NEW BOOK BY JOHN C. TIBBETTS

In THE GOTHIC WORLDS OF PETER STRAUB University of Kansas professor John C. Tibbetts presents the first serious study linking Peter Straub to the evolving contexts of the Gothic Tale, including the fairy-tale tradition of the Brothers Grimm, the ghostly shivers of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, the Weird monstrosities of H.P. Lovecraft, and today’s postmodernist trends in transgressive body horror. In addition to close looks at the celebrated novels, like Ghost Story and The Talisman (co-written with Stephen King), and the challenging short stories in Houses without Doors and Interior Darkness, Tibbetts examines for the first time Straub’s archives, working papers and correspondence. Several “close-up” interviews reveal the private and idiosyncratic sides of Straub, at work and at home. In short, continues Gary K. Wolfe in his Preface, “The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub provides an invaluable road map to the complex, multileveled novels and stories that will eventually come to define Straub's legacy.”

Peter Straub with the bust of H.P. Lovecraft (photo by John C. Tibbetts)

In his Foreword to the book, cultural and literary historian Gary K. Wolfe writes that “perhaps more than any author of his generation—Stephen King included—Peter Straub has extended the literary possibilities of horror fiction.” Winner of every award and accolade in the field of horror, including the World Fantasy, World Horror, Bram Stoker, and International Horror Guild Lifetime Achievement awards, Straub’s standing in contemporary Gothic horror is indisputable.

John Tibbetts (left) and Peter Straub, Providence, Rhode Island

“[He is] the premier stylist of the modern supernatural novel,” writes historian Douglas Winter, “a writer of rare wit and intelligence.”

In an interview with Straub’s occasional collaborator, Stephen King, conducted especially for this book, King observes that Straub brings "a poet’s sensibility to the field of dark fantasy and creates a synthesis of horror and beauty.”

DON’T BREATHE: INSIDE OUT

Spoiler alert!

Filmmaker Fede Alvarez has crafted a neat reversal on burglary movies: Instead of the thieves secretly contriving to enter a house, here they are desperately seeking to exit the house. It’s not the going-in that matters, it’s the going-OUT. And Alvarez does something much more disturbing. He delivers a piece of relentless, savage horror with an artful panache that is just this side of the movie it most resembles: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

The three would-be robbers, played by Jane levy, Dylan Minnette, and Daniel Zovatto, have targeted a blind and reclusive Gulf War veteran (Stephen Lang), who lives alone in a blighted neighborhood. Legend has it that the accidental death of his daughter has left him with a stack of money secreted away in his dark old house. So off they go, confident they can get in, find the money, and get out, before waking the sleeping man. But no. The man’s preternatural senses wake him and enable him to stalk the very people stalking him.

The film plays upon our sympathies like a demented pianist attacking a keyboard. On the one hand, of course, there’s this poor old guy, alone, blind, the victim of these vicious robbers. On the other, we have three hapless thieves falling prey to a half-crazed guy who not only brutally attacks them with blazing guns and heavy hammers, but, it turns out, is hiding a nasty secret in his old dark house: He is holding captive the young woman who killed his daughter in a traffic accident. He will release her only after she delivers the baby that will replace the daughter she killed.

The second half of the movie is a nightmarish flight and pursuit through every room, attic, basement, trap door, and corridor. When the lights are on, the robbers have the advantage; when they are off, the power play reverses. And there is something especially creepy in the moments when pursuer and pursued—who is who continually shifts about—stand together in the same space, motionless, lights on or off, each waiting for the other to betray himself with the slightest sound or breath. Balancing the sheer audacity of the brutalities is the artful mise-en-scene. DON’T BREATHE is a miracle of canny camera placement and scene composition, almost elegant in its calculation and execution. Pursuer and pursued are constantly kept in the frame in every possible kind of shot composition. In other words, while we are repelled, sometimes disgusted at the atrocities depicted, we can appreciate the beauty of the film’s design. Here is the supreme paradox. How do we deal with unspeakable horrors when they are delivered with great artistry? Perhaps the former is all the more effective due to the latter.

FIREFLY!

  “You Can’t Take the Sky from Me!”

Lately I have had the opportunity to revisit FIREFLY, the legendary, swashbuckling television series from 2002. Written and produced by Joss Whedon, it fell short of one complete season before the Suits at Fox cancelled it. But not before it garnered an enthusiastic fan base that has since grown over the years to cult proportions.

And the enthusiasm is justified.

Thank goodness, there’s nary a superpower or cape or mask among the nine members of the crew of Captain Mal Reynolds’s “Firefly” class transport ship. They are very human, flawed and heroic by turns. They ply the spaceways as they smuggle, steal, and scavenge their way in a futuristic world, caught in the crossfire of a galactic civil war.

