James Hynes

Last night I finished reading I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, which is British novelist John Lanchester's wonderfully smart, funny, and lucid popular account of the collapse of the financial markets. I have no head for economics, but even I think I understand things a lot better now than I did before I read the book. I still couldn't tell you exactly what a credit default swap is, but there are a couple of  insights about the larger economy that will stick with me. Here's my favorite one, from late in the book—something I had never thought of before, but which seems perfectly self-evident as Lanchester expresses it:

    ...There is a profound anthropological and cultural difference between an industry and a business. An industry is an entity which as its primary purpose makes or does something and makes money as a by-product. The car industry makes cars, the television industry makes TV programs, the publishing industry makes books, and with a bit of luck they all make money too, but for the most part the people engaged in them don't regard money as the ultimate purpose and justification of what they do. Money is a by-product of the business, rather than its fundamental raison d'etre. Who goes to work in the morning thinking that most important thing he's going to do that day is to maximize shareholder value? Ideologists of capital sometimes seem to think that that's what we should be doing--which only goes to show how out of touch they are. Most human enterprises, especially the most worthwhile and meaningful ones, are in that sense industries, focused primarily on what they do; health care and education are both, from the anthropological perspective, industries.
     At least that's what they are from the point of view of the people who work in them. But many of these enterprises are increasingly owned by people who view them not as industries but as businesses: and the purpose of a business is, purely and simply, to make money. The attitudes of a business owner are different from those of people who work in an industry, and from the point of view of business, an industry's ways of doing things are often the unexamined inheritance of the past, willfully inefficient, willfully indifferent to fundamental realities of how the world works. Money doesn't care what industry it is involved in, it just wants to make more money, and the specifics of how it does are, if not exactly a source of unconcern, very much a means to an end: the return on capital is the most important fact, and the human or cultural details involved are just that, no more than details. [pp. 197-198]

Again, this is self-evident and probably no surprise to most people—even to me, if I'd ever bothered to think about it in any serious way. It explains a lot about the culture industry, which includes fiction writing. At any rate, Lanchester puts it beautifully, and the book is full of bracingly clear-sighted insights like this. Here's one more, one of his concluding insights near the end—the, um, money shot, if you will:

So: a huge, unregulated boom in which almost all the upside went directly into private hands, followed by a gigantic bust in which the losses were socialized. This literally nobody's idea of how the world is supposed to work. It is just as much an abomination to the free marketeer as it is to the social democrat or outright leftist. But the models and alternatives don't seem to be forthcoming: there is an ideological and theoretical vacuum where the challenge from the Left used to be. Capitalism no longer has a global antagonist, just at the moment when it has never needed one more. Or rather, capitalism has found a deadly opponent, but the problem is that the opponent is capitalism itself. [p. 230]

Now, of course, my having read, enjoyed, and learned a great deal from Lanchester's book doesn't lessen my credit card debt by a single penny—nor does it make Lanchester himself a single penny, since I took the book out of the library. But even so, it's great, bracing stuff. Go read it for yourself.

Ever since last Friday, anybody who has anything to do with book publishing has been riveted by the clash of the titans between Amazon and Macmillan, as they duke it out like Godzilla vs. Mothra far above the heads of readers and writers over the pricing of e-books. If you don't know what's going on, the best account so far is Laura Miller's in Salon this morning, along with Sarah Weinman's more business-oriented account at DailyFinance. The short version: Amazon wants to keep the price of Kindle titles at $9.99, Macmillan and most other book publishers want to able to set their own prices, and while they battle it out, Amazon has removed the "buy" button from all Macmillan titles on their website. You can still go through Amazon to buy Macmillan titles from their associated sellers, but you can't buy any of their titles, either the Kindle or the paper versions, directly from Amazon. 

Here's how clueless I am: for the first 24-hours, I was interested in a general way, as a (very, very, very minor) member of the publishing industry, and it wasn't until Saturday night that I realized, with a sinking feeling, that hey, I'm a Macmillan author. Either I'd never known it, or had known it and forgotten, but St. Martin's/Picador, which is the publisher of four of my five books, is owned by Macmillan (which in turn is owned by the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck), which makes me perforce a Macmillan author. As soon as I realized this, I zipped over to Amazon, and true enough, none of the titles I currently have in print had an Amazon "buy" button, only a button that would send you somewhere else, where you can buy a used copy of The Lecturer's Tale for a penny. It was only at that moment that, in the immortal words of Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys, shit just got real.

