Books

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The Ruins, by Scott Smith

I’ve purchased a lot of books that carried a cover blurb by Stephen King. Generally speaking, the guy’s got pretty good taste when it comes to recommending horror novels. I read (and thoroughly enjoyed) both Clive Barker’s Books of Blood and Dan Simmons’ Summer Of Night based on a few words from King pasted on the back cover.

So it was with this in mind that I bought and read The Ruins by Scott Smith. It was the "best horror novel of the new century" according to King. There was a movie earlier this year, but I haven’t seen it yet.

It’s not the best horror novel of the new century. I haven’t read all that many, but King’s own Duma Key is better. So was The Terror which I reviewed earlier on this blog. In fact, The Ruins is pretty blah.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a very good read. The characters are well-drawn, the situation certainly tense. But it’s 500 pages long and could have been cut by about, oh…400 of those pages. This is a novella engorged to novel length.

In many ways, it reminded me of Stephen King’s short story, "The Raft," published in his anthology Skeleton Crew. In that story, about 20-30 pages if I remember right, a handful of people swim out to a moored raft in the middle of a lake, only to find that they are trapped there by a spot on the water that resembles an oil slick, but moves independently and with thought, and which dissolves the flesh of anyone unlucky enough to contact it.

In The Ruins, a handful of people go to some ancient ruins near Cancun, Mexico only to find themselves trapped there by vines that move independently, can mimic sounds and even human voices, and which dissolve the flesh of anyone unlucky enough to get trapped by them. Also, like "The Raft" the entire story here could be staged as a play. Aside from a brief prologue in a beach resort, a short tale of the journey to the ruins, and a brief trip into a hole in the ground, all of the action takes place in one setting.

What is missing from The Ruins, aside from any real action, is a reason. Sure, we’re given a reason for the five intrepid vacationers to be there. But the murderous vines are never explained. What are they? Where are they from? I’ve read every page and I still don’t know.

What we have here is nihilism. Things happen, but there is never a reason for it. The book is little more than an excuse to describe some gruesome deaths. Since there is no point to the deaths, then everything leading up to it is rendered pointless as well. The essence of tragedy is when bad things happen to people for whom the reader cares. The endings of, say, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach or Daniel Keyes’ Flowers For Algernon are certainly sad, even depressing. But the ending of The Ruins just makes me wonder why I went through 500 pages to get to this point. The ending is not pathos as it is in the Shute or Keyes book. It’s just bleak.

The book is a diverting read. It’s certainly a fast read, like a Dean Koontz or Stephen King book. You could do a lot worse than to curl up in bed on a rainy weekend and lose yourself in this world (you could be reading a James Patterson novel, for instance), and once you start the book is pretty compelling. It’s no-holds-barred horror in the tradition of other "go-straight-for-the-throat-and-don’t-let-go" writers like James Herbert or the team of John Skipp and Craig Spector, and it shares something of the latter duo’s dark world view (but not their sense of humor which lightened even gloomfests like The Bridge). But when it’s over you may just find yourself asking why you didn’t read something else.

Read it if it’s there and you like a decently scary story that doesn’t require too much thought.

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To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is one of those books that a lot of us read in high school. I have vague memories of seeing some of my classmates with the book. The book was never assigned to me, however. Nor was Lord Of The Flies, which just goes to prove that the English teachers I had in high school were the uncool ones. It’s disheartening now, all these years later, to learn that while I was stuck reading godawful tripe like West  Side Story, gems like Mockingbird were being read by the class down the hall.

My sole criticism first, just to get it out of the way. Harper Lee has a point to make in To Kill A Mockingbird and she’s going to make that point VERY CLEARLY. And if you don’t get it the first time around, the point will be made again in just a few pages. If you’ve read the book and still don’t get the point, allow me: Racism is bad.

Now, Lee is absolutely right about this. Racism is bad. And while the point may be a little obvious at times, the fact remains that To Kill A Mockingbird is still a profoundly moving book. The characters are beautifully drawn, especially Scout Finch, the young girl who comes of age during the course of the book’s 300 pages.

Lee does an amazing job of portraying the town of Maycomb, a dusty little spot on the map of Depression-era Alabama. I know nothing of Lee’s life, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Scout Finch has more than a bit of Harper Lee in her, and that Lee came from a town not unlike Maycomb.

It seems to me though that the book is not about racism, per se. The fulcrum on which the plot pivots is the trial of Tom Robinson, a one-armed black man accused of raping a white woman. The evidence all points to Robinson’s innocence, and his lawyer (the righteous Atticus Finch, father of Scout) makes a compelling case to the jury. Not only does Atticus provide a reasonable doubt as to Robinson’s  guilt, he even discloses who the real guilty parties are. Yet despite a rock solid case, Atticus knows going in that he will lose the trial. Everyone in town knows it’s a loser case. Everyone except Scout, her brother Jem, and their friend Dill. They are stunned when the guilty verdict comes down. Dill disappears from the book shortly thereafter. Jem, now a teenager, reacts as teenagers always react when the world is upended. He becomes angry and defiant.

