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.

Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner (2003)

 

I'm backtracking from A Thousand Splendid Suns which I read a year ago and which is honestly a masterpiece, but also from the movie adaptation of The Kite Runner. This was Hosseini's first, the one which sealed his reputation, and which I expected would be amazing. To be fair, the accolades heaped upon it have been mostly justified, and yet something isn't quite clicking. As you will possibly be aware, the tale is told against the backdrop of Afghanistan, specifically Kabul before and during the reign of the Taliban. Our focus is on the relationship of Amir, our narrator, and his friend, Hassan, towards whom he experiences an unendurable guilt parallel to the survivor's guilt which both character and author feel regarding Afghanistan and the Taliban. We also focus on Amir's ambiguous relationship with his own somewhat imperfect father, which he comes to understand better as he commits the same mistakes. As I suppose you might imagine, given the presence of authoritarian figures with firearms, much of what transpires is harrowing without ever quite being allowed to eclipse anything else the book might have to say; and it's beautifully written and communicated, particularly given how much of this is unfamiliar territory to me.

So what gives?

It's a minor detail, and possibly something I might not have noticed had I not already been so completely blown away by A Thousand Splendid Suns, but it's something in the tone, or elements of the tone of how the whole is bound together - something which, I might argue, distinguishes The Kite Runner as a debut novel. The narrative is respectfully conversational and carried with such a strong voice as to read like autobiography, which can prove deceptive because despite a wealth of autobiographical detail, it's very much a novel, arguably allegorical, and even a saga at least as much as the tale of Rostam and Sohrab from the Shahnameh, which Amir reads to Hassan at one point; and because it's a saga, it makes use of happenstance and repetition, thus Assef who terrorises the boys in their youth, turns up as the sociopath directing the public executions when Amir returns to Kabul as an adult - and in spite of the visceral realism of the telling, it feels a little like Darth Vader revealed as Luke's dad. So it's not so much the bricks of the novel as the mortar, the conspicuously tidy connections, segues, and patterns which somehow undermine the otherwise powerful realism. It isn't a huge problem, because The Kite Runner is nevertheless a tremendous and sobering read, but it feels like a first novel and there was better to come.

D.H. Lawrence - Apocalypse (1932)

 

Lawrence wrote Apocalypse, his highly personal interpretation of the Book of Revelation, on his death bed. It was his last great piece of writing and he made every word count, more or less reducing what he'd been getting at over previous decades to its clearest, most concentrated essence. You could call it religion or philosophy, although both are arguably misleading in this case. This is how Lawrence saw the world, or more precisely what he thought was meant by the term.

As an analysis of Revelation, Apocalypse somewhat reveals what might be deemed the contradiction at the heart of Lawrence's view of the world, specifically his shunning the methodical, scientific approach in favour of the intuitive. This might seem to foreshadow today's internet pundits with their apparent belief that facts may often complicate or unduly bias an issue. Lawrence, however, insists on there being two essentially incompatible ways of seeing, and he favoured the materialist approach, giving precedence to that which is seen, felt, or experienced over abstract rationalisation after the fact. Therefore, as with Etruscan Places in which he writes about Italian civilisation before the Romans through aesthetic consideration of their art and architecture, Apocalypse deals in what might be deemed poetic truth rather than the purely historical. While this might seem akin to Erich von Däniken finding flying saucers in Ezekiel's wheels - a proposal facilitated by conveniently ignoring existing interpretations of the symbolism - Lawrence's intuitive method is itself a refusal to impose established patterns or methods of understanding upon the material - in other words an attempt to unravel Revelation entirely on its own terms. This approach is validated, I would argue, by its refusal to view the texts as the poorly formulated mumbling of primitives - actually the opposite of Erich's methodology, such as it is - and is additionally validated by the clarity and conviction of his testimony. For what it may be worth, his testimony here also reminds me a little of A.E. van Vogt, who wrote about rockets and mutants but took a similarly intuitive approach.

As for what Lawrence actually says, the whole point of the book is that the discourse loses definition and even meaning when summarised or broken down into symbols, but the main theme is that pre-Christian religion was not religion as we understand it today, and because of this we have lost our way as a people. He sets out a convincing and coherent argument for this view as well, but - as with Point Counterpoint - you really need to read the thing to appreciate it.

All of this being said, Apocalypse remains very much a personal view - although Lawrence resisted the idea that any of his pronouncements should ever be taken as the final word on anything - so additionally revealing his blind spots; and it seems particularly sad given that he spent so much time in Mexico, engaging with adherents to a pre-Christian belief system very much in line with much of what is described in Apocalypse.

Even to the early scientists or philosophers, 'the cold', 'the moist', 'the hot', 'the dry' were things in themselves, realities, gods, theoi. And they did things.

Yet, little if anything of this makes it into The Plumed Serpent with its fallen Indians performing a heavily befeathered summary of an actual living religion filtered through the grimmer aspects of Lawrence's Methodist upbringing. It was staring him in the face and somehow he missed it.

Nevertheless, for all the flaws one might find in Apocalypse, the strength of the main argument eclipses them to the point of irrelevance, and this was one hell of a swan song.