Maya having a massive stockpile of gold which they intend to just give to Savage and his gang because that's how it works, but otherwise we have none of the usual rolling of eyes, wacky superstition, or human sacrifice fortuitously delayed by solar eclipse. While this may not quite add up to Shakespeare, Doc Savage doesn't aspire to Shakespeare. The writing such as we find in these pulps - and I'm still not entirely comfortable with that term - may seem odd and clunky in comparison to more literary contemporaries, and that which is often characterised as bad or inept writing is rather, I would argue, extremely stylised to very specific and admittedly narrow purpose. In other words, it's probably not fair comparing the Ramones to Emerson, Lake & Palmer*. The form this stylization takes makes heavy use of superlatives, and Doc's every action is described in terms making it clear that no-one else could have done it so well. It would be exhausting were it not rationed to certain scenes, but serves to set the mood and give pace to action sequences which might otherwise unfold too quickly and leave less of an impression. Doc's companions are written in similar terms, albeit with additional emphasis on how much they admire or are in debt to their bronzed leader. Once we're resigned to the fact of the narrative emphasising this angle whether we like it or not, there's plenty to enjoy.

Returning to the implication that we may as well be reading a Republic Picture serial with a slightly higher than usual degree of cultural fidelity, The Man of Bronze is single-minded yet mostly sensitive where it needs to be, and there's honestly not much to dislike unless you're actively looking for it.

Readers are now invited to proceed to the comments section where they may enjoy a selection of poorly articulated objections made by fan wankers who feel that while I enjoyed The Man of Bronze, I didn't enjoy it enough for their liking and maybe I should have fucking checked with them first.

*: Aside from anything, Emerson, Lake & Palmer were shit.

Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)

 

As will probably be obvious to anyone who saw the 1975 movie adaptation - which must surely be everyone - the mental institution in which the story takes place is a metaphor for society as a whole, which as such squares perfectly with the truism that mental illness may often be a logical and sadly inevitable means of dealing with the unreasonable conditions to which our society commits us. This, at least, was Kesey's approximate conclusion from working nights at the Menlo Park Veteran's Hospital in San Mateo County, and here it underscores the narrative in terms which feel almost Biblical with McMurphy's rising from the dead of shock therapy as a precursor to his ultimate sacrifice.

We're all familiar with the story, right?

For what it may be worth, Cuckoo's Nest seems a rare example of the film telling the same tale as the book for the same reasons, with both coming out on top. There are minor changes, the main one being that the story is told by the Chief who remains a silent hulk on the screen until the latter part of the movie; which shows that it can be done, contrary to whatever Ridley Scott might have had to say on the matter of making a completely different film.

Kesey writes well, although the text occasionally veers into getting too dense for its own good, requiring the occasional skip back to a previous paragraph to remind oneself of just who we're talking about; but it's otherwise meaty and powerful, pinning out its intricate diagram of injustice in colours so primary as to hurt the eyes, yet without spelling anything out or playing the usual sympathy cards; and so it puts the reader through a wringer just as Nurse Ratched does with her patients and our current societal set up fucks us over - or most of us - with a big smile and the promise that this is specifically because it has listened intently to our concerns. This is why One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest will break your fucking heart if you have one, because it's barely even a metaphor.

Philip Wylie - The Gladiator (1930)

 

I gather that much has been made of this novel as a precursor to Siegel and Shuster's Superman, or this is at least the reason for my having heard of it. The Gladiator was published in 1930 and features a man who leaps tall buildings with a single bound and can lift rocks of several tons. His skin is impervious to bullets and his hair is described as so black that it seems almost blue. It's hard to miss the parallels with the star of Action Comics, and although the first issue didn't appear until 1938, Siegel and Shuster had been working on the character since at least 1933. Nevertheless, once we're past those parallels already listed, the association becomes tenuous. One early version of Superman had powers bestowed upon him during the experiments of an irresponsible scientist, much like Wylie's Hugo Danner, but the argument remains thin.

Of course, the notion of progress as something which must surely apply to the future of human evolution was very much a hot topic when The Gladiator was written, meaning it taps into a popular theme more than it originates, and those persons then most visibly - or at least memorably - obsessed with such themes included those writing for early science-fiction magazines such as Hugo Gernsback's Astounding Stories.

Strangely, The Gladiator gets off to a thoroughly putrid start very much in the spirit of the misanthropy found in the worst of Astounding. Our amateur scientist is an unappreciated genius married to an unpleasant nag of a wife. Family values are emphasised with the sort of toxic conservatism typical of young male writers who haven't had much life experience but nevertheless presume themselves above the common herd; and Abednego Danner, our crusading scientist, routinely drowns any kittens left over once he's done with his experiments because he's above mere sentiment. His experiments, as you may have guessed, are geared towards the creation of a superhuman. He succeeds, and so his son is born effectively invulnerable with inhuman strength.