But the important one here is Scout. Her world has also been turned upside down. An innocent man is sent to prison and later killed for trying to escape. Her father, who can do no wrong in her eyes, has death threats against him. Scout is still too young to fully grasp what has happened in Maycomb, but she still tries to make sense of it. For the first time in her life, Scout has been introduced to the concept that there is evil in the world, an it lurks just down the street or in the house next door. Her neighbors, nice folks all of them, are threatening Atticus for defending Tom Robinson, a notion that doesn’t square with Scout’s view of fair trials for everyone. Her teacher despises Hitler for what he’s doing to the Jews, but is glad that Tom Robinson was found guilty despite the fact that she believes he’s probably innocent. Where is this coming from?

Earlier in the book there is a short scene that seems out of context when it occurs. Scout, Jem, and Dill are outside playing when they see one of the neighbors’ dog in the street. It’s a dog they’ve known for years, but now it’s acting funny, walking awkwardly and seeming to suffer from seizures. Jem goes for help and the neighbors come out. It’s clear that the dog is rabid, and the sheriff is asked to shoot it.

Instead, the sheriff turns over the gun to Atticus who shoots the dog dead with a single shot. Sickness and evil have come to Maycomb, and it is only the righteous man that can slay the beast.

Here is the sickness in the neighborhood. The dog serves as a symbol for what will happen to many of the residents of Maycomb when the trial begins. Good, decent, God-fearin’ folks will succumb to the sickness of their prejudices and become dangerous. And all the while, young Scout watches, wondering.

She also wonders about the shut-in neighbor, Arthur Radley. He’s a myth, this "Boo" Radley. The children believe he only comes out at night to eat squirrels, and they try to goad him into making a daytime appearance until Atticus tells them to stop. Boo Radley hangs over the book like a shroud. He’s the 500-pound gorilla in the room. In the imagination of the children, he is some kind of monster. In reality, he is a "mockingbird," something so innocent that he cannot bear to step foot outside into an evil world except when no one is around.

It is Boo who saves Scout and Jem from being murdered at the end of the book, and it is Boo for whom the sheriff is willing to lie. Locking up Boo Radley for killing a man, despite the fact that he acted to protect children, would be like killing a mockingbird, an act for which there can be no forgiveness. Innocence dies naturally  from exposure to the weather of experience, but killing it where it exists is  a crime against God. What Jem and Scout learn from their experiences is that evil exists in the hearts and minds of all men and women and they have choices  in how to deal with it. They can run from it like Boo Radley and become prisoners of the world, or they can face it head on, recognize that the good coexists with the bad, and try to change what’s wrong, like Atticus.

What comes to mind is the great Edmund Burke’s declaration that in order for evil to triumph, it is only necessary that good men do nothing. It’s clear the route that Scout and Jem will take, and that may be the overall message of To Kill A Mockingbird: yes, evil exists and racism is bad…but as long as there are people with integrity and honor, there is always hope.

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Barefoot In Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, by Bob Spitz

Bob Spitz’s 1979 book, Barefoot In Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, updated in 1989, is currently out of print. However, if you’re looking for a rollicking good read and a fascinating glimpse into the behind-the-scenes machinations that resulted in Three Days of Peace, Love and Music in 1969, contact your local library for a copy.

Generally speaking, although I have a great love for much of the music that came out in the 1960s, I feel the same way towards hippies that Cartman from South Park does and, if nothing else, Barefoot In Babylon proves that Sea People are as non-existent as clean hippies.

While the author’s tone is frequently admiring, it is far from hagiographic. The promoters of the Woodstock festival come across as naive, bored rich kids (at best) or drug-addled fools of epic proportions. Michael Lang, the curly haired poster boy for Woodstock was a generous and giving man, as long as it was with somebody else’s money. But when the festival started and the world started collapsing around the promoters, Lang was in outer space on acid and good vibes. It’s clear that he wanted Woodstock to happen because he wanted to attend the rock concert of his dreams.

The popular myth of Woodstock is that for three days the hippies lived in peace and harmony, grooving to Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, Ten Years After, and Jimi Hendrix. To an extent, that’s true. Violence was minimal, but that probably has as much to do with the altered consciousness of the attendees as it does to the better angels of human nature.

The dark side of Woodstock is almost never discussed. Yes, everyone knows it was a financial disaster. But there were thousands of drug overdoses, one fatal, many more nearly so. One young man was run over by a tractor. Concession stands were turned over and burnt down. It all sounds a lot like the mess that was Woodstock ’99. But no, this was the original.

