When I saw that William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was turning 70, I bought myself a new copy. I hadn’t read it for a while—30 years, give or take—and I wondered what its effects would be now that I, unlike the book’s protagonists and most of us when we first read it, am a grown-up. I picked up a recent-ish paperback issued by Faber, the British publishing house that bought the manuscript from Golding in 1954, offering him an advance of £60 for his debut novel, after it had been rejected by at least six others.
The new cover was bright red and featured faux-naïf drawings of naked child warriors scattered at jaunty angles, and surrounded by butterflies, lizards and yellow tulips. Or no, perhaps those were flames. Regardless, it was a cheerier cover than the one I remembered from our bookshelf as a child, which was white and featured a grim image of a pig’s head impaled on a stick, painted in greys, blacks and, for the blood dripping from its eyes, red.
The pig’s head is important, as are the naked child warriors and the flames, as you probably remember if you studied Lord of the Flies at school, which is quite likely: it has consistently been selected as a set text in the UK—at A-level, O-level and GCSE—since its publication. The writer Ian McEwan, in an essay published in a 1986 collection celebrating Golding’s 75th birthday, recalled reading Lord of the Flies at boarding school when he was 13; he was surprised to discover that “Golding knew all about us”.
Nor is it just British children who have studied it: the book has been translated into more than 30 languages. When Golding was presented with the Nobel Prize in 1983 by the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf told him: “It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr Golding. I had to do Lord of the Flies at school.” (The cruelty of that “had to”!)
The book has had a long half-life in popular culture, too. It has been turned into one reasonably good film, Peter Brook’s starkly monochrome 1963 adaptation; one criminally cheesy one, Harry Hook’s 1990 take, starring Balthazar Getty; and has inspired numerous other works, from the recent TV drama Yellowjackets, which transposes the dynamic to an all-girls’ football team, to the long-running reality-TV show Survivor.
To celebrate its 70 years this autumn, Faber released a graphic-novel version and, as I write, a new four-part BBC adaptation is filming in Malaysia, written by the British screenwriter Jack Thorne. At the announcement, Thorne said that he’d read the book with his mother as a boy, and that it “left a scar on me like no other”.
In 2018, The Independent included Lord of the Flies in a list of “Seven books our English teachers tortured us with”, but for Golding’s book this was unusually and specifically true. As an English teacher himself, at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, a boys’ grammar in Salisbury—a job he stuck out to support his wife and two children, with undisguised reluctance—Golding often wrote during lessons. He would set work, then scribble away furtively in exercise books under his desk.
Nor was he afraid to experiment on his pupils: John Carey’s 2009 biography, William Golding: the Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, describes a school trip to a Neolithic earthworks during which “Scruff”—as Golding was known, owing to his dishevelled jackets and scraggly beard—divided his charges into two groups, one told to defend the earthworks, the other to attack it. “It occurred to more than one boy that Golding stirred up antagonism between them in order to observe their reactions,” Carey notes.
It seems perfectly reasonable that a book about children—or really, though it’s not fashionable to make the distinction, about boys—should be read at a time of life when their characteristics and behaviours, if not their particular circumstances, are most easily recognised in ourselves. Here, on page one, is handsome, fair-haired Ralph, who clambers out of the jungle after part of the plane in which he and other English schoolboys have been travelling—to an unknown destination, while being evacuated from a nuclear war—has crashed on a nameless desert island.
Before the end of this first page there’s another child, a “fat boy” whose grammar betrays the fact that he isn’t as posh as the others. He asks that Ralph does not reveal his hated nickname, “Piggy”, to the other survivors; Ralph immediately calls him Piggy, of course—but so too, with insidious callousness, does the omniscient narrator, making us immediate co-conspirators. (We never find out his real name.) Completing an uneasy triumvirate is haughty head chorister Jack.
The boys are separated from the adult world, though not, importantly, deprived of sustenance: they have fruit, water and as many pigs as they can catch and kill. Golding’s novel is resolutely not concerned with survival in its most basic terms. Rather, it is a thought experiment about how a society might function with, as Ralph enthusiastically observes, “No grown-ups!”
After he’s voted in as leader, Ralph, disdainful yet heedful of Piggy’s sensible counsel, attempts to implement a rules-based system to improve their chances of rescue. Authority is outsourced to a talismanic seashell, a conch, which Ralph uses to summon the other boys and which, it is mutually agreed, gives its bearer the licence to speak.
Jack, as the leader of a quasi-comic pack of choirboys, whom we first encounter staggering up the sun-baked beach in caps, capes and “hambone frills”, is at first compliant, though subservience makes him bristle. Later, as mania, or desperation—or perhaps it is a form of extreme boredom—sets in, Jack will lead a darker, wilder, breakaway faction and the choirboys will swap their hats and cloaks for warpaint and spears.
When we read Lord of the Flies at 12 or 13, we are told it is an allegory about power. If we want to put it bluntly—and we’re 12, so of course we do—we might say that Ralph represents democracy; Piggy is scientific rationalism; Jack, totalitarianism. I haven’t yet mentioned Simon, a small, mystical boy, prone to epileptic fits, whom you may remember (though I’ll admit I’d forgotten all about him). It is Simon who encounters the pig’s head mounted on a stick, which Jack’s choirboys-turned-hunters have left as an offering to a beast they imagine is lurking at the top of a mountain.
It is Simon, or his subconscious, who converses with the pig’s-head demon, whose name, a literal translation of the Hebrew-derived “Beelzebub”, also became that of the book itself (chosen not by Golding but by a canny editor at Faber: Golding’s submitted manuscript bore the far more humdrum title Strangers from Within). Simon, we could think, represents spirituality; naturally, and with Christ-like foresight, he meets a grisly end.
We might also have been asked, as students, to consider the biographical context, to think about how Golding’s life experiences lurk in the pages. The critic Harold Bloom, writing in 2008, called the book “essentially a period piece”, seeing it as a barely digested regurgitation of Golding’s time serving as a lieutenant in the British Navy in World War II, during which he hunted the Atlantic for the Bismarck and took part in the Normandy landings.
Golding himself connected his observations of fascism—that it is an internal force rather than an external one—to the depravities he portrayed in the book: “I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature,” he once wrote. Though Bloom was dismissive of the book’s quality (“no Gulliver’s Travels”, he sniffed), he at least acknowledged its fabulistic power: “Any well-told tale of a reversion to barbarism is a warning against tendencies in many groups that may become violent, and such a warning remains sadly relevant in the early 21st century.”
It’s a revelation, when you’re young, to find out that a book might not be exactly about the thing that it’s about. Or at least, not only: that with the right set of contextual keys (and yes, that “right” is highly specious), a story can be further unlocked. But it can also be a thrill to read a book about children, when you are one, that treats their interactions, however extreme the setting, with the same seriousness you do.
“As far as I was concerned, the novel’s blaming finger was pointed at schoolboys like Jack, Piggy, Ralph and me,” wrote McEwan in 1986. “We were manifestly inadequate. We couldn’t think straight, and in sufficiently large groups we were capable of atrocities. In that I took it all so personally, I like to think that I was, in some sense, an ideal reader.” (I don’t have a son, but I gave my new copy to my 11-year-old daughter and, when she’d read it, asked her what she thought its message was. “Um,” she said, “that boys are idiots?”)
In some sense, yes, McEwan is right. In another sense, of course, he’s being facetious. (The same could be said, on both counts, of my daughter.) Describing the passage in which a forlorn Piggy, Ralph and Simon reflect on the mysterious sagacity of adults—“‘Grown-ups know things,’ said Piggy. ‘They ain’t afraid of the dark’”—McEwan writes: “At 13, I too had sufficient faith in adult life to be immune to Golding’s irony.” If you read Lord of the Flies again as an adult, however—and you must!—the irony, and its incumbent horror, are everything.
In his covering letter to the publisher Jonathan Cape, who expressed interest in taking on Lord of the Flies (though, like most of the others, went on to reject it), Golding referred to it as a book “for grown-ups”. This might have been worth stating explicitly, as he had conceived it as a response to a popular children’s book, The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne, in which the three child protagonists, Ralph, Jack and Peterkin (could Piggy be a secret Peterkin?), are also shipwrecked and alone.
This trio behaves in a civilised—or rather, civilising—manner: fending off cannibals and pirates and even spreading a bit of Christianity while they’re at it. Golding is said to have turned to his wife Ann after reading it as a bedtime story one evening, and asked: “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if I wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave?”
Reading Lord of the Flies when you’re younger, its essential truth is undisputed: as McEwan wrote, he knew all about us. But to an adult readership, “how children really would behave” becomes something of a debate. In 2015, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman sought a peculiarly literal refutation of Golding’s supposition, unearthing a 1966 newspaper story about six Tongan boys who’d been shipwrecked on an islet in the Pacific for a year, but didn’t go mad and kill each other.
“Their days began and ended with song and prayer,” Bregman wrote in The Guardian. It’s a strangely joyless thing to do to a book: yes, yes, children might very well not descend into bloodlust, but the tension comes from our fear, our suspicion—or, if we excavate deep enough—our knowledge, that they could.
Since I’ve been a parent and have had cause to observe children more closely, I’ve seen many a boy—and, only proving the rule, the odd girl—happily thwacking the heads off daffodils or casually squashing ants. In an isolated scene in Lord of the Flies, another young boy, Henry, plays with tiny sea creatures he spots in the encroaching tide, making lines and channels with a stick to determine their route through the sand. “He became absorbed beyond mere happiness,” writes Golding, “as he felt himself exercising control over living things.” Who hasn’t seen, or can’t imagine, a child doing exactly that? What is the brutal conclusion of the book but this same impulse in extremis?
When I read Lord of the Flies this time, it was teeming with things I had been oblivious to, or at least less consciously aware of, as a child. First, the extent to which it simmers with a sublimated sexual energy. The boys are in prepubescence, or early puberty, and forces are operating on them that they do not yet fully understand (nor was this aspect emphasised to me or the rest of my class of equally bewildered pre-teen girls).
They study each other’s bodies, sometimes with a voyeuristic appetite, as when Ralph watches Jack: “His grey shorts were sticking to him with sweat. Ralph glanced at them admiringly.” Towards the end, Ralph thinks of Jack almost like a vengeful lover: “Then there was that indefinable connection between himself and Jack; who therefore would never let him alone; never.”
In fact, the book is full of suggestive imagery, from the “great platform of pink granite thrust up uncompromisingly” on which Ralph builds the first meeting place, to the equally phallic “bold, pink bastion” upon which Jack builds his rival fort at the other end of the beach. The conch shell itself is… well, you decide: “In colour the shell was deep cream, touched here and there with fading pink. Between the point, worn away into a little hole, and the pink lips of the mouth, lay 18 inches of shell…” Who can blame Piggy when, overcome, he “paused for breath and stroked the glistening thing that lay in Ralph’s hands”?
The whole island pulsates with the boys’ urges, like a kind of hormonally supercharged enactment of Gaia Theory (it was Golding, in fact, who suggested “Gaia”, the Greek goddess of the Earth, to his friend James Lovelock for the name of his scientific idea of organic unity, clearly having more of a knack for titles that were not his own). Oh! And yes, the Greeks. They’re easier to spot when you’re grown up too, and when you know Golding was a big fan, although the book’s stark structure, adhering to the convention of Greek tragedy by starting in media res, was not his idea at all.
In fact, it was among several improvements made by Golding’s editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, who encouraged the excision of the opening chapters that described the nuclear war from which the boys have escaped, as well as removing a whole heap of commas, “which,” as Monteith later recalled, “studded the pages as thickly as currants in a fruit loaf”. It was also Monteith who got the book published at all, having famously rescued it from the slush pile as a junior editor, after a first reader had already deemed it “rubbish and dull” and “pointless”, and marked it with a circled “R” for “reject”.
But back to those Greeks: Piggy wailing and ignored, is a chubby, doomed Cassandra, the prophetess fated not to be believed; or, as he grasps for his smashed spectacles, now reduced to a single lens, he’s the three Graeae, Gaia’s granddaughters, after Perseus steals their one shared eye. Or how about Jack’s tribe stealing fire from their rivals, like Prometheus; then being condemned, like him, to a rock in the sea?
And what do we make of the boys falling on a mother pig feeding her young and stabbing her with sharpened sticks—one up her anus (how is that explained to schoolkids?)—until she “collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her”? This has echoes of Circe turning Odysseus’s sailors into swine, or Oedipus having sex with his mother, and, reading it now, it’s the book’s most shocking scene.
Particularly shocking if you’re a mother, maybe. Mothers in Lord of the Flies are dispatched, like the sow, with savage coldness. Ralph emerges from the jungle’s “scar”—the gap in the jungle left by the aeroplane’s passenger compartment, which has been swept back out to sea—like a baby from a Caesarean section, “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped,” as Macduff had it. (If you’ve ever had the pleasure of having a baby extracted directly from your abdomen, “ripped” is very much the word.)
It’s only Piggy—the ill-fated Piggy—who displays any nascent paternal, or maternal, instincts, keeping track of the younger boys, the “littl’uns”, and thinking about their welfare. He is also the only one to refer to a woman, his aunt; one of Ralph’s first questions of him is, “What’s your father?” Naturally Piggy is ignored, causing him to wear “the martyred expression of a parent who has to keep up with the senseless ebullience of children”. (Ah, I know it well!) In a 1985 interview with his biographer Carey, Golding said of his own mother, Mildred, “I gave her a hell of a time.” In what is perhaps the darkest of his sardonic riffs, he dedicated the book to his parents.
I’m not sure I remembered there being jokes in the book at all, to be honest. But Golding, who, despite pronounced depressive episodes, could also be something of a hoot—promoting her own memoir in 2010, his daughter Judy called him “a very warm person, and tremendously funny”—has put in plenty. There’s a peculiar outburst from Ralph about meetings that is painfully recognisable: “Don’t we love meetings? Every day. Twice a day. We talk,” he rants. “Someone would say we ought to build a jet, or a submarine, or a TV set. When the meeting was over they’d work for five minutes, then wander off or go hunting.” One can only be relieved that Golding, who died in 1993 aged 81, was spared the joys of Microsoft Teams.
In the novel, the character who is most obviously comic is Jack, the head chorister who challenges Ralph for authority (in Brook’s film it’s Piggy, played by 11-year-old Hugh Edwards, in his quite deservedly one and only film role, which he got by writing a letter to the director that started, “Dear Sir, I am fat and wear spectacles”). It is Jack who speaks the ingeniously daft line, “After all, we’re not savages. We’re English; and the English are best at everything,” and is there not something inherently hilarious about him suggesting he be chief because he can “sing C sharp”?
But it is also Jack who gets seized with the urge to kill, who initiates the frenzies that lead to the deaths of Simon and Piggy, and nearly to Ralph’s, and proves, when in power, the most dangerous. (Entirely unrelated to Jack’s risibly self-important boast, Donald Trump claims to have won 18 golf-club championships, Vladimir Putin has compared himself to Peter the Great and Kim Jong Il, as we all know, invented the hamburger.)
Which is how we get to the most frightening aspect of Lord of the Flies. At the end of the book, the boys are rescued by a British Navy cutter, which spots the smoke rising from the island that they have set on fire. At the sight of an adult, a smartly dressed naval officer, just as Golding himself once was, the survivors start to sob, and in Ralph’s case, to weep “for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy”. In a kind of literary crash zoom, the reader is yanked out of the protagonists’ proximity, and they once again become “little boys”. We are back with the adults because this is, after all, “a book for grown-ups”. The naval officer is unable to deal with their outpouring and looks away.
And are we, his fellow grown-ups, any more equipped to make sense of it? Well, we know that there’s a nuclear war happening out beyond the island and that the adults have made no better a fist of things than the children. The stakes have only got higher, and the weapons more devastating. But we also know, from our own lived experience, that being an adult is as much of a construct as being a child; our psychology gets no more complex, our instincts no better. During the pandemic, as those in positions of authority sold contracts to their friends and partied through the funerals, I regularly found myself muttering, like a kind of deranged mantra, “Where are the grown-ups?” as though forgetting that, technically, I was one, too.
In 1974, Golding wrote an entry in his journal suggesting that, as the decades had passed, he’d come to see the book in even bleaker terms. “Twenty years after writing Lord of the Flies, I now see that Ralph who weeps for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, was weeping for an age that is passing,” he wrote. “Seen from the other side, the heart of man is not dark, but flamelit and terrible. Perhaps then Jack and his hunters had the heart of the matter after all.”
The most devastating metaphor for this in the book comes in the form of the monster at the top of the mountain. The possibility of its existence has morphed from a folkloric fear into a mechanism with which Jack can ensure compliance from his subjects (weapons of mass destruction, anyone?). But the monster isn’t really a monster, but a man, or was once: it’s the rotting body of a parachutist who, like the boys, has fallen from the sky. They think he’s a living monster because the wind catches the dead man’s chute every so often, causing his head and torso to lift up and down, “so as the stars moved across the sky, the figure sat on the mountain-top and bowed and sank and bowed again”.
Not only are adults not going to save you, the dead pilot’s terrible dance seems to say, but they’re all but useless, spending their time performing hollow, empty gestures, like brainless marionettes. As a parody of adult civility, it is chilling and grotesque. Perhaps, this is something that, when we’re young, we also fear, suspect, or—if we dare to excavate deep enough—know. But it’s not until later in life that we recognise it as a kind of dreadful truth. Adults, as we might once have imagined them, don’t really exist; we are all no more than scared, confused, vicious children of different sizes. No grown-ups.
Originally published on Esquire UK
It’s time to check in: How was the year in books for you, dear reader? Now that we've approached the conclusion of 2024, it's time to reflect on the year's embarrassment of literary riches—and now we’re here to spread the gospel about our favourites.
The best books of the year took us to dazzling new frontiers. In the fiction landscape, a spate of new novels offered visions of humanity from unlikely narrators, including robots, aliens, and the undead. Meanwhile, it was an outstanding year for memoirs; new outings from luminaries grabbed us by the heartstrings and refused to let go. In the non-fiction space, some of our finest intellectuals released titles that helped us make sense of our changing world, from the culture-flattening force of algorithms to the future of work.
Here are the best books of 2024.