Just as I'd begun to wish I'd picked something else to read, the superbaby becomes a child and the novel reveals itself to be something quite different to that which was seemingly promised in the first chapters.

From his earliest day that longing occupied him. He sought to hide his strength. He hated to think that other people were talking about him. The distinction he enjoyed was odious to him because it aroused unpleasant emotions in other people. He could not realise that those emotions sprang from personal and group jealousy, from the hatred of superiority.

Our boy, you see, is afflicted with superhuman ability more than he is blessed, and this theme dominates so much as to dispel any similarity to those sunnier cartoon people who fight crime and right wrongs with a big, big smile. If The Gladiator foreshadowed anything in the world of comic books, it would have been Stan Lee mashing caped books up with romance comics to produce the angst-ridden superheroes of the sixties and beyond, but even there the parallels are superficial, traditional comic book superhero angst serving mainly to add depth and contrast to the three colour antics. Here the angst is probably nothing less than a measure of the gulf which exists between ideology and that to which it is applied, because the dreams of supermen can only ever be a distraction.

His tragedy lay in the lie he had told to his father: great deeds were always imminent and none of them could be accomplished because they involved humanity, humanity protecting its diseases, its pettiness, its miserable convictions and conventions, with the essence of itself—life. Life not misty and fecund for the future, but life clawing at the dollar in the hour, the security of platitudes, the relief of visible facts, the hope in rationalisation, the needs of skin, belly, and womb.

I'm therefore assuming that the wince-inducing Gernsback-isms of the first chapters are deliberate, ultimately serving as a refutation of the mania from which they were born, and it's probably no coincidence that our main character is named Hugo.

Reaching maturity, the aforementioned Hugo does his best to make his way in the world, but his physical superiority sabotages everything he does to the point of leaving him destitute, struggling to make a living at a carnival sideshow. He struggles at college, accidentally kills an opponent during a game of football, before finding himself drawn into the first world war - the ultimate refutation of meaning, ideals, and ideology.

The Gladiator delivers a deliberately contrarian opener before settling into an intense and genuinely gripping philosophical debate with more than just a flavour - as well as the literary flair - of H.G. Wells at his best, savoured with pulpier touches and moods that remind me of John Fante and Céline, of all people. So I'm not saying this is superior to the caped comics which followed, but that it's such a different animal as to render comparisons mostly pointless. It's not much less than a retort to pretty much every lie we told ourselves for the duration of the last century.

Jay Anson - The Amityville Horror (1977)

I saw a demon when I was fifteen, maybe sixteen. I was in bed. It was dark outside, and looking to the gap between the curtain and the window, I could see a terrifying face gazing in at me. It had the traditional hooked nose and a pair of tiny horns projecting forward from its forehead just above the eyebrows. Because the window was down near my feet, I was seeing this from an angle, and the demon, which was facing forward, was looking downwards and to its right in order to meet my eye. I stared for a minute or two, gripped by something like provisional terror. I was fairly certain the apparition couldn't be real, but couldn't see any explanation for an illusion which failed to correspond with whatever could have been reflected in the glass; and so it appeared real for a short time, but not quite the same sort of real as the curtain, the bed, the wall, or my feet projecting from beneath the quilt. This wasn't the screaming terror we see in horror movies, but I suspect must be a fairly common emotion experienced by those who encounter what appears to be the supernatural. It may be what members of the Lutz family experienced in the house on Ocean Avenue, at least where what they saw, heard, or smelled could not be otherwise immediately rationalised.

My own demon, as I realised after a few minutes, actually was a reflection, the hooped wooden rings supporting my Habitat curtains forming both the hook of the nose and curve of the horns with terrifying fidelity.

I read The Amityville Horror in the year it came out, so far as I recall. I would have been twelve and my friend Paul habitually lent me books about flying saucers, alien visitors, and other unexplained staples from his father's substantial collection. The supernatural didn't seem too far removed from my usual discomfort zone, and I recall the book as both plausible and terrifying. Naturally my curiosity has increased over time, particularly given how little I read back then, and so here I am nearly fifty years later giving it another shot.