The artists who played don’t get off scot free either. Joan Baez did a very nice thing by going to the side stage and performing for people who couldn’t get to the main stage. On the other hand, the Grateful Dead were asked to expand their set in order to keep the kids calm, and instead refused to play unless they were paid upfront in cash–no small demand in a tiny town in the middle of the night on a weekend when no banks were open. The Who, also, did this. Sly Stone wouldn’t go on until “the vibes were right” (the vibes became right when one of the promoters verbally berated the star). Jimi Hendrix was threatening to cancel until the last minute because he was freaked out by the size of the crowd. Even Sha Na Na’s manager insisted his act go on at night (he was put in his place by the promoters, who didn’t care whether Sha Na Na went on at all).

But the creation of the Festival was some kind of triumph. Until one month before Richie Havens took the stage, the festival was supposed to be held in Walkill, New York. With a month to go, the town of Walkill pulled the rug out from under the promoters and left them with no site. It was pure luck they found Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, and a miracle that they were able to turn the farm into a usable concert setting in that time. Electrical lines needed to be laid, wells needed to be dug, ground had to be cleared, and the stage had to be built. It was an enormous amount of work, and many corners were cut.

There were not enough portable toilets, and hundreds of them were inaccessible to the trucks that were supposed to clean them out. Within hours of the first day, most of the portable toilets were overflowing. Ditches needed to be speedily dug and the waste siphoned into them. The water pipes were laid on top of the ground. Stepped on by hundreds of thousands of hippies, the water lines broke and needed to be repaired almost constantly. Similarly, the electrical wires ended up above ground after the rains came, and then exposed by trampling feet. This opened up the very real possibility that thousands of people could have been electrocuted, since everyone was wet and packed together like sardines.

I always knew that Woodstock didn’t quite go as planned. But the scope of the disaster was a revelation. The book starts with Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld pitching their idea for a recording studion to John Roberts and John Rosenman, two venture capitalists in search of an idea. The studio, to be located in Woodstock, would be heralded by a giant concert.

From there, the author takes you on a tour of town zoning meetings (not as boring as it might sound), and into the back rooms where the promoters were forced to hand over money to groups like Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farm, or the anarchist Up-Against-The-Wall-Motherfuckers, in exchange for not causing trouble. The Hog Farm comes in for a particular beating in the book. Far from being the Hippie Clown he portrays himself as, Hugh (“Wavy Gravy”) Romney was just another hustler on the take, looking for bribe money with the threat that he could cause a lot of problems. Abbie Hoffman, also, threatened Woodstock with anarchic disturbances unless he got paid off. In the Sixties, they were hippie characters. In any sensible decade they’d be called extortionist radicals.

The book is endlessly fascinating, though I would have liked more about the music. In the end, though, the book was about the promoters and the behind-the-scenes wheeling, dealing, and outright scheming that led up to that music (much of which was great). The Woodstock Festival has long ago passed into mythology, and will never be removed from the haze of nostalgia. But it was an arrogant undertaking, poorly planned, hastily put together, and atrocious in its execution. Enjoy the music; the music abides. But be glad you weren’t one of those people in the Bad Trip tent, or wallowing in the overflowing sewage. It’s a better movie than an experience.

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In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

I’m not sure whether Truman Capote intended this or not, but it seems to me that In Cold Blood is nothing less than a meditation on the absolute banality of evil.

The triumph of the book—and it is a triumph—belongs to Capote, who crafted a new style of journalism with this book. By writing a non-fiction book using the conventions of a novel, Capote was able to bring an immediacy to the story that is lacking from most non-fiction and especially from most “true crime” books, a genre that has attracted more than its fair share of hacks looking to sensationalize the gruesome details of someone else’s last day on earth. Capote doesn’t sensationalize anything here. In many ways, and this isn’t a criticism, the story is as flat as the Kansas landscape in which it takes place.

For me, the most effective part of the book was the first. Capote alternates sections of Book 1 between the story of a typical November day for the Clutter family (going to the insurance agent, helping a friend bake pies, etc) with the day of Dick Hickcock and Perry Smith (eating lunch, going to the general store to buy stockings and rope). The reader is lulled into a sense of complete normalcy, though there is definitely something amiss. Book 1 ends with the meeting of the Clutter family and Hickcock/Smith, and the slaughter that electrified and terrorized the tiny town of Holcomb.

The subsequent sections deal with the aftermath and investigation of the crime, intercut with the killers wandering aimlessly in the West and Mexico looking for work (but not too hard), planning more petty crimes. It is the testimony of a prisoner who had told Hickcock about the Clutter family and their mythical safe with thousands of dollars in it, that leads to the arrest, conviction, and, eventually, the execution. Four shotgun blasts lead to six deaths, all of which are “in cold blood.”