Lauded as “the first great incel novel,” Rejection opens with a bang: In the first of its several linked stories, titled “The Feminist,” an aggrieved young man details his youth spent “dragging his virginity like a body bag into his 20s.” In the brutal and brilliant character studies that follow, Tulathimutte paints scorching portraits of lonesome outcasts: a depressed woman spiralling over her unrequited crush, a start-up bro seeking his other half, a gay man going to shocking lengths to pursue his convoluted fetish, and more. Flayed open by the author’s scrutiny, these characters blister off the page, all of them electric in their rage, their alienation, their tragicomic grossness. Paired with a deft metafictional coda, their voices coalesce into a unified theory of rejection. Perverse, profane, and profound, Rejection will make your skin crawl.
Anna Williams-Bonner, the widow of the best-selling novelist at the center of The Plot, takes center stage in Korelitz’s enthralling chaser, The Sequel. After her husband’s supposed suicide, Anna enjoys collecting his royalty checks as a famous literary widow, but when she pens her own runaway best seller, trouble follows. Soon enough, she begins to receive mysterious excerpts from a novel she never expected to see again—a novel no one can know about. In a twisty-turny quest to contain her secrets, Anna hunts down her anonymous tormentor, but much to her frustration, the dead don’t want to stay buried. Much like The Plot before it, The Sequel revels in lambasting the literary ecosystem, but this time there’s a winking metafictional glee about sequels as a form. Through the narration of this unforgettable antiheroine, a deliciously nasty storyteller, Korelitz delivers a ripping good read.
Ten years after the conclusion of his Southern Reach trilogy, VanderMeer returns with a surprise fourth volume that puts the weird in “Weird Fiction,” to delightful effect. At once a prequel and a sequel, Absolution shades in some of the previous volumes’ dark corners, but rather than provide answers about Area X, a coastal wilderness colonised by something alien, it poses new questions. In Part One, set two decades before Area X’s formation, a team of government-funded biologists introduce alligators to Florida’s Forgotten Coast, with disastrous consequences; Part Two is a potboiler investigating the ongoing aftermath, still tormenting locals 18 years later. Part Three contains some of the liveliest writing in the series: Recounting the first expedition into Area X, it’s the story of Lowry, a foul-mouthed self-styled “hero” with his own ulterior motives. Surreal and Lovecraftian, packed with cascading cosmic horrors, Absolution shows a singular mind at work.
As we embrace new digital experiences, what embodied truths do we lose? That’s the aching question at the center of The Extinction of Experience, a roving investigation of the threat technology poses to our social and cultural norms. Rosen writes about the danger of “mediated” experiences curated by data-hoarding megacorporations—for example, we check the weather on our phones instead of stepping outside to sense the temperature. “In these new worlds, we are users, not individuals,” Rosen writes. “We are meant to prefer these engineered user experiences to human reality.” But don’t mistake this book for a hand-wringing polemic against change; rather, in each disappearing ritual, Rosen highlights the deeper loss to the human psyche, as in the connection she draws between the end of cursive writing instruction and a measurable loss to children’s cognitive skills. Rigorously researched and elegiacally told, The Extinction of Experience is a compelling reminder that “go touch grass” is more than just an Internet punchline—in fact, it’s a human imperative.
“You can’t give back what already belongs to someone,” writes Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle in this powerful history of land theft in Oklahoma, spanning more than 200 years of atrocities committed against the Five Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole). Blending reportage and historical research into a propulsive narrative that reads like a legal thriller, Nagle traces the connections between key inflection points, from the Trail of Tears to a small-town murder on treaty lands. More than a century later, that murder would lead to McGirt v. Oklahoma, a landmark Supreme Court ruling that reaffirmed Indigenous rights to Oklahoma land. Through the checkered history of this one state, By the Fire We Carry tells a broader story about the ongoing fight for justice and tribal sovereignty among Indigenous Nations. Detailed and impassioned, it’s a gripping corrective to the historical record and not to be missed.
At 17, Ciment began a sexual relationship with her drawing teacher, who was 47 and married with two teenage children. In 1996, she published a memoir of their unconventional marriage called Half a Life; now, nearly 30 years later, the widowed author throws a stick of dynamite at that book. In her new memoir, Consent, Ciment reconsiders her love story, disassembling the careful mythologies she’s constructed around her early years. In Half a Life, she insisted that she initiated the first kiss; looking back decades later in the pages of Consent, she remembers how her husband pulled her into a kiss when she hung back after class to ask a question about careers in the arts. “Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later?” Ciment writes. “Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?” Unflinching and bravely told, this postmortem of a marriage is one of the gutsiest books of the #MeToo era.
Indiana Jones meets Star Wars meets Nietzsche in this thrilling galactic heist packed with existential thought. Kitasei’s nail-biting story centers on Maya Hoshimoto, once the galaxy’s most notorious art thief, who now lives a quiet life as an Ivy League archivist. When a dead explorer’s journal materialises at the archive—one that promises to lead her to “the grail,” an artifact with the power to open portals to other solar systems—Maya is forced out of retirement. But she isn’t the only one searching for the grail, and if it falls into the wrong hands, interstellar travel could become impossible. Maya’s quest across the stars is a space opera of the highest order, rich in breakneck pacing and memorable alien accomplices, but it’s in the quest for moral clarity that The Stardust Grail really soars. As Maya journeys from planet to planet, Kitasei offers a profound allegory about the dangers of colonisation, taking this rousing romp to the next dimension.
When 30-something Lauren returns to her London flat late at night, she finds her husband waiting at the door. There’s just one problem: When Lauren left the house, she was single. She quickly discovers that her attic is generating an endless supply of husbands; as soon as one goes up, another comes down, and her life re-forms around him. At first, Lauren wonders which husband she can live with for now as she seeks a suitable plus-one for an upcoming wedding; then, which husband she can live with forever; and ultimately, which version of her life and herself she can live with. In this warm, wise, and bittersweet debut, Gramazio delivers a moving meditation on the paradox of choice in modern dating (and modern life).
In Wayne’s latest novel, we see “the real winners of America” through the wide eyes of Conor O’Toole, a college athlete raised by working-class parents. Fresh out of law school, Conor decamps to coastal Massachusetts for a luxurious summer: In exchange for tennis lessons, he’ll receive free lodging on Cutter’s Neck, a gated oceanfront community for the grotesquely wealthy. But Conor has student loans to repay, so when a sharp-tongued divorcée offers to pay twice his hourly rate for more than just tennis lessons, he can’t help but acquiesce. Soon enough, he tumbles into an erotic affair that challenges everything he thought he understood about sex and power; meanwhile, he falls for a young writer. As Conor’s double life spins out of control, one horrifying mistake threatens to punish him for his trespasses among the elite. Gutsy and shocking, The Winner is a palm-sweating thrill ride through the lives of America’s winners and losers alike.
In a series of immersive reported vignettes, the Financial Times’s AI editor takes readers around the globe to investigate the technology’s damaging effects on “the global precariat.” In Amsterdam, she highlights a predictive-policing program that stigmatises children as likely criminals; in Kenya, she spotlights data workers lifted out of brutal poverty but still vulnerable to corporate exploitation; in Pittsburgh, she interviews UberEats couriers fighting back against the black-box algorithms that cheat them out of already-meagre wages. Yet there are also bright spots, particularly a chapter set in rural Indian villages where under-resourced doctors use AI-assisted apps as diagnostic aids in their fight against tuberculosis. Fair-minded but unsparing, Code Dependent is the most lucid reporting yet on a fast-growing human-rights crisis.
Just how much do algorithms control our lives—and what can we do about it? In this eye-opening investigation, Chayka enumerates the insidious ways that algorithms have flattened our culture and circumscribed our lives, from our online echo chambers to the design of our coffee shops. But all is not lost: Chayka argues for a more conscientious consumption of culture, encouraging us to seek out trusted curators, challenging material, and spirited conversations. After reading Filterworld, you’ll be ready to start your “algorithmic cleanse” and get back in touch with your humanity.
In 1977, Adina Giorno is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Then, at age four, she’s “activated” by her extraterrestrial superiors 300,000 light years away on the dying planet Cricket Rice, who task her with reporting back about how humans think and behave. Through a fax machine in her bedroom, Adina transmits astute and often hilarious observations about the confounding behaviour of earthlings (for instance: “human beings don’t like when other humans seem happy”). Meanwhile, she experiences the bittersweetness of growing up; ostracised by the popular clique and mocked for her dark skin, she learns how, sometimes, being human means feeling alien. Warm, witty, and touching, Beautyland is an out-of-this-world exploration of loneliness and belonging.
Set in 1895 at the border between Texas and Mexico, The Bullet Swallower centers on Antonio Sonoro, the scion of a moneyed but deplorable family living in Dorado, Mexico. After a train robbery gone wrong outside of Houston, a shoot-out with the Texas Rangers leaves Antonio’s brother dead and Antonio horrifically disfigured, earning him the nickname “El Tragabalas” (the Bullet Swallower). Antonio’s quest for revenge against the Rangers takes him through the heart of the Texas badlands, where he weighs his violent impulses against the opportunity for repentance. Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative set in 1964, Antonio’s grandson Jaime, a Mexican movie star, transforms his grandfather’s story into a feature film, hoping to redeem the Sonoro name. Linking the two narratives is the mystical stranger Remedio, a reaper of souls guiding the Sonoros toward the light. Rich in lyrical language, gripping action, and enchanting magical realism, The Bullet Swallower augurs a bright future for the new frontier of westerns.
One of our finest practitioners of the short-story form delivers her debut novel at last—and what a novel it is! The Book of Love is a phantasmagoric door stopper rich in characteristically Link-ian pleasures, like the collision of the mundane and the magical. In a coastal New England town called Lovesend, four teenagers investigate how three of them died, only to be resurrected by their music teacher (to whom there’s more than meets the eye). Then Lovesend is transformed by magical happenings as the veil between this life and the afterlife is ripped away, leaving our young heroes desperate to hang on to the real world. Enchanting and immersive, The Book of Love is a landmark achievement from a writer who never stops surprising us.
Fifty years after Studs Terkel’s Working, a historian delivers a comprehensive sequel for the age of late-stage capitalism. Assembled in a polyphonic oral history, Larson presents 101 conversations with American workers from all walks of life, including teachers, nurses, truck drivers, executives, dairy farmers, stay-at-home parents, wildland firefighters, funeral directors, and many more. In the wake of the pandemic and the Great Resignation, Larson’s subjects share their struggles to make ends meet, reckon with economic upheaval, and locate meaning and purpose in their work. Presented together in one thick volume, these often-fascinating anecdotes are a rich portrait of modern-day economic anxiety and social change.
In her latest bravura memoir, Jamison chronicles a wrenching period of rupture and rebirth. When their daughter was 13 months old, Jamison and her husband separated; what followed was a brutal struggle to balance parenthood, work, dating, sobriety, and creative fulfilment, all while the pandemic loomed. Told in overlapping, ever-widening circles of thought, Splinters details Jamison’s struggle to inhabit the roles we ask of women: mother, daughter, lover, friend. At the same time, the book is an intimate tribute to the author’s rapturous love for her daughter. Splinters thrives in this messy, imperfect complexity—in “the difference between the story of love and the texture of living it, the story of motherhood and the texture of living it.” Honest, gutsy, and unflinching, Jamison scours herself clean here and finds exquisite, hard-won joy in the aftermath.
Born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo Territory in New Mexico, Taffa situates her outstanding debut memoir in similar collisions of culture, land, and tradition. Here she recalls the people and places that raised her—especially her parents, who pushed her to idealise the American dream and assimilate through education. Taffa layers in diligent research about her mixed-race, mixed-tribe heritage, highlighting little-known Indigenous history and the shattering injustices of colonial oppression. Together the many strands of narrative coalesce to form a visceral story of family, survival, and belonging, flooding the field with cleansing light.
In 2019, Crosley suffered two keelhauling losses: First her apartment was burglarised and her jewelry stolen, then one month later her friend and mentor Russell Perrault took his own life. For Crosley, the two losses became braided together; “I am waiting for the things I love to come back to me, to tell me they were only joking,” she writes. In this raw and poignant memoir, divided into five sections that correspond to the five stages of grief, she links her frantic desire to recover the stolen jewelry with her inability to bring back Perrault. Leavened by Crosley’s characteristic gimlet wit, this excavation of grief, loss, and friendship leaves a lasting twinge.
In this stirring sequel to his breakout novel, There, There, Orange tells two linked stories: One centers on a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, Jude Star, who’s taken to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and forcibly stripped of his identity and culture. The other traces his modern-day descendants in Oakland, reeling after the powwow shooting that ended There, There. In this wrenching story about the legacy of colonial violence, we see generations of Indigenous characters orphaned from their past. Through poignant resonances between then and now, Orange delivers an epic saga of generational trauma, devastating to behold and impossible to put down.
Cunningham’s sensitive and sophisticated roman à clef centers on David, a 20-something Black man working in a minor fundraising role on an upstart senator’s presidential campaign. The author, who worked in the Obama White House, is clearly writing about an Obama analogue (this eloquent Black senator “project[s] an intimacy that was more astral than real”), but connecting the dots between fact and fiction is the least interesting reading of Great Expectations. As a young father and a college dropout, David struggles to relate to the privileged world of political palm greasing. As the campaign burns toward the White House, Cunningham spins a wise coming-of-age tale about power, idealism, and disillusionment.
In this provocative debut novel, Greer delivers a Frankenstein for the digital age. Sexbot Annie is the perfect girlfriend for her wealthy human owner, Doug. Programmed to please, she cooks, cleans, and adjusts her libido to Doug’s whims. But Annie is an “autodidactic” robot, meaning that she’s always learning and changing. As she experiences jealousy, secrecy, and loneliness, she becomes less perfect to the loathsome Doug and ultimately flees to meet her maker—with dangerous results. Annie’s painful journey of becoming is a poignant parable for the age of AI; it’s a rich text about power, autonomy, and what happens when our creations outgrow us.
James centers on a seminal character from American literature—and yet, seen afresh through Everett’s revelatory gaze, it’s as if we’re meeting him for the first time. Blasted clean of Mark Twain’s characterisation from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the enslaved runaway Jim emerges here as a man of great dignity, altruism, and intelligence. The novel opens in Hannibal, Missouri, where Jim teaches enslaved children to run their speech through a “slave filter” of “correct incorrect grammar,” designed to pacify white people. Then the story settles into Twain’s familiar grooves—on the run together, Jim and Huck raft down the Mississippi River, facing danger, separation, and charlatans aplenty. Along the way, Jim imagines verbal sparring matches with dead philosophers, falls in love with reading, and begins to pen his own story: “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being,” he writes. And so he does. On the road to freeing himself and his family, Jim becomes more self-determined than ever. Clever, soulful, and full of righteous rage, his long-silenced voice resounds through this remarkable novel. Subversive and thrilling, James is destined to become a modern classic.
Originally published on Esquire US
On 20 March, 1995, members of a religious cult released toxic gas in three Tokyo subways, killing 13 people. Some months later, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami happened to be reading the letters page of a banal Ladies’ Home Journal–type magazine in which a reader described her husband’s psychological inability to return to his job at the transit authority after surviving the terrorist attack.
Murakami decided to interview survivors to examine the many traumatic effects of such a horrific event. The resulting book, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, is an oral history in the vein of Studs Terkel. In one of the few moments that come from Murakami and not the victims, he inadvertently summarises one of the core themes of his fiction. Without the ego, he explains, we lose the “narrative” of our identities, which, for him, is vital for our ability to connect with others.
Of course, a narrative is a “story,” and “stories” are neither logic, nor ethics. It is a dream you continue to have. You might, in fact, not even be aware of it. But, just like breathing, you continue incessantly to see this dream. In this dream you are just an existence with two faces. You are at once corporeal and shadow. You are the “maker” of the narrator, and at the same time you are the “player” who experiences the narrative.
Translated by Matthew Carl Strecher
The inescapable duality of human consciousness—that is the terrain of much of Murakami’s fiction. What drew him to this work of reportage also animates his inventions. Murakami’s approach to consciousness is less representational than literal, with many of his characters literally being transported to a realm created by (or wholly inside of) their minds.
These places often appear underground, in inky darkness. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, it’s a vast, cavernous world crawling with creatures called INKlings. The nether realm in Killing Commendatore is referred to as the Path of Metaphor, and the narrator finds the entrance with the help of two figures from a painting.
Murakami’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, features a library with a chilly office deep below the main building, where the narrator converses with the ghost of the previous librarian. And later, after the narrator merges with another character, they can only “meet” as separate people in a “small square room” inside his mind, lit with a single flickering flame. Wells, too, are a recurring motif.
In every instance, the existence of these impossible locations prompts bewilderment from the characters. The reader, too, is left just as confounded. How can a person go inside of himself? How are these characters travelling to these worlds? Are these other worlds real? Why are all these women vanishing all the time? And what’s with all the goddamn cats?
The world of Murakami is a land of mysteries, but perhaps the most pressing enigma has less to do with the meaning of any of his novels and more to do with the unlikeliness of his literary rise. Born in Kyoto in 1949, Murakami came of age in the complicated decades following the devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His middle-class family, as John Wray put it, had a “vested interest in the national culture: his father was a teacher of Japanese literature, his grandfather a Buddhist monk.”
He grew up in Kobe, a port city teeming with American sailors, where he developed his love of Western popular culture: the eclectic forms of jazz, the unadorned minimalism of dime-store genre fiction, the romantic pop of Hollywood movies, the bright and splashy corporate iconography. In the late '60s, he left home to attend Waseda University in Tokyo, at the height of a tense period of student unrest.
In his book Novelist as a Vocation, Murakami characterises the expectations of men at the time and his own acceptance of those norms. “Most guys graduated from college,” he writes, “found work, and then, when things levelled off, got married.” He assumed the exact same future for himself: “It was the way of the world, after all. I had no intention to contravene (for better or for worse) what seemed to be the dictates of common sense.”
Instead, Murakami married young, ran a jazz café called Peter Cat for much of his '20s, dragged his (admittedly tired) heels before finally graduating after seven years, and accepted that “our futures, it seems, don’t always unfold the way we expect.”
For Murakami, this is an understatement. Consider the story of his transformation from jazz-café proprietor to experimental novelist. It began, as he tells it in Vocation, like this: In April 1978, Murakami attended a baseball game at Jingu Stadium in Tokyo. An American player named Dave Hilton hit a double into left field, and when the “satisfying crack” of Hilton’s bat arrived at Murakami’s ears, he thought to himself, apropos of nothing, I think I can write a novel.
And he was right.
Since that moment at the baseball game, Murakami has published 15 novels, five short-story collections, and five works of nonfiction, which have sold millions of copies, been translated in more than 50 languages, and won numerous major prizes. A cinematic adaptation of one of his short stories, “Drive My Car,” won Best International Film at the 2022 Academy Awards. His stories have also been adapted into a video game and in manga form. And ever since the publication of 1Q84 in English in 2011, there have been midnight parties held around the world to celebrate the release of new Murakami novels.