The story, as you probably know, describes the supernatural trials of a family spending their first month in a new house, one in which a series of grisly murders had occurred. With hindsight I realise my friend Paul may have been screwing with me, my own family having moved into a new house earlier that year. Anyway, in recent times I've noticed not only a movie adaptation but a series of sequels seemingly of a kind you wouldn't ordinarily find spun off from a true story, and closer scrutiny has revealed that maybe it wasn't. Jay Anson wrote the book, drawing from hours and hours of interviews with members of the Lutz family describing what they claim to have experienced, and his last word on the matter seems to have been that whether any of it happened or not, they clearly believed that it did. On the other hand, the book - which we may as well call a novel - seems to contain an unusual number of factual discrepancies in what happened to whom and where, and William Weber - defence lawyer for Ronald DeFeo, who committed the aforementioned series of grisly murders - claims to have cooked up the whole story with George and Kathy Lutz prior to Jay Anson writing the book; so, to cut a long preamble short, I'm reading this one out of curiosity and as a novel.

The Amityville Horror reads very much like a novel too, given its attention to mundane domestic detail serving as contrast to the alleged supernatural activity; and despite the non-fiction qualification listed on the spine, there's very little in the way of analysis, not even so much as was to be found in saucer literature of the time. The preface by the Reverend John Nicola offers waffle about how mere superstition must be kept separate from the rigorously documentarian disciplines of both science and religion, and what you will read almost certainly pertains to the latter, beyond which the narrative feels very much like a series of set pieces drawing on The Omen, The Shining and The Exorcist. So I enjoyed it, and it's efficiently written in the usual bestseller prose but it felt a little ridiculous in places - when George Lutz stops off for a pint at a bar called the Witches' Brew, for one example, and you can actually feel the author staring at you, waiting for shadows of fearful anticipation to cloud your coldly sweating brow. It's worth a read, I guess, and I don't regret reading it either back then or now, but it turns out that non-fiction printed on the spine did one fuck of a lot of the heavy lifting.

Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean - Signal to Noise (1989)

 

What exciting times they were. Neil Gaiman turned up seemingly out of nowhere and everything he wrote was amazing, and there was suddenly a lot of it about, so much so that it was difficult to keep track of it all. This one was serialised in The Face, which I browsed in WHSmith but didn't buy because it was The Face and I've never really given a shit about exciting young designers and how they've revolutionised trousers yet again. But I've always liked the title, Signal to Noise, and all that it seemed to promise, so I always intended to read this, assuming it would eventually be collected because it's Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, and so here we are.

Signal to Noise is the short tale of a film director ready to begin work on a film about the end of the previous millennium when he discovers he has cancer and only months to live. He's never going to finish this latest undertaking, which now seems crucial in view of his impending mortality; and yet he finishes it because what else is there to be done?

That's the story in full, more or less, and it's nothing earth shattering but it's beautifully told, poignant, and thought provoking without any of the dreary goth twinkle which would come to inform and infect Gaiman's subsequent writing. It takes the form of a comic strip in so much as that time unfolds across a series of sequential images with the occasional speech bubble, but it arguably has more in common with Robert Rauschenburg or William Burroughs than Batman, at least in how it's told. It's ingenious, often beautiful, and with surprisingly little suggestion of anyone doing an Alan Moore or a Bill Sienkiewicz; but somehow it falls short of the hype. It's great, but not life-changing because, I suppose, we all hoped they'd both go on to even better things, which didn't really happen. So Signal to Noise is a lavish but brief promise of what might have been but wasn't. All the same, it's nice to go back to a time when I could read something by Neil Gaiman without giving myself a headache from the constant involuntary rolling of my eyes.

It's funny that he's never written anything starring a bloke who works on the bins or in a biscuit factory, wouldn't you say? I wonder why that should be.

Robert Heinlein - Methuselah's Children (1958)

 

I guess Bob had taken to thinking about his own mortality, or at least about his no longer qualifying as a spring chicken, whatever that is. I know the feeling. Methuselah's children are a group of extraordinarily long lived humans whose socially awkward longevity has brought them all together as a secretive subgroup inhabiting the fringes of human society. They're not a secret society in that they don't, as a group, have any particular collective influence on anything, and - unusually for golden age science-fiction - neither are they anything so obvious as homo superior or the coming race. They're simply people who live longer than the rest of us for reasons no-one quite understands. Anyway, fearing discovery and the possibility of dissection in order to glean the secret of longevity when even they have no idea what that secret could be, they band together and flee the planet, going off in search of a world where they can all live their lives without having to forge a new birth certificate every seventy years or so.

