Hubert Selby Jr. - The Demon

But Harry was not going to kill for profit--at least not in the usual accepted sense of the word. There would be no monetary gain. No gain of power or influence. No fulfilling of a vendetta. No wounded pride or broken heart...no personal connection. So there was no danger. No fear of exposure. He would not have to taunt the police and court apprehension as he had with the burglaries (strange how foreign that word sounded, as if it had nothing to do with him). There just wouldn't be any way he could be connected with the killing. It was that simple.

Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 2005

The Demon by Hubert Selby Jr came along more than 25 years ahead of American Psycho and I wonder if it was an inspiration for Ellis's novel. We have a similar set up, that is a rising young executive with a high paying "job" (it's never made clear what he does at work) who spends many of his hours nurturing depraved obsessions. Ellis's novel took things to the extreme, while in The Demon, our hero Harry dives into his psychosis with a methodical, deliberate approach.

We first meet Harry as an arrogant young man with a promising future, and a yen for married women. When they're married, you see, you get none of the commitments, no virginal hangups, no baggage that gets in the way of a young stud having a good time. You score and move on. No tearful goodbyes or messy breakups. You hit it and quit it, and Harry is a master at this game of hunt and conquest. Harry works in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn with his parents. Between his job, his commute and his home turf there is no shortage of young married women whom Harry can work his charms on. Finding a broad without cashing in on his freedom is Harry's chief goal in life. But, if you've ever read anything by Hubert Selby before, you know that shit is going to go south for our Harry in a bad and ugly way. No one survives Selby's world unscathed.

The first part of the novel follows Harry as he pursues his hobby. Except for his job at the firm, Harry is free to pursue his game without worry of commitment. And things are fine...at first. He spends his lunch hours watching the women in the city, flirting, chatting them up, sharing lunches with them, always on the prowl for his next score while playing the confidant for them, nurturing their lonely desires. But inside, the pressure builds. The game has a way of encroaching on his limited time that he must devote to his job. His boss and coworkers are noticing his long absences from his desk. His secretary covers for him best she can but eventually his boss has the "come-to-Jesus" lecture about Harry's responsibility to his job. After all, Harry is one of the brightest young men in the firm, a rising star, a guy who's going places, as long as he puts his nose to the grindstone and puts in the time demanded of him at the office. Yeah, Harry knows this...but inside, that desire for the game of conquest is boiling...burning him up inside. He needs that release that only random sex with a woman can satisfy.

Eventually, Harry's seemingly careless attitude at work loses him a promotion. One hour too many in a hourly motel during lunch costs him an advance in his career. He's got to get his life under control, put his ass to work, get his mind right with his job and earn back the respect of his bosses...but there is still the women in the park and in the cafeterias and at the department stores, and the desire for release won't go away.

Then, a turn of events occur for Harry. He meets another young woman, Linda, at his firm during a management picnic at the country club. He feels something for Linda unlike anything he's ever felt for a broad before. Could it be an actual desire to get to know her? To date her? To build a relationship with her? He asks to drive her home and a budding romance between them begins. His desire for strange is pushed aside. His relationship with Linda has brought his wayward desires back onto the straight and narrow. His work returns to to the promise that his bosses once held for him. More responsibility and promotions follow. He and Linda get engaged. He is once again a man in control. Until one night after celebrating a successful deal with a client, drinks and hookers are called for. And the need for conquest returns. Guilt and remorse haunt Harry. Fear of losing Linda hangs over him daily. For a while, marriage with Linda was enough...now it's something to be sheltered from his inner demon. This demon who haunts the wild side of the street, who sates his need on skanks and prostitutes, junkies and addicts, diseased and wasted, scabbed holes to be pounded in self-loathing and disgust. And it's still not enough. Harry begins to skip out on paying restaurant tabs, a new thrill is developed in the wake of his desires. Petty thievery, raiding office desks after hours for change, jewelry, whatever he could find and throw away. But the addiction wants more...and thoughts of murder begin to surface. Only who to murder?

This is one of those novels that I couldn't put down. I tried reading American Psycho once, somewhere back in the mid-nineties, but just couldn't get  into it. The Demon works on a level that many readers may find uncomfortable, which is clearly the point. Stylistically, it's similar to Selby's other novels I've read in it's relentless, unforgiving narrative. You want to look away, but it's hard to. You care about the characters, yet you're kept at a distance from them by their abandon and betrayals. You close the book and thank the fates that you're not like them...you hope.

