Uncle Silas (1864) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Uncle Silas (1864/This Oxford edition 1989) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu: Irish Protestant Le Fanu was the greatest horror writer of the 19th century after Edgar Allan Poe, producing his work in the middle decades of the Victorian Era. His most famous work is "Carmilla," a terrific and weird novella about a female vampire and her teenaged victim that stands in the background of every lesbian vampire work.

Le Fanu was steadfastly prolific over his 40-year writing career as both a novelist and short-story writer. Much of that output was non-supernatural, but it's his supernatural work that endures and influences. To name one, Bram Stoker's Van Helsing was clearly inspired, right down to his name, by Le Fanu's prototypical supernatural investigator and chronicler Dr. Martin Hesselius. Stories that include "Green Tea," "The Familiar," and "Mr. Justice Harbottle" still retain the power to shock and amaze.

Uncle Silas is probably the only Le Fanu novel still read by choice by readers today. It's not supernatural, though its atmosphere certainly is, and it's weird enough to feel supernatural throughout. It's also steeped in Swedenborgianism, making the introduction and notes in this volume pretty useful for the non-Swedenborgian.

A late-Gothic/Victorian sensationalist novel, Uncle Silas concerns the sinister Uncle Silas, a gambling addict, all-around rogue, and suspected murderer now supposedly reformed in his old age. He stands in line to act as his only niece Maud's guardian until she reaches the age of 21 should her ailing father die. Silas, financially supported by that brother for decades, may have an eye on the enormous fortune Maud would inherit upon reaching maturity.

If Maud dies, he gets the money...

Narrated in the first person by Maud, 18 when the novel begins, Uncle Silas sees Maud's seemingly idyllic, pastoral, though isolated country life invaded and infected from outside and inside, the latter in the form of some tremendously bad decisions and character assessments on the part of her father. 

Uncle Silas is a novel of mirroring, duplicates, and deception. Uncle Silas and Maud's fathers are bad and good father figures, the former with some good qualities and the latter with some bad. Maud's childhood home finds a debased and broken mirror in Silas' estate. But good lurks there, brought out by Maud's own flawed but essential decency when dealing with initially suspicious but redeemable figures that include her cousin Millie. 

But there are also dangerous characters throughout the novel. Uncle Silas sits at the top of that hierarchy, like Moriarty pulling the strands of his spider web. There's also the oafish, creepy but physically imposing cousin Dudley and a French governess who really just has to be experienced rather than described second-hand. Her dialect, along with that of some of the country characters, slides back and forth between the representational and the parodic.

It makes for a long but fun and enduring novel. Le Fanu ratchets the tension up over the past fifty pages or so. If you like protracted endings and epilogues, this novel is not for you. If you want a long novel of manners, morality, and Swedenborgian shenanigans, it probably is. Highly recommended.

The Morrison Effect

Doom Patrol Book One (Collects issues 19-34 of Doom Patrol Volume 2 1989-1990, 1992, 2004/ Collected 2016): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Richard Case, Doug Braithwaite, Scott Hanna, John Nyberg, Carlos Garzon, Simon Bisley, and Brian Bolland: DC's Doom Patrol was weird even when it was supposed to be a straightforward superhero team book in the 1960's. Revived in the 1980's, it really did become straightforward until, facing low sales, DC elected to hand the keys to the car to Scottish writer Grant Morrison in 1989. Morrison had already invaded the U.S. with Animal Man and Arkham Asylum. But Doom Patrol would soon become his weirdest 'mainstream' superhero work.

This new reprint volume collects the first third of Morrison's writing stint. It starts with a bang. A Borgesian bang, to be exact, as Morrison riffs on Jorge Luis Borges' strange story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." An imaginary world is in the process of invading the Earth, and the Doom Patrol gets together to face it, reluctantly. 