Like a lot of writers, I'm more or less siding with Macmillan, but with mixed feelings. The pricing of all books, not just Kindle editions, is a vexed issue for every writer I know, because every writer I know is also a serious reader and, for the most part, a serious buyer of books. On the one hand, like every writer I know, my heart sinks a bit when someone asks me to sign a copy of one of my books that they obviously bought used (which means I didn't make a dime off it, let alone a penny). One lovely elderly woman in my neighborhood regularly tells me, every time I run into her while she's walking her dog, what a fan she is of Kings of Infinite Space, and how she bought a copy at Half-Price Books and passed it around to fifteen friends of hers. Like I say, mixed feelings: fifteen people read my book, but none of them paid for it, and the one who did, didn't earn me any royalties. But on the other hand, I buy used books all the time, usually at the aforementioned Half-Price Books here in Austin. In fact, I buy used books much more often than I buy new ones—not to mention that I regularly take books out of the library, which likewise earns each author I read exactly nothing. All of which is to say that, as a book buyer with a limited budget, I like a bargain as much as the next guy.

The mixed feelings I have about this are only rivalled by the mixed feelings I have when I read my semi-annual royalty statements. These are notoriously impenetrable, written in the bookkeeper's equivalent of Linear B. (I once complained to my agent that I couldn't make any sense of my latest statement, and he said, "Well, you're not supposed to.") But one thing I have divined from my statements—along with the realization that I need to keep my day job—is that the steeper the discount given to a retailer, the smaller my royalties are. And since Amazon is basically the Wal-Mart of the Internet, demanding, and getting, huge discounts from its suppliers (i.e., publishers), the percentage I make off of each copy I sell through Amazon is appreciably smaller than the percentage I make off of books sold elsewhere. (Though this isn't unique to Amazon: Borders and Barnes and Noble can also command huge discounts, which means basically the only books I make full royalties off of are ones sold by independent booksellers.) Now, if I were Stephen King or John Grisham, this wouldn't matter so much, since what I'd make up in volume would more than offset what I lose per individual book. But most of us aren't King or Grisham, so it stings a little to see our royalties (such as they are) shrink even more to accomodate a powerful retailer. I'm not going to compare myself to a sweatshop worker in Singapore, whose wages are kept low by Wal-Mart's insistence on low prices for running shoes or sweatshirts, except maybe I am, just a little bit: the aggressive push for discounts and low prices by retailers has its harshest effect not on publishers, per se, but on the people who actually, you know, make the goods. Which is why it matters to me that Amazon wants to encourage book buyers to get used to the $9.99 Kindle edition, or even $9.99 hardcovers. It's money out of my pocket.

But then, on the other hand (and in this argument, I have more hands than the goddess Kali), even if they boost the price of e-books to $14.99 (at least for new books), and even if every one of those fifteen freeloading readers of Kings of Infinite Space bought a new copy at full price at an indie bookseller, I still wouldn't make that much money. Full price books sell fewer copies, and I ought to know, because I can't remember the last time I bought a new book at list price. The fact remains that no matter who wins this dispute over e-book pricing (and book pricing in general), the vast majority of fiction writers still won't be able to make a living off of writing books.

In the meantime, I guess I'm still mainly siding with Macmillan. The fact that Amazon has been acting like a 19th century mill owner, locking out obstreperous workers, only encourages me to side with the other international conglomerate in this fight. But, the fact is, I'm not even sure how much this is my fight, for all the reasons I've enumerated above. As Laura points out in her article, this is more an argument about technology than it is about reading or literature; it's one of those epic struggles between big media companies that has happened many times before (see the early history of television, or the history of the movie business, or for that matter the effect of publishing technology on the rise of the novel in the 19th century), and which affects the lives of artists without much taking into account their interests or desires. I have a vital interest in how all this turns out, but at the moment, I mainly feel like collateral damage.

My new novel, Next, comes out in six weeks, so those of you who drop by this on-again, off-again (mostly off-again lately) blog should brace yourself for increasingly intense bouts of self-promotion, defensiveness, and rank narcissism. I'm going to make an effort (really, truly) to write about other stuff, too, but today, I'm returning to the blogosphere to shamelessly tout the book.