Joseph Wambaugh - The Glitter Dome

And the exotica: jodhpurs, knickers, and gold, gold, gold. Twenty-four-karat dresses glittered like mother lode. Headdresses reflected most of the subcontinent of Asia and the entire continent of Africa, twenty-four karats from the top of the head to the tip of the toe. There were enchanting girls in gold brocade culottes and gold-encrusted jerseys. All in all, it made Al Mackey think of munchkins and monkeys and rainbows. Fabulous!

Bantam Books June 1982

So that's what a Hollywood party is all about! Gold and babes draped in the stuff. Dang. My kind of party in 1981 was swinging as long as a keg of Budweiser was in it. And no girls dripping with gold in sight.

I was in the mood for a Hollywood crime novel and remembered this one by Joseph Wambaugh. He wrote this novel decades before returning to Hollywood with his Hollywood Series published in the past few years. The Glitter Dome is vintage Wambaugh, with its large cast of bizarre characters, its loopy and meandering plot and cops just a badge removed from psychotic.

The main plot concerns the murder of a bigshot film producer, Nigel St. Claire, whose body was found in a bowling alley's parking lot off Hollywood Blvd. Said parking lot is a hangout for skaters and hustlers and punks and assorted weirdos that populated Hollywood in the day. Just why St. Claire ended up there and who put two bullets into his face is what homicide detectives Al Mackey and Marty Welborn have to figure out. Both detectives are old, both are tired, cynical, and both are on the edge of breakdowns thanks to too much booze, too many cases, and too many nightmares. They take solace, when they can, at The Glitter Dome, a bar where cops and groupies hang out between shifts. Mackey's had a tough year. He's facing eviction from his apartment, his health is falling apart, he can't get it up and he's having alarming thoughts about chewing on the barrel of his gun. His partner Marty Welborn seems to have his shit more together, at least on the surface. He's good-looking, dresses well, a few months short of his pension and in reasonably good health, except for the nightmares of past victims still crying out for help. They both get handed the St. Claire case after its first team of detectives have reached a dead end with it.

But that's just part of the novel. The majority of the novel is made up of cop stories featuring a multitude of sleazy and bizarre crimes. We have Buckmore Phipps and Gibson Hand, a black and white team of street cops described as monsters. There is also Ferret and Weasel, a pair of hardcore undercover narcotic officers, And old-timer Cal Greenberg who hums Glenn Miller tunes while doing time at the station. Capt (Whipdick) Woofer who wants to retire intact while keeping some semblance of order among the animals and criminals. You have a perv named Tuna Can Tommy, who likes to leave Polaroids of his privates on women's cars. Hookers like Jackin Jill, who manages to become a key to the murder of St. Claire. There is also a layer of prostitution and porn to wade through, right up to a possible snuff film in Tijuana. All manner of dirt and crimes go down, some of which connect, however remotely, to the murder of Nigel St. Claire.

I would think that readers picking up this book might get frustrated by the many diversions that Wambaugh takes from the murder mystery at hand. Yes, eventually we'll find out who killed St. Claire in the parking lot of a Hollywood bowling alley, but that's not the point of the novel so much as a window to climb through into this world of Tinseltown misfits. No one is innocent, and justice isn't guaranteed. If you take the novel on its own terms, it's all a really cool trip into a world some thirty-plus years removed from now. Is it an escape? I don't know. I'll let you be the judge.

The Rats - James Herbert

Stephen pulled a rat from Vikki's hair and hurled it away from him, his hands torn by the creature's gnashing teeth. He grabbed her arm and pulled her along the row, pushing at the people ahead of him. Inexplicably, the house-lights dimmed and finally faded leaving the confused scene lit only the light reflected from the huge screen. Something was biting into the boy's leg and he tried to kick it against the back of a seat, but because of lack of space the rat was able to hang on. He bent down to pull it away and his hands were nipped at by another rat. In desperation, he sat on top of a seat and painfully raised his leg onto the back of the seat in front, lifting the great black rat with it. Vikki ran from him and stumbled over a man in his last death struggles with three rats. She fell heavily, and was immediately engulfed in bristling bodies, her screams unheard amongst the screams of others. 

Signet, First Printing May 1975

So...not really a date you want to share with your favorite sweetheart. The scene above, from James Herbert's classic horror novel The Rats, takes place in a crowded movie theater, and pandemonium has busted loose all up in there. Does Stephen and his girl Vikki get out alive? Well, you'll have to take a guess. But considering James Herbert's early novels from this period were known for their gore and take-no-prisoners attitude you can probably figure there ain't no goodnight kiss gonna happen with our lovebirds.