Mind you, this is an artist whose work, as John Updike put it, possesses “a bewildering overflow of possible meanings.” Steeped in Japanese symbolism, literary allusion, and American pop culture, his fiction isn’t exactly the stuff typical best-sellers are made of.
How, then, does a demure jazz-club owner become not only Japan’s perennial Nobel Prize contender but also a sensation the world over?
The most cited reason for Murakami’s global success is his writing style, which stands out in two major ways. First, he eschews some of the conventional elements of Japanese literature. His prose is hip, rhythmic, talky, unadorned, even disaffected. He employs informal pronouns not typically found in “serious” fiction. As an experimental stylist, he caused a bit of a stir when he arrived on the literary scene.
But it was more than just his inventiveness with his native language. Murakami scholar Matthew Carl Strecher describes what he’s alternately referred to as the author’s “nationality-less” style or his “translationese tone,” which he cites as reasons Murakami’s novels seem to work so well in other languages. But these are also backhanded ways of noting, as the Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe said outright, that even though Murakami writes in Japanese, “his writing is not really Japanese.”
To be sure, many of Murakami’s strongest influences came from outside his home country. For instance, he learned English reading American best-sellers, and he came to particularly admire Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, Raymond Chandler, and J.D. Salinger, all of whom he eventually translated into Japanese.
When Murakami toiled over his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, he felt unsatisfied with his initial effort, so he pulled out a typewriter and rewrote it in English; at the time, he had only an elementary grasp of the language. Then he translated his simpler English sentences back into Japanese, cleaning them up as he did so.
This resulted in what Murakami calls “a rough, uncultivated kind of prose.” Combine this stripped-down approach with his irreverent syntax and pop-culture fixations and you’ve got what could be considered an anti-Japanese style. Certainly many of his critics thought so. And for the first fifteen years of his career, as Strecher points out, Murakami “preferred living in Europe, the Mediterranean, or America, anywhere but Japan.”
During the writing of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in the mid-'90s, however, Murakami became newly committed to his home country. “I’m 45 years old, you know,” he told Strecher in October 1994, “and I can’t be a rebel all my life. I think right now may also be a turning point for me.”
No matter his geographical or philosophical loyalties, Murakami has always written about Japanese characters, often in Japanese settings. “I don’t want to write about foreigners in foreign countries,” he told The Paris Review in 2004. “I want to write about us.” Murakami does not read his books in their English translations despite his fluency, telling the writer Roland Kelts, “My books exist in their original Japanese. That’s what’s most important, because that’s how I wrote them.”
Despite their supposedly “nationality-less” affect, Murakami’s novels are not circumstantially Japanese but rather fundamentally so—at least in his interpretation of what that identity means. One thing he does share with his countrymen is kata, meaning “form,” which manifests itself most vividly in his narrative conclusions, such as they are.
Reviewing Murakami’s novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Tim Parks notes that the trajectory for most of the writer’s protagonists involves them “returning, or preparing to return, to some more recognisably traditional community.” Parks continues, “For all the surreal adventure of the loner’s alternative world, it is the world we are familiar with that reassuringly reasserts its dominance. In that sense, these stories are perhaps less revolutionary than they might seem.”
Murakami’s global appeal, then, might exist in the heightened contrast between the unruly, traumatising, consciousness-splitting, ghost-filled world beyond and the comforting, drama-less certitude of the conventional life.
But the pleasures of Murakami aren’t all so high-minded—in fact, the author is beloved for his embrace of familiar tropes, some of which have become so charmingly ubiquitous as to inspire a comic strip called “Murakami Bingo.” Here, a non-exhaustive list of features you will probably find in a Murakami novel:
The story will oscillate between two unconnected narratives that ultimately bridge together. At least one of the narrators will be a single male who lives alone, because of either a recent breakup or a lifestyle not suited to romance. He will listen to and spend a not inconsiderable amount of time thinking about classical music and jazz. At some point, he’ll have sex with a woman for whom he has affection but nothing more; perhaps she’s married. Somewhere in this (often unnamed) narrator’s life, there is a young girl (usually 16) who vanishes from his life, either mysteriously or tragically. He might search for her, a quest that takes him into strange underworlds. Some cats will be there, too, that’s for sure. One might get lost. And sometimes they’ll be able to talk. Other supernatural, mythological, and metaphorical beings—ghosts, unicorns, monsters, figures from paintings—abound. Characters with metonymic names like the Sheep Man, Johnnie Walker, and the Man with the White Subaru Forester menace the background. All of this is recounted with a matter-of-factness that belies the absurdity it’s often describing.
Murakami wields cultural references as literary devices as deftly as Quentin Tarantino. There’s the Proust’s madeleine-esque usage of a Beatles song in Norwegian Wood, instantly transporting the narrator in his memory to his youth. Murakami’s short story “Samsa in Love” reverses the famous transformation in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis so that the protagonist awakens “to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa.” In the George Orwell–haunted IQ84, Janáček’s orchestral piece Sinfonietta is a catalyst for the character Aomame’s realisation that she’s in an alternate dimension. Art, for Murakami, makes the worlds go ’round.
Remember, the creator of these allusive and thorny and non-English works is a global sensation. The odds, it would appear, are stacked against Murakami and yet he thrives internationally. But perhaps it’s not as unlikely as it seems. In an email interview with Philip Gabriel, one of Murakami’s translators, I asked about the author’s ascent, and he said that those unlikely qualities—translated magical-realist fiction filled with unfamiliar symbology and ambiguous endings—“do not, I think, disqualify a writer from international acclaim. Quite the opposite.”
In the US, books in translation sell far fewer copies than those written in English, but many of the handful of foreign authors whose work is critically lauded and lives forever in backlists do, superficially at least, share many qualities with Murakami. For one, they often write with either a magical-realist or postmodern bent—think Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Olga Tokarczuk, Orhan Pamuk, Umberto Eco, Han Kang, et al.
They also, as Murakami does, incorporate into their novels the cultural iconography and folklore of their native countries. Some would say this makes their writing somehow representative of their respective nationalities, while others might argue that our fascination with them is more about our tendency to exoticize foreign lands than it is about our desire to learn about them. Regardless, we have a surprising tolerance for the strange and the alien in our translated literature.
Gabriel also points out the historical circumstances that can occur to encourage Murakami’s popularity. For instance, the translator says, “As [Murakami] has noted himself, his work was surprisingly popular in East Europe in the early 1990s, when the collapse of the old Cold War regimes made people feel like the ground beneath them was unstable, as if the boundaries between real and unreal were blurred.” Sometimes someone else’s awareness of the strange and alien can be a source of reassurance.
While wholly true, these explanations alone don’t quite cover it. After all, there are plenty of writers the world over writing magical realism, and there are plenty of regions dealing with dark political ramifications. In unravelling the chain of events that led to Murakami becoming a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature and a global industry unto himself, it’s important to remember that such an occurrence requires the complicity and talents of translators, editors, and publishers. David Karashima’s Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami depicts the trajectory of transmogrifying Murakami’s magic into English.
In addition to the vital contributions from Murakami’s trio of translators—Gabriel, Alfred Birnbaum, and Jay Rubin—the person whom Karashima cites as particularly integral to Murakami’s ascension is Elmer Luke, a Chinese American editor at the Japanese publisher Kodansha International, whose role at the company was to help its books “break into the US market.”
Luke deftly oversaw the editing and promotion of Murakami’s 1982 novel A Wild Sheep Chase, generating no small amount of literary buzz in New York City with a series of events, interviews, book reviews, and appearances (especially a feat considering Murakami’s extreme reticence as a public figure).
He also gave Robert Gottlieb, then the editor of The New Yorker, a copy of Murakami’s short story “TV People”—the first of many to be printed in the magazine, which was a real boon, personally and professionally, for an author hoping to find an English-speaking readership. Murakami himself gives Luke a lot of the credit: “Luke started the engine.”
When it comes to translating, there’s also the general predicament of doing the actual work, which, as Gabriel explained via email, is extremely nuanced. “Besides the usual challenging aspects of Japanese language you'd expect in any Japanese novel—differences between male and female speech, honorifics, onomatopoeia—Murakami seems to be always pushing himself as a writer, and you find new elements,” he said.
One such element is the unusual speech patterns of some of Murakami’s, let’s say, eccentric characters. “These are a challenge, for sure,” Gabriel told me. “I’ve read papers by linguists in Japan analysing the unusual speech patterns of, for instance, Nakata in Kafka on the Shore, and the Commendatore in Killing Commendatore. And what voice do you adopt for non-human characters, for talking cats in Kafka, and a very polite, talking monkey (“A Shinagawa Monkey”)?”
Gabriel, for his part, has one aim with his translations: “As far as maintaining a ‘Murakami voice’ in the translation, the goal is to convey, as honestly as you can, the voice you hear when you read the original.” Jay Rubin, another of Murakami’s translators, communicated a slightly different result to Roland Kelts, saying, “When you read Haruki Murakami, you’re reading me, at least 95 per cent of the time.”
This is not hubris on Rubin’s part but rather a quirk of linguistics, meaning that Murakami’s translators were just as crucial in creating the “Murakami voice” in the global scene as the author himself. Rubin recalls asking Murakami about the colour of a character’s glasses in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. (“In one scene, a character had black-framed glasses. In another, the frames were brown.”) As Kelts writes in The New Yorker:
The Japanese language acquires much of its beauty and strength from indirectness—or what English-speakers call vagueness, obscurity, or implied meaning. Subjects are often left unmentioned in Japanese sentences, and onomatopoeia, with vernacular sounds suggesting meaning, is a virtue often difficult if not impossible to replicate in English. Alternatively, English is often lauded for its specificity. Henry James advised novelists to find the figure in the carpet, implying that details and accuracy were tantamount to literary expression. Is it possible that Japanese and English are two languages so far apart that translators can only reinvent their voices by creating entirely new works?
In order to “stand on a level playing field with other American authors,” Murakami writes in Vocation, he found his own translators, then brought the completed English version directly to publishers. He began this strategy after his agent, Amanda “Binky” Urban at ICM, told him that “she doesn’t deal in works she can’t read in English.” One cannot underemphasise Murakami’s business savvy, a characteristic not often shared by his fellow novelists.
By now his books have been translated into more than 50 languages—meaning that a large cadre of linguistic adventurers have joined the campaign to spread the gospel of jazz, cats, and other worlds.
They come out at night, it turns out, these Murakami people. As a capper on the end of two months spent embroiled in his disorienting realm, I attended a midnight release party for The City and Its Uncertain Walls in Columbus, Ohio. It happened at Prologue Bookshop, an independent bookstore with what is probably my favourite slogan for such an institution: “Never Skip the Prologue.”
At 10pm on Monday, 18 November, the place was packed. Dan Brewster, the owner, told me he was anxious about the turnout when he first scheduled the event but the response was so great that he had to fill his car with items from the store to make room for all the attendees. It’s no wonder. Prologue is a small boutique, so when it’s filled, it’s filled.
On a table sat Sapporo beers, hōjicha tea, and “Murakami muffins” (what exactly makes them Murakami, I’m not quite sure). Abbey Corcoran, one of Prologue’s booksellers, handed out Murakami totes full of swag: stickers, some Beatles-esque sunglasses, a party-hat-style unicorn horn, the aforementioned Murakami bingo cards, and a lovely pin. Caroline Angell, the assistant buyer, and Tara Ryan-Gallagher, the marketing and events manager, both expressed surprise at how many people were milling about their store.
Prologue closes at eight on weeknights, so there was an after-hours sense of fun to the whole evening. Dan emceed two rounds of trivia (which, save for a couple overly obscure questions, the audience completely slayed), then he randomly selected winners of some pretty nifty door prizes: One was a bottle of Japanese whisky, while another was a signed copy of the new novel.
Murakami has been publishing for almost half a century, yet the release of a new novel—not even a public appearance—can still pack a bookstore in central Ohio on a Monday night. That almost seems as far-fetched as anything from one of his novels.
What struck me most is the irrepressible sense of how normal everyone here is. Murakami, too, repeatedly insists that he’s a completely ordinary person, a totally regular guy. So do his protagonists. The narrator of The City and Its Uncertain Walls says when he’s a teenager that there isn’t much to say about his life or his “average, everyday kind of parents” who did “ordinary, run-of-the-mill” things.
Murakami sees these characters as long-lost twins: “And when I was two years old, one of us—the other one—was kidnapped. He was brought to a faraway place and we haven’t seen each other since.” His heroes, then, are himself if a few things had gone a different way. But they remain normal nonetheless.
This brings us back to the terrain of Murakami’s fiction: the duality of consciousness, the corporeal and the shadow. Normality can only be defined by what isn’t normal. Definitions require parameters. Murakami, in depicting such contrasts of fantasy and reality, places each idea in sharp relief.
And maybe this explains his literary prominence. Readers can journey along with his cavalcade of oddities, his sheep men, his unicorns, his magical towns surrounded by high walls, but they do so with the reassurance of a narrator (and a novelist) who emphasises that he is just like them.
They can witness the world in all its inexplicability, its unrepentant unfairness, its history of cruelty and trauma, and feel comfort in a protagonist who is just as overwhelmed by all of it. Perhaps, then, it is not Murakami’s strangeness that accounts for his success; maybe it’s the world’s.
Originally published on Esquire US
I am no arbiter of cool, but I think anyone would have a difficult time denying the title to Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. For everything they had in common as California natives of the same era writing about many of the same places and people, these two writers had just as many stark contrasts. Even their versions of cool operate in different realms. Didion’s is captured in the many black-and-white photos of her that proliferate in the literary world, from tote bags to bookmarks to nearly every single cover of any book written about her. Hers is a severe, sentence-fragment kind of cool. Babitz’s cool is the charmer’s cool: gregarious, seductive, biting, intimidating, hilarious, sexy. Didion’s cool was quiet and physically unassuming, which she used to her advantage in her reportage. Babitz’s cool was boisterous and socially dominating—the kind of cool that would drink you under the table and then go home with you.
Another contrast: Didion has remained a prominent figure, though she’s become almost ubiquitous in the past two decades, whereas Babitz’s career followed a much (much) rockier path. In fact, until 2015, when an article in Vanity Fair by Lili Anolik sparked renewed interest in Babitz’s work, many of her books were out of print. Anolik then expanded that piece into Hollywood’s Eve, a hybrid biography of Babitz’s life and career spliced together with Anolik’s reflections on her own relationship with Babitz in the aftermath of the Vanity Fair attention. Then, a few years after Hollywood’s Eve, Babitz passed away (one week before Didion did), and Anolik discovered a box of materials she hadn’t seen before, which included a letter Babitz wrote to Didion, a note so telling and revealing and evocative that Anolik had to return to her subject a third time, only now with a compelling foil. The result is Didion & Babitz, truly the culmination of Anolik’s already excellent work on Babitz as well as a brilliantly cutting examination of the complicated legacy of Didion.
Anolik uses the phrase “a man’s woman” to describe both of her subjects in Didion & Babitz, and it struck me as ironic that these two figures could be, as personalities, so appealing to men and yet, as writers, mostly seem to appeal to women. At the very least, much of the commodification of Didion’s and Babitz’s cool is aimed at women. Didion in particular is so universally known that pretty much any woman embarking on a literary career will inevitably be faced, again and again, with her essays. Katie Roiphe, in In Praise of Messy Lives, puts it this way: “I don’t think I have ever walked into the home of a female writer, aspiring writer, newspaper reporter, or women’s magazine editor and not found, somewhere on the shelves, a row of Joan Didion books.” In Brown Album, Porochista Khakpour puts it a little differently: “I have read Didion my whole life and have been told I should worship Didion my whole life.”
Understandably, many women have a complicated relationship with Didion. But what relationship, if any, do men have with her? And what about Babitz, whose reputation as a “groupie” often discounts her credibility? Is it because of the “Cool Girl” label? Do men think these writers will only reach women? Or are men reluctant to learn the truth about how women think, live, believe? Are they afraid of what they’ll learn? About women? About themselves?
When Didion and Babitz started out, they entered a hostile literary environment where some men spoke of women writers like this:
At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn.
Norman Mailer, ladies and gentlemen. Never mind the fact that he wrote this in 1959, the same year Shirley Jackson published The Haunting of Hill House and Lorraine Hansberry premiered A Raisin in the Sun—Mailer manages to toss pretty much any non-white, non-male, non-straight, and non-Jewish person into his pool of also-wrotes. This is the secret core of prejudice: It is never isolated. It will always indict more types of people under its purview. In this way, bigotry is all-inclusive.
Let’s start with Didion. Her literary career began officially in 1956, when as a senior at UC Berkeley she won the “Prix de Paris” essay contest administered by Vogue, where she would work as a copywriter until the mid-sixties. Anolik points out that although Didion liked to wax proletariat, as in her claim that “the people with whom I preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations,” she was, as Anolik writes, “every inch the all-American bourgeois girl.” She was also decidedly ambitious. At the end of eighth grade, she gave the graduation speech in front of her classmates and their families. In high school, she sat on the Sophomore Ball committee, worked on the yearbook staff, was elected to the student council, and hobnobbed with the children of elites, such as Nina Warren, the daughter of California’s then-governor Earl Warren (of the Warren Commission fame). At Berkeley, she joined a sorority, where she befriended Barbara Brown, the daughter of Pat Brown, another California governor. Also during this period, she wrote her first short stories, reported for the school’s newspaper (including an interview with the poet W.H. Auden), and won a place in the same guest-editor program at Mademoiselle that Sylvia Plath had won two years before, which she would later immortalise in The Bell Jar.
At Vogue and later Life and The Saturday Evening Post, Didion launched a career as an essayist and journalist, though her true ambition lay in fiction. Indeed, her first book was a novel, Run River, which debuted in 1963, but it wasn’t until the publication of her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem that Didion began to establish herself as a major writer and generational voice. As the sixties gave way to the seventies, she was counted among the ranks of the New Journalists, an umbrella term for magazine writers (from Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson to Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin) who challenged the conventions of journalistic style and form. For decades, she worked as a Hollywood screenwriter with her husband and co-writer, John Gregory Dunne, though few of their screenplays were actually filmed; they were more prolific as script doctors. She was known for her detached style, often referred to as “cool,” which works perfectly in concert with the black-and-white Julian Wasser photos of her that feature on the covers of any book written about her.