Starting with Shelf Awareness, a daily website for the book business, which is devoting today's issue to the launch of Reagan Arthur Books, my new publisher. Reagan is my once-and-future publisher, actually, since she not only edited Next, but The Lecturer's Tale as well, back when she and I were both at Picador. Since then, she has become (in the words of Gawker) a "rock star editor" at Little, Brown, publishing critically acclaimed and bestselling novels by Joshua Ferris, Elizabeth Kostova, Kate Atkinson, Denise Mina, George Pelecanos, and others. And now, for reasons that passeth understanding, she's publishing me again. Anyway, check out Friday's Shelf Awareness for news about all of the imprint's new releases, some lovely photos and interviews with Reagan and her talented team, and some smart-alecky answers from me to the site's Book Brahmin questions.

And if you go here, you can read the recent Publishers Weekly review of Next, wherein I dodge a bullet. So far, so good.

It's a wild and windy Christmas Eve in Austin, Texas: scudding clouds, blowing leaves, and cold, too, or at least cold for central Texas. We've got wind gusts up to 35 mph, and the tree across the parking lot from my apartment, which was full of turning leaves yesterday, has been stripped almost bare, leaving drifts of orange leaves under the wheels of my car. The wind is also a reminder of just how drafty and badly insulated my apartment is, and the little icy breezes that leak in through my windows make me feel positively Dickensian. I should be typing this at a high desk, wearing a scarf and those gloves without any fingers, like Bob Cratchit in the scenes before Mr. Scrooge comes to his senses. The wind makes my cats restless—makes me restless, too, come to think of it, and later, I'm going to bundle up like Mr. Cratchit and take a brisk five-mile walk around the Hike and Bike Trail.

Tomorrow I'm participating in a Christmas dinner at the home of my hemi-semi-demi ex, but tonight I'm on my own, which is sort of the way I like it. I've said elsewhere on this blog that Halloween is my favorite holiday, and that's mostly true, but Christmas still strikes me pretty deep. It's a melancholy holiday for me, more so in recent years, because it's the time of year my father died, and the time of year my mother was diagnosed with dementia. So there's sadness about what what I've lost, but then, I've always thought it was a melancholy holiday. Which is a good thing, because I actually enjoy (if that's the word) melancholy. I like the fact that this time of year it's cold, that there's more darkness than light, that the sky is blacker at night and the stars a little brighter. Insofar as I have a spiritual life, this is the time of year I feel the mystery more keenly. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way, but it's that mystery, the thinning of the veil between what we think we know and the vastness of what we don't, that overwhelms me and makes me feel simultaneously awed and sad and weirdly hopeful.

Which doesn't mean that I'm not a sucker for the culture of Christmas, both the kitsch and the not-kitsch. I've been listening to the local classical radio station's non-stop, 24-hour "Festival of Carols," and I've been playing my own non-stop assortment of Christmas tunes: the Vince Guaraldi soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas, the Phil Spector Christmas album, Anne Dudley's album Ancient and Modern, and a lot of Vaughan Williams music. The two tunes that always get to me, every time, are Stephen Oliver's arrangement of "God Bless Ye, Merry Gentlemen" from his music for Nicholas Nickleby, and Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." The last especially reduces me to a sodden mess.

I've already watched two of my favorite Christmas movies, the Alaistair Sim version of A Christmas Carol (Sim is the best Scrooge ever, with the possible exception of Mr. Magoo), and Billy Wilder's The Apartment, which, if you've never seen it or you have seen it and forgotten, is set mostly between Christmas and New Year's Eve. The final shot of Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine playing gin rummy makes me happier than any number of more traditional Christmas images. And tonight I think I'll do a double-header of Christmas movies, Die Hard and It's a Wonderful Life. Yes, Virginia, Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and even a pretty cheerful one, unless you're a corporate executive or a Euro-trash supercriminal in an expensive suit. And as for It's a Wonderful Life, it's the perfect Christmas story for melancholics everywhere, with Jimmy Stewart playing, for once, both sides of his persona in the same film: the aw-shucks charmer of You Can't Take It With You and the brooding, bitter obsessive of Vertigo. It encapsulates somehow the crazy dichotomy of the season—at least as far as we melancholics go—that roller-coaster combination of "Why fucking bother?" with "Hey, anything can happen!" This may be the only time in history that anybody will ever compare Frank Capra with Samuel Beckett, but in its own crazy, sentimental way, It's a Wonderful Life (which for much of its running time has the distinct subtext, "No, it isn't") is a gloss on Beckett's "I can't go on, I'll go on."

So, in the spirit of my Christmas movies, I say to you all, Merry Christmas, you wonderful old building and loan! Yippie ki yay, y'all! God bless us, every one! And shut up and deal.