Being in the middle of the throes of Year-End reporting at work, I was in the mood for a fast and nasty horror novel. This one fit the bill perfectly. Getting it all said and done in just under 200 pages is just about the perfect example of what a horror novel should be. Nothing bloated and heavy, no long passages of internal angst, no wasted dialog about extraneous bullshit, Just giant rats eating people. That's it. Giant rats eating people. Giant, intelligent, blood-thirsty rats invading homes, churches, subway trains, theaters and schools to eat people. It's like a perfect late-night horror film. You have a large cast of characters, a few of which are given a backstory before they meet their demise under the fang. You have a hero, school teacher Harris, who is pulled into various battles with the Rats throughout the novel, You also have ineffective government types scrambling to quell rising panic while covering their asses. But mostly you have the Rats bringing it to the citizens in seemingly concentrated attacks.

When this novel was first published it wasn't received kindly by critics. But a few discerning horror fans out there took note and realized that something cool was coming back to horror fiction out of Herbert's typewriter, and that was full on glorious unapologetic pulp. The kind of pulp one didn't see at least since the horror comics of the early fifties.

Coming from postwar Liverpool, I would imagine that James Herbert didn't get much exposure to the gentler side of things, and it's reflected in the politics of the novel with the Labour Party and Conservatives blaming each other for the wasted conditions affecting the underclass of society. Things haven't really changed much since the novel's printing when it comes to political parties pointing fingers while solving nothing. I think that attitude is what appeals to horror fans, or heavy metal fans, or punk rock fans, whatever. You know you're ultimately on your own, and no one in "power" gives fuck-all about you. You sink or swim with the rats.

But all that philosophizing aside, ultimately The Rats is just a kick-ass horror novel for those old-school fans out there who enjoy a little grue now and then.

Dog Soldiers - Robert Stone

"I've been waiting my whole life to fuck up like this."
"Well," Elmer said. "You made the big time. Congratulations."

Ballantine Books, 1975

Were Americans ever really naïve or is that just something that our collective modern myth tries to convince us of. Personally, I don’t think so. The 60s is a just a duplicitous reflection of history that’s become cliché. The reality depends on where one stood at the time. Were you in the back of the bus? In a segregated school? Were you going to Stanford? Were you one of the multitude (if you believe most aging boomers) at Woodstock waking up to Jimi Hendrix? Or were you carrying a weapon in a jungle on the other side of the world? I was born in the early 60s so none of the tropes were in my radar. For me the 60s was Captain Kangaroo on TV. Coming to age in the 70s I’m the first to admit that my mind went into shutdown mode whenever some pampered suburbanite started waxing poetic about their rebellious youth living a life somewhere between Easy Rider and Woodstock. Especially when I knew they voted for Reagan and both Bushes.I thought most of the crap I heard second hand about the 60s was bullshit slung around by old farts trying to relive some kind of life they saw in the movies. I probably sound the same to others generations after me. 

So we have Dog Soldiers, a novel deemed by critics to be an allegory of the waning 60s. Or really, was that Robert Stone’s intention with this book? I have no idea. Clearly it’s a product of his experiences. My recollection of the 70s, when this novel takes place, is of television, skateboards and school. Then girls, sports, pot, going to movies and part-time work at Winn Dixie. I was sheltered from the ugliness of the world mostly, given that ugliness still seeped into the ‘burbs in spite of our parents’ best and failed efforts. So this book is a look at a time and place involving a couple of young wasted lives pursuing a fool’s dream with heroin. The deck is stacked against them, as it is for most of us in this crazy country of movies, music and jingoism. You want to read a good and sordid book about drugs and dreams, then you’ll like this book. I liked this book. I probably read it at the right time in life. Had I read it when I was 25 I might not have cared.

The Kubla Khan Caper - Richard S. Prather

From where I lay in lazy ease on a poolside chaise lounge, I could see a gaggle of Bikini-clad Hollywood houris squealing and splashing in the water. On the blue-tiled deck across the pool from me half a dozen bare-midriffed nautch girls wiggled, doing what comes nautchurally.

Pocket Books - 1967

Oh man, that's painful. But that's just what you'd expect from our pal Shell Scott. For anyone who doesn't know, Shell is a tough and randy Hollywood private eye who never lets a tomato escape his attention in the pursuit of solving the various "capers" he's involved in. Published in 1966 The Kubla Khan Caper is approximately the 31st appearance of Shell Scott in Richard Prather's series. I say approximately because along the way he was featured in a few collections, including Three's a Shroud and Have Gat - Will Travel. His 1st appearance was 1950 in The Case of the Vanishing Beauty and continued clear to 1987's Shellshock. He's the kind of guy who'll definitely stand out in a crowd with his white hair, white inverted V-shaped eyebrows, scar over his right eye and a bullet-clipped ear. All that and a total horndog for any lusciously curved twist, dame, tomato, skirt, babe, dish, doll, cutie, etc, who crosses his path. And believe me, cross his path they do. Which is all part of the charm of these novels. Certainly written as something of a satire of the whole paperback private-eye genre, these novels still have enough tough-guy violence and mayhem to please fans of Mickey Spillane.

