Seven Tickets to Hell

Robert Moore Williams Seven Tickets to Hell (1972)
Aside from occasional encounters with Abbott and Costello, little is known of the activities of Frankenstein's monster after the events of Mary Shelley's book, not least his brief career in publishing which brought us the Frankenstein Horror Series back in the early seventies. Frank Belknap Long wrote one, and this is by Robert Moore Williams, of whom I've become quite the fan.

Perhaps anticipating a variant audience to that which presumably read his science-fiction novels, Williams seems to have played it safe with this one in certain respects, channeling his love of Abraham Merritt into a relatively generic adventure which would probably transfer to the big screen with ease, rather than making it up as he went along and stuffing it full of his weirder ideas about the universe and our place therein. It's still reasonably strange given Williams choosing to write in second person, swapping between two main characters addressed as you.

The men you can face. Perhaps they were not as badly wounded as you had thought. This is what you tell yourself. You know this isn't true, you know these men were dead, but you can lie to yourself about them.

He sustains this for the full 190 pages, which is impressive, and the prose positively crackles with that weird energy found in his best books, or his strangest books depending on how you look at it.

Should he require introduction, Williams was a man with certain psychological issues which informed much of his fiction, and many of his common preoccupations and themes appear here as detail to what is more or less Indiana Jones taking on the Mexican narcotics trade, liberally spiced with a heap of mythology-cum-pseudoscience. Of Williams' staples, we get the sacred mountain, ancient underground races, that which man once knew but has since forgotten, a vague cosmic connection, biological robots, and love as a mysterious universal force. There's enough Mexican mythology to suggest the man did his research, and although he gets it somewhat skew-whiff in places, you don't mind because it's Robert Moore Williams and you keep reading just to find out what the hell he's going to do next. Unfortunately what he does next betrays the influence of Merritt more than is usual for this author, so Seven Tickets to Hell isn't anything like so unpredictable or arrestingly weird as Beachhead Planet or The Bell from Infinity; having said which, he's always worth reading, and this one still delivers much more than is promised by the cover - excepting the female secret agent who doesn't seem to be in the book at all, but then it was the seventies.

The Boy in the Bush

D.H. Lawrence & M.L. Skinner The Boy in the Bush (1924)
Mollie Skinner ran a guesthouse in Darlington, Western Australia at which Dave and Frieda stayed. She'd published a couple of books and Lawrence took an interest in her novel The House of Ellis which was then a work in progress. After leaving Australia, he corresponded with Skinner and offered to rewrite The House of Ellis so that it might be published as a collaborative effort, albeit as The Boy in the Bush. It's the story of Jack who arrives in Australia, fresh from England, and views the country through his eyes as he tries to make his way, thus echoing Lawrence's recent experience and allowing him the opportunity to map what he saw as Australia's spiritual dimension.

Unfortunately, if Lawrence rewrote Skinner's prose, it doesn't really show, perhaps testifying to that maxim about the futility of attempting to polish a turd. His own prose on the other hand sticks out a mile, concentrating as it does on the psychic disposition of his characters and their setting, and it's mostly powerful stuff which foreshadows the blood consciousness of The Plumed Serpent to a considerable degree; but these passages form remote islands divided by page after page of Skinner writing something which reminds me a lot of [sentimental garbage written by one of my wife's relatives who will not be identified here for obvious reasons] - coming, going, people eating dinner, other people asking whether they've eaten dinner, ranching, and so on; and I tried but it's barely readable, not grammatically incorrect, just tedious and repetitive. After two or three chapters I was reduced to skimming, which was actually fairly easy, Lawrence's text tending to take the form of lengthy, ponderous paragraphs as distinct from Skinner's endless chit chat. One day someone will isolate just Dave's material to form a decent if slightly disjointed novella, but until then The Boy in the Bush does very little to reward the effort of trawling through for the passages which are worth reading.