In my (probably futile) efforts to remain au courant with the inexorable digitization of literary life—and to shamelessly promote my new novel, Next, soon to available as both a book-book and an e-book and who knows what else, maybe a direct download to your cerebral cortex, so you can remember having read it with actually having to take the time to turn the pages and have my prose pass before your eyes—I now have an author page on Facebook. This is in addition to my Twitter page, of course, and this blog. They are all linked to each other in the sticky, organic, and kind of creepy way everything is these days. It doesn't really matter if I think all this is a good thing (and believe it or not, sometimes I actually do), because it's not just coming, baby, it's here, and it's sink or swim from here on out, especially for aging midlisters like me. It's hard, though, I'm just saying. Sometimes I enjoy it—I actually like Twitter's 140 character limit, because it plays to my strength (aka, my weakness) for making short, glib jokes. On the other hand, Facebook baffles me, and makes me feel like I'm my mom, and it's 1987, and I've got my first VCR, and it's blinking 12:00, 12:00, 12:00 at me—let's face it, it's laughing at me—and I haven't got the slightest idea how to make it stop, let alone how to record or play back anything. As for programming the fucker, forget it; it's like learning Urdu, which I'm guessing is the original language of the guy who wrote the instruction manual.

Okay, anyway, so you get the idea. I'm old, all this shit is new, and it scares the hell out of me. People, I didn't even have a cellphone till about eight months ago, after I locked my keys in my car with the motor running in the Central Market parking lot (talk about your senior moment) and couldn't find a payphone within a ten-mile radius, and I had to go into the camping store next door and ask the earnest, young camping-store hipsters if I could use their phone to call a locksmith, and it turns out locksmiths don't even answer their fucking phones anymore, they have a service, and the first thing they ask you for is your cellphone number. (I ended up calling a cab, because it turns out cabbies carry jimmies and can pop the lock for you for about 25 bucks, a good thing to know if you're in your mid-50s and your mom already has Alzheimers and you can feel your own brain slowly turning to oatmeal.)

Anyway, as I was saying, Facebook is a baffling, strange new world for geezers like me—it took me all day yesterday to figure out the difference between a "page" and a "profile," and even now, I'm still not sure I've got it right. But at any rate, the author page is there, under the pretentious title, James Hynes, Author,  to distinguish it from my other Facebook page, which is personal, and which you can't get to unless you know me or used to know me, and which, let's be honest, I hardly ever look at because it comes at me like a firehose of information, often from people and sources (friends of friends, apparently) whom I've never heard of before. It's an adjustment, is what I'm saying, for a 54-year-old novelist who is used to spending vast amounts of time by himself, to find that in order to swim and not-sink in the ocean of digital literary culture, he needs to open himself to the hive mind of the internet, that he has to switch off the solitary, austere, I-wanna-be-Tolstoy mindset of the creative artist and turn himself into Locutus of Borg in order to sell the book. Though there are worse things, I guess, than being Locutus of Borg, like, say, being a former midlist novelist.

Anyway, there it is, my geriatric rant, my cranky, catlike rage at a world that insists on changing and requiring new skills of me when all I want to do is lie in the sun and wait to be fed. I got it off my chest. I'm done. My resistance, it turns out, really is futile. I have been assimilated. See you on Facebook.

This is a belated post: I meant to write about the great British TV and screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin back in September, when he died, but I'm only getting around to it now. What reminded me was two things that happened in the last few days. One is that I saw a trailer for an American feature film remake (starring, saints preserve us, Mel Gibson) of Martin's masterpiece, the 80s miniseries Edge of Darkness. The other, better news was that I just found out that the original Edge of Darkness is at last available in the U.S. on DVD.

Martin made his early reputation as the creator of a gritty British cop show called Z-Cars (which my very British friend Jim Crace tells me is pronounced "Zed Cars," not "Zee Cars), but the only TV writing of his Americans are likely to have seen are Edge of Darkness and Reilly Ace of Spies, both of which played on PBS in the 80s (I think). His screen work may be more familiar: he wrote two films that Americans (of my age, anyway) are likely to remember. One was the original, Michael Caine version of the comic heist film, The Italian Job, which has a well-deserved cult reputation . It's got a very offbeat, loose, late-60s vibe (like, say, Bedazzled, or name-your-favorite-Richard-Lester-film). I first saw iton TV back in the summer of 1974, during my first summer home from college, and the power went off ten minutes before the end of the film (there was a tornado; long story), and while I had a chance to see the famous chase scene in Milan (I think), where tiny European cars chase each other through medieval pedestrian arcades and over rooftops, I didn't see the movie's famously ambiguous ending for years afterwards. It's still a fun movie, and much better than the recent remake.