Cast members are Nathan Fillion as the good Captain; Gina Torres as Zoe, his tough second-in-command; Alan Tuduk as “Wash,” ship’s pilot (and husband of Zoe); Adam Baldwin as soldier-of-fortune Jayne; Jewel Staite as engineer/ mechanic Kaylee; Morena Baccarin as the professional “companion” (read that: courtesan) Inara; Ron Glass as the priest Shepherd Book; and Sean Maher and Summer Glau as a brother and sister on the run from the Federal authorities.

FIREFLY, bless it, is concerned more with personalities and crew relationships than it is on special effects (although there are some beauts) and chases (although yes, there are a few). It has a great heart. And the joy and comradeship shared by the ensemble cast is compelling and real.

It is also one of the more heart-breaking might-have-beens, in that producer Whedon was blocked from finishing it and revealing its many secrets.

But at least the glorious fragment that has been left us is available for all to either revisit of discover for the first time. They can’t take THAT away from us!

GENIUS!

A Film by Michael Grandage about Editor Maxwell Perkins and his famous clients, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe.

Should the spontaneity of the creative urge be counterbalanced by the restraint of reflection and reconsideration? This new biopic about the relationship between novelist Tom Wolfe and his editor at Scribner’s publishers, Maxwell Perkins, considers the issue. The “genius” of this dual portrait is not just that the editor restrains the novelist, or that the novelist rebels against the editor. No, GENIUS shows how the two enter into a reciprocal dynamic.

Maxwell Perkins
(played by Colin Firth)

Thomas Wolfe
(played by Jude Law)

Two contrasting scenes provide a case in point. In the first, mild-mannered Perkins and volatile Wolfe are in Perkins’s office locked in nothing short of literary combat as they pore over passages from the manuscript of Wolfe’s first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Perkins tries to cut and trim Wolfe’s notoriously expansive and unwieldy verbiage. “Cut! Cut!” shouts Perkins. Protest! Protest! groans Wolfe. He watches in dismay as Perkins’ blue pencil dances across the typescript, line by line, correcting, erasing, questioning. Each cut by the relentless Perkins is answered by two more lines from the stubborn Wolfe. And so it goes. Eventually, the offending page has been sawn in half, as it were. The two men, gaze happily at each other, exhausted. While Perkins releases the core beauty of Wolfe’s sprawling prose, Wolfe in turn learns lessons in concision and restraint.

Now we turn to the second scene, which reverses the process. Perkins has dragged the reluctant Wolfe to a lower East Side jazz joint. Perkins admits he doesn’t like music. Wolfe takes up the challenge and demands Perkins choose a favorite song for the jazz combo. Right. “Flow Gentle, Sweet Afton”? The combo takes up the tune, moderate at first, but then explodes into a syncopated frenzy. It’s Perkins’ turn to be educated. The formally stiff editor loosens up under the spell of the hot music, and we see him for the first time shamelessly intoxicated and in synch with Wolfe’s volcanic energies.

The rest of the film extends and confirms the exchange that produces this unstable compound of Art and Craft... and ultimately the struggle to bring Life itself to the printed page.

I submit GENIUS to any prospective writer who feels himself or herself free of the restraints of an editor. Most writers know and respect that humbling process. And most editors justifiably regard themselves as essential partners in the creative work. Not just Wolfe, but many other writers have depended upon the sobering influences of the professional editor. I cite short-story writer Raymond Carver as a prime example. Where would the tight concision and spare prose of his work be without his editor, Gordon Lish? (See the fictionalization of this process in Stephane Michaka’s novel, Scissors.)

By contrast, consider the fate of a writer like Ray Bradbury, surely the latter-day inheritor of Tom Wolfe’s extravagantly descriptive prose. It pains me to acknowledge that the beauty of Bradbury’s prose that enlivens the first two-and-half-decades of his work gradually became bloated and overwrought in the last three decades of his life. As long as he was responsive to friends, editors, and associates, few American writers produced such masterly writing. But when, like Wolfe, he fell so much in love with his prose, it overmastered him. It was like he puffed so vigorously into a balloon, that the balloon soared aloft, carrying Ray with it, leaving behind considerations of story and character.

Let GENIUS be an object lesson—and a warning—to all of us who strive to breathe life into our writing. Having said that, I feel the breath of Maxwell Perkins on my neck—

And I’ll stop here.