Kirby - King of Comics

Mark Evanier Kirby - King of Comics (2008)
I've read several versions of the story of how Stan Lee created Marvel Comics and is directly responsible for more or less everything, ever, and it seemed like high time I took a look at what was happening on the other side of the wall, Jack Kirby being the man who drew a humongous number of those comics which Stan may or may not have written. I found Kirby's art a bit weird when I was a kid and resident of the age group for which they were intended. There was something about his art, but I found the figures weird, forever reaching forward out of the page, smiling hard like John Wayne with that single dazzling white tooth spanning the entire width of the grin. All the same, he obviously made a huge impression judging by how much I loved some of those strips, even though his style had become the standard - from where I was stood - which is probably why 2000AD seemed like such a breath of fresh air.

However, my appreciation has grown in recent years, partially through a better understanding of what Kirby was doing, when he was doing it, and how starkly it contrasted with what everyone else had been doing up until that point. You may already know that Kirby created and even wrote a lot of the stuff for which Stan Lee has been given credit, and sometimes so much credit as to relegate his artist to some talented monkey who was able to hold a pen without dropping it on the floor; and if you're a regular working class person such as like what I am, you'll probably recognise the pattern because getting stiffed by the boss is the story of our lives. This isn't to suggest that Lee was without talent or failed to put in the work but, let's face it, it was mostly Jack. I'm not sure comics as we know them today wouldn't have happened without Jack in the right time and place, but at best it would probably be a completely different landscape.

Evanier's book, which may be one of the greatest things I've read on the subject of the comics biz, balances a sensitive, sympathetic biography with just the right quota of lovingly reproduced artwork to illustrate the tale without it becoming some luxurious portfolio, which most of the other Kirby books seem to be from what I can tell. As a friend and colleague of Kirby, Evanier is particularly well qualified to tell the man's story, and he does so with an incredible warmth which never slides over into sentiment or arse kissing. He paints Kirby as someone you would like to have known, with whom you would have wanted to hang out - or at least I would: imaginative, seriously talented, and above all just a regular working class guy trying to get by, who wanted to do a good job. Weirdly, Kirby puts me in mind of Ray, a former work colleague of mine - English, but the same generation, who bore a more than passing resemblance and who was likewise no stranger to getting stiffed by the boss. This biography accordingly left me with a few feelings I don't normally get from the accounts of the lives of people I've never met. It felt sort of personal, key to which might be Street Code, one of Kirby's very few - possibly only - autobiographical strips, eight pages shining a light on his having grown up under circumstances of grinding poverty during the depression. It's almost Harvey Pekar and has some of the same power.

I can't actually think of anything more useful, or even more coherent to say, but this is a frankly fucking incredible book about an incredible guy who, from my point of view, was one of us.

A Man & His Cat

Umi Sakurai A Man & His Cat (2018)
Some facebook thread on a friend's page recently threw up the assertion that western comics are crap because it's all superheroes while manga is amazing because it can be about anything. This one is about a man and his cat, as the title implies. Unfortunately though, despite the sheer force with which the subject alone socks it to anyone who ever dared take pleasure in an issue of Superman Family, it's still manga.

I'm well aware that manga has its admirers.

I'm not one of them, because to admire something simply because of its format would be fucking stupid, like enjoying vinyl records regardless of what's recorded on them. I liked a few of the Godzilla comics which Dark Horse reprinted back in the late eighteenth century, and Akira and Grave of the Fireflies were great - although they're movies - but I remain otherwise unconvinced.

On the other hand, I'm a big fan of cats, which is why my wife and I have a number of them - not less than thirteen, usually more depending on who turns up for breakfast - and we also volunteer for a local cat rescue organisation; so you can sort of see how I ended up with this book, which is a manga.

The story is about an old man - or one who is referred to as an old man despite his depiction - who buys a cat, followed by the usual realisations which occur to anyone who takes on a cat regarding their feeding, use of litter tray, and so on and so forth. Of course, it's mainly about how much the man and his cat love each other.