From a certain perspective, one might reasonably assume that the Didion so described—native of the West Coast, working in Hollywood, participating in a nonfiction revolution, an epitome of Cool wearing sunglasses in ads for French luxury brands—would lean, or even swing, toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. But although her allegiances changed and evolved throughout her long career, she tended, on the whole, toward the right. Her perspective has been described alternately as “a Goldwater Republican” (Bret Easton Ellis), “a dyed-in-the-wool Republican” (Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar), and “among the most fundamentally conservative writers in America” (Thomas Mallon) on the one hand, while on the other she’s been called an “apostate” (along with John Leonard) by her former editor William F. Buckley. Additionally, one of her iconic black-and-white portraits was emblazoned on a tote bag for the website Literary Hub, a decidedly liberal publication. She’s also been described as a feminist by writer Evelyn McDonnell; “not a feminist, my ass,” is how she puts it. Writers as various as the conservative firebrand Christopher Hitchens, the pop culture writer Alana Massey, and The New Yorker critic Hilton Als have considered themselves devotees.
That’s because Didion isn’t so easy to pin down politically. She herself characterised her politics as “pretty straightforward, stay-out-of-our-hair politics,” the “same as they were when I was voting for [Barry] Goldwater.” She dismissed feminism in the seventies, refused to read Virginia Woolf, and once declared, “I agree with every single thing that Norman Mailer puts down on paper” and that he “is one of the few people who can write about sex without embarrassing me.” She could, at times, espouse a by-your-own-bootstraps ideology we still hear right-wingers spout today. Yet she could also accurately diagnose the media’s racist groupthink about the Central Park Five in 1989, see through the Republicans’ mission to impeach Bill Clinton by any means, and generally capture the duplicitous realpolitik of twentieth-century America. During the rise of Ronald Reagan, a disillusioned Didion registered as a Democrat—“the first member of my family (and perhaps in my generation still the only member) to do so”—only to discover that the switch “did not involve taking a markedly different view on any issue.”
In American politics, Didion remained her most pitiless and unforgiving; her repeated mention of Goldwater seems spiked with equal parts nostalgia and resentment. In the foreword to Political Fictions, Didion writes, “It was clear for example by 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.” In 2001, she remarked in an interview with L.A. Weekly, “I don’t know who is represented by the current Democratic Party, or the current Republican Party.” Her disillusionment with the American political system might well be her greatest gift to the men of today: By falling out of line with mainstream conservatism while never fully embracing conventional liberalism, Didion maintained an outsider status that both elevated her analysis and made her career, retrospectively, a benchmark against which to measure the right’s cyclical descent into fascism.
Here is how a contemporary man should approach reading Didion to get the very most out of the experience: One can follow Didion’s trajectory, her merciless observation of American political and cultural life, as a narrative of how American conservatism has radically shifted since the sixties. Not that the Republicans of this era were moral paragons by any stretch, but there is one hell of a contrast between Eisenhower's warning about the military industrial complex and Donald Trump nakedly trumpeting it. If Didion was a “dyed-in-the-wool Republican” in her early career, how does she compare to our present-day diehards? How do her conclusions (as vague or as lofty as they may be at times) about American power and money, about the futility of our electoral process, the crass, calculated cynicism of it—how do these square with conservative thought now?
Reading Didion, then, is to read through our recent history as much as it is to read about it. Men can read her essays, her reportage, her immaculate nonfiction for Didion’s own perspective, but what’s most productive is to read her against everyone else.
Eve Babitz is another story altogether. Her Cool is the playful, flamboyant type. Her writing brims with intelligence and insight, but its lessons and insights focus on individual human foibles rather than macro concerns about society as a whole. She was an It Girl, a groupie, a hanger-on, and a legendary charmer. In her writing, which may not possess the same skill as Didion’s, we find a frank and guileless account of a generation from a unique perspective—one that’s usually overlooked, if not downright disdained. It’s most succinctly–albeit grossly–put by Julian Wasser, the photographer behind Didion’s iconic images. Wasser also shot an iconic image featuring Babitz: a photo of artist Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a nude Eve. Anolik adroitly uses Wasser’s characterisation of the two experiences to typify the contrast between Didion’s and Babitz’s reputations:
When I asked Wasser if he’d instructed Joan on how to dress or where to stand during their session, he replied, his tone reverent, “With a girl like Joan, you just don’t tell her what to do.” When I asked him why he’d chosen Eve for the Duchamp photo, he replied, his tone contemptuous, “She was a piece of ass.”
“A piece of ass” like Babitz, though, could gain access to areas even unassuming reporters like Didion could not. She didn’t hobnob with rock stars, famous artists, and celebrities to get their stories; rather, she told stories about hobnobbing with rock stars, famous artists, and celebrities because that’s how she lived. They were her stories.
Babitz had an enormous pool to draw from. Her mother was an artist, and her father was a studio violinist. Her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. As a child growing up in Hollywood (she would attend Hollywood High), she was exposed to the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Bernard Herrmann, Kenneth Rexroth, and Bertrand Russell. In her early twenties, Babitz wrote, she was “alive with groupie fervour, wanting to fuck my way through rock ‘n’ roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the Sunset Strip.” She was, in Anolik’s wonderful phrasing, “a low-high, profane-sublime bohemian-aristocrat.”
Babitz would go on to do things like design the album cover for Buffalo Springfield Again; introduce Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí; appear as an extra in The Godfather Part II; and sleep with the likes of Steve Martin, Glenn Frey, Harrison Ford, Jackson Browne, and Joseph Heller. She chronicled some of these scenes, in her best work, with stunning fluency, despite the fact that she “didn’t want to be a writer; it would scare men.” This line comes from the title story of her collection Black Swans, and she elaborates on her view of writers: “I wanted to look up to and admire men, not be like Joan Didion, whose writing scared the hell out of most of the men I knew.” A bit of deflection, to be sure, as Babitz cared so deeply about but felt so inadequate for literary creation that minor discouragements delayed her apprenticeship. Her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, didn’t come out until 1974, even though she’d completed a draft of a novel “about being Daisy Miller, only from Hollywood” 10 years earlier, when she was 20.
Her second book, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A., is her best book, as it displays most fully the kind of uncomfortable truths Babitz could so casually wield. The whole book, a brief prefatory note explains, is essentially an attempt by Eve, the narrator, to “get this one I’m in love with” to read her writing by making it all about him. In reality, this was the artist Paul Ruscha; in the book, his name is Shawn. In Didion & Babitz, Anolik describes Slow Days as depicting Los Angeles with “a total lack of interest in approving or disapproving of its characters’ morals.” This, ultimately, is where the great value of Babitz’s work lies. Her stories and essays come without any moralising and without any attempts to mould reality into a recognizable shape. Yet so much of her writing has an air of truth to it, and an authority in its vision. Her assessments of herself and those in her orbit could be brutal, even unkind—but the truth is in the character Eve’s firm belief in them. Babitz’s devastatingly frank voice and savage wit, in life and in prose, still hit you with a pang of recognition, only she doesn’t instruct you what to do with the feeling. For instance, when Anolik’s Vanity Fair piece renewed interest in Babitz’s work, leading to reprints of her books, her line to Anolik was this: “It used to be only men who liked me. Now it’s only girls.”
In her final years (she died in 2021), Babitz veered into right-wing paranoia and delusion, ranting to Anolik on the phone about how she was having an affair with Donald Trump (which obviously wasn’t true). Anolik told me how she worried that Babitz would run into trouble on the streets of West Hollywood, where she lived. She wanted to don one of those bright red MAGA hats, “so I’d buy her Chinese MAGA hats—you know, MAGA in Chinese characters,” Anolik said, in order to obscure her rabid Trumpism without her knowing. “She loved those hats.” She lived in filth, the stench so bad Anolik could barely stand it. “I think there was a dead cat in her place,” she told me, “a dead something.” But despite the tragic nature of where she ended up, Babitz’s record of late-twentieth-century America is a gift from someone canny enough and charming enough to gain entry to its most rarefied spaces.
“If a man is looking for insights and angles into women,” Anolik told me, “I’d recommend Eve, if only because I believe that Eve, at her best—by which I mean, in Slow Days, Fast Company, her one masterpiece—was a better translator of female sensations and stratagems. In Slow Days, Eve offers to readers a study of feminine consciousness that has extraordinary charm and verve, not to mention expansiveness."
In her first book on Babitz, Hollywood’s Eve, Anolik categorized the writer with the New Journalists, which struck me as arguable, perhaps, but not really accurate. When I asked her about it, she was quick to say that she no longer sees it this way. “I’m so glad I got a second crack at Eve,” she said, because for Anolik, Babitz now falls into the tradition of the “artist-adventuress,” an “American Colette.” I completely agree. Her antecedents were figures like the Russian writer Teffi and the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, her contemporaries the art groupies Ultra Violet and Candy Darling, and her descendants Gawker’s Emily Gould and the poet/essayist Kim Addonizio. These writers were best in the short form, didn’t always produce large catalogues of work, and suffered, personally and professionally, from cultures dismissing them as “pieces of ass,” as gossips, as gushing TMI-coded dilettantes.
Neither Didion nor Babitz ever had delusions of swaying men to the side of women.
Here, at last, is the most important lesson Babitz can teach men: Women who live unconventionally, women who drink and do drugs, women who fuck, women who talk, women who reject you at the bar, and women who make art out of all of those things—their inner lives are just as deep as yours, if not deeper. Their perspectives show them a side of society men rarely glimpse: the barrage of dismissal and obstruction and condemnation, and the constant threat of violence and subjugation. Babitz, who was as big a fan of feminism as Didion, was a victim of this herself. She internalized a belief that women shouldn’t write because it might put off men. Can you imagine if one of the twentieth century’s most lively and original chroniclers never wrote a word because of the insecurities of men?
I say these are the lessons from Didion and Babitz that men might learn, but after last week’s election results, I don’t have much faith in American men, no matter how many writers not like them we expose them to. Women have told men about the danger they regularly feel. They’ve written at length about sexism, chauvinism, the patriarchy; they’ve campaigned for suffrage, bodily autonomy, marital agency, sexual freedom, and financial equity. Men know these things. Have known these things. And yet here we are, with a nation of men for whom rampant misogyny and sexual predation are not disqualifying. Neither Didion nor Babitz ever had delusions of swaying men to the side of women. In a 2000 piece on Martha Stewart, Didion remarked that Stewart’s success was not that of “a woman who made the best of traditional skills” but rather “the story that has historically encouraged women, even as it has threatened men.” For all the strides made by women in the past 60 years, we’re still living, sadly, in Norman Mailer’s America.
So men can go ahead and read Didion and Babitz as much as they want, but I can’t help recalling something Babitz, ever the cutting realist, said after she went through a horrifically painful fire accident in the late nineties: “People think this will make me a better person. It won’t.”
Originally published on Esquire US
There’s a long-standing theory that in times of real-world strife, readers lose their appetite for fictional horrors. That has never been true. The carnage of pulp magazines only gained popularity after the world wars, while Vietnam and the end of the hippie dream led directly to The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and the ascendency of Stephen King. And now our freshly unstable world is proving fertile ground for the growth of new budding nightmares.
So far, 2024 has been brimming with fantastic horror stories. I’ve done my absolute best to curate a list of the must-read titles released up to this point. The most promising element of the list below is in the breadth, depth, and variety of the darkness at play. Unlike previous “golden” eras of horror, there is no dominant trend. Rather, horror writers are digging their own grim tunnels into territory old and new. Retro haunted-house stories sit alongside extreme body horror. Whimsical horror comedies work in tandem with serious political subcurrents. Horror is not just responding to the perma-crisis we’re all living through; it’s providing respite and escape from it. Horror teaches as much as it terrifies. It heals as much as it hurts.
This list contains titles from the whole spectrum of the genre. There are stories to satisfy the most bloodthirsty tastes, and some that will lead the uneasy on their first forays into the shadowy end of the library. Stay with us, because we’ll be updating the list as the year continues.
Enjoy. It’s good to be scared.
In 2023’s Fever House, Keith Rosson brought the world to the edge of apocalypse. It’s a dense, punk-inflected pressure cooker of street violence, shady government shenanigans, and diabolical magic. The sequel, The Devil by Name, is both more of the same and something quite different. Following the broadcast of Fever House’s cursed audio file, the zombie-esque menace has spread beyond Portland. A reluctant group of survivors are pulled into a confrontation with a rogue government agent and a rising demonic power. Rosson continues to trace the spreading ripples generated by the first book’s cliff-hanger ending but replaces the tight, real-time focus with a nightmarish road trip across a broken America. It’s a bigger story, more relaxed and sprawling in the telling, but with the same unpredictable energy and flights of comic-book excess. My advice: Read this duology as one single grand, mutating epic.
Very early in Sacrificial Animals, there’s a scene that warns us Kailee Pedersen is not screwing around. The cruelty of a foxhunt reverberates throughout the novel, hanging over Nick and Joshua’s reluctant return to their Nebraska farm, where their father has called them to witness his dying. All of the tension between father and sons can be traced back to that early brutality, but Pedersen’s Gothic anti-pastoral is twisted further by the presence of Joshua’s wife, Emilia, whose Asian heritage allows a late injection of Chinese folklore into midwestern horrors. Pedersen draws on her own childhood as a Chinese adoptee growing up on a farm, and the authenticity shows. Restrained and ornate though the prose may be, Sacrificial Animals is savage in its details and saturated with dread.
Pay the Piper is Daniel Kraus’ second posthumous collaboration with the great George Romero. As in 2020’s The Living Dead, Kraus worked from notes to complete Romero’s vision, but this time around—perhaps freed from the weight of the filmmaker’s undead iconography—Kraus’ feels like the driving imagination of the story. The plot centres on Alligator Point, a town as mired in injustice as it is in swampland. It’s a classic small-town horror setup, with personal histories and enmities that reach far back into history and entwine with the presence of the Piper, a shape-shifting, child-killing entity who appears sparingly but with startling violence. There are surface-level comparisons to be made to well-known horror stories (most obviously, Stephen King’s IT), but Kraus couldn’t write a derivative book if he tried. Symbolic sceneries, Cajun patois, and the fey charm of Pontiac, Kraus’ nine-year-old protagonist, combine into a satisfyingly eccentric take on local monsters and ancient histories.
A Laird Barron collection is always a reason to celebrate, and this one has been gestating longer than usual. Not a Speck of Light, his first collection of stories in eight years, cements Barron’s standing as the contemporary horror writer most adept at meshing cosmic high strangeness with muscular noir—like Jack London dabbling in the Lovecraftian mythos. Stories contain eerie entities attracted to disaster sites; meanwhile, a cyborg war dog reflects on its immortal war against humanity’s many enemies, and in “The Glorification of Custer Poe,” we meet a Confederate soldier pursued by his own grizzly sins (and yes, that’s a pun of sorts!). These are some of the more easily resolved stories in the collection; others you may have to read slowly, or more than once, to fully grasp their slippery logic. This is the magic of Laird Barron: He provides too many pieces of the jigsaw and an excess of possible pictures to assemble. It’s our job to find the one that works. Nowhere is this technique more effective than in the collection’s penultimate story, “Tiptoe”—the best horror story I’ve read in many years.
A fellow master of concise, uncanny horrors, Mariana Enriquez returns to the short story, following her experiment with maximalism in 2023’s Our Share of Night. The new collection’s title story refocuses the grim real-life fate of Elisa Lam, who’s become a subject of online speculation after her body was found in a hotel water tank in 2013. In lesser hands, such a story could be a travesty of exploitation, but Enriquez has made her name in exposing the mistreatment and brutality meted out to women, often deploying horror as a sheer gauze pulled across the very real violence of the world. Other stories in A Sunny Place for Shady People range from the allusive and elusive to the grimly physical. “Face of Disgrace” literalises the notion of faceless victimhood, while “Hyena Hymns” features a haunted dress that imposes the wounds of historical torture onto the wearer. The best stories, however, concern children. “The Refrigerator Cemetery” depicts a macabre game played among the shells of abandoned appliances, and in “Black Eyes” Enriquez repurposes another famous piece of Internet lore in the attempts of two suspect children to penetrate the fragile safety of the narrator’s car. Chilling, grotesque, and slyly funny, A Sunny Place for Shady People is the author’s return to what she does best—and better than most.
Liminality is having a bit of a moment in horror: The Backrooms is clipping TikTokers out of reality, Silent Hill 2 is back with better-rendered mist, and films like Skinamarink and The Outwaters are setting film festivals achatter. Into this zeitgeist strides Sofia Ajram with a big literary “hold my beer.” Her debut novella traps the suicidal narrator in a limitless subway station. Is this impossible space real? Does it exist as an externalisation of his internal mental state or as an allegory for depression? And what, if anything, is in there with him? Coup de Grâce is equal parts fun and frantic desolation. In her references to early online folklore and a late metafictional flourish, Ajram speaks to horror’s uber-contemporary fascination with trauma and mental health but also to the current vogue for ’90s and ’00s nostalgia. Like all good liminal architecture, Coup de Grâce contains far more than its space should allow, and it unfolds like cursed origami.
Rachel Harrison has a special knack for reconfiguring horror tropes as a reflection of post-millennial angst. She’s worked with witches, werewolves, cults, and now, with So Thirsty, she’s come for the vampires. When risk-averse Sloane and her hedonistic friend Naomi cross paths with a band of vamps, they’re forced to confront the realities of an immortal life lived in the shadows. It’s not all bad news, though—there’s passion, freedom, and friendship to be found once the ticking clock of a normal life comes to a halt. Harrison blends two traditions of vampire fiction into one story: There’s gore and violence aplenty but also eroticism and romance. Linking both strands is a pointed observation on female aging in contemporary culture. It’s a sex-drizzled, blood-soaked treat, but like all of Harrison’s fiction, it has something angry and urgent to say about the conditions of reality.
Novellas are great, but too often they leave me wanting more. More character, more plot, more incident, and more emotion. Rest Stop is a full serving of all those ingredients in just 150 pages. By the time Abraham is locked into a gas-station bathroom by a homicidal maniac, we already know about his unrequited love, his conflicted Jewish faith, and his fragile relationships with friends and family—and we’re only a few dozen pages in! It’s a bravura feat of efficiency that leaves Cassidy plenty of room to eke out Abraham’s torment at the hands of his googly-eyed assailant. What follows is part creature feature (arachnophobes beware!) and part Beckettian character study. My point is that Cassidy packs a whole damn story into Rest Stop, without a word wasted. This is what a novella is supposed to be.
