Brief Thoughts 31

ABBA Gold (33 1/3) by Elisabeth Vincentelli

ABBA's back in 2021. They've released two singles, they're putting out a new album soon, and they're going on tour together again for the first time in several decades. No better time to pick this up.

The book makes a fairly solid case for Gold being ABBA's most important album, though I still think The Visitors is their magnum opus. The album helped put some distance between the cheesy 70's disco image they were known for and introduced them to a new generation of listeners. For myself, Gold was the first I heard of them as a kid. Even pompous, rockist critics started to take them more seriously. There's a reason several ABBA songs have been covered by metal bands, and not just for the novelty factor.

Reading it did make me realize the main reason why, even now, they're still widely considered a lightweight band for wine moms in spite of their craft as songwriters and musicians, a catalogue of songs that have stood the test of time, and their importance to LGBT+ subcultures. It's not just that they made pop. Madonna made pop, and she's still considered a living legend, even while she keeps embarrassing herself. There's no real mythos to ABBA. They were two couples who made a lot of songs together, both amicably divorced, and then they went their separate ways for years, largely keeping out of the news. The closest to anything is the fact that Frida's father was a German soldier during WWII. Just a soldier, not an SS officer or some war criminal. The ABBA story has no major drama, no suicides, no drug abuse, no mental breakdowns, no controversies, no early deaths. It was just two men and two women making well-crafted pop music. While it shouldn't matter to the music, people still love a juicy story attached to their legends.

Obviously, I love me some ABBA. One of my novels is named after and inspired by one of their B-sides, I'm excited for the new album, and, if they come near me, I'll definitely be going to one of their shows. If you do too, it's worth picking this up and getting some insight into the stories behind the songs and how Gold was put together. 

Buy the book here.

Dead Inside by Chandler Morrison  

This book has become somewhat infamous due to both its content and for a reading Morrison did from it which probably did more to kill the convention it was read at than Covid-19.

So, what is Dead Inside?

The elevator pitch is that it's a love story between a necrophile and a cannibal. An anhedonic hospital security guard who only feels any sort of pleasure when he's fucking corpses has his world turned upside down when he meets a maternity doctor with a compulsion to eat dead bodies. Specifically infants.

You can tell when Morrison wrote this, he wasn't really going for an extreme horror or splatterpunk story. In fact, one of the flaws in the book is that his influences are a bit too obvious at times. The unnamed title character's excuse of "I have to check the monitors" to get away from people is very reminiscent of Patrick Bateman's "I have to return some videotapes" in American Psycho. He also delivers a rant against normalcy at one point which reminded me a lot of the "choose life" rant from Trainspotting.

For me, it wasn't as shocking or disgusting as others seemed to have found it. This was mostly because there's a dark humor in it which offset a lot of the more unpleasant scenes. This is why I found Less Than Zero more disturbing than American Psycho, the latter has a lot of dark humor and other devices that distance the reader from the horror while the former just plainly describes it.

However, the dark humor was engaging and, at times, hilarious. I also very much enjoyed the story on multiple levels. It works well as a twisted romance. Morrison makes the unlikely scenario sound plausible. The way the main character struggles with his feelings works very well, too. I've struggled with depression most of my life as have some people very important to me. Seeing the way the main character sabotages a chance at being happy because he's pushed himself so far into a fortress of his own misery was all too familiar, even if he's kind of douchebag and he fucks dead bodies. The contrast between how the main character and his love interest deal with their neuroses (to put it mildly) is an interesting look at the different ways people deal with their alienation.

Don't get me wrong, there's still some really offensive shit in this book that will send a lot of people packing upon reading it, so there's your warning. I'm probably just jaded, but this book worked for me on the level of being an examination of people who have to struggle to feel a connection with others than a gross horror story. 

Buy the book here.

Dancin' in September: Updates

As I announced on my social media a couple days ago, I've got two books coming out soon.

The first is a book of plays, tentatively titled PLAYS/hauntologies, coming out from Madness Heart Press. It's currently in the editing stages.

The second is a novel called Music is Over. The cover, done by the very talented Mark Wilson, is below. It will be out from Malarkey Books early next year. In a few days, you'll be able to go to malarkeybooks.com to subscribe to their book club to receive this book and all of Malarkey Books' 2022 releases.

I'm about halfway through my current novel Candy Shopping at the End of the World. I took a break to work on some other things. I'll be back to finishing that and more details will come soon.