Here in The Kubla Kahn Caper, Shell is hired, initially, to locate a missing beauty contestant, Jeanne Jax, for the grand opening of a desert resort named The Kubla Khan. Shell's cover is to act as a judge for the beauty contest, a job he considers himself more than qualified for. His client is Ormand Monaco, the managing director of the Kubla Khan. Monaco is adamant that Shell Scott carry out his investigation for the missing girl with the utmost discreetness, as any adverse publicity could damage what is intended to be a lavish grand opening, full of all the celebrities and dignitaries appropriate to such an event. Shell Scott is no more than an hour or so into the investigation when the missing Jeanne Jax turns up dead, gunned down in her sports car on the side of a desert road that leads from Monaco's home. Also dead is the reclusive millionaire owner of the Kubla Khan, Ephraim Sardis. It turns out that Jeanne Jax was intent on getting in touch with Ephraim Sardis about something, only someone put a stop to it by putting them both on ice. The same someone who's taken a couple wild shots at Shell Scott when he arrives on the scene in his robin's-egg blue Cadillac. Now what had been a missing person case is a murder. Monaco is promptly arrested for the killing of Jeanne Jax and insists that Shell Scott find the true murderer before the grand opening beauty pageant takes place in 24 hours. Scott's got his hands full, what with interrogating a slew of kooky contestants, a shifty hotel manager, and various assorted heavy types including a jealous-minded green giant of a man named Bull Harper.

Along the way we've got fights, make-out sessions, a two-page rant against girdles(?!), a nude foot-chase, mucho cocktail guzzling, plenty of eye candy and babes, dames, dishes, tomatoes...you get the picture.

Up close she was all velvet and fire, skin like silken umber, the eyes still dark and almost brown, but with lots of green in them, the color of wet moss, or the sea, or emeralds in shadow. They were big and round and that look of constant surprise in them gave her an air of virginal innocence--when you looked at her eyes. But a breath below was where the virgin died and a bawd was born. 

I think these novels are a blast. Certainly they're dated and so goofy that you can't believe you're reading them, but they're also way too much fun to put one down once you start it. Most of them are now available on e-reader format, which is a good thing. More fun though is seeking out the vintage paperbacks, which are still relatively easy to come buy. Happy hunting!

Astounding Science Fiction - The Naked Sun

Hers was a triangular face--rather broad at the cheekbones--which grew prominent when she smiled--and narrowing to a gentle curve past full lips to a small chin. Her head was not high above the ground. Baley judged her to be about five-feet-two in height. (This was not typical. At least not to Baley's way of thinking. Spacer women were supposed to lean toward the tall and stately.) Nor was her hair the Spacer bronze. It was light brown, tinging toward yellow, and moderately long. At the moment, it was fluffed out in what Baley imagined to be a stream of warm air. The whole picture was quite pleasing. 

Astounding Science Fiction - Oct, Nov and Dec 1956
cover artists Richard Van Dongen and
Frank Kelly Freas

A couple years ago I happened upon an old stack of Astounding Science Fiction magazines in a local comic book store. I browsed through them and discovered that three of them contained the full serialized novel of Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun. And this for only a few dollars each! It was a no-brainer to take them home with me. Last weekend I had the opportunity to finally crack them open and read the novel in its entirety, It was pretty much what you'd expect from a classic Sci-Fi writer like Asimov, clear and swift story telling, compelling psychology, a dash of science, and a cracking-good puzzle. Oh yeah, and the random nerd flourishes that Asimov couldn't seem to prevent from popping up in his writing. For example, the Spacer babe in the above passage as having a "head not high above the ground" instead of just being petite. He was, after all, a scientist. I should also mention that this Spacer babe was also naked, which sent our hero Plainclothesman Elijah Baley into stuttering fits.

For anyone who doesn't know, The Naked Sun is the second in a series of Sci-Fi mysteries featuring Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw solving a seemingly impossible murder among an alien setting. They're Asimov's versions of locked-room mysteries in that the crimes seem to violate his famous Three Laws of Robotics. If you don't know what the Three Laws of Robotics are, my friend, you are woefully behind in your science fiction education.