While the wheelchair-bound genius The Chief, a.k.a Niles Caulder, and Cliff Steele, a human brain in the body of Robotman, remain from the first iteration of the Doom Patrol, Morrison adds new member Crazy Jane -- a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who now has at least 64 multiple personalities, all of them with superpowers -- and a modified old one, Negative Man, now renamed Rebis and consisting of an amalgam of a man, a woman, and a 'negative energy being.' Josh, a.k.a. Tempest, comes along from the second iteration of the Doom Patrol, but only if he gets to be the team's medical officer and isn't expected to play superhero on a regular basis. Dorothy Spinner, a holdover from the issues just before Morrison takes over, also functions as an occasional member of the team, with her occasionally erratic, reality-shaping powers.

Having survived the threat of the Scissormen and the invading, fictional world, the Doom Patrol moves into the Justice League's original, abandoned HQ on Rhode Island. But their work is never done. A creature calling itself Red Jack (a Star Trek: TOS reference) kidnaps a comatose former member of the Doom Patrol and takes her to his strange pocket universe. Dorothy's powers go haywire. 

There's more! The former Brotherhood of Evil reunites under the new leadership of Mr. Nobody and sucks all of Paris into a magical, reality-bending painting.  Crazy Jane retreats inside her own mind, forcing Cliff to take a telepathic voyage into the wonders and horrors of her fractured psyche. The Cult of the Unwritten Book threatens all of reality with erasure. 

And The Brain and Monsieur Mallah, charter members of the Brotherhood of Evil, invade Doom Patrol HQ in order to secure Cliff's new and improved robot body for The Brain. The Brain is an evil, disembodied brain living in a jar. Monsieur Mallah is the super-intelligent, beret-and-bandolier-wearing gorilla he trained from birth to be his evil sidekick. And those last two are holdovers from the original, 'normal' rogue's gallery of the 1960's Doom Patrol! Somewhat fittingly, the last issue reprinted here has a title taken from a Smiths song.

Hoo boy. Fractured, self-mocking, postmodern, often poignant fun for the discerning superhero fan. And this volume is as normal as Morrison's run on the title gets! Handling most of the pencilling duties, Richard Case offers a seemingly straightforward, crisp art style that makes even the weirdest moments seem (mostly) plausible. And Morrison and Case keep things straightforward when it comes to page lay-out: there's no need to push the boundaries of lay-out. The weirdness is all inside the panels, so it's best one doesn't get too lost. And remember: 'dada' is French slang for 'hobbyhorse.' Highly recommended.

Batman: Gothic (Deluxe Edition) (1990/ Collected 2015): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Klaus Janson: Writer Grant Morrison's second major foray into the world of Batman (after 1989's Arkham Asylum) take the Dark Knight into a literary hellscape of nods to Faustus, Don Giovanni, Lord Byron's Manfred, Fritz Lang's M., Lewis's The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer, and a host of other horrific antecedents. There's even an exquisitely detailed, Rube Goldbergesque death trap for Batman to escape.

Batman faces an enemy from his past -- his past as a schoolboy at a private school, that is, in the days before Bruce Wayne's parents were murdered and Bruce's journey towards Batman began. But the enemy threatens Gotham's major mobsters as well, whom this old enemy hunts for revenge. Klaus Janson supplies lots of moodiness and doom as artist. It's one of Batman's most nightmarish adventures, even with the typical splash of Morrisonian postmodernism. This would make a terrific Batman movie, live-action or animated. Come on, DC! Highly recommended.

Dead Travel Coach

Crimson Peak: written by Matthew Robins and Guillermo del Toro; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Mia Wasikowska (Edith Cushing), Jessica Chastain (Lucille Sharpe), Tom Hiddleston (Thomas Sharpe), Charlie Hunnam (Dr. McMichael), and Jim Beaver (Carter Cushing) (2015): Guillermo del Toro delivers a love letter to Edgar Allan Poe, Gothics, haunted houses, ghost stories, and the 1950's and 1960's horror movies of Hammer Studios and Roger Corman. Oh, and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Rebecca. "The Turn of the Screw." "The Beckoning Fair One." And a whole lot of others. Also, a guest appearance by Buffalo, New York. 

The production and costume design are extraordinary, colour-super-saturated in the manner of many of Corman's Poe adaptations while also supplying the requisite amount of decay and disintegration. Mia Wasikowska is solid as the late-19th-century American woman who chooses the wrong English guy, Tom Hiddleston conjures up some Vincent-Price-like morbid empathy as he plays that wrong guy, and Jessica Chastain is sinister and loopy as the wrong guy's sister. 