Elaine is on sale for $0.99 on Amazon Kindle until Saturday (09/04/21). This is a good chance to head over and grab that if you haven't. If you enjoy it, please also consider picking up its short follow-up, I'm a Marionette. That's available for Kindle Unlimited for free or on Godless.com with bonus material for only $0.50.

Other projects I'm working on include a collection of media-themed horror stories, tentatively titled Saturday Morning Mind Control and Other Fatal Strategies, and an as of yet untitled poetry collection which, so far, is my personal and emotional. I look forward to sharing those both with you all when they're finished.  

 

NOW AVAILBLE: I'm a Marionette (Or, The Nowhere Train for Elaine)

This short follow up to my last novel, Elaine, is now available as an eBook on Amazon and Godless. I recommend picking up the Godless version. Not only is it cheaper, but it comes with three bonus poems. 

Amazon

Godless.com

What People Are Saying About Ben Arzate

 My friend Anita Dalton, who runs one of my favorite blogs, did an excellent review of Elaine. 

Read it here. 

Francis Nally AKA Pilleater also did an overview of my work as a reviewer and an author. Watch it below. 

Book Review: Widespread Panic by James Ellroy

 

Freddy Otash was a former corrupt L.A. cop turned corrupt private investigator for the tabloid Confidential. In the 1950's, he had dirt on everyone from Caryl Chessman to Marlon Brando to John F. Kennedy. Now dead and stuck in Purgatory, he writes his confessions of all the dirt he did for a shot at escaping. 

I'm consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I'm revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW.

Widespread Panic is James Ellroy's first standalone novel in a couple decades. The majority of them have been part of a series. However, the character of Freddy Otash, who's also a real historical figure, has appeared in Ellroy's books before. The first section of this novel was originally published as an ebook titled Shakedown back in 2012.

Otash's character is best summed up by the fact that his personal motto is, "I'll do anything but commit murder. I'll work for anyone but the Reds." He, however, goes on to do both. In fact, he commits murder very quickly in the beginning as a cop. This is not, however, what forces him to turn in his badge. He's kicked off the force after the chief discovers he slept with a post-op transgender woman. Despite being shaken more by being fired than this revelation, he immediately signs up to work for the slimy magazine Confidential, one of the first tabloids. 

Like in Ellroy's other books, Los Angeles is a festering wound of a city. Otash derides the film industry as "Hollyweird," and the moniker is earned. Any celebrity that isn't a rapist, a pedophile, or a sociopath still has unhealthy addictions to drugs or sex. Many take part in underground pornography and hate groups. Any who are otherwise likeable pay for trying to do any good. At one point, Confidential accuses Johnnie Ray of being a regular glory hole visitor. Ray files a defamation lawsuit in return. Otash confronts him and, despite trying to handle it civilly, Otash still ends up beating the shit out of him. 

Eventually, Otash finds himself roped into investigating a murder. The wife of the man he killed as a cop turns up dead and he's a suspect as he'd been sending compensation payments to her for his actions. To clear his name and his own conscious, he starts looking into it and stumbles on an underground cadre of communists. Despite his staunch hatred of their politics, he ends up close to the members, even sleeping with one.

For all his prowess as an investigator and his perceived ability to see through people, others still get the best of him more and more. He becomes more self-aware of how greedy and dirty he is, but is incapable of change. The inevitability that he'll lose everything creeps closer and closer as the plot progresses. 

Those familiar with Ellroy probably know of how hardboiled and minimalist his prose usually is. This isn't the case with Widespread Panic. It's written from Otash's point of view and his writing is full of alliteration, 50s slang, and sensationalism reminiscent of tabloid writing. That it maintains this style through the 300+ pages and still manages to shift the mood between thrilling, humourous, and depressing without feeling forced is a testament to Ellroy's ability as a craftsman of prose. 

Widespread Panic is an entertaining and gripping work of mystery and historical fiction. Some may find the prose takes some getting used to, but those who like their noir dark and sleazy will definitely enjoy this. Ellroy fans will love it and, like me, probably pre-ordered it as soon as it was announced. 

Buy Widespread Panic by James Ellroy here. 

Buy the ebook here.

Book Review: The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright

 

Fred Daniels is an average black man with a job and a wife about to give birth. One day, as he's leaving the home of the people he works for with his pay, the cops snatch him off the street accusing him of murdering the people next door. Despite his protests, they eventually torture him into signing a confession. However, he manages to slip out of their custody and hide in the sewers. In the underground, he finds ways to observe the city above and the guilt that all the people possess.

