Oddtober 2024: Tears of a Komsomol Girl by Audrey Szasz

Book: Tears of a Komsomol Girl

Type of Book: A hybrid of true crime, photography, literary fiction, historical fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Jesus Christ, this book…

Availability: First published in 2020 by Infinity Land Press, you can get a copy here. My copy is from a 2022 reprint.

Comments: I said in yesterday’s look at Grady Hendrix’s take on the final girl trope that today I would be discussing an anti-final girl, and while that is sort of a flippant way to broadcast a new entry, it’s still an accurate assessment. Arina, or Arisha as her mother calls her, dies several deaths in this novel, and though she (sometimes only) dies in her dreams, her deaths are no less real and devastating for that fact.

This is one of those times when I realize I’ve come across something rare and so odd I am almost uncomfortable trying to discuss it. I know there are subtexts I will miss. I know that there are ideas and emotions Szasz is trying to convey that I will overlook entirely. But the inevitability that I will get things wrong also comes with a bit of excitement, especially if it means others who have tackled this book come and discuss it with me (hint, hint).

Arina is fourteen and lives in Russia during the heady days of glasnost and perestroika, an uneasy time when the culture change from communist control to a more open approach to trade and politics is just beginning. The specters of the old ways are crashing headfirst into the dangers of the new ways and Arina is trying to find her way in the midst of this change. Alongside Arina’s arrogant yet hopeful explorations, the Ripper of Rostov, one Andrei Chikatilo, is murdering people in horrific, gory ways and he too is a specter that haunts Arina.

This is a novel with an unreliable narrator and pays no attention to a linear progression of time. Arina, an accomplished violinist who aspires to become a professional musician, attends a boarding school for gifted students but she also attends a school near her home, sometimes returning to a dormitory, sometimes returning home to her mother. Sometimes she is an orphan, sometimes she lives with both parents, and sometimes only her mother is at home.

Arina’s versions of her life are always grounded in some very specific realities, mainly that she is small and looks younger than she actually is and she knows she is prey even as she hopes one day to become a predator in her own right. She does not want to be a murderous predator, but rather hopes her already jaded approach to male-female interactions enable her to make “connections” that will serve her well when she is an adult. She approaches the dying days of the USSR by graduating from Young Pioneers to becoming a Komsomol girl, and she approaches party politics the way she does her sexual interactions – it is something she does with an eye to building connections that can later assist her in her future ambitions.

Arina doesn’t hesitate to discuss herself as a bratty girl. She complains endlessly about the cheap, man-made leather shoes her mother purchased for her, one of the consistent threads in her different stories, she admits she has the sense that she is better than others, and she engages in uneasy behaviors, like covert masturbation as her family is gathered, watching a video of one of her performances. She does not worry that her recitations of her less positive qualities will ever hamper her, as she is profoundly confident in her capabilities to navigate the world around her and manipulate the situations in which she finds herself. Or at least she thinks she can until she encounters the killer she calls Satan, Mr. Chikatilo, and it is in his presence, even if it is only in her nightmares, that she encounters a force that genuinely reveals her vulnerabilities and forces her to regard herself as a victim who does not have control, dignity or even bodily integrity if a strong adult decides to take them from her.

It’s so tempting to discuss this novel in terms of the collision between old communism and the changes that awaited Eastern Europe after the dissolution of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin wall. Chikatilo, born in Ukraine right after the Holodomor and right before the horrors of the Second World War, endured a savage upbringing. He may or may not have lost a sibling to cannibalism, but undeniably he lived in dire poverty until he was an adult. Shaped by chaotic political violence, it would have been difficult for him to conform to the necessary self-control required in the USSR even had he been sane. But he wasn’t sane and the structure that communism would have given him he ultimately devoured with every person he killed. Arina, on the other hand, raised in structure so confining that she lives a life longing for ultimate freedom, was more than poised to leap into the brave, new, unstable world of travel, work and freedom but was herself devoured by the chaotic past, and it happened over and over, each dream of her death at the hands of Satan worse than the one before.