It’s 1962 and Jemma Barker has answered a strange invitation to leave Chicago for New Orleans, to take up employment in the mansion of the reclusive Duchon family. Once she arrives, she finds a Halloween advent calendar of Southern Gothic delights: ghosts, curses, hidden rooms, family secrets, and incestuous desires. Simmering beneath it all is the more awful and persistent trace of colouirism, which Sandeen is clear to distinguish from the genre’s more often tread and binary treatment of prejudice. Heavy as the theme is, This Cursed House is never less than absolutely fun. It’s self-aware but never self-conscious and Sandeen pauses the breakneck pace only to ensure that you have a moment to fully grasp the secrets buried in its lineages and family trees, like Wuthering Heights transposed to the Big Easy. It’s such ripe Gothic that if you squeezed it, I’m half convinced blood-red juice would stain your hands.
This novel may open with a woman in a nightgown fleeing a creepy asylum, but The Redemption of Morgan Bright is far from a traditional Gothic chiller. When Morgan inveigles her way into Hollyhock Asylum, she’s seeking answers regarding her sister’s mysterious death. Once inside, she’s assaulted by punishing systems of control and the oppressive presence of another personality inside her own head. Is she mad? Has the system made her so? Or is something else going on? (Spoiler: It’s option three.) This novel provides a chilling twist on the unreliable-narrator trope, as well as a contemporary restaging of Nellie Bly’s exposure of psychiatric cruelties. Panatier nods often to the past (the warden is named Althea Edevane, a name dripping with Victorian Gothic menace), but within the asylum walls, echoes of antiquated maltreatment go hand in hand with future-punk exploitation. The Redemption of Morgan Bright suggests that our treatment of the vulnerable never changes. Or if it does, it’s only for the worse.
Nevill’s stories are full of tight interiors, narrow minds, and entities that slip under a reader’s defences. In All the Fiends of Hell, he’s done it again but on a broader apocalyptic canvas. Granted, we only see the British portion of Armageddon, but that’s more than enough. Following a night of mass abduction by otherworldly forces, a few weak, sickly survivors are left alone under a crimson sky. Well, not alone exactly—there are also hideous monsters who can only be seen in the ruby-red light. We join an everyman and two children on a desperate race to the ocean, carrying the last, lingering shreds of forlorn hope. But hopelessness is the point of the novel, whose central question is: What keeps us going when nothing good remains? All the Fiends of Hell is an especially grim and very British Armageddon. It’s The Road as envisioned by Ken Loach. It’s also Nevill’s best book in some time.
The title of Malfi’s latest novel sets expectations of Stephen King or Norman Rockwell’s Americana. It turns out to be much stranger than that. When old friends reunite in their hometown, an inevitable showdown with their past quickly tips into the surreal. Weird ash falls from the sky, basements become liminal spaces, and a grid of hairy wires is discovered just beneath the surface of the town. Amid all of this craziness, Malfi does what he does best: He creates fully fleshed-out characters and pitches them into uncomfortable and very realistic situations. Small Town Horror defies assumption. It’s no nostalgia trip back to a rosy childhood, nor is it an ode to friendship. Thomas Wolfe famously wrote, “You can’t go home again”; in this novel, Malfi asks why the hell you would want to.
What a showcase 2024 has been for the imaginative range of LP Hernandez! One of his two entries on this list, No Gods, Only Chaos is a collection of stories ranging from dark fantasy to creature feature, containing some of the most abhorrent crimes imaginable. Each story is an act of ventriloquism. Whether Hernandez is adopting the dust-bowl drawl of “From the Red Dirt,” mouthing Gen Z idioms in “The Last of Our Kind,” or exploring the broken mind of a neurodivergent killer in “The Bystander,” he obscures himself entirely within his characters and narrative voices. "Family Annihilator” is the most memorable story in the collection and even darker than its title suggests. It’s an utterly shocking piece of fiction, though not without a trace of void-black comedy. Maybe memorable is too mild a word. Unforgettable, incurable, bedeviling… it’s a story that leaves a stain. Anyone looking for a truly exciting new name in horror fiction will find something here to love or flinch away from.
There are two major strands of anxiety in Tremblay’s work. One is the psychological ambiguity of his characters; the second is his appetite for experimentation and self-awareness. Horror Movie is the most effective balancing of the two since the author’s landmark A Head Full of Ghosts. A retrospective arc details the making of a cursed film in the nineties, while in the present day, the lone surviving member of the cast works toward a remake. Any dissonance between the two accounts is further complicated by a full reproduction of the original script—and kudos to Tremblay for coming up with a screenplay that evolves from a parody of art horror to a genuinely disturbing piece of work. There’s plenty of meta commentary about horror cinema (including one agonizingly extended scene that’s just begging for a bold director to adapt), but Tremblay hasn’t forgotten to include moments of crowd-pleasing savagery, torture, and dismemberment. It makes for a book that equally thrills the head and the gut.
There have been plenty of nostalgic horror novels in recent years, but few have captured the laconic charm of the eighties and nineties paperback boom quite like Lost Man’s Lane. The elevator pitch would be “Boy takes a summer job as the assistant to a private detective and helps solve a supernatural crime,” but that’s really only one element of this long, meandering tale involving rattlesnakes, rock climbing, young love, family dynamics, and unusual friendships. Carson manages to tie off each strand in a neat and emotionally satisfying bow, even if it seems unlikely. There’s a lazy pace to his plotting, more reminiscent of a sprawling bildungsroman like The Goldfinch than any contemporary horror fiction. Lost Man’s Lane is the kind of horror novel “they” used to write. A big swing of a book, best enjoyed in a hammock with ice-cold lemonade.
Speaking of nostalgic horror, King’s latest collection of short stories reads like a homecoming. Most of the dozen stories feature a callback or a thematic link to his expansive bibliography; they also vary significantly in length, from the two-hundred-page crime nightmare “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” to razor-sharp shorts like “The Fifth Step.” The shorter stories read like nasty little jokes that would be comfortably at home in King’s collections from the seventies and eighties, while “The Dreamers” is proof that he’s still more than capable of a writing a full-blooded nightmare to equal Revival or Pet Sematary, complete with Lovecraftian hints of things lurking beneath the wall of rationality. The best of the stories benefit from a life well-lived, with a shared focus on grief and mortality. It’s evident in the horror of “Rattlesnakes” (an unexpectedly haunting pseudo sequel to Cujo) and in the gentler man’s-best-friendship of “Laurie.” The closing story stands above all, though. “The Answer Man” packs a whole human life into eighty pages, mundane but with occasional glimpses of the mystery beyond. It’s a story only King could write, and we should all be grateful he has.
Fans of Gothic fiction will feel immediately at home in Midnight Rooms. It is 1840, and the orphaned, biracial Orabella subsists on the cusp of spinsterhood before gambling debts and plot conventions lead her into marriage with the devilishly appealing Elias Blakersby. So far, so retro, and much of the reader’s early comfort is due to Orabella’s familiar discomfort in her new home. However, once the story settles in the gloomy Korringhill Manor, Coles defies expectations. As Orabella endures long nights locked in her quarters, interspersed with animalistic revelries and dreams of meat, the faux-Victorian framework collapses into fragments and fever dreams more recognisable from modernist fiction. Imagine Jane Eyre or Rebecca as rewritten by Virginia Woolf. I could not, hand on heart, say that I’ve grasped all the implications and secrets of this book or its strange household, but the disorienting flow of language makes Midnight Rooms one of the most remarkably written books of the year.
Only Stephen Graham Jones could get away with this. A first-person, stream-of-consciousness, coming-of-age memoir about the making of a serial killer—it shouldn’t work. It should be received with the same ire and disgust as American Psycho. But the difference between the two books—and the difference between Stephen Graham Jones and Bret Easton Ellis—is emotion. Patrick Bateman was a dispassionate automaton; I Was a Teenage Slasher’s Tolly Driver is a sympathetic outcast and a victim of fate. Ellis wrote to make a point; Jones writes to tell a story and to move the reader. At different moments, we’re moved to laughter, because Jones is very happy to push toward parody or comic-book excess, but at others, especially in the novel’s later stages, we’re more likely moved to tears. If there’s any concern that Jones had nothing left to say about slashers in the wake of his Indian Lake Trilogy, this book puts it to bed. I Was a Teenage Slasher is somehow ridiculous and grounded, affected and honest, horrifying and heartfelt, all at the same time.
Valencia grew up on the West Coast and lives on the East Coast, but her debut collection is fixated on the desert states. In Mystery Lights, the American Southwest is a stage for slippage between reality and the weird, between horror and beauty, and between speculative and literary fiction. A young girl lost in a cave system meets the mutants who call it home. A newlywed couple’s marriage is founded on—and tested by—their shared sensitivity to ghosts. A corporate wellness retreat (look away, Gwyneth!) is a site for occultism and monstrous transformation. The collection is published by Tin House, which should set expectations about the stories’ literary leanings, but Valencia is not afraid to dip a toe—hell, her whole foot—into the speculative uncanny. If you enjoy the work of Kelly Link or Carmen Maria Machado, you will find much satisfaction in Mystery Lights.
The follow-up to the crunching 2022 hit The Devil Takes You Home is, in some ways, more of the same. Once again, Iglesias casts the grit and gore of street violence against a cosmic backdrop, and he doesn’t hold back from prolonged, brutal beatdowns. However, whereas Devil felt like an assault on the reader’s spirit and good mood, House of Bone and Rain alleviates the bleakness with moments of camaraderie. Rather than one man on a mission, Iglesias sets a group of young, wild friends against the bigger fish responsible for the murder of one of their mothers. The violence is harsh and unflinching but refreshing in its honesty. As one of the heroes says early in the proceedings, this book is not about “the macho bullshit we were raised on.” Instead, House of Bone and Rain is a lament for young, dumb men and the codes they feel pressured to live by. It’s not all human tragedy, though. In a delightful nod to Lovecraft, it turns out that there are even bigger fish playing their part from just offshore…
Each entry in the Clown in a Cornfield trilogy has been bigger and stranger than the last. What began as a sociopolitical spin on the teen slasher became, in the second volume, a commentary on nostalgia, disinformation, demagoguery, and the events of 6 January (among other things). Now, in The Church of Frendo, Cesare caps his project (so far) with a novel that asks questions about religion and the myth of America itself. This all sounds very grand, and rest assured, Cesare packs in plenty of grind-house violence and folk-horror traditions—he even finds a spot for professional wrestling and Juggalos. Just the list of ingredients in this short blurb alone should give you some idea of how madcap and unexpected this book is. Indeed, the idea behind Clown in a Cornfield is so audacious that it’s difficult to believe Cesare could extend it over three volumes and stick the landing. Yet he does. The Church of Frendo is the unpredictable climax to an inimitable trilogy and proof that making horror political doesn’t make it any less fun.
I rarely consider nonfiction titles for this list but Bogutskaya’s treatise on the state of horror is a must-read for anyone seeking a refreshed perspective on the genre. Focused predominantly on horror movies released in the past decade, Feeding the Monster is a worthy successor to Stephen King’s Danse Macabre and other canonical studies. It’s written with the critical rigour of an academic review but invested with all the humour and personality of the smartest blog posts from back when the Internet was fun. One minute Bogutskaya is discussing the symbolic function of hunger in horror or debating the overuse of trauma narratives; the next she’s telling us about her childhood memories of Freddy Krueger or explaining how horror helps her frame an agonizing memory of a hospital visit. It’s the perfect balance of the personal and the political with which to survey a genre that has always ricocheted between those two poles. Read it and you’ll feel smarter the next time you watch a horror movie, while the extensive watch list in the appendix will ensure you have plenty to see.
Really good haunted houses are few and far between. These days, the spirit-infested home too often falls into high camp or is put to such elevated metaphorical purpose that it forgets to actually be scary. The House of Last Resort has no such problem. When Tommy and Kate relocate from the US to a drowsy Italian village, it’s supposed to be a better life. Of course, their new abode makes a mockery of this well-being kick. The titular house comes complete with hidden rooms, hallucinations, and a historical entanglement in the Catholic Church’s struggle against some very persistent demons. Golden draws on the very best of seventies and eighties pulp-horror influences, with hordes of rats, ambulatory corpses, and a grand diabolic finale. But he makes time for quiet moments of chilling intensity, including a kitchen-table conversation that ranks among the most disquieting scenes of the year. The House of Last Resort is horror that goes hard but never forgets to be fun. It’s the author’s finest novel to date.
If you watched the climbing documentary Free Solo and thought, Okay, climbing a nine-hundred-foot cliff face without a rope is scary but you know what it really needs? Murder ghosts!, then Kiefer’s debut will scratch your itch. This Wretched Valley follows four intrepid fools into the deep Kentucky woods, where they plan to map and climb a brand-new ascent. Of course, like any backcountry worthy of a horror fan’s time, their chosen ground is saturated with bloody history. It doesn’t take kindly to interlopers, either, particularly these vain, self-absorbed numskulls. There are comparisons to be made to Scott Smith’s adventure-horror classic The Ruins, but most crucial is Kiefer’s absolute lack of mercy for her characters. For much of the book, you gleefully anticipate their foreshadowed deaths, but the manner of their end is so brutal and so desolate that you can’t avoid a creeping empathy. Kiefer has stared you down. She has more belly for this than you. She wins.
Lebbon’s most recent novels serve as a loose thematic trilogy, connected by a focus on high-octane adventure and a backdrop of quickening climate disaster. However, whereas Eden and The Last Storm were genre-splicing affairs, Among the Living goes full-bore on the horror, pitting an uneasy assemblage of climate activists and mineral excavators against a viral threat long buried in the Arctic tundra. This is no mere illness, though. What Lebbon conjures up is an intelligent disease, able to control its hosts’ thoughts and behaviour, creating a paranoiac trap in which the characters cannot even trust their own motivations. It’s easy to think of comparisons—The Thing, The Last of Us—but Lebbon brings a flair for action scenes and his experience with endurance sport, propelling the story with unexpected physical and psychological dimensions. Fast-paced, compulsive, suitably horrifying: Among the Living reads like Michael Crichton having a particularly bad dream.
If you’re familiar with Canada’s Nahanni Valley, you’ll know that wilderness has a history and lore thick enough to fill several novels. Seriously, you should take a Wikipedia dive; thank me later. All that mystery is buried in the substrata of In the Valley of the Headless Men, but Hernandez’s excursion resembles the surrealism of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, though less cold and less austere. Hernandez has a particular gift for the details of grief: the final sip of a dead mother’s lemonade, a lost child’s sock tucked safely in a purse; each is a small totem of heartbreak. And though the flesh of his novella is pared to the bone, somehow he still accommodates a trio of characters—each with their own arc of loss and redemption—on a shared journey to some ineffable, elusive truth. As for what else waits there, I shan’t tell you. it’s best you decide for yourself… and I’m still not sure that I even really know.
What if an entire neighbourhood became a ghost? Not just the people but the buildings and the street itself? And what if three girls escaped that fate, then returned twenty years later to see what remained of the homes and families they left in that sunlit purgatory? It’s a concept high enough to give you a nosebleed, but Kiste reins it in masterfully, never worrying too much about the mad logic of the situation. Instead, she centres the story on more mundane forms of haunting: the dark gravity of memory, family, and trauma. The Haunting of Velkwood reads like a literary double negative, a brand-new thing emerging from the overlap of Twin Peaks’ suburban uncanny and the melancholy nostalgia of The Virgin Suicides. Kiste doesn’t shy away from these references (David Lynch is everywhere in Velkwood), but she’s still written one of the most original—and downright strange—novels of the year so far.
Before turning to fiction, Hull wrote the screenplay for Glorious, a cult horror movie about an eldritch entity invoking apocalypse through a glory hole in a public-bathroom stall. Though not a sequel of any kind, Hull’s debut novella shares much of his movie’s grindhouse DNA. It also has a hole of its own in the titular Mouth: an inexplicable toothed orifice in the ground inherited by Randy, a good ol’ all-American drifter. Randy’s attempt to satisfy Mouth’s hunger forces him into a partnership with Abigail, a young woman with secrets to keep and vengeance to seek. Mouth comes in handy there. The novella is rapid and raw and unburdened by plot complexity, but there’s something so endearing about both the book and its innocent monster that you can’t help but cheer them on. Imagine Roger Corman’s take on Frankenstein and you’re somewhere close to Mouth’s goofy charm.
King Nyx is at the softer end of the horror colour chart. There are no ghosts or demons, and there’s barely any blood (though there are life-size marionettes to haunt your dreams). Instead, Bakis has crafted a compelling period mystery centred on the island home of a wealthy tycoon whose wives just keep dying before their time. When a young woman accompanies her husband on a personal writing retreat to the island, everything seems immediately off. The couple are quarantined in a private cabin. She sees strange bearlike figures in the woods and finds mysterious notes aplenty. All the oddity suggests something very wrong is going on in the Big House. It’s all wonderfully bizarre, but buried beneath the novel’s gothic veneer is an interrogation of supposed male genius, balanced so precariously on the shoulders of unremembered women. King Nyx is one of those thrillers that smuggle real substance into their scares without ever taking on a lecturing tone. It’s also a great gateway novel for readers who would usually shy away from horror’s excesses.
Graham Jones made this list in 2022 and again in 2023 with the first two instalments of the Indian Lake Trilogy. Now, with The Angel of Indian Lake, he absolutely sticks the landing. In this third and concluding volume, we return to the bruised and bloodied town of Proofrock, Idaho, for a final confrontation between Jade Daniels and the many monsters in her past, her present, and her head. Just as in the preceding books, Angel begins in the cold chaos of violence and metatextual references, which slowly coalesce into something human, heartfelt, and, by the end, emotionally overwhelming. Unexpected bodies rise and fall, and at no point could even this seasoned horror reader rest easy that the absolute worst would not come to pass. The Angel of Indian Lake is an almost indecent success; Jones should not have been able to guide this freewheeling, snowballing mass of story home. But he does. And like its now-iconic heroine, it remains defiant and unbowed to the end.
As I’ve covered elsewhere, horror has not traditionally been kind to characters of colour. Evans and Fennell’s anthology is sure to become a key text in the Black horror renaissance working to correct that injustice. The stories included here share one crucial characteristic: Each features a young Black female protagonist who must survive—but otherwise, it’s a sprawling survey of horror’s various subsections, every one refreshed by the Black female gaze. LL McKinney’s “Harvester” is nightmarish Americana about a very unusual cornfield. Zakiya Dalila Harris’s “TMI” is an of-the-moment technophobic satire about privacy and identity, while Evans’s “The Brides of Devil’s Bayou” offers old-school Southern Gothic of the finest stripe. The Black Girl Survives in This One may be billed as young-adult literature but stories like Monica Brashears’ “The Skittering Thing” are pure adult-grade nightmare fuel. The best of them pose a question that underlies the entire anthology: Is surviving the same thing as having a happy ending?
