The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron (Collected 2007) containing the following stories: Old Virginia (2003); Shiva, Open Your Eye (2001); Procession of the Black Sloth (2007); Bulldozer (2004); Proboscis (2005); Hallucigenia (2006); Parallax (2005); The Royal Zoo is Closed (2006); and The Imago Sequence (2005):
Not the first, not the second, but the third time I've read this collection in the last four years. So I guess I like it. I'll add only that the third reading allowed the connections among the stories to stand out more in my mind.
And Barron's generally-doomed tough-guy protagonists sometimes bring to mind some of Jim Thompson's characters along the same lines, though Thompson's characters didn't have to deal with screamingly awful occult menaces. I sort of wish Barron would write a story in which one of his tough, morally dubious protagonists beats a Shoggoth to death with a shovel. That would be awesome. Highly recommended.
On the Ropes: written by James Vance; illustrated by Dan Burr (2014): The late-1980's graphic novel Kings in Disguise was also written by James Vance and illustrated by Dan Burr. It was an unapologetically Steinbeckian work set during the Great Depression in the United States. Realism and melodrama combined in that graphic novel to make for one of the lesser-known great graphic novels ever produced in the medium.
It took about a quarter of a century, but Vance and Burr return here to the Great Depression, and to the youthful protagonist of Kings in Disguise, the now-17-year-old Fred Bloch. And it's great to have them all back.
The main narrative takes place in 1937, though Bloch narrates the events from an undisclosed but seemingly distant future time and there are also copious flashbacks. Fred Bloch now travels through the American Midwest with a carnival funded by FDR's federal Work Projects Administration to provide both work and entertainment in Depression-era America.
Across the country, workers are unionizing. And across the country, businesses are hiring people to break up strikes, unions, and attempts to unionize, often by any means necessary up to and including murder. That last part isn't melodrama -- violence and even murder was often a tool used by businesses and the State against unions in 19th- and early 20th-century America. The Pinkerton Agency, for example, was at least as well-known during that time for its union-busting activities as it was for anything remotely resembling detective work.
Fred works for an escape artist with a tragic past, romances a fellow young carnival worker, gets a WPA-funded reporter interested in labour's battles with Big Business, and covertly helps organized labour by acting as a 're-transmitter' of union communications through the post. Mail was often intercepted if it were believed to be union-related (yes, this is also historical fact and not melodrama), so Fred's help is invaluable so long as he remains the unknown link in a chain of communication. Unfortunately, two murderous thugs hired by a steel company are on his trail. And one of them has a history with Fred's escape artist.
Vance's writing is solid, involving, and certainly heartfelt. If the climax of the story strikes me as being melodramatic -- well, it is sometimes nice to see a battle between good and evil in a graphic novel that doesn't involve bright costumes or muscular hyper-competence. Fred, navigating now more intellectually between the problems of the mundane world and the communal aspirations of socialism, remains a finely drawn and sympathetic character.
Burr's art suits the material perfectly -- it's nicely rendered, skilfully laid out, and refreshingly normative in its depiction of the Depression era and all its characters, good or bad or humanly in the middle. Like Kings in Disguise, On the Ropes is work of admirable and quietly beautiful craftsmanship. Highly recommended.
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (2003): If this non-fiction book were fiction, it would seem ridiculously over-determined. As historical fact, it's ridiculously creepy and weird.
The 1893 Chicago World's Fair, dubbed the 1893 Columbian Exposition in honour of the 400th anniversary of Columbus arriving in the Americas, was also a hunting ground for one of history's most prolific serial killers AND a mentally disturbed would-be assassin with a fixation on Chicago's popular mayor. The fair itself was the greatest spectacle of modern history up to that point. Envisioned as a showcase for modern industry, architecture, and good old Chicago pluck by chief architect Daniel Burnham, the fair delivered against all odds.