It's a nice idea except the cat resembles a Pokémon character and seems to have been written by someone who doesn't understand cats - so Fukumaru, as the cat is named, is written with the needy qualities of a dog and eyes abrim with tears for almost half the page count. The purpose of the story seems to be delivery of the narrative equivalent of a series of emoticons, emotional currents reduced to a series of hearts and frowny faces. Consequently A Man & His Cat feels like one-hundred pages of button pushing.

Even with more of a story, I'm not convinced it would work. As you might expect, it's all giant eyes, tiny mouths and infantilised women, the same style as drawn by a billion others churning out this same corporate variant on cereal box design, all distinctive qualities flattened out to the artificial texture of mass production and candy. This saddens me because I respond to anything involving a cat, but this one doesn't feel entirely sincere. Fukumaru's dialogue substituting you for mew and my for meow just isn't that funny, and the whole thing has the unpleasant angular look of a style copied without much underlying ability to draw or to arrange shapes on a piece of paper; and the supposedly old man looks about thirty, or would if he didn't resemble Christian Bale in American Psycho, or would if he looked remotely human with that weird angular chin. Seriously, it all makes Rob Liefeld look like Leonardo da Vinci and I don't know how people can be satisfied with anything so thin, so lacking in character.

Kangaroo

D.H. Lawrence Kangaroo (1923)
This is one of Lawrence's leadership novels, as they've been called, although I've also seen the same cited as evidence of his fascism. I'm not sure leadership is quite the right term, and Kangaroo is as much a refutation of the notion that Lawrence suffered from a stiff right arm as anything, unless you regard fascism as everything which isn't actually Owen Jones. However, it can be said that it's one of his more transparently autobiographical novels, with details drawn from his flight from England and three months spent in Australia prior to sailing to the Americas. Central to Kangaroo is the rise of a popular nationalist party, some of which is doubtless drawn from what Lawrence witnessed in Italy during the rise of Mussolini, which is where the fascism supposedly comes in.

Kangaroo is the nickname of one of those dynamic leader types around which angry young men who just happen to love their country tend to cohere; and so far as I'm aware, the character wasn't really based on anything inhabiting the Australian political spectrum of the day. It's also interesting that he's Jewish - much like Bertold Goltz, leader of the paramilitary Sons of Job in Philip K. Dick's Simulacra. Kangaroo's somewhat dilute brand of fascism doesn't seem to go further than a not unreasonable distrust of labour unions, typically nebulous waffle about international banking, and some fairly mild racial stereotyping - at least mild for the twenties - and, politically speaking, he seems to represent revolutionary figureheads making the same mistakes as those whom they aspire to replace. His role in the novel, as with those of his supporters befriended by the itinerant Richard Somers, is seemingly as a screen onto which Lawrence projects his ideas about fascism, authority, and everything that was going on in the world, in order to provide a critique; so we're talking about ideas and beliefs which the author is examining rather than necessarily endorsing; and Kangaroo's eventual assassination during a failed coup of his own instigation doesn't suggest a whole lot of faith in the road trodden by Mussolini and others.

Unfortunately though, not all of the novel is as interesting as this may sound, and Somers' time spent with Kangaroo is mostly extended conversational circles about the possibility of love between a man who was never confused and another really strong man without any of the funny stuff getting in the way, which is fairly typical of Lawrence talking to himself and is difficult to imagine transposed to the lips of Nigel Farage.

Evil is the great principle that opposes life in its new urges. The principle of permanency, everlastingness is, in my opinion, the root of evil. The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stone he engraved them on are millstones around our necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine than flowers are. But our divine flowers - look at those hibiscus - they don't want to immortalise themselves into stone. If they turned to stone on my table, my heart would almost stop beating, and lose its hope and its joy.

Huh! What a flipping Nazi!