This has been a pretty bleak and bloody list of stories so far. Let Ryan pour some sunshine into your TBR. Bless Your Heart is the tale of the Evans women, a matriarchal dynasty who runs the funeral home in their small, quaint corner of Southeast Texas. Unfortunately, the dead in their town don’t always stay dead, forcing generations of Evanses to moonlight as ghoul killers. During a particularly bad infestation of undead, the elderly Ducey (horror’s best octogenarian for a good while), her daughter Lenore, and her adult granddaughter Grace must deal with the problem while indoctrinating young Grace into their clandestine guardianship. The word that immediately springs to mind is charming, as this novel has plenty of local colour and turns of phrase. However, what elevates Bless Your Heart beyond pastiche is Ryan’s willingness to revel in full-on gore and to follow through on some genuine, last-minute emotional stakes. This was announced as the first in a series of novels, and I can’t wait to see—and try to work out—what’s going to happen next.
In the few years since LaRocca burst onto the horror scene with Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, he has steadily grown a reputation for wielding disgust and excess to singular effect. This new collection contains four novelettes, each spinning around twin themes of obsession and harm. In the title story, an estranged daughter goes home for her father’s funeral, only to discover truly hideous secrets in her family home. “All the Parts of You That Won’t Easily Burn” may go off in a batshit-crazy direction toward the end but the central conceit of a self-harming cult with a penchant for broken glass evokes the very best of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood body horror. It’s the closing story, though—on the surface the smallest and most superficial—that really got under my skin. “Prickle” presents a vicious game of one-upmanship between two elderly friends that takes the book to a gleeful, capering conclusion. It shows that beneath his coat of many nasty colours, LaRocca has a very good (and very dark) sense of humour.
I talk a lot about “fun” horror—the kind of horror that tries to scare you, for sure, but makes the process entertaining, enjoyable, a romp, rather than a raid on your psyche. This is exactly what Thorne delivers in Diavola. As with Christopher Golden’s The House of Last Resort, Thorne transports the reader to a tiny Italian village for some very dysfunctional family drama, though any loving central relationship is replaced with the hilariously maddening repartee between Anna and her siblings. Their scratchy dynamic is a grounding contrast to the supernatural goings-on, revolving around a tower in their villa that should not be opened. Shocker: It’s opened, and craziness ensues. Diavola is a gothic gem, as full of sharply observed characterisation as it is genre tropes. I read it in two sittings and even now I’m not sure if I was supposed to laugh as much as I did. Pack this for your next holiday and avoid talking to your own family.
The Underhistory may be the most intriguing horror novel of the year so far. It’s a blend of ghost story and home-invasion thriller in which a group of criminals descends upon a haunted house in the middle of a guided tour. That’s enough of a concept to set the novel apart but Warren fully commits to a structural conceit that exposes how the architecture of houses and story are one and the same. Each chapter is titled after the whimsical name that the elderly guide, Pera, has given to the rooms of her home. While she takes her customers through the details of the house—all the while trying to placate and manage the bad men in their midst—she also reveals her own gothic history, embedded in the peculiarities of each room. Gradually, we learn that Pera is far more capable than we (or her assailants) imagine her to be. And her house is a very bad place to invade. The Underhistory reads like Shirley Jackson or Catriona Ward at their most gothically playful. It’s a wholly unique intellectual exercise and a deeply compelling page-turner.
Malerman’s Incidents Around the House is [...] a deeply discomfiting, imaginatively ripe, yet ruthlessly efficient novel in which eight-year old Bela is targeted by a malign presence in her home. This “Other Mommy" hounds the girl with a request to “go into your heart.” What follows is a chase narrative of claustrophobic terror that almost transcends articulation. Glimpses of Other Mommy are elusive to the point of impressionism (she has long, hairy arms and “ slides across the floor”). What does this mean? What is she? We never know, as we are only ever given the compromised perspective of a frantic child or a terrified adult. It’s as if Malerman has channelled something into the very sentences of this novel, something that is so much greater than the sum of its linguistic parts. Simply put—and I do not say this lightly—Incidents Around the House is the most purely effective horror novel I have ever read.
Originally published on Esquire US
At least once every year, a debut short-story collection comes along and gets under my skin. Last year, it was Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare, by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, and the year before that, it was Bliss Montage, by Ling Ma. All these months later, despite reading thousands of pages since, I can still remember plot details from individual stories in those books.
In 2024, that collection is Beautiful Days, by Zach Williams—a subtle and speculative barn-burner that fans of Stephen King and Ling Ma will devour. Like the short fiction of Brian Evenson, the stories in Beautiful Days are about the horrors of encountering something completely unknowable in the course of everyday life, whether it’s the mind-warping experience of parenthood or the echo-chamber effect of the Internet and social media.
It opens with “Trial Run,” in which a Manhattan office drone is trapped in a skyscraper during a snowstorm that may or may not be real, with two coworkers who may or may not mean him harm. In “Neighbors,” which went viral in The New Yorker earlier this year, a San Francisco man tries to perform a wellness check on his next-door neighbor, only to stumble upon a scene he can’t rationally explain.
In “Wood Sorrel House,” new parents find themselves in an Edenic setting to raise their child but can’t remember how they got there. These stories wade into uncanny waters gradually, but others—like “Return to Crashaw,” featuring tourists who visit mysterious megaliths in the desert—embrace their pulp inspirations from line one.
Despite Stephen King’s You Like It Darker sitting on top of the New York Times bestseller list right now, some people in the American publishing industry see short stories as an endangered species—or at least as a genre that’s becoming harder and harder to sell. “I was writing for myself,” Williams tells Esquire. “I wasn’t thinking about the marketability of what I was writing. I was just thinking of what I could write best—and what I could finish.”
Williams grew up in the suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware, earned his MFA at NYU, and now teaches fiction writing at Stanford University. Over Zoom last month, we spoke about writing short stories in an industry built to sell novels, getting fired from a Hollywood job for reading books under his desk, and why you might be reading more short stories than you realize. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
ESQUIRE: When did reading and writing first come into your life?
ZACH WILLIAMS: Video games were big for me in that regard. Myst and Riven were so immersive that I read the [spin-off] novels. Tim Schafer [game director of Grim Fandango] was also a really important writer for me. But I loved going to the library as a kid and reading Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark—and all those Time Life supernatural mystery books on UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster.
When I tried writing short stories in my early twenties, I think I just fundamentally didn’t have anything to write about, so when I graduated college, I moved out to L.A. and got an internship at Beacon Pictures. I got fired because all the interns showed up at this party one night where we weren’t supposed to be. After that, I worked as an assistant to the post-production coordinator on this Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony movie called El Cantante, and then I was the fifth assistant in Jerry Bruckheimer’s office during the Pirates of the Caribbean shoot—until I got fired for reading books under my desk when there wasn’t anything to do.
I got the sense that I wasn’t in the right place, so I taught middle and high school for twelve years. It was a lot like Mr. Holland’s Opus, where it was supposed to be this brief interlude while I figured out how to be a writer, but I did it for a long time and could only write in fits and starts. Once I got married and we had our first son, I finally felt like I’d been around long enough to write stories with a sense of urgency.
What drew you to short stories as opposed to novels?
In middle school, the only book I would ever reread was The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. The idea of a novel-in-stories was really fascinating to me. A lot of my undergraduate creative-writing classes were focused on short stories just by virtue of the workshop format. For me, short stories have this very direct relationship with the subconscious. One idea that’s really exciting for a writer is usually enough to get a short story off the ground. Even the stories in this collection that I worked on for years, they all originated with one spark. I wrote two stories in [Beautiful Days], “Red Light” and “Neighbors,” right after these nights of terrible insomnia, where I was just lying in bed for hours and the ideas just erupted from my subconscious. They didn’t need to become sprawling projects.
Publishing a short story in The New Yorker is a holy grail for a lot of writers. What was that like for you?
It was a wild experience to have that be my first time in print. At NYU’s [MFA program], they have this agent meet-and-greet at the end of the year, and mine was virtual because of the pandemic. I wound up having a call with Claudia [Ballard at William Morris Endeavor], and she asked to see one of my stories after I gave her my elevator pitch for the collection. I sent her “Wood Sorrel House,” and she said right away, “I want to send this story to The New Yorker.” I signed with Claudia that summer, and then the editorial process at The New Yorker was unbelievable. Working with Deborah [Treisman] and her fact checkers and copy editors was a real education. They found all of these things in the story that I had lost the ability to see myself.
It must be hard to fact-check a story like “Wood Sorrel House,” which is set in another reality.
My favorite thing that came out of fact-checking “Wood Sorrel House”—I still think about it with such gratitude—is that outside the cottage in that story, there’s one of those turtle-shaped sandboxes. We have so much overlap in our background; is that a familiar thing from your childhood, too?
Yes, we had one in our backyard.
Perfect. So I had written that it was made by Playskool because that’s what I remembered, but no, they were made by Little Tikes. The fact checker discovered this, and I was so thrilled to get that correction.
Which story in this collection was the hardest to write and revise?
“Lucca Castle” was really difficult, and the other two that come to mind are “Ghost Image” and “Return to Crashaw.” I didn’t know what I was doing. I started things without knowing how long they were going to be. Every single story was a learning process for me. There is very little in this book that I did on purpose, because I was trying to write intuitively.
Why open the collection with “Trial Run” and close with “Return to Crashaw”?
There were times when I would try to think of this book like an album. I thought about how the stories sounded together in a musical way. “Return to Crashaw” just felt like an ending in the sound of the sentences and the language—and the way that there’s music on that last page. There’s also a sort of warmth to that story for me, whereas “Trial Run” is the total opposite. It’s dark and scary and claustrophobic and paranoid. I’ve always had “Trial Run” up front because there’s something about walking into that building in the snowstorm that felt like the start of something, in the same way that the music at the end of “Return to Crashaw” felt like an ending to me.
How can the short story make a case for itself in 2024? Big Five publishers have disinvested in short stories as a genre, and it seems like readers prefer novels.
So many of the best books I’ve read recently have been short-story collections or novels-in-stories. Jamil Jan Kochai’s collection from 2022, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, has one of the all-time great short stories about video games in it. There’s also Out There, by Kate Folk; Bliss Montage, by Ling Ma; After the Sun, by Jonas Eika. Jonathan Escoffery’s book If I Survive You is fascinating to me, because it’s somewhere between a collection of linked stories and a novel. Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers, is told in four sections over the span of many centuries, around the building of this cathedral where St. Cuthbert’s body is buried. Other huge books for me in this regard are Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan.
My point is that some of the most exciting work I’ve seen in recent years comes from people who are working in shorter forms to different ends. A lot of them are technically short-story collections, but they don’t really make aesthetic sense without one another. My sense of these books is that the stories were written very intentionally to be part of one work, and I think that makes so much sense in our present moment. I could say something banal about attention spans, but it’s more than that. There’s something about the form of short stories and life on the Internet, scrolling and clicking, and the basic hypertextual experience of navigating the Internet. A book can contain many different worlds, too, without staying too long in one place.
It’s a vital time for the form. It’s equipped to do something that the big novel can’t, and there are a lot of writers doing really good work. But I’m not that smart about the necessities of the marketplace. I don’t know enough about how publishing works.
I think you’ve hit on something really interesting about the marketplace, though, which is that publishers are sometimes packaging (or maybe even disguising) short-story collections as novels-in-stories—and marketing long short stories as short novels!—in the hope that they’ll sell more copies.
I hadn’t quite connected those dots, but yeah, you’re right. There are a lot of books people are reading that contain these other forms.
Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is often celebrated as the greatest novel of the century so far, but it’s essentially a collection of very long linked stories.
That’s true. I just read Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories for the first time a few years ago. The stories are all really different, but there’s this one repeating character who’s a dark and powerful figure. To me, there’s something really special and unique about the ability of a book that contains disparate things to link them in a way that strikes more than one note. When I was writing this book, I wanted to be aggressive about the variety of ideas that appeared in it. I wanted to just throw ideas out recklessly rather than take one thing and use it as the basis for a longer project just because that’s what you’re “supposed” to do. I wanted it to be a little riotous. A lot of my favorite collections of stories—or as you said, novels that contain a lot of little worlds—are doing that.
Why call this collection Beautiful Days?
The title comes from the story “Wood Sorrel House,” where the last line is “There will be beautiful days.” I had a different experience writing the book than people do reading it, because when I look at that story again, I feel like there’s a lot of prettiness in that story—the pastoral aspect of it with the lake and the forest and the mountains, and then also the bond between parent and child. There’s a lot of darkness in that story, but there’s some beauty in it, too.
I knew that I was writing a book with a lot of darkness in it, and one that was cynical in places. I started writing the stories when I was living in New York, so maybe there’s some of that big-city claustrophobia or paranoia, especially in “Trial Run.” I also think some of it comes from life on the Internet and being constantly glued to our devices, where my phone feels like a portal to a darker reality.
But all of these characters are trying to figure something out. They feel like they desperately need answers to big questions and they can’t get them, but they’re going to try—and in the trying, I think there’s a lot of hopefulness and redemption. These impenetrable mysteries are how the basic conditions of life feel to me. That’s what speculative fiction can do: help you set your sights more clearly on questions that are concrete in your life.
Originally published on Esquire US
When Chelsea Monroe-Cassel began chronicling the foods of Games of Thrones for her punnily named cookbook A Feast of Ice and Fire, she looked for culinary inspiration in the recipes of the Middle Ages.
We’re talking properly medieval stuff. The sorts of recipes that assume you’ll be killing your own goat and will know by habit how to roast it, and that you’re already equipped with a kitchen where meals are prepared in cauldrons and curing salt is on the cutting edge of cooking technology. “They don’t have timings, they don’t have ingredients, they don’t have quantities,” Monroe-Cassel says. “So you have to pore through all kinds of related material to treasure hunt for details.”
It’s exactly the sort of offbeat gastronomic excursion that Monroe-Cassel has become familiar with throughout her career as a fictional-food creator. Alongside feasting at the tables of Westeros, she has tasted the snacks of the USS Enterprise and drunk the soups of Tatooine. She’s eaten the lembas bread beloved by the hobbits of the Shire and tucked into the pies and stews of the fantasy world of Azeroth. She has travelled to places with her stomach that most people go only with their minds. Yet in making these journeys, she’s been far from alone.
The past decade has ushered in a wave of such fictional feasting through a genre of cookbooks that reverse engineer the foods of popular movies, television shows, books, and video games into recipes for the home kitchen. Thumb through The Official Harry Potter Cookbook and you’ll find instructions for whipping up a batch of Hagrid’s Dragon Eggs. Open The Unofficial Stranger Things Cookbook for a method of turning figs into Demogorgons.
In The Official Witcher Cookbook, you’ll learn how to brew a Sorcerer’s Beef Stew, while Friends: The Official Cookbook breaks down how to make Monica’s Onion Galette. Pixar: The Official Cookbook includes tips on creating Toy Story 3’s Jelly Bean Burger, and The Unofficial Simpsons Cookbook reveals the secrets of the Flaming Moe (or as fans will surely know it, the Flaming Homer).
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can find recipe books for Godzilla, Ghostbusters, Titanic, Alien, Back to the Future, Avatar, The Lord of the Rings, Jurassic World, The Godfather, The Hunger Games, The Wizard of Oz, Home Alone, The Princess Bride, The Big Lebowski, Seinfeld, Doctor Who, The Walking Dead, Peaky Blinders, Bridgerton, The Office, Ted Lasso, Mad Men, Happy Days, Parks & Recreation, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bob’s Burgers, Gilmore Girls, Adventure Time, Naruto, Lilo & Stitch, Rick and Morty, Pokémon, Minecraft, Street Fighter, Stardew Valley, Assassin’s Creed, Animal Crossing, Halo, The Sims, The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and many, many more.
The biggest of these books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, retail bookstores often dedicate entire displays to them, and the appetite for the genre has grown so large that Monroe-Cassel has written a second Game of Thrones cookbook due to release in May. Some are officially licensed, meaning that they carry all the branding, artwork, and high production value that their properties afford. Others are humbly titled “unofficial,” inching tentatively up to the line of copyright infringement. Many are hefty, hardback tomes created with immense detail and genuine love for their source material. And then there are the less convincing releases, stamped with the name of a popular franchise to warrant a glossy cover and high retail price.
All, essentially, are merchandise, designed to entice enthusiasts of whatever pop-culture license they’re tied to. Usually, that’s a franchise of some kind—one that commands a loyal audience and for which a branded recipe book doesn’t look out of place next to shelves of T-shirts, plushies, hoodies, action figures, coffee-table books, board games, and everything else publishers release to the baying delight of eager fans. But the best of them are extensions of the worlds on which they’re based, letting readers engage with their favourite fiction in a new way by getting a little physically closer to it.
“It’s just a whole other way to cosplay,” says Elena Craig, a recipe developer who’s written cookbooks for the worlds of Harry Potter, Deadpool, and Hocus Pocus. They allow readers to bring their favourite fictional world to life, she thinks, and enlarge it to the point at which they can partake in it themselves. For Tomb Raider superfan and fan-site owner Michelle Harris, Tomb Raider: The Official Cookbook and Travel Guide does more than just handily collect recipes from hero Lara Croft’s travels—it deepens her connection to the character’s journey. “You get to taste the food the locals would eat,” Harris says, “and by doing this, it gives you a little more insight into the areas Lara travels.”
Fantasy and science fiction stories are natural candidates for the model. They’re rife with imaginary foods to playfully re-create, and their expansive world-building often gestures toward the cuisines of their fictional peoples. “If the cookbook is for a TV show or movie, I rewatch it over and over again looking for food references,” says Jenn Fujikawa, a food writer who’s authored Star Wars, Ghostbusters, and Avengers cookbooks. “I really study the shows to build a proper backstory so that the recipe makes sense in-world.”
Monroe-Cassel says the trick to re-creating fictional foods often lies in finding real-world ingredients that can convincingly pose as imaginary alternatives—which may sound rather straightforward until you’re staring down the culinary canon of World of Warcraft and have to whip up dishes with names like Chimaerok Chops. With foods as made-up as these, where do you even begin?