Outside of time and space, he looked down upon the earth and saw that each fleeting day was a day of dying, that men died slowly with each passing moment as much as they did in war, that human grief and sorrow were utterly insufficient to this vast, dreary spectacle.

Richard Wright wrote this novel right after Native Son. However, it was rejected by his publisher who found the scenes of Fred's torture by police too unbearable to read and the less realist atmosphere making for a poor follow up to Native Son. While a truncated version was published as a short story, this is the first time that the full-length novel as been published.

The depiction of police brutality is as timely as ever. It wasn't unusual, before a lot of modern technology, for police to simply grab someone they could pin a crime on, preferably a black man, and beat a confession out of them. Fred Daniels finds himself caught up in this practice. The scenes of torture are pretty heavy, but don't feel gratuitous. In order to cope with the emotional and physical stress, Fred Daniels depersonalizes and remains that way throughout the book. This is especially relevant when he descends into the sewers.

In the underground, he finds ways to listen in on other people's conversations and the things they do when they think nobody is looking. At one point, he comes upon a choir in a black church. While Fred himself had been in the choir at his church, observing the ritual from completely outside the experience makes it seem to him to be absurd and humiliating. Likewise, when he later breaks into a real estate company and steals the money from the safe, he realizes he has no use for the money underground and uses it as wallpaper in the cave he uses as his room.

Included with the novel is the essay “Memories of My Grandmother.” In it, Richard Wright expounds on the inspirations for the book. He points specifically to his grandmother's religiousness as the main inspiration. As with Fred when he enters the underground, he felt that his grandmother had a sense of living in the world without being of it. This is something that Christianity, especially the stringent brand his grandmother followed, often teaches. With Fred, however, he doesn't come to see a higher power as a hope, rather he sees the connection between his situation and the others and believes he can bring truths that will free everyone when he returns above ground. His inability to articulate these “truths” prove to be his undoing.

Richard Wright considered this his most inspired work and it's hard to disagree with him. The book reads like a waking nightmare with its atmosphere and prose. It examines and indicts the justice system of America and digs deep into the nature of “Otherness” all while telling an engaging and fast-paced story. Even if you haven't read any of Wright's other books, I highly recommend picking this one up.

Buy The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright here. 

Book Review: The Exploding Book by Mike Russell

 

 

Not long after you, the reader, are pulled into the library of the town of Gladeville, it explodes. This leaves the librarian dead and all books, except for the Dark Book, destroyed. As you, the reader, explore the town, you discover that the town is trapped within a giant box. Many of the inhabitants find they have no concept of things like sex, death, or the existence of any other towns. 

The gold temple is both inside you and inside this book but this book is not written in blood and your veins are not running with ink. 

The Exploding Book reminds me a lot of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. It examines the nature of literature and language through a number of metafiction elements and a fantasy-tinged story. The book is told in second-person, however "you" are essentially given an omniscient viewpoint by being a traveling spirit inside the book. 

The various characters of Gladeville often find themselves in a state of confusion, having no language for common things. For example, at one point the chief of police and a reporter find themselves driven nearly mad with lust, but don't understand the concept of "sex." Animal instinct leads them to copulating anyway. This results in the police chief getting pregnant and not understand why, because she also has no concept of "pregnancy" or its connection to sex. 

The duck-rabbit optical illusion is a reoccurring motif. It first appears as a hole in the walls surrounding Gladeville and later as an actual creature. The duck-rabbit illusion is often used as an example of the difference between perception and interpretation. The people of Gladeville start religions based on saying the hole is for certain a duck or for certain a rabbit, and the two bitterly clash. In his examination of perception, Russell looks at the difference between genuine curiosity and adherence to dogma. 

While the book is heavy on ideas, it also tells a surreal, but mostly straightforward story. The various residents of Gladeville find themselves embarking on their own quests to discover the nature of their reality, prompted by the mystery of why the library has been destroyed. The characters have different arcs all based on trying to sort out the confusion they've found themselves in.

My one complaint about the book, is that it often feels dragged out. There are scenes that go on a bit too long and belabor the point. This is especially true of the ending which does wrap up the story nicely, but involves a lot of repetition that isn't really necessary. 

In spite of that, The Exploding Book is still an enjoyable surreal fantasy with a lot of interesting perspectives on language, perception, identity, and literature. I believe this is worth picking up, especially if you've enjoyed Russell's short work in the past.

Buy The Exploding Book by Mike Russell here.