Whether by accident or design, Stephen Baxter would eventually revisit a few of these ideas in the Destiny's Children books, because they're worth revisiting, and Heinlein threw out some weird and fascinating ideas in this one. The problem is that we're two thirds of the way through the novel before anything interesting happens. I can barely remember what occurred during the first hundred pages. There seemed to be a lot of yacking, page after page of dialogue and not much else, and most of it the sort of snappy content-free repartee which made Stranger in a Strange Land such a fucking chore; so it's a relief when they steal the spaceship and flee the solar system because things happen, and Bob gets to play with science and relativity and the rest, which is where he excels. I also enjoyed the fact of this final third of the novel having the almost haphazard cadence of Simak or even A.E. van Vogt, eschewing the usual brilliant minds with elaborate scientific plans and the need to explain them at length. The long lived hundred or so thousand just sort of sneak onto the conveniently unoccupied New Frontiers - as the galaxy spanning craft is named - assuming there will be something to eat, places to sleep and so on; and one of the gang has conveniently come up with a revolutionary new star drive.

'It looks to me, son, about time to try out your gadget.' He poked a thumb at Libby's uncouth-looking space drive. 'You say that all you have to do is to hook up that one connection?'

'That is what is intended. Attach that one lead to any portion of the mass to be affected. Of course, I don't really know that it will work,' Libby admitted. 'There is no way to test it.'

'Suppose it doesn't?'

Luckily it works, and we're off. The two extraterrestrial civilisation they eventually encounter are both friendly but very odd, and the crew of the New Frontiers decide to head back to Earth after all, because this isn't one of those novels about seeking out new life, new civilisations, or boldly going anywhere in particular. It's mostly about mortality, specifically that of the author.

'I propose to hang onto this life as long as I can and learn as much as I can. Maybe wisdom and understanding are reserved for a later existence and maybe they aren't for us at all, ever. Either way, I'm satisfied to be living and enjoying it.'

I've had trouble reading later Heinlein, and you can tell the preoccupations which informed his less agreeable works were creeping in here, but he's still making the effort, still mostly at the top of his game, and still delivering much more than is promised by the summary on the back cover.

pStan Batcow - The Sleeping Party (2025)

 

Veterans of the weirdy tape and/or mail art scene may recall former Ceramic Hob pStan Batcow as the prime mover behind Howl in the Typewriter and Pumf Records. He's been at it since the eighties, and not only has he failed to slow down a bit, as many of us have done, but if anything he appears to be accelerating. This is his first novel, although it doesn't read like a first novel having arguably spent at least four decades in the making with many of the texts found herein originating as Stanzines, as he deemed them - short zines of Batcow fiction or simple rumination periodically produced by the man seemingly because he just couldn't stop himself. I had a couple here and there, notably This Bleeding Heart which doesn't seem to have made it into the novel and which I remember as noteworthy. So the prose and general composition are confident and accomplished as the work of a man who found his voice - as the saying has it - many years before. This ain't his first rodeo.

The premise has a group of people monitored as they sleep, their dreams recorded herein towards ambiguous ends. It's structured pretty much as a loose tangle of unrelated lengths of super-8mm film edited together into a single continuous strand, and it would be fair to call it an experimental novel; although unlike a few experimental novels I've encountered of late, this experiment is undertaken by someone who has some idea of what the fuck he's doing. We meet our cast as the book opens, learn what they're about to do, and the rest is one individual testimony after another - either unrelated, or related by means which aren't immediately obvious. Former Stanzines appear as Rachel dreams about reading them in a library, which is cheeky as fuck in compositional terms but the material blends beautifully into the whole regardless. We alternate autobiographical musings with surrealism and punky philosophy and somehow it all hangs together as a sort of social realist Naked Lunch written under the influence of Lewis Carroll, amongst others. It kicks against the pricks while remaining generally humanist and refreshingly low on the kind of cynicism to which the Batcow might be entitled given a few of the more obviously autobiographical details. Themes emerging may depend on where the reader is sat, and I found something generally positive with a firm grounding in reality amounting to we're all in this together so let's not be arseholes, as proposed by our narrator's thoughts as he observes a couple of rats.

The crouching rat hadn't moved, but he sensed that it was very aware of his presence. It was plainly terrified, but resisting its natural instinct to flee. In a bizarre moment of empathy, he realised that these rats were mates, and the one lying dead was being watched over, protected posthumously by its loyal and mourning consort.

It was a touching tableau, sorrowful yet a somehow uplifting scenario. He was witnessing something that seemed to mirror what should be the very meaning of existence - something that should be duplicated in spirit as the blueprint for a perfect world.

It's a weird one, as might be expected of such an assemblage, but it holds together beautifully even if it isn't always obvious why, effortlessly drawing the reader though to the point at which it ceases to feel like random images.

Buy as many copies as you can afford here.