“So a rok is a bird, and a chimaera is a lion-eagle-goat thing,” says Monroe-Cassel. “I can work with goat, but I can’t find goat.” Anything else, then? “Let’s do lamb!” The result is a lamb-shoulder chop marinated in a nutmeg-and-Aleppo-pepper-flake rub, served with couscous or rice. Not bad for a dish that appears in the video game as only a small, vaguely food-shaped clump of brown pixels.
This is, of course, half the appeal. Not only do these foods offer new sensory gateways into fictional worlds, but when they’re cooked, you get to eat them. “I want my cookbooks to be fun to use at home for watch parties, so I like to make sure the food isn’t too daunting that people wouldn’t even want to try to make it,” says Fujikawa.
The more children-oriented cookbooks often contain novelty dishes, like the Dobby-shaped cupcakes of the The Official Harry Potter Baking Book, or the Splash Zone cocktail of Jurassic World: The Official Cookbook that arranges marshmallows around the rim of a glass to (sort of) look like the toothed mouth of a dinosaur. “You want to make sure everyone feels included, especially in comics,” says Michelin-star chef Paul Eschbach, who created the recipes of the upcoming Marvel: Spider-Man: The Official Cookbook. “We’re not making up a cookbook for Noma here. What is Peter Parker going to eat?”
It’s exactly the sort of question we’ve been asking of our favourite characters for decades. Pop-culture cookbooks may be enjoying a newfound popularity, but the genre is hardly new. Cult soap opera Dark Shadows received a cookbook tie-in back in 1970, and Marvel put out a collection of superhero-inspired recipes a few years later. Trekkies got their first recipe book in 1999, and The Sopranos Family Cookbook followed in 2002.
These early titles, though, were few and far between, and it wasn’t until the 2012 publication of Monroe-Cassel’s first Game of Thrones cookbook that the genre took off in earnest. She and a friend had started a blog the year before to showcase their take on foods from the beloved book series; then they sent a tongue-in-cheek email to author George R.R. Martin suggesting they team up for an official collection. “Not only did he write back,” Monroe-Cassel says, but he told his publishers to get on it. “Turns out that whatever George Martin wants, George Martin gets.”
It helped that the Game of Thrones TV adaptation had just started airing, enthusing a fresh audience to the lore of Westeros and creating a new batch of fans to lap up merch of the hottest prestige television show of the moment. At the same time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was inching toward its eventual domination of the Hollywood box office. Suddenly, sweeping imaginary worlds became the commercial tentpoles of pop culture. Understanding their expansive lore was no longer lazily seen as the purview of geeks, nerds, and other unpleasant stereotypes but instead practically necessary if you wanted to keep up with the latest watercooler chat in the office.
“Everyone can be geeky these days, and it’s not frowned upon,” says Nicolle Lamerichs, lecturer in creative business at University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, who specialises in studying fandom and media. “That even your average uncle is watching these shows and is super invested in them helps to see how fans are part of the mainstream.”
Bertha Chin, lecturer in social media and communication at Swinburne University of Technology and coeditor of Eating Fandom: Intersections Between Fans and Food Cultures, remembers when fandom was chiefly expressed and enjoyed at comic cons, clubs, and other underground events. Fans would meet up for a weekend to enjoy their shared interests before returning to their normal lives come Monday morning. “Now everywhere you turn on Twitter or TikTok, people are just sharing their fandom,” she says. “A lot of it has to do with social media making everything more accessible.”
With like-minded people just a few clicks away, it’s easier than ever to find a community that shares an interest in whatever characters, worlds, or creators you love. And with potentially thousands of other Internet users always ready to chat, speculate, argue, and share memes online—anonymously or otherwise—you need never stop. A burgeoning interest can quickly become a hobby, and it doesn’t take that much screen time for a hobby to become an obsession.
It’s music to the ears of publishers looking for an easy payday. To some degree, fans are the perfect consumers: They’re loyal, dedicated, and have at least some level of preexisting interest in branded products. Pitch a product right and you’ll open the door to a ready-made audience. Or try an outlandish idea like, say, a tie-in cookbook and you’ve got a good chance of finding a gap that fans have been waiting to fill.
As a big Star Trek fan, for instance, Lamerichs owns various bits of merch, including things like fictional travel guides to the planet Vulcan and other locations in the show. “But the nice thing with a cookbook is that in a way it’s interactive,” she says. “It’s about re-creating these dishes and fantasising about these dishes. It’s about thinking, If this had existed for real, how would we go about creating it? There is more creativity to it than wearing a T-shirt.”
Yet there’s also something undeniably peculiar about it all. It’s a strange, almost amusing exercise to reduce the world’s most commercially and critically beloved franchises to items that can fit on a kitchen shelf. It’s not only that these blockbuster worlds seem too big for the pages of a recipe book but that recipe books themselves sit in an altogether different domain. They belong to the mainstream.
Pop-culture cookbooks, then, seem to straddle the divide, extending fandom to the very consumers who are typically thought of as outside it. Or to put it another way, while you probably won’t catch many Downton Abbey fans walking around in graphic tees or adding to their Funko Pop collections, a great deal of them will be exactly the sort of people to enjoy a good recipe collection.
For food historian Annie Gray, there’s more to it than just business savvy. When she was asked to create the official cookbook of Downton Abbey, she was most interested in how the format could be a useful vehicle. She remembers thinking, “I can use this to put across the actual history of the period tied into a series that people really love. This is a really good opportunity to get real history in front of an audience of people who are already receptive.”
Much like the television shows on which they’re based, the recipes in Gray’s Official Downton Abbey Cookbook and Call the Midwife: The Official Cookbook are inspired by the ingredients and tastes of their eras but tweaked to be more palatable for a modern audience. Every recipe is introduced by an explanation of its origins and development, and sections are interspersed with short essays discussing the trends, industries, and forces that influenced English cooking of the time.
It’s a far cry from some of the other pop-culture cookbooks Gray remembers reading in preparation. Many, she says, made basic historical errors, while an unofficial Downton Abbey cookbook seemed to think the fictional stately home was somehow connected to England’s monastic “abbeys” dissolved in the Reformation of the 16th century.
Errors that egregious are thankfully rare, but it’s still not too hard to spot the cash grabs of the genre. Cast your eye across a random selection of pop-culture cookbooks and you’ll quickly see brands so devoid of culinary material, or so infertile for expansion, that slapping their name on a recipe book seems little more than cynical.
Will fans of 16-bit video games really get much from Sonic the Hedgehog: The Official Cookbook? Will Fast & Furious: The Official Cookbook have anything to teach a burgeoning gourmand? And does Catan, a nearly 30-year-old board game that includes no mention of food other than the odd picture of a bushel of wheat, have much to offer a home cook? For obsessives, maybe. For those looking for an easy birthday gift for an obsessive, probably. And for publishers, certainly.
“These books have been really selling well and getting really great placement,” says Casie Vogel, vice president and publisher at Ulysses Press, who published Catan: The Official Cookbook last year. Picking recipes for that book, she says, involved choosing foods that could tie into the game through wordplay or could be shared by a group of friends during a board-game night. But selecting the license for a cookbook is more business minded.
“It’s a lot of discussion about who do we think the audience is for these shows, movies, or whatever the pop-culture tie-in is,” Vogel says, “and going from there to see if those are people that we think are book buyers who kind of get this stan-fan culture.”
Brenna Connor, manager of U.S. books-industry insights at the market-research firm Circana, says that such licensing is now an important part of the book market at large. In the U.S. between 2013 and 2023, the number of published licensed books more than doubled, and while cookbook sales are down from their pandemic peak, licensed cookbooks of all varieties represent one pocket of growth. Many are tied not to pop-culture brands but to individuals who’ve made a name for themselves on TikTok, YouTube, and other social media platforms, including B. Dylan Hollis, Joshua Weissman, Nick DiGiovanni, Barbara Costello, and Joanne Lee Molinaro.
These authors are effectively the modern incarnations of the TV chef. “On average in 2023, cookbook sales for these TikTok stars outperformed the top 100 cookbooks by 600 percent,” says Connor. In fact, looking at licensed books across all adult categories, the licensed cookbook is the top area of growth, with sales reaching 2.2 million books in 2023. “The titles driving the most growth are coming from licenses with strong brand loyalty, like Disney Parks, Yellowstone, Dungeons & Dragons, Minecraft, and Hocus Pocus,” says Connor.
It’s a trend the publishing industry has fully embraced. Consider the case of UK imprint Expanse, which was set up by mega-publisher HarperCollins to specifically focus on the biggest properties across gaming, TV, and film. Its mantra is “books for fans, by fans”—a motto that couldn’t better summarise the way publishers are betting on the ever-growing appetite of fandoms. Says Expanse publishing director John Packard, “I think there is a lot of nostalgia for these brands, either for something you played or watched as a kid or spent hundreds of hours of your life immersed in. People want to carry on that experience and continue engaging with that world, and cookbooks are one fun way of doing that.”
It’s not like their creators are going to run out of material anytime soon. “We’ve got other offshoots of it, whether it’s baking, cocktails, or entertaining,” says Vanessa Lopez, who oversees licensing and partnerships at publisher Insight Editions. “And there’s always new media being created that gives us opportunity for this sort of publishing.”
Are we set, then, to wade through ever more of these novelty recipe collections, created with varying degrees of quality and love yet published ultimately for the reliable financial return promised by the brands and characters and worlds to which we’ve grown loyally attached? Yes, probably. But is that so bad?
When writer and comic historian Jermaine McLaughlin was approached to pen the words of Marvel: Spider-Man: The Official Cookbook, the whole project seemed a bit of a head-scratcher. But after going through the process and seeing the final collection of recipes —taken from across the five boroughs of New York as seen through Spider-Man’s mask—he understands the appeal. “There’s something pretty fun about being able to marry people’s culinary interest—even if it’s, like mine, a surface-level interest—with these characters,” he says. “It makes the read a bit more fun, and it may help people discover recipes that they may not have even known they were interested in.”
The best fiction has always challenged conventional taste. Now it’s just doing that in more ways than one.
Originally published on Esquire US
Four days before I’m supposed to travel to Portland, Oregon to meet Chuck Palahniuk, we’re already plotting a murder. Multiple murders, actually. Palahniuk is texting me from a Columbia High School reunion in Burbank, Washington, from which he graduated in 1980 (it wasn’t technically his reunion but his older sister’s), and among his fellow Coyotes are the bullies who chanted mean shit at him and beat him bloody.
“Several will die today,” one text reads. This was a conversation that began nine texts earlier with me saying hello, it’s the writer from Esquire, wanted to touch base, etc., and now, it’s somehow progressed to killing his childhood tormentors. Soon, Palahniuk discovers that “several are dead. I feel cheated.” His solution is, of course, obvious: “Must find and piss on their graves.”
To someone like me, who used to read his work as a twenty-something, this feels quintessentially Palahniukian: darkly funny, shamelessly macabre, and—most crucially—completely straight-faced. In Palahniuk’s fiction, twisted violence and sex occur in a matter-of-fact manner. His infamous short story “Guts,” which used to induce fainting in audience members when Palahniuk read it at events, is a vivid cautionary tale about a teenage boy sitting naked on a pool circulation pump as a means of sexual pleasure, which results in his colon being sucked out of his anus.
In Beautiful You, a woman finds herself in a 50 Shades of Grey-type relationship with a megabillionaire who plans to release a line of sex toys for women and uses the protagonist as an experimental subject. In one scene, he has her insert colour-coded beads into her vagina (pink) and anus (black) while they dine at a restaurant. The “orgasmic waves” she experiences are too intense, so she runs to the bathroom to pull them out, only she can’t—the beads are magnetised. As her “secretions dripped to the floor, where they’d begun to pool,” another woman has to help her by sucking out the pink bead, like “snake’s venom.”
By the time this text exchange is happening, I’ve spent the better part of a month becoming a Palahniuk completist: miring myself in his menacing diegeses, rife with rape, murder, torture, self-mutilation, suicide, and all manner of gruesome body horror. His latest, Not Forever, But For Now (releasing in early September), is a tour de force of literary debauchery, featuring some truly nasty stuff. Helping him plan the murder of his high school bullies, then, doesn’t seem strange at all. As I texted him then: “I would expect nothing less.”
Less than a week later, I’m in Portland, Oregon, I’m in the passenger seat of Palahniuk’s Prius, and I realise I have no idea where we’re going. I deferred to Palahniuk about where we would conduct the interview, and I neglect to ask as we navigate the city Palahniuk adopted as his own six days after graduating high school in 1980, the place teeming, as he wrote in Fugitives and Refugees, with “the most cracked of the crackpots.”
Chuck Palahniuk has a more significant literary oeuvre than he’s often given credit for, likely because of an unfair association with toxic masculinity, misogyny, and various other social ills typified by Tyler Durden, the impossibly intoxicating antihero at the centre of Palahniuk’s breakthrough debut novel Fight Club. It’s true that the majority of his fans are young men, the kind whose dorm room walls are festooned with movie posters featuring, say, Al Pacino, Uma Thurman, and a scowling Brad Pitt clutching a bar of soap, but attempts to link Palahniuk to the recent ascent of men’s rights activists fall apart upon closer examination of the novels.
It’s also true that many of his characters possess similar traits, espouse similarly nihilistic or anarchistic philosophies, and behave in similar ways as these misogynist trolls, but this only means that Palahniuk identified the disastrous consequences of enforced masculinity more accurately and earlier than everyone else. To be completely honest, I originally came to Portland to argue in favour of the Palahniuk-to-incel pipeline, but once I was disabused of that premise–first by reading the novels; then by speaking with Palahniuk–I discover something completely unexpected.
What becomes clear to me during the eight and a half hours I spend with Palahniuk is that he cares about his characters—about their happiness—much more than I would have assumed, and that his primary objective as a storyteller is the emotional climax a reader can be brought to. The murder? The mayhem? The soap? These are merely his tools, but what he builds with those tools in no way reflects its construction.
Palahniuk is much more subdued in his manner than I expected. He speaks quietly, softly, with a gentleness I associate with patient teachers. His voice and demeanour contain zero trace of menace or even naughtiness. He’s dressed in an understated way, but his clothes fit impeccably, and the interior of his car is as neat as straight bourbon. I can’t envision this Palahniuk pissing on the graves of dead bullies.
At half past noon, we pull into a mostly empty parking lot for what looks like a park. Enormous fir trees are clamouring to be the first to reach the cloudless sky. Urban noise vanishes, replaced by the usual ambience of nature and that human hum we can’t fully eliminate in the “natural” spaces we design and build onto. It’s gorgeous and eerie.
“I’m taking you here to kill you,” Palahniuk says, smiling. This is said without even a joking malice, but instead like an endearment.
The National Sanctuary of our Sorrowful Mother wouldn’t be a bad place to go, honestly. Known locally as the Grotto, it’s 25 hectares of towering conifers centred around a ten-storey cliff-face out of which a small cavern has been created by dynamite to serve as a Roman Catholic altar, which is festooned with statues, candles, and flowers. More than a dozen rows of pews extend out from the Grotto Cave for the services that regularly occur there.
At the end of the plaza, another formidable precipice looms over us, although this one’s manmade: the Chapel of Mary’s façade is tall and flat and wide, mirroring the grandeur of the nearby cliff. A path beyond the chapel, guarded by a comically ineffectual turnstile, leads to an elevator that takes you to the upper gardens and the meditation chapel and vistas of the city, which is, Palahniuk informs me, our destination. Though it’s midday on a bright and warm July Wednesday, the atmosphere is understandably solemn.
When we approach the Chapel of Mary and peer in to glimpse its mural and marble and mosaic-filled interior, I mention that I’m going to snap some photos because my visual memory is so terrible. Very politely, Palahniuk motions for me to be silent, nodding to the handful of attendees inside. He watches them with genuine affection, or at the very least deferential respect. I watch him instead.
Palahniuk is 61. He’s fit, healthy, and stylish in a way one wouldn’t necessarily associate with someone in their seventh decade, but his manner of moving about in the world—patient, deliberate, wholly aware of and attentive to the other people around him—strikes me as something acquired with age. The one other time I saw Palahniuk in real life was in Boston in 2007, when he packed the Coolidge Corner Theatre promoting his novel Rant. I didn’t speak to him that day, only sat in the audience, but he seemed, at 45, to lack some of those qualities.
He thrived on that stage, the crowd orchestral to his conductor’s sway. Fans arrived, per Palahniuk’s instruction, decked out in wedding gowns and tuxes, a nod to a demolition derby-style sport called Party Crashing in Rant. It was a raucous affair, as many of Palahniuk’s events are, replete with contests, trivia, beach balls, inflatable animals, and one of the liveliest crowds I’ve ever been a part of. And Palahniuk ate it up, with an almost arrogant ease. My recollection isn’t pristine—it was sixteen years ago, after all—but the Palahniuk standing in front of me, wistfully gazing at a very different group of devotees who worship a very different leader, operates with a humble wisdom. The Grotto, these places of contemplation and reflection, suit him.
Still, it feels like a weird place to discuss a novel about two wealthy brothers who spend their time fucking each other and murdering the staff of their mansion.
Not Forever, But For Now is Palahniuk’s twentieth novel and twenty-sixth book. He’s been a part of the American literary scene for three decades and has produced some of our most fascinating fiction. When Fight Club was published in 1996, Palahniuk emerged as part of a generation of young, transgressive writers—including David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Bret Easton Ellis, A.M. Homes, Elizabeth Hurtzel, Douglas Coupland, and Irvine Welsh—whose books depicted drug addicts, paedophiles, murderers, and the sexually promiscuous with unapologetic directness.
David Fincher’s 1999 adaptation of Palahniuk’s first novel catapulted him to genuine fame, allowing him to become a writer full-time after years spent working odd jobs like a mechanic or a technical writer—something for which he still expresses gratitude. The novels that followed Fight Club took on subjects from the edges of society: cultists, pornographers, drag queens, political extremists, and child soldiers. Not surprisingly, his books have proven controversial.
His 2001 novel Choke was challenged at a high school in Arkansas for “promoting homosexuality.” Hasan Basri Çıplak, the head of Ayrıntı Publishing House, and Funda Uncu, a translator, were charged with distributing obscenity and taken to court by the Turkish government for publishing Palahniuk’s 2008 novel Snuff. The trial, however, was postponed indefinitely, and the publisher was warned not to release any more obscene works in the meantime.
Most recently, Palahniuk’s story collection Make Something Up made it all the way to number eight on the American Library Association’s Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2016 because, according to the ALA’s website summary of the complaints, it was deemed “disgusting and all around offensive.”
Palahniuk’s writing has pissed people off the world over, but even after all that, he hasn’t been cowed in his mission to transgress and to shock. Not Forever, But For Now is among his most disturbing novels, as it contains numerous gruesome and repugnant moments, and it features characters who make Tyler Durden look like Harvey the rabbit.