I gather the philosophy which Lawrence eventually developed had some parallels with Buddhism, or at least the idea of there being nothing permanent but change, and it is expressed here at crippling length but without any coherent development, ideas being set down in whichever order they occurred to the author, Kangaroo being one of his semi-improvised works. The accusation of fascism seemingly comes from the discussion of those details already mentioned in combination with Lawrence's growing misanthropy, the contradiction of which he himself remained very much aware.

It's a kind of nervous obstinacy and self-importance in you. You don't like people. You always turn away from them and hate them. Yet like a dog to his vomit you always turn back.

That being said, Lawrence's cynicism is given thorough account in the two painfully autobiographical chapters flashing back to Cornwall during the first world war. Lawrence had evaded the draft, having been declared unfit for active duty, but was treated with heavy suspicion, and harassed by the authorities beyond reason to the point of being effectively driven from the country; all because his wife was German and he wrote novels and was therefore presumably a bit weird. Anyone who can read these chapters and still attribute authoritarian tendencies to their author is an idiot.

So Kangaroo is some way down the list, but flourishes of poetic genius are to be found throughout, and chapters twelve and thirteen are amongst the most powerful written by the author.

Revelation of the Daleks

Eric Saward Revelation of the Daleks (2019)
As you may recall, Doctor Who was a children's science-fiction serial on the telly back before the advent of the video recorder, meaning that if you wanted to catch up on older episodes, you had to buy the novelisation published by Target. Happily, at least for persons such as myself who require everything to exist within the context of a neatly ordered set, Target eventually novelised everything seen on the box, even a few which would have been on the box but weren't due to the lazy, work-shy BBC sponge-monkeys being on strike that year because the tea served in the staff canteen was the wrong colour.

Anyone still reading?

Never mind.

Anyway, by the time Target went tits up, they had published all but five of the Who serials seen on the television, notably two by Eric Saward who supposedly didn't want anyone else adapting his work - although I may have remembered that wrong. It could have been something to do with the estate of Terry Nation, but really - who gives a fuck? Revelation of the Daleks was unofficially novelised by Jon Preddle back in 1992 as part of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club's campaign to fill in those five terrifying gaps in our collections. I didn't know of this until many years later, by which point, copies of Preddle's version were impossible to find unless you count eBooks, which I don't.

Well, I'm nearly fifty-fucking-seven, older, probably wiser in some poorly defined capacity, and with a general suspicion* regarding almost everything sprung forth from Who since he came back on the telly played by an Easter Island statue in 2005; and yet my devotion was once so deeply ingrained that, even now, I still feel the need to fill those five gaps in a collection of books I may never read again because I'm no longer thirteen.

Revelation of the Daleks was an odd story, although one for which I recall some affection. I think I may have watched a VHS copy at some point back in the nineties, but I'm otherwise so unfamilar with whatever it did as for this to be an almost new thing, now that Eric has finally found time to write it.

Saward seems to be regarded as one of those problematic Who writers, probably meaning he wasn't afraid to point out when some sacred fan cow was actually a pile of shite, or at least that's how it usually works. For my money, he wrote some decent stories and did a good job of keeping things interesting during his time as script editor on the show. I've seen him criticised as a Douglas Adams knock off, which I don't quite see given the lesser level of annoying self-conscious whimsy.

Converted to prose, Revelation of the Daleks serves as a strong reminder of Who having been developed back when television was still pretty much theatre with cameras pointed at the actors. Everything here occurs within what may as well be a couple of rooms with a cast of eight or nine chasing each other from one set to the next; and if it's not exactly Shakespearean, it's closer to being a twentieth century Billy than it is to either Star Wars or Asimov's Foundation. Revelation reads very much as a telly script novelised for the benefit of thirteen-year olds or younger, which doesn't mean that it's bad so much as that certain narrative weaknesses seem amplified and they're difficult to overlook.