The crime in this novel is the murder of a Dr. Rickain Delmarre on one of the Outer Worlds known as Solaris. The cool thing about Solaris is that the entire human population of the planet numbers about 20,000, give or take one or two (you know, what with the murders and all!) The robot population of Solaris is 200,000,000, or one human per ten thousand robots. Each human has been conditioned since birth to live alone amount his or her own estate on a parcel of land with a slew of robot servants. Communication is done through a means termed viewing, which is a sort of three dimensional "televised" process, so realistic that it's become a complete substitute for personal contact. In fact, residents of Solaris find personal human contact as horrific, or unthinkable. Yes, marriages are assigned and population is controlled by means of rare physical joining, but such things are deemed unspeakable in polite society. It's in this setting that Dr. Delmarre was murdered by blunt-force trauma, which means some human being (not a robot as that would violate the First Rule of Robotics) had to get near Delmarre. The only witness to the crime was his robot servant, which somehow violates the Second Rule of Robotics in that no robot can allow harm to come to a human. The only possible suspect is his wife Gladia Delmarre, who shared his estate. But how could she have done it? The Delmarre's have no children, and contact between the two of them was done only through viewing. The concept of marriage, as Earth knows it, is non-existent on Solaris.

As for Earth, Elijah Baley's home turf, well its inhabitants live in crowded "caves of steel" deep beneath the surface of the planet. The idea of dwelling on the surface is so far from day to day concept that most of the Earth's population have developed an agoraphobia that prevents them from functioning outside their overcrowded underground cities. So you have a study in extreme opposites with Earth and Solaris, which causes fits for our detective hero Elijah Baley and his robot partner Daneel Olivaw. Well, not for Olivaw since he's a robot, a highly programmed humanoid robot who could easily pass for human if not for being bound by the Three Laws of Robotics.

The novel is a lot of fun for mystery fans, as well as classic science fiction fans. I've yet to read anything by Asimov that wasn't enjoyable. This murder plays within the rules of Robotics, and along the way we get a study of Asimov's thoughts concerning over-population, robotics, psychology, and sociology. That and a handful of eccentric characters bound by their own human weaknesses and prejudices. In addition to the Asimov novel, the magazines also contain stories by Robert Silverberg, Poul Anderson, Algis Budrys and others whose work I'm not yet familiar with. All three of the issues were edited by John Campbell Jr. and the artwork throughout is appropriately retro for sci-fi nerds like me. I'm sure these later issues of science fiction mags are readily available to collectors and for reasonable prices. Combined I got these issues for less than what I would have paid for a new paperback copy of anything current in Barnes & Noble--parish the thought!

Richard Brautigan - The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966

When I first met Vida she had been born inside the wrong body and was barely able to look at people, she wanted to crawl off and hide from the thing that she was contained within.

Pocket Book edition 4th printing 1975

I guess, after a half century on this planet, it's about time that I would get around to reading something by Brautigan. I found this one in a used bookshop some time back, and remember someone once telling me about Trout Fishing in America. He didn't really sell Trout Fishing, nor Richard Brautigan, well enough to get my interest revved up. I was into the beats at the time and not really aware of hippie-lit as such. I was also going through a series of relationships with women who didn't know me beyond a surface level, which resulted in nothing except unread poetry. 

So I read this one on a single Friday several weeks ago and enjoyed it. Not really sure what the message is, or if there really is a message behind it. Is Vida's spiritual escape from the most gorgeous body in the world a symbolic abortion? Is the Librarian and Vida's leaving the womb of the library of unread books a symbolic abortion? Is their farewell to a life of lonely solitude an abortion? 

Simply, it's about a librarian working in a library of "unwanted" books written by anyone with the desire to create such a thing. One day a girl shows up at the library with about about her book about hating her own body. She's the most beautiful girl in the world, with hair as black as a bat's. She stays with the librarian and the two of them make love. Eventually she is pregnant, and she and the librarian agree to go to Tijuana where she can get an abortion. They enlist the aid of the librarian's associate who provides them the name of a doctor to see. They go to Tijuana and...

The novel is delivered in simple prose with no fancy tricks, no self-aware indulgence that writers often go for in novels about nothing. So you have a novel about nothing, where there exists a place for books that will never be read and two lovers who share a relationship of uncertain prospects. And they're fulfilled. 

I liked this book. I can see why people would be drawn to Brautigan's novels. But I have a hunch that novels like this one are now passe, considering the glut of pseudo-lit memoirs and zombie novels that clog the shelves in Barnes & Noble. I stopped going to Barnes & Noble a few years ago, when I noticed that they starting looking more like a Toys-R-Us than a bookstore. I wonder if your typical college lit major would bother with a novel like this one, or appreciate its simplicity. 

I also have In Watermelon Sugar on my stack of books to read next year.