The brothers at the novel’s centre are Otto and Cecil, two ambiguously aged nepo babies living a lavish life in a manor in Wales. When we first meet them, they’re watching a nature documentary about Australia, from which they glean a wholly Palahniukian lesson: a newborn joey has to crawl up its mother’s fur to reach her pouch, unassisted, and “the squirmy, pink thing must rescue itself.”
Otto, the more dominant of the pair, explains to Cecil, the narrator, that sometimes a mother kangaroo will flick away one of her offspring “like a lump of nasty snot off her fingers.” She does this, Otto says, “because she hates its puny weakness,” and because “a mummy can always tell when a joey isn’t like the other joeys, why, it’s always going to be a stunted pre-male.”
As Otto and Cecil’s privileged world of affluence is unveiling, a couple of odd and discomfiting phrases appear. The brothers refer to a game called “Winnie-the-Pooh,” which turns out to be a euphemism for sexual dominance (“Will you be my daddy and chase me through the Hundred Acre Wood?”), and they use phrases like “having a go” and “having it off.” These are also sexual euphemisms, obviously, but these terms are so disturbing because they appear in reference to the brothers. As in, “We get back in the car and Otto has a go with me,” and, “Otto pushes me down on the cushions and has it off.” These brothers fuck each other… a lot. They are constantly engaged in some kind of sexual activity, so much so that there’s a recurring joke about the stench of their nursery.
Their sexual deviancy extends beyond each other, as well. In one scene, Cecil demands the nanny “bathe me front and back,” which she initially refuses to do, because, she says, he’s too old and has “all that hair down there.” Cecil insists, threatening her job. While it never explicitly states that what they’re arguing over is her pleasuring him, there’s a moment when Cecil mentions that they “once had a nanny who did it with her mouth.”
When they’re not doing all of that stuff, Otto and Cecil occupy their days by writing sexually charged letters to prison inmates in the hope that, once released, the convicts will come to their manor in search of some Winnie-the-Pooh, at which point the brothers will kill them.
They belong to a family of murderers with Bond villain-level ambitions for global control. Their grandfather hopes to mentor Otto into a successful member of their organisation. He occasionally shows up to reprimand the boys for their horrid, unmanly lifestyles and to regale them with tales of his exploits. They are not ordinary contract killers, but rather forces of empire power.
They orchestrate what they consider to be necessary events for the betterment of humanity. Otto and Cecil’s family is responsible for, among other major tragedies, 9/11, Kent State, and Jonestown, as well as the deaths of Princess Di, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Phil Hartman, and Sonny Bono. This devious cabal represents “great powers” who control the fate of history, and their reasons for setting these events into motion are the same as all imperial regimes: the expansion and perpetuation of power.
Two significant historical moments—that the Grandfather claims are related—receive special attention in the novel, through a lengthy flashback that’s parsed out in small chunks throughout, partly because the scene succinctly lays out the modus operandi of the organization’s history-forging, but also because it contains what I now know is a deeply personal expression of Palahniuk’s arduous life. The two events are the death of Judy Garland and the Stonewall Riots.
After an elevator to the upper level, Palahniuk and I briefly take in the view of Portland from the Meditation Chapel, with its wall of windows, before finding a bench in the Peace Gardens, where Palahniuk elucidates his passion for what he calls “apostolic fiction,” where a narrator details the thoughts and exploits of a person they love, like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.
Palahniuk says, “When you're writing about a character who really admires and loves another character, it’s such a joy. Because so often with my generation, it’s just narratives of snark, where it's just always about people tearing down things. But to have a character writing about the thing that they love—that is absolutely breathtaking. To be with someone who is intelligently praising, and in that Boswell way, saying, I know this great guy, I want to record everything this great guy says, I want you to love the thing I love. Yeah. That is a joy to write.”
Palahniuk is referring to Fight Club, his first and best-known novel. The unnamed narrator so idolises Tyler Durden because Durden was designed by the narrator himself to be an ideal, a psychological manifestation of everything he wished he would be. This is why Tyler has proven so perniciously stubborn as a hero of alienated young men. You love Tyler because the narrator loves Tyler, and in the film, every detail of Brad Pitt’s physique, style, and attitude were meticulously calibrated to make you admire him.
Palahniuk also claims credit (convincingly, I think) for popularising the pejorative word snowflake, though ironically, his initial use of the term (”you are not special, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” in Fight Club) was meant as a debunking of the treatment his generation received from public education, this “all encouraging all the time” celebration of everyone’s individuality as equally special. This technique, in Palahniuk’s view, left him and many of his cohort ill-prepared for adulthood. But what right-wingers and boomers mean by snowflake is weakness: an unwillingness to confront dissent, an intolerance to disagreement, an expectation of privilege. Basically some trigger-warning safe-space wokeness bullshit.
To put it another way: Palahniuk targeted the parents who raised their kids to believe in such universal uniqueness, whereas now those same parents seem to take aim at anyone foolish enough to believe them. This, to me, succinctly articulates the gap between Palahniuk’s nuanced satire and the surface-level interpretations of a certain contingent of angry, reactionary men who feel cheated out of something they assume was promised to them.
For his part, Palahniuk laughs when I bring up Fight Club’s connection to incels. What interested him was what would happen if men had their own version of the Joy Luck Club or the Ya-Ya Sisterhood—and to him, the fact that it would be violent wasn’t even a question. “I just wanted to create this arbitrary club,” he says, because what really mattered was the escalation. “Fight Club has to become Project Mayhem. It has to become this thing that’s beyond our control, a thing you can’t reel back in.”
Not Forever, But For Now is also apostolic fiction. Cecil adores Otto; he’s always telling us how clever Otto is, how wise. Cecil, though, is quite aware of Otto’s evil. In fact, Cecil’s narration deliberately withholds information about Otto from the reader because, as he explains, “I’d rather you embrace Otto as a winning boy.” He’s so protective of his abusive brother that he cares more about creating a positive illusion than revealing the negative truth.
Palahniuk chose the word “apostolic” as his name for this narrative form, even though when he defines the term in conversation, he invokes love and admiration. Apostolic, though, refers to religious discipleship—not merely love but worship, proselytisation, and devotion. Apostles spread the gospels as missionaries and crusaders. An apostle is stauncher than a lover, and much less prone to doubt and nuance. Love—healthy love, at least—seeks to view its object in all its complexity, flaws and all.
Otto wants Cecil to organise his existence around his needs. “Sometimes,” Cecil tells us, late at night, “Otto stands over my bed” and warns him that, “If I held any suspicion you’d leave me, I’d put a stop to you in an instant.” Cecil is completely under Otto’s spell, a fact Palahniuk emphasises with a tactic he has used since the beginning of his literary career. “I did the Fight Club trick,” he says, “where the narrator—his quotes are never inside quotation marks. It’s always paraphrased.”
Dialogue is one of the most effective ways of communicating character, so its absence keeps someone’s true self at bay. The result is that the reader never hears the narrator when he interacts with others, giving him little definition as a character, even on the page. Cecil’s liberation, then, is tied to Otto’s destruction. Cecil can only thrive when the one he loves dies.
It’s easy to dismiss Palahniuk’s fiction as provocation for provocation’s sake, as an indulgence in decadence and debauchery, providing as much visceral pleasure (but as little artistic quality) as gritty horror movies and bloody video games. It wouldn’t be hard—I know, I’ve done it—to dismiss his novels as moody stopovers between young adult fiction and adult literature, like a reader’s goth phase. His work is dark, disturbing, and unsparingly satirical, and it’s filled with an eclectic array of information.
When Palahniuk attended college at the University of Oregon, he studied journalism, which is apparent in his novels. One of his trademarks is providing fascinating facts about niche, underground subjects. How to make bombs. The logistics of pornography. The effects of drugs. The means by which Hollywood foley artists create sounds. Palahniuk lends his stories a conspiratorial verisimilitude with these brief lessons, as if nudging you and letting you in on a little-known secret.
Moreover, the novels lob savagely satirical bon mots at their targets, many of which are represented by the characters. This can lead to flimsy, stand-in cyphers who function as tools of the novelist’s subtextual aims rather than full-fledged individuals with convincing agency. Palahniuk’s characters, as he ages, have become more and more human, and their growth more central to the arc.
His previous novel, The Invention of Sound, features two protagonists mired in a wild narrative involving missing children, recorded murders, and Hollywood corruption; the finale is a scene of harrowing violence between these two characters. A contextless description of this ending would not do it justice, as what’s happening underneath the violence is an incredibly moving and meaningful conclusion to both characters’ stories. The pieces are disturbing, but the whole is heartbreaking. As a novelist, pathos is now Palahniuk’s primary intent.
I ask him if he thinks readers or critics recognise the emotional component of his novels.
“I don’t think 99% of them do,” he says, “And it’s painful. I don’t blame them for not wanting to go there.”
There is the true depths of a character’s catharsis, a confrontation with their deep, troubled selves. One scene in Not Forever, But For Now involves Otto and Cecil hunting around for “shy, blushing, effete types we can coerce into giving a ride.” They find a guileless boy named Digby, who despite Otto’s unambiguous remarks remains unaware of their intentions. When Cecil spots him, he assesses his appearance:
The lad looks to be so alone that he’ll do human toilet and tell himself this was love, why, he’ll do anything we ask just so long as he’s not ignored and left to stand there alone. He’s a baby animal so unwanted he’ll do rusty trombone and risk his life—risk catching hepatitis and AIDS—to ward off another moment of being some pre-male nobody set under a bus-stop light in the middle of cold nowhere.
When Palahniuk talks about this moment, I sense a real note of resignation in his voice. “That Digby scene is the most human scene I’ve ever written,” he says. “But nobody will appreciate that. Nobody will appreciate the pathos of that scene, because they’ll fix on the sort of dirtiness of it.”
He’s hurt. It hurts him that people rarely grasp the emotional punch of his writing, that they aren’t more moved by the grounded feelings and earned catharses of his characters. Readers don’t see how much his own personal anguish and history informs his fiction. But they can’t. They aren’t privy to enough of Palahniuk’s life to make the connections. They’re understandably distracted by the heightened plots and grotesque imagery and lurid themes. The emotions are there, certainly, but sometimes the visceral intensity overpowers the soulful underpinnings.
In an essay in Stranger Than Fiction, Palahniuk writes that Fight Club is “less a novel than an anthology of my friends’ lives. I do have insomnia and wander with no sleep for weeks. Angry waiters I know mess with food. They shave their heads. My friend Alice makes soap. My friend Mike cuts single frames of smut into family features.”
Lullaby was composed in the aftermath of a personal tragedy, but it would be impossible to discern this from the novel’s plot. In 1999, Palahniuk’s father was murdered, along with a woman he was seeing, by the woman’s ex-boyfriend. During the killer’s trial, Palahniuk struggled over whether they should seek the death penalty, ultimately writing a letter recommending a death sentence. Lullaby is about a culling song that ends the life of anyone who hears it; words that kill.
Palahniuk crafts his art with such personal investment and hard-won wisdom. He immortalises his friends and navigates his grief, incorporating private pain and experience. And like many artists, he struggles to accept a fundamental disparity in presenting work: that what the art the world sees speaks only to a fraction of the struggle required to complete it, meaning they necessarily underestimate its ingenuity and emotional complexity.
But Not Forever, But For Now contains some of Palahniuk’s most personal expressions of himself, which brings us back to Judy Garland and the Stonewall Riots.
For the past 30 years—since before he’d ever published anything—Palahniuk has been with his husband Mike. They live on a large property outside of Portland, where they’ve lived for the better part of two decades. Palahniuk is protective of Mike and doesn’t like him being written about all that much, so I only want to characterise Mike the way Palahniuk does, as I did not meet or speak with Mike.
Mike mostly doesn’t read Palahniuk’s books (although he did read and was moved by Lullaby), but he acts as Palahniuk’s sounding board for ideas. “Mike is really smart in terms of cultural precedent,” Palahniuk says, “and he can say, ‘No, that’s too much like this thing a million years ago.’ Because God forbid you get forty pages into something and realise, oh, that was a Simpsons episode.” But if Palahniuk can get Mike to smile, “that little smile like, you bastard, don’t do that,” or, even better, if he can get him to laugh, “that’s the ultimate green light.”
The nefarious firm of murderers in Not Forever, But For Now must kill Judy Garland, the Grandfather explains to her on June 22, 1969, so that the Stonewall Riots will take place. This is a regularly recurring (and most certainly apocryphal) story about Stonewall. The idea is that the funeral of gay icon Judy Garland, which took place the same night as the riots, set a gloomy mood to the evening and thus contributed to or perhaps even caused the events that unfolded.
It probably originated with Charles Kaiser’s 1997 book The Gay Metropolis, but historians don’t grant the theory much credence. In her book The Gay Revolution, Lillian Faderman spends four pages considering, via interviewees, the numerous factors that contributed to the events, and Garland isn’t mentioned at all.
But Palahniuk is using this myth more in the sense that Christopher Bram invokes in his book on gay writers, Eminent Outlaws: “People want to connect the death of Garland with the riots, but no mourners appear to have been present at Stonewall. The juxtaposition is only a symbolic coincidence (yet it’s hard to say exactly what it symbolises).” Others, like activist Bob Kohler, who was present at Stonewall, totally objected to the notion, “because it trivialises the whole thing.”
But it’s more than that. The Grandfather tells Judy Garland why on earth the powers that be would want something like the Stonewall riots to occur, and it goes something like this: “the population explosion was planned” by this ruling cabal because they “needed more humans to constantly vacuum clean the environment.”
These expendable hordes will “act as traps to collect and store really harmful germs and viruses such as HIV and hepatitis, thus making those bugs less of a threat to better humans.” But “a slave class,” as Grandfather refers to them, must be controlled so that they don’t take over. Lucky for Grandfather’s firm, “a really ripping science-based solution presented itself.” That is, “the mid-century explosion of styrene and isoprene and vinyl chloride” from the plastics industry caused a birthrate spike of “fey, feeble, polyurethan-defected things.”
Gay men is what he means, though he never refers to them that way. Instead it's “PCB-poisoned pre-males” or “this plastics-infused population of eunuchs.” If a growing community of excluded and ostracised people were to discover the truth—that not only have carcinogenic compounds produced “deviant, plastics-inspired impulses,” but that these impulses will deny them “traditional means of advancement,” so that they will “accrue wealth with no offspring”—they might understandably revolt, but they would most certainly sue. At first, Grandfather’s firm decided to employ shame to keep these “wispy, lispy” “bred-to die drones” from acknowledging their sexuality, let alone investigating its possible causes. This worked for a while, but a better solution was needed.
Hence Stonewall. Stonewall and the birth of the gay rights movement would shift the narrative “from shame to pride.” Now, these “tight-pants pre-males” will “embrace their engineered disabilities as badges of honour,” which will, according to Grandfather, result in the same unwillingness to find a cause, or even to consider the idea that their sexuality has a cause, thereby keeping them from discovering the truth and bringing down the global economy.
These are all, from Judy Garland on down, offensive ways to depict gay men and the legacy of Stonewall. Not that it’s any more objectionable than a lot of the stuff in Palahniuk’s fiction, but this relates to an aspect of his life he isn’t very public about, so I was curious what he had to say about this part of the novel.
“God, it’s going to be tough to articulate this,” he says. “Being same-sex-attracted in the tiny town I grew up in was really a dangerous thing. And when I came out to my mother, she said, ‘Don’t tell anybody. Don’t tell anybody, please. They will kill you.’ And I never came out to my father. Then he was murdered in ‘99. So that was always a huge incomplete thing.”
“How old were you when you came out to your mother?” I ask.
“I was sixteen,” he says. He repeats: “And she said, ‘Don’t tell anybody, because they will kill you.’ They will kill you. Because when she was a teenager, somebody in the town was suspected of being homosexual, and his house was burned down, and he was driven out of town. It was such a horrible ordeal that she was terrified it would happen to me.
“And then I age into this culture,” he continues, “where if you aren’t completely out in every aspect of your public life and personal life, then you’re somehow damaged and shameful and raw. So within my lifetime I’m supposed to transition from being a person that has really created this whole guardedness not just for my own protection, but for the protection of the people I love and for my family who are still in that small town. Then I’m expected to automatically step out of that into a kind of joyous, flag-waving outness that is completely at odds with the entire way I’ve been raised, where that was my shell and my armour. You don’t just give that up. You don’t give that up overnight. And people say if you don’t give that up overnight, then you’re self-hating, all these wrong things. So I’m fucked either way. I’m just trying to be one person and live a life. And I’m sorry: I’m just not ready to be completely out and just put it all out there.”
I anticipated Palahniuk citing the corporate commodification of Pride or the conservative backlash that came with it—but I didn’t expect such a personally anguished reason. Then I remember the bullies from high school that he and I plotted to kill, the ones who chanted “Pal-ah-niuk! Suck my dick!” at him while they assaulted him.
I think too of the narrator of Fight Club in relation to Tyler Durden—the meek, closeted drone versus the uninhibited, flamboyant hero. I think of the disdain Otto and Cecil have for the weak joeys, how the language they use is not theirs but the Grandfather’s, who has taught them to hate themselves. And I recall, too, how Palahniuk’s fictional milieu tends towards loners who resent the legacy they were born into, who seek out deviant pleasure from disreputable sources, who are made to feel guilty for something they didn’t choose.
I see Palahniuk’s anger at all that was withheld from him in his youth that now exists in plentitude. Even though those things no longer mean what they might have to him at sixteen, he’s now expected to be grateful for them. He’s no longer allowed to be afraid.
They will kill you.
Now it’s no surprise at all that Palahniuk cares so deeply for his twisted creations—who else is going to love them? Sure, they’re thieves and con artists and cheats, they’re druggies and sex addicts and adrenaline junkies, and they’re murderers and rapists and villains—but Palahniuk’s novels serve as a haven for them to be their true, deviant selves, because he was never given one himself. These extremist misfits are his life’s work; not the novels, or the over-the-top stories, or the abrasive humour and the controversial satire.
It’s Cecil and Mitzi and Madison and Carl and Pygmy and Tender and Joe’s Raging Bile Duct. In their horrific, transgressive, and misunderstood behaviour, these outcasts act in his stead to embrace a selfhood he wasn’t allowed, arrive at a catharsis he never experienced, or get retribution on enemies he could only joke about. Like any great novelist, Palahniuk adores his darlings; it’s just that his darlings kill.