The other Martin script Americans will know is Kelly's Heroes, which is, of course, a touchstone film for guys my age, a cheerfully cynical heist/World War II comedy, in which a unit of weary American soldiers at the end of the war stage their own private invasion behind enemy lines to "liberate" a cache of German gold from a bank in a French village. I'll even confess to owning the DVD, and I watch it every couple of years or so. It hasn't aged as well as The Italian Job; a lot of what seemed madcap when I was fifteen now just seems labored and phony. The film features a lot of sweaty American character actors who are too old to be playing WWII-era GIs, and a lot of the dialogue sounds like it was written by a non-native speaker of American slang (which is what Martin was, of course). That said, it's a clever idea, and a well-constructed story. If you're willing to put up with Telly Savalas and Don Rickles, the film also stars a steely, young Clint Eastwood as Kelly and Donald Sutherland in full, late 60s antic mode, playing an anachronistically hippie-ish tank commander called Oddball. And it's handsomely made, with some skillfully staged action sequences. Mainly, though, I still love it because it's vastly less sentimental about human nature than the George Clooney Iraq war film (first Iraq war, that is), Three Kings, which is basically a remake of Kelly's Heroes.  Three Kings is pretty impressive until the last ten minutes, when it loses its nerve and turns into a third-generation photocopy of Casablanca, whereas Kelly's Heroes flaunts its cynicism to the very end, with its American "heroes" cutting a deal with an SS officer and riding off into the sunset with stolen Nazi gold.

But much as I love these cult-fave movies, the real reason to celebrate Troy Kennedy Martin is Edge of Darkness, which for my money is one of the greatest TV miniseries of all time. It stars Bob Peck (best known to American audiences for his later role as the big game hunter in Jurassic Park) as a tough, Northern English cop named Ronald Craven, who, in the opening scenes of the series, witnesses his twenty-year-old daughter, Emma, being murdered by an Irish terrorist. So the story starts out as a standard revenge melodrama—tough, obsessed cop on a quest to find his daughter's killer—but even within the first episode, it takes a weird turn and keeps getting weirder. I don't want to say more about the story, in the hope that you'll track down the DVD and watch it yourself, but suffice it to say that it combines elements of mid-80s British politics (anti-Thatcher, anti-nuke), with elements of the paranoid thriller, ecological activisim, the supernatural, and intimations of incest. It's interesting to note, for example, that in the iconic publicity photo from the series (see above), both the teddy bear and the gun that Craven is holding belonged to his daughter.

Other reasons to watch it: it's beautifully directed by Martin Campbell (who has gone on to make several James Bond films, including the excellent recent reboot, Casino Royale), and it's shot in that moody, gloomy, claustrophobic, telephoto-lens-heavy style of mid-80s Brit thrillers that I like so much. It also features wonderful performances by a small army of great British character actors (Ian McNeice, John Woodvine, Zoe Wanamaker). Peck himself is magnificent, playing repressed rage in a way that evokes that master of repressed rage, the late, great Patrick McGoohan. 

The series also features the best performance of American actor Joe Don Baker's career. If you only know him as a heavy from American films, you're in for a surprise. In Edge of Darkness, he's clearly having the time of his life playing a more-than-half-crazy, golf-obsessed, rogue CIA officer named Darius Jedburgh. In his first scene, he's carrying his golf bag into a luxury hotel suite in London, just back from Nicaragua, and among the drivers and nine-irons is a .50 cal machine gun. He also gets many of Martin's best lines. In the scene where he first meets Craven, the two bond over a Willie Nelson song ("The Time of the Preacher"), and Jedburgh asks Craven if he's ever been to Dallas. When Craven says no, Jedburgh gives a big Texas grin and says, "It's where we shoot our presidents. The Jews got their Calvary, but we've got Dealey Plaza."

More than that, I shouldn't say. After Martin died a few months ago, I dusted off my blurry old VHS copy and watched the series again, and not only does it hold up really well, it seems surprisingly resonant with, um, our current situation. Let's just say that corporate malfeasance, government complicity with same, and imminent environmental disaster never go out of style (not to mention crazy CIA agents). I can't imagine that the Mel Gibson remake will be nearly as good—there's a whole other blog post to be written about how American feature film remakes of good British TV series (State of Play, Traffik) always manage to mute or even eliminate everything that was interesting about the original show—but I am encouraged that the film is being directed by Campbell, who made the original. But in the meantime, go to Amazon or your online retailer of choice, and get the DVD of the original. Jim Bob sez, check it out.

