LITTLE ROCK — This is another attempt to figure out a formula for the monthly books column. These are some fairly recently published numbers:This Dark Earth John Hornor Jacobs Gallery Books, $15 B+
While zombie apocalypses are generally not my thing - I just can’t stand AMC’s The Walking Dead - I am a fan of good writing. John Hornor Jacobs nearly matches his excellent debut novel, Southern Gods, with This Dark Earth, which somehow manages to be bleak and tender as it posits humanity’s last stand in the miasmic jungles of Arkansas.
While I detect a nod to the Terminator movies, there’s a ferocious and unpretentious literary talent roaring within this book. Jacobs has a foot in Cormac McCarthy territory, though he’s more hopeful and humanistic, which transcends the limitations of genre fiction while remaining pulpy-fresh enough to invite speculation about who’ll play Gus and Lucy in the (inevitable?) movie.
The Age of Miracles Karen Thompson Walker Random House, $26 C-
A well-crafted debut novel that grafts speculative sci-fi - what would happen if the Earth’s rotation inexplicably slows? - with a coming-of adolescence story about a girl named Julie, who is 11 years old when “the slowing” commences. Julie is uncomfortable in her shifting skin - on the cusp of caring about boys and experiencing her parents as fallible people - when she’s thrust into banally impossible circumstances.
It feels like the waste of a great premise. Walker’s writing is efficient and overly careful, creating a kind of unintended illusion of dictation. Julie’s a dull girl - I don’t understand the author’s fascination with her.
Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight Travis Langley Wiley, $17.95 B
Like the aforementioned John Hornor Jacobs, Travis Langley is an Arkansas author - he’s a professor at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia. I didn’t figure that out until halfway through this exceedingly readable (and fun) discussion of the psychological landscape of the Batman universe. Langley is extraordinarily well-versed in the lore and characters, and scrupulous about the questions he chooses to address. Is Batman mad? Probably not, considering the morally deformed universe he inhabits. What about his underage Boy Wonder? Is Batman gay? No, but one might have interesting reasons for believing so.
Langley admirably resists the temptation to snark. He also treats the often-reviled Dr. Frederic Wertham - whose 1954 book condemning the form, Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth, led to the infantilizing strictures of the Comics Code - remarkably fairly. I got the feeling it would be fun to take one of Langley’s classes.
Bangkok Hard Time Jon Cole Monsoon Books, $16.95 B-
Prison memoirs seem to have been in vogue at least since Billy Hayes’ Midnight Express was turned into a movie - with a screenplay by Oliver Stone - in 1978. But Arkansan Jon Cole’s Bangkok Hard Time is at least a little different, in that he, to some degree, debunks the received wisdom that Third World prisons are particularly hard on Westerners. Cole claims Australian Warren Fellows exaggerated the conditions of his confinement in his 1997book The Damage Done. Fellows claimed he had to eat bugs to survive in Thailand’s Klong Prem prison - Cole says that wasn’t his experience when he spent time there in the ’80s.
Cole remembers that the “senior” American prisoner had his own house in the compound; when he was released he bequeathed it to Cole. He says the Thais never beat their foreign prisoners - who had access to drugs if they wanted them. (Thai inmates had a VIP section.)
Cole not only refuses to complain about the conditions or justice of his incarceration, he allows that he brought it all on himself. As a military dependent - his father was a Green Beret colonel - and student at the International School Bangkok during the Vietnam War, he wasn’t a whole lot different from the other kids who hung around the American Teen Club. But he slowly began to venture out into the “economy,” where he found easy access to drugs and money and made the acquaintance of a dangerous heroin dealer in Bahn Pee Lek, who misheard his name and amusingly dubbed him “Django.”
This led to a decade-long career as a drug smuggler, shuttling from the U.S. (Cole claims to be the first person to be arrested in Arkansas for selling LSD) back to the Kingdom, until his luck finally ran out. There’s a marriage in there, and a couple of Elvis Presley sightings but no evidence of self-pity.
“Since my release I have not used heroin or been involved with heroin trafficking,” he writes, in what may be the most controversial passage in the book. “Drug addiction, alcoholism, etc. are not diseases. They are simply character flaws and something that can be changed. This is perhaps debatable.”
I don’t know about that, but I believe Cole’s sketches of Bangkok. He effectively conjures the sort of half-insulated lives military dependents live in foreign countries. And his writing is clean, concise and he doesn’t cut himself much slack.
State Street Blues David Malcolm Rose Createspace, $9.99 B
In recent years, some of the stigma that attaches to self-published projects has been rinsed away. Anyone who dares to dip a toe into the river can expect a flood of vanity publications to come their way. (Apres this blurb, le deluge.)
But I’m going to make an exception here because I really like Hot Springs-based artist David Malcolm Rose’s memoir/urban history of Little Rock in the 1970s and ’80s, State Street Blues. Since I’ve kind of focused on Arkansas writers in this column, it seems a shame to leave it out. So I’m not. It’s a quirky, readable memoir with a surfeit of wit. Plus, Rose remembers the “Hoodlum Priest” graffito that was on a brick wall at 23rd and Arch streets for many years.
Anyway, you can find State Street Blues online or pick it up at Green Corner Market in Little Rock. (Also recommended, if you can find it, is Rose’s The Rock and Roll Chronicles, a sort of prequel to State Street Blues.)
Every Night the Trees Disappear Alan Greenberg Chicago Review Press, $24.95 A-
Filmmaker and writer Alan Greenberg’s book is a slim and poetic dissection of his sometimes collaborator Werner Herzog’s 1976 film Heart of Glass, arguably Herzog’s most idiosyncratic and conceptual film. What Greenberg is trying to get at is Herzog’s peculiar species of creative madness, which can sometimes manifest itself as genius. Here’s what you need to know: Heart of Glass is the story of an 18th-century Bavarian village renowned for the production of ruby-red glass, through a secret process known completely only by the master glass blower. When the glass blower dies, the secret is lost and the town descends into madness.
(Really, you should see the movie - it’s on Netflix - before reading the book, though Herzog’s screenplay is included.)
In his afterword, Herzog (who also contributes a foreword) tells us the story “needed a specific stylization,” so only the lead actor, Josef Bierbichler, who plays a herdsman who foretells the town’s doom, and the professional glass blowers who were actually working with molten glass, were not hypnotized.
“But the trance was not with the actors alone,” Herzog explains. “The film is permeated by images [and music] of a Land of Trance.”
It’s not exactly an E Hollywood Movie (it’s more like Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams), but Every Night the Trees Disappear is as deeply fascinating and strange as its subject.
Style, Pages 47 on 07/29/2012