But that is just one of many ways to look at this astonishing novel. Another is that all the versions of herself that Arina conveys are elements of the experiences clever but underprivileged girls faced in the USSR, even as it became Russia. One could see her different stories as the results of small changes in her environment that, when reset, left her on a similar but somewhat different path. She is in turns a girl from an abusive home where fathers beat unfaithful wives, a girl sent to an orphanage when her parents died, a girl who was preyed upon by those in power in a supposedly classless society, a girl who would be ravaged by the past before she could begin living her future. But Arina also represents every teen girl anywhere. The anger she felt over her man-made leather shoes that looked cheap and did not hold up to the weather well, being unable to please her mother no matter how much she practiced her violin, being in possession of a new body and the new power that comes with it – this is the state of all girls everywhere. The arrogance of youth is universal, as is its hope. I would have been an age peer of Arina’s and her inner life was not wholly different from mine and the main difference is that Arina, by virtue of where she lived, was more or less born to be prey and no matter how her life changed from chapter to chapter, her end would always be the same. She may live a different life during the day but at night Satan always takes her in her dreams until one day she does not get a chance to rewrite the story of her life.

Arina’s dreams and reality can be summed up in a passage where she meets a man with whom she begins a sexual affair (and keep in mind she is fourteen and looks even younger while he is very much an adult), a man she calls Uncle Vanya. She walks past his chauffeured car and it is so obviously a symbol of the wealth and power she one day hopes for herself that she stops and looks at the car intently, seeing her own reflection shining back at her from the immaculately clean vehicle. This seems like a great symbol – she sees herself in the objects that represent a life far better than the one she currently lives. But then the chauffeur steps out and threatens her, telling her to leave. Uncle Vanya tells his driver to stand down and takes his measure of Arina, feeling her out to see how much intolerable behavior she will accept. When she lies and says she is much older than she is, he understands she is both too young to understand the near-Faustian bargain she will make if she accepts the ride he offers, but is old enough to feel as if she controls the situation since she caught the eye of a much older, wealthy and powerful man. And in the end, Arina does not seem to mind what Uncle Vanya and his friends want from her and because she is willing, she does not see it as a violation because she experiences true violation every time she dreams of Satan. It’s also interesting to note that one of her sexual fantasies where she is not raped and murdered involves a very involved dream about a Lenin statue coming to life.

This is a brutal novel but even in the most excruciating passages discussing the harm that comes to Arina, Szasz writes the horror with an almost poetic hand, but other times her hand holds a hammer, as does Satan during one of his attacks on Arina.

The photography in this book is disturbing, showing what happens to Arina in her dreams of Satan. Photographed and illustrated by Karolina Urbaniuk, the black and white photos in this book are of Szasz, wearing the same clothes and hair style but experiencing violence differently in each nightmare attack. Each chapter begins with a photo of Szasz as Arina, featured in a collage of other famous people and common sights in Russia, with a photo of her ravaged body later in the chapter. Each violent photo is accompanied by a paragraph or so of Russian that looks as if it could be from a newspaper clipping. Intrigued, I used Google Image translate and realized the text in those images came from the things Arina says during her attacks.

The final attack is, understandably, the one that affected me the most. Arina, wearing the dreaded synthetic leather moccasins she hates, is rushing to a Komsomol Youth meeting where lateness is not tolerated. The bus breaks down and everyone is forced off the bus in the rain and Arina is distressed about potentially being late and in trouble. Chikatilo, who has been stalking her, is on that bus and attempts to comfort her, reminding her that she had no control over the bus breaking down. He urges her to come with him back to his home where she can dry off and wait out the storm, and knowing she absolutely should not follow him, she does anyway, almost fatalistically going to her death. Once she arrives inside the shack, she knows she is in trouble but remains calm, holding onto a sliver of doubt that perhaps this would not end poorly, thinking perhaps she is being too hasty in her opinions. But then it happens and nothing can save her, and in this scene I forgot how obnoxious Arina was, how arrogant and scheming and bratty she was.

She became to me what she was and always was – a teen girl in a dangerous world where terrible things happen to the weak and no amount of pleading or dreams of power could change that.

There are so many ways to explore this novel that I hope others who have read it find this discussion and tell me how they processed it. I cannot say if this is a book you should read, because it is violent and upsetting. However, I can say I found this to be a remarkable book, so remarkable that you may notice by their absence the swaths of text I often reproduce when I discuss books. I did not quote from this book because I have no idea which section would best represent the elements of this book that spoke to me, a former spooky girl who lived in my head and never knew what damage was waiting for me to find it. The entire book is a memory and a revelation to the right reader, and if you are that sort of reader, I highly recommend it.

Oddtober 2024: Final Girl Meta – The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

Book: The Final Girl Support Group

Author: Grady Hendrix

Type of Book: Fiction, horror, dark humor

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s not wholly odd, but sometimes you can veer off the odd path when it’s Oddtober and you want to discuss final girls.