The strengths of the original story were arguably its big ideas regarding what's really going on at Tranquil Repose, but here - even without the Dalek connection already spunked away by the title - everything is signposted from almost the very beginning with clues so fucking obvious as to what's coming that the eventual revelation of what's really going on feels redundant. All the running around therefore seems designed to keep us busy as we wait for certain discoveries to be made - even though we've already guessed what they're going to be - and accordingly lacks drama. This leaves us with just the humour, which I assume would be the DJ, played on the box by Alexei Sayle, and which could have worked as a linking device in the vein of Lynne Thigpen's DJ in The Warriors, but didn't because the whole thing may as well have been an episode of fucking Rentaghost; and Dave Lee Travis in space is not an inherently funny idea if you've actually mistaken Dave Lee Travis for anything genuinely cool; and in case you've forgotten and were wondering, the DJ's weapon by which he blasts his foes with - sigh - concentrated rock'n'roll is also corny as fuck on the printed page, and not even in an entertainingly ironic sense, as it might have been had Saward specified that, for example, such and such a Dalek had been obliterated by the mighty force of that fucking terrible I Like It song by Gerry & the Pacemakers.

So, I'd say I'm too old to get much from this adaptation, except I routinely read all sorts of juvenile shite, most of which works just fine for me; and it's really, really difficult to work out just who it's aimed at, given that I found it in the science-fiction section at Barnes & Noble, as distinct from the children's section. It's a shame because some of it works, and a quick peak at other Sawards suggests he may simply have rushed this one to get it over and done with. An even greater shame is that a quick peak at Jon Preddle's unofficial online version leads me to suspect that he probably did a better job.

*: I say general suspicion but I actually mean uncompromising hatred.

Gobbolino the Witch's Cat

Ursula Moray Williams Gobbolino the Witch's Cat (1942)
This is a Puffin book which I was given for either Christmas or a birthday back when I was an age for which a book about a witch's cat might be deemed appropriate. I read but I wasn't a big reader, and I never got around to reading it because, quite aside from it being obvious that there wouldn't be any spaceships involved, I was put off by the cover illustration which made our boy look pleased with himself in a way that bothered me - and which somehow reminded me of Nicola Bennett at school. I remember her marching around the playground during some game or other with more or less the same expression and I found her a bit annoying.

Then suddenly on the fifth of November, 2010 - which I know because the receipt is still inside the book - I found this copy in a charity shop in Coventry. I bought it because I still felt profoundly guilty at having failed to read the thing when I was a kid.

So here goes - half a century late, but never mind…

It pains me to say because I wanted to get something out of this, but the best that can probably be said is that it is what it is. Gobbolino - which is a fucking terrible name for a cat - just wants a quiet life and doesn't really enjoy doing bad stuff, so his owner dumps him. She's a witch so obviously Gobbolino is a huge disappointment. The rest of the story entails Gobbolino finding a new home, getting settled, then having that ticket to dumpsville renewed once it becomes obvious that he's witches a cat; and this happens over and over and over because children like repetition. Williams apparently insisted that she wasn't writing children's books even though children enjoyed what she wrote, which I personally find a bit unconvincing. Gobbolino the Witch's Cat does its best with all the usual stuff about orphans, knights, princesses who live in towers, Lord Mayors, a travelling Punch & Judy show, and so on, but is let down by its star acting more like a dog than a cat, particularly with all the arse kissing and self pity. Maybe Williams didn't actually know what a cat was, and the frequent saucers of milk seem to support this given that cats are lactose intolerant. Also, the reference to a little black slave on page 102 is a bit weird.

Well, if low on surprises, Gobbolino has its moments at least as much as anything you probably should have read before you developed pubic hair. It's not an unpleasant read, nor was it in any sense a chore, and it's nice to see that at least someone was waving the flag for cats in the kiddie books of our youth given that I seem to remember a lot of scheming felines forever paying the price for being too clever, not like all those loyal hounds.

I just wanted it to be better, and I wanted my six-year old self to have been wrong.