There are even elements of steam punk in Hiddleston's clay-digging machine, and a tribute to Sherlock Holmes (and creator Arthur Conan Doyle, fully name-checked in the narrative) in the person of Charlie Hunnam's opthamologist/ghost-hunter/amateur detective. 

There's nothing subtle about the movie -- it wears its metaphors on its brightly coloured sleeves. All this, and the ghosts -- as in the del Toro-produced Mama -- are stunningly creepy, a triumph of visual effects and the imagination of del Toro and his designers. This movie isn't for everybody. The build is just a tad slow in the first half, while in the second half del Toro pulls away from the cataclysmic finale antecedents such as "The Fall of the House of Usher" have primed us to expect. Highly recommended.

The Innocents: adapted from the Henry James novella "The Turn of the Screw" by John Mortimer, William Archibald, and Truman Capote; directed by Jack Clayton; starring Deborah Kerr (Miss Giddens), Megs Jenkins (Mrs. Grose), Martin Stephens (Miles), Pamela Franklin (Flora), Peter Wyngarde (Quint) and Clytie Jessop (Miss Jessel) (1961): Director Jack Clayton's adaptation of "The Turn of the Screw" is also an adaptation of a stage play based on "The Turn of the Screw." The play supplies many of our governess-protagonist's speeches, which Deborah Kerr pretty much nails -- though I'd always pictured Miss Giddens as being much younger than Kerr was at the time of her performance.

The set-up is simple and direct. A governess is hired to take care of the two orphaned charges of their uncle. They reside at a country estate. Miss Jessel, their previous governess, died under mysterious circumstances, as did the estate's head groundskeeper Mr. Quint. But the longer the governess stays at the estate, the more disturbing the circumstances become. The children begin to behave strangely once older brother Miles returns, expelled from boarding school for unnamed acts. The governess starts to see strange figures and hear strange noises. But the cook doesn't see or hear any of these things. The Uncle in London doesn't want to be bothered with anything to do with the children. The governess is in charge of the household. What will she do?

The movie doesn't really answer the faulty either/or binary posited in much of the 150 years of literary discussion about "The Turn of the Screw." Are ghosts haunting the governess' two young charges or is everything in her head? The movie, like the text itself, evades the binary and instead works best with both possibilities existing simultaneously. They're not mutually exclusive.

The Innocents manages to create a genuinely creepy atmosphere through direction, cinematography, sound, and the occasionally unnerving performances by the two child actors. There are a couple of 'Gotcha!' moments that involve the sudden appearance of a specter, but for the most part the movie relies on a gradual accumulation of distressing details.

Two changes from the original text limit some of the film's possibilities. "The Turn of the Screw" was told as a narration inside a narration decades after the events of the story; the movie omits this construction. James' original forces the reader to consider the fact that the governess went on being a governess for decades after the events of the story while also parenthesizing the entire story inside the governess' own telling of it, recounted to another person decades later. The movie also tries to be a bit more overt in explaining why Miles got expelled from boarding school, limiting the more unnerving possibilities of what Miles is capable of -- and of what Quint and Jessel subjected he and Flora to.

The whole thing works very well, though it is occasionally a bit mannered. Both the supernatural and the psychological work within the movie to gradually build a sense of dread. The acting is fine throughout, from the salt-of-the-Earth cook to Kerr's increasingly freaked-out governess to the two preternaturally coy and manipulative children. Highly recommended.

Re-Animator: adapted from the H.P. Lovecraft novella "Herbert West, Re-Animator" by Dennis Paoli, William Norris, and Stuart Gordon; directed by Stuart Gordon; starring Jeffrey Combs (Herbert West), Bruce Abbott (Dan Cain), Barbara Crampton (Megan Halsey), David Gale (Dr. Carl Hill), and Robert Sampson (Dean Halsey) (1985): Richard Band's score channels Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho as Vertigo-riffing opening credits zip by.  Then we get this weirdly faithfully unfaithful adaptation of a novella that H.P. Lovecraft essentially wrote on a dare and considered complete schlock uncharacteristic of all his other stories.