PS: If you can still find it on ABE Books or e-Bay, Faber and Faber published Martin's Edge of Darkness script back around the time the show was on the air. It's well worth reading in its own right.

I'm a small town boy. I was born in Lansing, Michigan, which is not small, but from the age of six, I grew up in Big Rapids, a small, mid-Michigan college town. Most of my memories of growing up there are pleasant, but it was also in Big Rapids that I learned to love scary stories. I probably checked out every ghost story anthology there was in the Big Rapids Public Library, and whenever I think of Halloween, the first memory that comes to mind, the baseline of every spooky mood I've ever felt, is the image of the ten-year-old me walking home from the library on a gloomy October Saturday afternoon, kicking through the fallen leaves on the sidewalk, under an overcast sky. I've already got my nose in the book I just checked out—an old, fat hardback with a crinkling plastic cover—and I'm wearing my fall jacket against a northern wind that already has the slight sting of winter in it, and that rattles the red and orange leaves of the maples overhead. I can smell the sharp aroma of the fallen leaves and the mustiness of the book, and I know without thinking about it that if I just walk slow enough, I can finish the first story in the book by time I get home.

Ohhhh-kay. With that egregiously sentimental intro, I bring you my brand new list of Halloween stories for 2009. I really hadn't planned on making this an annual event. I did a list a few years back for Maud Newton, and then I did my own list last year. I wasn't going to do one this year—it seemed like too much work—but then, over the weekend, it was actually kind of rainy and cold and gloomy for Austin, Texas, and I caught the old seasonal mood. Not only that, but this year it's a themed list, in honor of my small-town, Bradburyian roots: a collection of scary stories, novels, and films that have something to do with small-town life.

Some of them are supernatural stories, but some of them are not. Some are classically paranoid, from the-small-town-with-a-terrible-secret genre, while others are just horror stories that happen to be set in a small town. Some of them are actually about the nature of small-town life—namely, the potential creepiness of close-knit communities, and what the members of those communities know, think they know, and actually don't know, about their neighbors—while others derive their spookiness from the simple idea of isolation and remoteness. Still others are about the ease with which a small community can be corrupted or destroyed by outsiders, or even by a strong-willed native.

Some of the entries are kind of a stretch, theme-wise, and some of them are rather obscure, and maybe even impossible to find. I've also tried not to repeat entries I used in earlier list (so I'm not including Salem's Lot or "It's a Good Life") (except that I just kinda did). But all of them evoke in me, to varying degrees, the pleasant thrill of those gloomy Saturday afternoons back in Big Rapids, in the weeks before Halloween.

1) "Young Goodman Brown," by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The ur-text (American apocalyptic allegory division) of the creepy small-town story: it's set in Salem, Massachusetts, it starts at sunset, and by the end, young Goodman Brown has found out all sorts of things about his neighbors, and even his wife, that he'd rather not have known. Oh, and it's got the Devil in it, too.

2) "The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson. Another ur-text—American, apocalyptic, allegorical. You know it, you love it, and no matter how many times I read it, it always—always—creeps me out.

3) "The Dunwich Horror," by H. P. Lovecraft, who of course wrote a number of stories set in gothicky small towns in Rhode Island and western Massachusetts, this one being the most famous. Though I'm sure he wasn't thinking of it (Lovecraft not being known for his ideological bent), this one plays on Marx's idea of the "idiocy of rural life," through his evocation of the reclusive, inbred, white-trashy Whately family, who just happen to have been (how shall I put this?) intimate with godlike, malodorous, tentacled demons from another dimension. Just like some of the folks I knew in Big Rapids, in other words.

4) Dr. Cook's Garden, by Ira Levin. Most people know of Levin's work through the film versions of his novels Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives (both of which are well worth reading in their own right), but he was also a successful playwright. This one is about a seemingly kindly doctor in a seemingly idyllic New England town who takes a very hands-on approach to social engineering. You can buy the play, cheap, if you click on the link above, but I know it from a 1971 TV film starring, of all people, Bing Crosby as Dr. Cook. Bearing in mind that I haven't seen it in nearly 40 years, I have very fond memories of the film, and recall that Crosby was very chilling in the part. It's completely unavailable on DVD or even VHS, as far as I can tell, which is a shame, because after seeing it, I've never heard "White Christmas" or "In the Blue, Blue, Blue of the Evening" quite the same way again. 