TARZAN’S NEW QUEST

Edgar Rice Burroughs always found new ways to plunge a civilized John Clayton back into his native jungles to resume life—with scarcely a missed step—as Tarzan of the Apes. In Tarzan and the Foreign Legion, for example, he’s a World War II Air Force officer whose shot-down plane plunges him into the Sumatra jungles to continue the War. And here in the new Warner Bros. film, THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, he’s a late-19th century aristocrat who effortlessly sheds his waistcoat and cravat and finds himself back in the Congo to foil a plot by the King of Belgium to enslave the Congolese.

And so, we’re off and running. Or, to put a finer point on it, swinging... I have to confess since my boyhood, all I really cared about in the many Tarzan movies was the vine-swinging quotient. Across the decades, the aerial escapades have really been the bottom line for me. But good tree-swinging has proven to be sporadic at best. Lumbering ancient Elmo Lincoln in 1918 was earthbound. The young Johnny Weissmuller did a fair job, courtesy of a team of acrobats in his first three films, TARZAN THE APE MAN, TARZAN AND HIS MATE, and TARZAN ESCAPES (1932-36); but as he grew heftier in the mid-1940s most of the tree-swinging abated. Gordon Scott’s Tarzan in the late 1950s was too muscle-bound to soar aloft. A few years later an emaciated Jock Mahoney spent most of his time on the ground. And in GREYSTOKE, Christoph Lambert was too busy in England to indulge in much aerial hi-jinks.

Now, in LEGEND OF TARZAN Alexander Skarsgard gives us a couple of nifty flying sequences, but that’s all. Most of the time he’s preoccupied with rescuing Jane from the clutches of the evil Christoph Waltz. At other times he’s fending off the wisecracks of his sidekick, Samuel L. Jackson.

Drawing by John C. Tibbetts of Edgar Rice Burroughs
and his two most famous characters, Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars.

Most of the familiar tropes are here. Jane is abducted, of course. She’s always a captive of somebody or other. And when things look hopeless with the bad guys, Tarzan summons the beasts of field, vine, and water to come to the rescue. One detail is different, though: In the inevitable clash with a Great Ape he gets pounded into the ground. And his famous yell is different. “What’s that?” someone asks. “It’s Tarzan,” comes the reply, “only it sounds different.”

Painting by John C. Tibbetts of Tarzan and the Golden Lion
(after the original by J. Allen St. John)

Unfortunately the film fails to explore the anxieties crucial to any Tarzan tale: John Clayton’s confusion between his aristocratic heritage and his savage jungle instincts. Alas, no identity confusion here. Instead, Alexander Skarsgard’s passively slips in and out of both identities without batting an eye. Author Burroughs at least was quite clear about it: We forget that he ended TARZAN OF THE APES with a noble act of renunciation: John Clayton gives up his claims to the titles and estate of the House of Greystoke and as Tarzan returns to the jungles where he belongs. He doesn’t question the mystery of his origins. “I was born there,” he says quietly. “My mother was an Ape, and of course she couldn’t tell me much about it. I never knew who my father was..."

That’s the right of things. The jungle is, after all, where the trees and vine are...

NEW LANDS!

At long last, Swedish director JAN TROELL’s magnificent chronicle of Swedish emigration to America is available from Criterion.  THE EMIGRANTS (1971) and the NEW LAND (1972) follow the fortunes of Karl and Kristina Nilsson (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann) as they journey to America in the mid-nineteenth century and attempt to adjust to their new world.  Here is a slow-breathing, deliberately paced story of hardship and survival which tracks the changing textures and moods of land and water, moving from the stony monochrome of the bleak Swedish farmland, to the tossing grey-blue of the pitiless ocean, to the bursting colors of the verdant Minnesota river country.  Watch for other films by this shamefully ignored director:   In ZANDY’S BRIDE (l974) the spectacular vistas of California's Big Sur form the backdrop for the developing relationship between a pioneer rancher, Zandy (Gene Hackman) and his mail-order bride, Hannah (Liv Ullmann). HURRICANE (l979), shot in Bora Bora, relates the inner turmoil of star-crossed lovers (Mia Farrow and Dayton Ka'ne) against the spectacular elemental fury of a South Seas storm.  And THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE pits the fool-hardy ambitions of three Swedish explorers bent on reaching the North Pole by balloon, against the implacable hostilities of the frozen wastes.