"H.H. Holmes" is the Devil of the title. That's his preferred assumed name, not his birth name. He was a charismatic conman, pharmacist, businessman, doctor, and land speculator who came to Chicago in the late 1880's and discovered that he liked it there. The rapidly growing metropolis offered fertile ground for Holmes's endless grifting. It also offered a steady supply of anonymous young women who'd come to the big city to get jobs and found themselves the prey of this horribly prolific serial killer.
Holmes killed about 50 men, women, and children over a 5-year-period before getting tracked down and arrested by the freelance detectives of the Pinkerton Agency for insurance fraud in Philadelphia and subsequently revealed as a mass murderer. An awful lot of conclusions arise from his career. For one, policing was extremely crude in late 19th-century Chicago. Trained police detectives were few and far between not just in Chicago, but in America. And while several people suspected Holmes of being a serial murderer for years, they did nothing, in part because no one really believed the police were capable of catching anything other than a bribe. The relative anonymity created by an America in which transportation had outstripped communication also helped Holmes. So, too, did his charisma. Many of these women walked into the lion's den, leaving their husbands behind in a couple of cases, taking their own children to their attendant dooms.
And Holmes is more a premonition of Adolf Hitler than an echo of Jack the Ripper. He has henchmen, though none were ever brought to trial for the murders. He's eerily charismatic. He's committed to his version of an ideology, his grifting and speculation ultimately being Capitalism in its purest form. I'm surprised Ayn Rand didn't idolize him. He's the serial killer of the American Dream.
He's also immensely cowardly. He tends to kill with either gas or chloroform. And then he would make money from the bodies of the dead, selling four bodies he had reduced to skeletons to medical practitioners. Waste not, want not. Once captured, he spun out a series of partial truths, with the lies and facts changing each time. Thus, no final determination can ever exist of his murder total.
Meanwhile, the World's Fair came together to showcase Chicago to America and the world as a first-class city (this was, of course, New York's put-upon Second City). Daniel Burnham orchestrated the Fair, the White City of the title. The buildings were massive and imposing and painted white. The construction schedule was breakneck. The number of employees needed to make Opening Day a reality was enormous, and enormously beneficial during a period of world economic recession.
The politicking and negotiating and organizing that made the World's Fair a reality are a marvel themselves. Massive buildings went up in the time it now seems to take to fill a pothole. Things burned down or blew down or fell down and were rebuilt. Arguments over architectural style were had, most of them won by Burnham with his pseudo-classical, monumental perferences. People were stunned simply by the massive presence of the Fair. America's finest architects and engineers pitched in, including the legendary, crotchety landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, designer of Central Park. The Fair became a monument to progress and to Chicago's emergence as a worthy civic rival to New York.
And the White City brought a flood of visitors who needed a hotel. And H.H. Holmes ran a hotel in a building he had designed with the aim of making murder easy and fun. For him, anyway.
Above it all rose the world's first Ferris Wheel, created by an engineer named Ferris (natch) and almost cyclopean in its scale: 270 feet high, with 36 giant cars capable of carrying several dozen people apiece. It was as if the first tall building had been the Empire State Building. And Burnham also had a hand in one of New York's most famous early skyscrapers, the distinctively nicknamed Flatiron Building.
Erik Larson -- who also wrote the excellent Isaac's Storm, about the hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas in 1900 -- does a fine job here of marshalling and orchestrating facts in an entertaining fashion. He makes a number of interesting connections and suppositions. And he makes engineering, planning, and architecture fascinating subjects while also situating the narrative in its historical context of the rise of unions, suffragettes, and an increasingly integrated global economy.
Larson does go somewhat over-the-top in a couple of sections in which he tries to imagine things for which there were no historical records. This tends to lead him to speculate on unknowables such as 'What was this person thinking?' It's a hallmark of the history written for popular consumption. Given the horror of what we know of Holmes' actions, these attempts to depict crimes which we don't know the details of seem like overkill. Nonetheless, despite those reservations, this is a splendidly readable history. Highly recommended.