5) Harvest Home, by Thomas Tryon. Speaking of narratives about seemingly idyllic New England small towns, this novel scarred me for life; my own novella "99" is basically a riff on Tryon's book. Tryon was B-list Hollywood actor for about fifteen years, before giving up to write novels. In most cases, turning to novel-writing to make money isn't a smart career move (take it from me), but in Tryon's case, it paid off. Several of his books were bestsellers, and two of them, The Other and Harvest Home, are bona fide horror classics. It's out of print, apparently (are you listening, New York Review Books?), but click on the Amazon link above, and you can find cheap used paperback copies.

6) Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury. How could I do a list of small-town horror and not include this? I must have read it half a dozen times before the age of twelve. I've read it since, and while the writing strikes me now as, erm, a little mannered, once I give in to it, it's still a very creepy little novel, with the added attraction of being set closer to my own experience, i.e., in a small, midwestern town. And in this one, the darkness isn't homegrown, but comes from without, from an evil circus. And who doesn't love an evil circus? 

7) Vampire Circus. And since one evil circus deserves another, here's my favorite Hammer Film. It was made in 1972, during the era when Hammer's films were getting more lurid—more blood, more breasts—and this one certainly fits the bill. It's also cheap-looking and rather clumsily put together, but it has a raw power to it, and it is, in the phrase of that noted vampire aficianado, John Marks, a very dank movie. It is, alas, not available in a Region 1 DVD, but if you live in or near Austin, Vulcan Video has a blurry old VHS tape of it which I watch every year. 

8) The Heart of a Witch, by Judith Hawkes. Between 1989 and 1999, Judith Hawkes published three first-rate supernatural novels: Julian's House, which for my money is one of the best novel-length ghost stories ever written, My Soul to Keep, which is nearly as good, and this one, a sympathetic portrait of a Wiccan coven in a small town in upstate New York. It's got loads of small-town atmosphere, lots of spooky magic, and a truly heartbreaking ending. It's an indication of the book's idiosyncratic appeal that, from its Amazon page, you can buy used copies for a penny, but a new copy for nearly a hundred bucks. And, for what it's worth, it's got 49 reader reviews, most of them five-star raves, and many of them by practicing Wiccans.

9) The Land of Laughs, by Jonathan Carroll, who really is a cult writer, and doesn't just call himself one, like I do. He's already published seventeen books, but this is his first one, in which a writer travels to a small Missouri town to write a biography of his favorite children's book author, and discovers that the writer and the town have...wait for it...a terrible secret. A beautifully written and genuinely haunting book.

10) The Midwich Cuckoos, by John Wyndham, the great British sci-fi author.  It's is a combination of small-town apocalypse with Cold War paranoia: women in an English village are impregnated by aliens, and the resulting children turn out to be unusually creepy, even by hybrid alien baby standards. Brian Aldiss once dismissed Wyndham for his "cosy catastrophes," but it's Wyndham's narrow focus, quotidian detail, and sharp characterizations that make his books so unsettling. Same with the two films of the book: made twice as Village of the Damned, the first version, with George Sanders, is the best, one of those low-budget, black-and-white British thrillers of the late 50s and early 60s that is all the more effective for being so tight and economical. Unlike your modern, over-the-top alien invasion blockbuster, with massive CGI explosions and nameless CGI extras being flung through the air, this one evokes the feel of coming face to face with an implacable enemy in your own yard.

So, there it is. As you wander the leafy streets of your own small town this holiday season, or just imagine you do, bear in mind that under those rustling, autumnal maples and behind the solid doors of those snug woodframe houses lurk sinners of every description, not to mention the Old Ones, matriarchal corn cultists, Wiccans, and alien children. If your doctor wants to give you an flu injection, you might think twice if he looks anything like Bing Crosby. And if the circus comes to your town this month, take my advice and stay home.

Happy Halloween!