Schlock and grue and hyper-violence and nudity are all in writer-director Stuart Gordon's wheelhouse. Indeed, Re-Animator would help make his name and his studio's name as a creator of enjoyable, bloody, violent, witty, and low-budget horror movies. Gordon on less pulpy Lovecraft fare such as "Dagon" or "The Dreams in the Witch-House" -- not so good. Gordon on Re-Animator, From Beyond, or the Re-Animator sequels? Just fine.

I had forgotten the lamely acted romantic plot that weighs down parts of this movie. Really, I'd forgotten Bruce Abbott and Barbara Crampton, the ostensible leads of the movie, completely. Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West and David Gale as Dr. Carl Hill are the real stars, along with a whole lot of resurrected dead people, mobile body parts, and extremely angry resurrected cats. Gordon throws blood and guts around, but he does so with wit and a fair idea for what makes a horror movie gross and funny even as it occasionally verges on disturbing the viewer. I'll be damned if I completely understand part of the climax, though: sometimes a little exposition is a good idea.

Jeffrey Combs holds the screen whenever he's on it, which is never enough. He certainly captures the gonzo spirit of Lovecraft's obsessed Resurrection Man. And Gale is a hoot, never moreso than when he's menacing people while his head is separated from his body. The splatter effects are cheerfully bright, as is West's day-glo-green Resurrection Fluid: in reality, the liquid from inside a glowstick. Recommended.

Gothic Revival

Unholy Trinity by Ray Russell (1967), containing the following novellas: "Sanguinarius" (1967), "Sardonicus" (1960), and "Sagittarius" (1962): Penguin recently re-released this slim volume of three novellas. If you enjoy Gothic fiction, you should buy it.

Ray Russell fiction-edited Playboy over its first several years. He was also a very talented writer. Unholy Trinity collects Russell's three Gothic-infused novellas of the 1960's. They pay homage to both the general tropes of Gothic and pre-Gothic texts and to specific texts within that long tradition. Stephen King once characterized the most famous of the three, "Sardonicus," as the finest Gothic homage ever written, and I don't necessarily think he's wrong.

First in the collection and last to be written, "Sanguinarius" retells the true story of the Bloody Countess, Elizabeth Bathory, who slaughtered young women and bathed in their blood to remain youthful back in 17th-century Hungary. Russell's style mimics English literature around the same time -- the diction occasionally ventures into the territory of grue-filled plays by Shakespeare, John Webster, and others from that century. The novella establishes a remarkable level of sympathy for Bathory while also bringing the reliability of her narration into question throughout. Technically pre-Gothic in literary time, it reflects the style and content of Gothic influences that include The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil, The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and Macbeth. Its a marvelous piece of work about a lot of dreadful people.

Secondly and first-written is "Sardonicus," adapted into a movie entitled Mr. Sardonicus in the 1960's. Set during the 19th century, Russell's novella is a brilliant whole of description, characterization, and plot: only the psychology feels a bit too modern for the tale to be a lost story from the end of the Gothic's dominance. It's an immersive pleasure, a joy to read. It also straddles the line between natural and supernatural throughout its narrative, a common attribute of the Gothic; deployed within, to fresh and startling effect, are such tropes as the sinister, wealthy male; the younger woman in terrible peril; horrifying physical disfigurement; a dark and terrible castle; a blighted landscape; torture; and many, many others.

Finally, there is "Sagittarius," Russell's tip of the hat to Jack the Ripper, the Grand Guignol, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  As with the first two, this is told as a reminiscence of horrors past, though the frame-tale now exists in 1960's New York. And, another tip of the hat, that frame tale takes place in a gentleman's club, that oft-used setting for the frames of ghost stories. It's another terrific piece, especially in its evocation of the Grand Guignol theatre in late-19th-century Paris, with its excesses of horror and titillation.

As noted, this volume now exists as a Penguin reprint under the collective banner of guest editor/presenter Guillermo del Toro. It's a terrific example of a writer conjuring up tales that seem to be from another time yet nonetheless remain determinedly contemporary in their sensibilities. Highly recommended.