More recently is Troell’s quietly subtle EVERLASTING MOMENTS (2008). Over a span of approximately a decade, as the family grows from three to seven children, and as a young wife Maria (Maria Hellskanen) struggles to keep her home and family together in the face of the Great War, hard times, a workers’ strike, unemployment, and a chronically philandering and abusive husband (Mikael Persbrandt), she keeps taking pictures.  Tentative at first, under the tutelage of the kindly village photographer, Sebastian Pedersen (Jesper Christensen), Maria soon enthusiastically masters the camera.  “Not everyone is endowed with the gift of seeing,” he tells her, an unspoken love in his eyes.  From her own darkroom she produces fragile images of the family cat, the children, her neighbors, village parades, her friend Pederson, and, finally, herself.  “The pictures take me over,” she laments at one point to Pederson, guilty about carrying on her picture-making against the wishes of her husband; “and I’m another person.”  Pederson’s response might well be Troell’s own artistic credo:  “You see a world there to be explored—to preserve, to describe.  Those who have seen it cannot merely close their eyes.  You can’t turn back.”  Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moment is a family album, a humane and compassionate series of glimpses into lives we care about and are grateful to know.  And all of it is captured not just through the camera eyes of Maria, but through the affectionate viewfinder of Jan Troell himself.

Autographed drawing by John C. Tibbetts

TIME ON HIS HANDS!

Time-Travel stories have long fascinated me. And my first encounter at age 13 in 1959 with Jack Finney’s short-story collection, The Third Level, put the seal on what has become a life-long interest. The story is about a Third Level platform at Grand Central Station where a train can take you to Galesburg, Illinois in the year 1894. By the time I had finished the story, by God, I was ready to go there with its gentle narrator as my tour guide.

Although best-known for the book that launched no less than four movie adaptations, including Don Siegel’s classic INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS in 1956, Finney’s time-travel stories command my special attention. And now I’ve completed an article, “Time on His Hands: The Fantastic Stories of Jack Finney,” which will soon appear this Fall in the Weird Fiction Review, No. 7.

Finney’s time travelers oppose the deadening, conformist Present that flattens and stifles the grace and beauty of the Past. Like Miles, they are disaffected and vulnerable, finding themselves at the nexus between Past and Present. The seams momentarily buckle and tear. The boundary between “here and then wavers” (“The Love Letter” 219). A persistent memory, the stimulus of a photograph or letter, an emotional longing are enough to trigger the Past-ness that has never entirely vanished. “Every man remembers the thing that struck him like the thunderbolt of an instant,” writes G.K. Chesterton, “though it had stood there waiting for him as the memorial of an aeon."

In his story collections The Third Level and I Love Galesburg in the Springtime, and his novels Time and Again and its sequel, From Time to Time, Finney has found ways to take his characters (and us) back in time. On the one hand, there are simple talismanic props—a letter, an old rolltop desk, and a stamp from1869 that enables two lovers to communicate across time; and a “Woodrow Wilson” dime that serves as a passport to an alternate world and an alternate time. On the other hand, there are all manner of Time Machines, as it were, that effect the transition: The train from the platform of Grand Central’s Third Level steams toward 1894; the Wright Brothers aeroplane in “Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands in the Air” takes an inventor back to the Civil War with an offer to help General Grant with aerial surveillance (the offer is refused); and a restored Jordan Playboy automobile in “Second Chance” drives its happy occupant backward from 1950 to 1923.

The Past itself becomes a character that is reluctant to yield to the incursions of the Present. In the title story in I Love Galesburg in the Springtime, another favorite, the entire Illinois town’s past history conducts guerilla raids on present-day changes. Turn-of-the-century streetcars clang through the modern-day streets and ancient fire trucks leap to the alarm bell to rescue an old house from destruction. "'It's resisting us," says a local citizen, "for the past isn't so easily destroyed.”

This is no mere nostalgia. Finney is careful to note that fractured time can be dangerous. In a disturbing fable, “I’m Scared,” the narrator speculates on the consequences of a “growing rebellion against the present:

For the first time in man's history man is desperate to escape the present. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slight but definitely, affecting time itself.

The ease and availability of new time travel technologies are hemorrhaging the future. Disaffected people escape to the Past—and do not return. “’Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave it to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time.”

Although Finney’s stories never appeared on Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, Stephen King has famously declared that Finney, perhaps more than anyone, truly forged the modern fantasy vein popularized in that series: "I urge you to find a copy of Finney's The Third Level," wrote King, "which will show you what The Twilight Zone could have been."  

Drawing of Jack Finney by John C. Tibbetts

I may be no longer the thirteen-year old kid who first stepped on the platform of the Third Level so long ago, but when I dip back into the pages of Finney's books, as I do on occasion, strange things happen. Characters don't move and talk precisely the way I had remembered; events don't transpire in just the way I had supposed. Blinking, I double-check the lines of print. No, that can't be... Just as the seams between past and present in Finney’s stories “momentarily buckle and tear,” I think the borders between Finney and me are breaking down. I am no longer sure what time period, even what reality I inhabit...

That's all right. I'm content. Jack Finney's work, I am convinced, is for all our times, not just for this one. That's his secret: He tests the flux of time and tide against the ticking of our own pulses.