Throughout, the novelistic prose takes the story way past the ordinary true crime story. Because Capote had incredible access to almost all the parties involved (including both killers), it allows him to take the form of the omniscient narrator. This is the essential ingredient that most true crime books are missing: in depth interviews with the criminals. Yes, Perry and Hickcock are portrayed with a degree of sympathy, but the murders themselves are never excused as the byproducts of not enough quality time with Daddy.

Unlike a book like Helter Skelter, the prosecutor’s version of the Manson murders, Capote doesn’t make the villains of his piece larger than life. Nor does he canonize the victims, or inflate his own role in the story. Bonnie Clutter’s fight with mental illness is discussed, as is the rough childhood of Perry Smith. When Capote does appear, he is in the nameless character of “a reporter.” In Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi made Manson and his followers larger than life and twice as mean. Capote portrays the killers here as exactly what they were: a couple of bored losers and petty criminals who, through a combination of arrogance, stupidity, and viciousness, entered the Big Time by killing four people.

It’s telling that when Hickcock and Smith were caught, the townspeople at first were incredulous. They had fully expected that this was some sort of professional hit organized by someone in town. They found it easier to believe that one of their neighbors and friends had planned and organized this than to believe that a couple of strangers had done it. Robbery was the goal (and perhaps the rape of young Nancy Clutter by Dick Hickcock—thwarted by Perry Smith who had no tolerance for sex crimes), but it was acknowledged that the murder might be necessary. “No witnesses,” the soon-to-be killers agreed over lunch. The killers knew nothing about Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon Clutter. They didn’t have to. The identities of the victims, and the lives they led, were never considered. As simple as that.

This is the dirty secret of this kind of evil. It’s all very ordinary. John Wayne Gacy killed over 30 people, and was a pillar of the community and a clown at kids’ parties. Jeffrey Dahmer was the normal guy who lived next door who kept body parts in his refrigerator in case he got hungry. Ted Bundy was an extremely intelligent man active in local politics when he wasn’t luring girls into his traps. Dick Hickcock and Perry Smith were just punks looking for a quick cash fix (the better to blow it in Vegas, most likely). That’s all they were. Yes, they had rough childhoods…especially Perry. But as one character in the book says, “So what? So did I. I may drink a little more, but I don’t kill people.”

We are conditioned to believe that evil froths at the mouth. It is recognizable in the over-the-top gesticulations and overheated rhetoric of Adolf Hitler, or in the wild eyes of Charles Manson, and it exists on 24-hour news channels. That’s all very comforting because we believe we can avoid evil as long as we can avoid those scary people. In Cold Blood reminds us that it also exists in settings as bucolic as the flat plains of Kansas, and it looks a lot like the guy standing next to you in the store, buying rope and joking with his friend.

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The Terror, by Dan Simmons

A horror novel disguised as historical fiction, or vice versa. In The Terror, Dan Simmons, a brilliant writer of many different genres, tells the true story of the HMS Erebus, commanded by Sir John Franklin, and the HMS Terror, commanded by Francis Crozier. The facts are all there: both ships were ordered to find the Northwest Passage through the Arctic. Both ships became icebound. The canned food supplies on both ships were tainted with food poisoning. Both ships were abandoned and all hands perished on a long, brutal walk through an Arctic nightmare. There is some evidence of cannibalism.

But the story of what actually happened to the expedition can never be fully known. The ships were found, as were some remains. But what went on will remain forever a mystery. What Simmons has done here is fill in the mystery with fantastical fiction.

Simmons sticks to the facts in the broadest terms, but drops in heavy dollops of Inuit mythology and some of the trappings of horror fiction including a huge white creature that hunts and kills the men of the ships like a cat playing with a box full of mice. At first it is thought to be a polar bear, but it soon becomes clear that this is a monster on a whole other level.

The only problem is that this is a bridge too far. The fictionalized story of the expedition was harrowing. The monster on the ice seemed like it came from a different book (a potentially good book, but a different book nonetheless). The book is extremely long (almost 800 pages of a large bound paperback) and crammed with details about life on the ships, the horrific effects of scurvy, a full chapter on delerium tremens, etc. It’s not unlike Moby Dick in its attention to detail, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. The last 100 pages or so of the book ties up the one remaining loose end from the previous 700 pages…the fate of Captain Crozier. It’s 100 pages of hallucinatory prose, mixed with poetry, blended with Inuit creationist mythology (at least the monster is explained…I was beginning to think it wouldn’t be), and standard expository prose. Nearly all of it could have been cut or condensed.

Simmons is a great writer and always worth reading. However, this book is nearly 300 pages too long. Edited down to a more than reasonable 450 pages, this book may have been classic Dan Simmons. As is, it’s a lot of work to put in for a relatively small payoff.