My reaction to Roman Polanski's arrest in Switzerland was, like a lot of people's, originally pretty blase—it's been thirty years, what's the big deal, who cares anymore?—until I read Kate Harding's piece in Salon yesterday. Returning again and again to a single, irrefutable refrain—"Roman Polanski raped a child"—Harding demolishes, with a fine, cleansing rage, all the arguments for leaving Polanski at liberty. The most pernicious excuses are easily dealt with—that the girl had a pushy stage mother, that Polanski's own childhood was horrific, etc.—and the rest of them—it's been a long time, he hasn't done anything like that since, his grown-up victim has forgiven him—probably wouldn't even have been brought up if Polanski weren't a celebrated film director and the friend and co-worker of a lot of famous people. 

In fact, what Polanski's defense boils down to finally is what you might call the Ezra Pound Exception, i.e., that some people consider great artists to be exempt from moral judgement (to wit, "So what if Ezra Pound was  Fascist, he was a great poet, etc."). If you take Polanski's talent out of the equation, then his defense falls apart, which is easy to see with a little thought experiment. Assuming that the facts are not in dispute—that Polanski pled guilty to unlawful sex with a minor and then fled the country to escape sentencing—consider this: if he were just an ordinary 76-year-old man, and not the guy who made Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby and Knife in the Water, then no one would take the other reasons for not extraditing him at all seriously. Her mother was pushy? So what. She was "advanced" for her age? So what. It happened a long time ago? So what. For anybody else but a celebrated and/or wealthy guy, none of this would matter.

And even if you do think that Polanski's personal history and the victim's forgiveness are mitigating factors, surely the proper venue for taking them into account would be a sentencing hearing in Los Angeles County. If they are mitigating factors—and I honestly don't know if they are or aren't, that's not my point—then let Polanski return to face the charges he admitted to, and let a judge take them into account. Given that he confessed to the truth of the charges, and then fled the country to avoid facing the consequences, letting him off the hook during the extradition process just feels wrong to me, or at least premature.

I say all this as an admirer of Polanski's work, or some of it. Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby are two of my favorite movies, and his version of Macbeth (the first film he made after his wife's murder by the Manson family, another potential mitigating factor) is my favorite Shakespeare film. (And no matter what happens, I will continue to watch them and enjoy them, just like I still think Ezra Pound actually was a great poet, if not such a nice guy, and just like I'll continue to listen to Phil Spector's great Christmas album, despite his being a convicted murderer.) In all three films, the film's script or original source material is not by Polanski, but he brings to them not just the cool elegance of his Polish film school training, but the full effect of his understanding (gained the hard way, by surviving the Holocaust) of the seductive persistence of evil. I watch Rosemary's Baby almost every Halloween; it's the scariest movie I know, and yet it's almost completely free of the visceral shocks you usually get in horror films. What's scariest about it is the slow accumulation of ordinary, quotidian moral compromises, culminating in that blackly comic and horrific final scene, at the end of which Rosemary (who is also a victim of a rape, by no less than Satan) comes to accept her demon child—evil triumphs through the back door, by means of a mother's love for her newborn son. And, of course, the ending of Chinatown is equally harrowing, as a rich and powerful old man who has committed a series of horrific crimes, ranging from rape and incest to the corruption of a city government, basically gets away with it. Polanski even changes the ending of Macbeth: while Macbeth himself gets what's coming to him—his severed head rolling in the dirt—Polanski adds a little scene at the end, with the new king of Scotland riding off to visit the witches and make his own pact with the devil.

Now, bear in mind, I'm not saying that Roman Polanski is Satan, or Macbeth, or even Noah Cross. He's continued to make good movies (if not as great as the ones he made before his arrest), and, as even Harding concedes (through gritted teeth), he may even be a decent guy, all things considered. And it's entirely possible that a judge may buy all or at least some of the mitigating factors everyone is invoking and let Polanski off lightly. All I'm saying is that if he weren't a famous (and wealthy) film director, none of these reasons would be enough to keep him from standing before a judge to accept his sentence, which is what he probably should have done thirty years ago. Much as I love his movies, and his bracingly ambiguous and subtle vision of the moral abyss we all walk over, all the time, I don't want this story to end the way his best movies do, where good people shrug off a crime and let it stand. This time, we shouldn't forget it. This isn't Chinatown.

You can now read the first chapter of Next, my forthcoming novel. Go here.

Everything I read and everything everybody I know tells me says that this is how you publish and promote a novel these days, but it still feels weird to me. I'm doing my geriatric best to keep up: I'm on Facebook now, fer chrissakes. God help me, I'm on Twitter, too, though I hardly ever think of anything interesting to say. The other day, I tweeted that I was eating a banana. Is this what Herman Melville would have done? Oh, time, strength, cash, and patience!