Availability: Published by Berkley in 2021, you can get a copy here.

Comments: Grady Hendrix really knows how to create tiresome female lead characters who really drive home how irritating they are even as you want them to win. He did it in Horrorstör, which has been discussed on this site, and he did it in The Final Girl Support Group. The heroine in this novel really is quite tiresome, but I kept reading even as I was rubbed the wrong way because Hendrix, through the use of high tension and a perpetually caroming plot, keeps his reader in such a state of anticipation that the miserable inner chaos of his lead character seems very fitting.

There have been several movies and books released over the last decade or so that use the “final girl” trope. I discussed one of them in yesterday’s look at the film Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, I am neither pro nor con regarding meta-heavy looks at horror, but I prefer those that are black comedies or outright parodies. Though Hendrix manages to maintain a tense plot, this is a comedic book, mainly because the heroine, when juxtaposed with the other final girls in the book, is such a mess. The book can be very deep in terms of psychology, giving a look at what PTSD can do to survivors of violent crime, but ultimately it is mostly a rollicking, fun horror novel that takes the final girl trope and runs with it in a million directions all at once. And, to give Hendrix his due, I had a couple of “a ha!” moments after reading that were gratifying, like realizing how it was one character’s computer was “hacked.” Just half an a hour ago before writing this I suddenly understood why the psychiatrist’s son was being such a brat, antagonizing one of the final girls and urging her to read his self-drawn comic book. It’s hard to have a tight, labyrinthine plot, but Hendrix pulls it off with such ease you don’t realize it until the black humor fades and the plot points take center stage.

Here’s a quick synopsis and be aware that there may be spoilers though I am going to do my level best not to ruin the ending: In the fine tradition of Palahniuk’s use of support groups to bring together unlikely characters, final girls from notorious murder cases that closely mirror the plots of famous horror movie franchises have come together for group therapy. The recovery from their violent pasts has varied from woman to woman, but none have struggled more than Lynnette, whose descent into PTSD-fueled paranoia has taken over her life and turned her into a terrified but well-organized fear machine who is also surprisingly cowardly when push comes to shove. Then one day the woman who best handled her attack – Adrienne – is murdered, and on the day she is killed the rest of the group experience odd and violent events that make it seem as if they are all under attack again. Lynnette, paranoiac that she is, knows something terrible is happening to them but has a hard time convincing the other girls. When it is revealed that Lynnette had been writing a book about the group that had very unflattering portrayals of the group and their psychiatrist, Dr. Carol, Lynnette becomes the temporary villain of the piece, as she was the reason so much information got out about the final girls, putting them in danger. As Lynnette is forced to find the other final girls and plead her case about them all being in danger, she is hurled through all sorts of violent and harrowing situations as she pieces together what is really happening. When she realizes who the killer is, she sets in motion her extremely violent redemption.

That’s all I will give of the plot, but it will hurt nothing to discuss the final girls in this book because half the fun of the novel is the sort of fangirl (or boy) experience of seeing the characters who shaped the horror films of your childhood reconfigured into the women in this novel. Here’s a look at the cast of characters, who all have the first or last name of the actress who portrayed their characters:

Lynnette Tarkington is inspired by a girl who had a very limited role in the first movie in the “so bad it’s good” Christmas horror franchise, Silent Night, Deadly Night. The role is played by scream queen, Linnea Quigley, and Lynnette is clearly a call back to “Linnea.” When the deranged Santa in the film breaks into a family home, he finds a girl who had just had sex on the family pool table, picks her up and impales her on a mounted stag head, ramming the antlers through her torso. Lynnette plays dead and survives, and part of the reason she was never able to move on as well as the other final girls in her support group is because she merely survived the attack that killed her entire family. She did not kill the men who harmed her, and that has caused some of the women in the support group to believe she is not a genuine final girl. She wants to support the other women but when she is initially given the chance to save one of her therapy-mates, she chokes. Overcoming the bone-crushing fear that narrows her focus to her own survival and nothing more will be difficult for her.

Adrienne Butler is a rare black final girl who is inspired by Alice from the first installment of the Friday the 13th franchise. She survived and killed the man who attacked the counselors who let his son drown (he never really had a son though) and was appalled when her struggle was turned into a film. She later sued, took control of the franchise and bought the camp where she was attacked and turned it into a retreat for abused and victimized women.

Heather DeLuca is an amalgam between Nancy from the first A Nightmare on Elm Street and Kristen from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Though she is clearly meant to signal association with Nancy, played by Heather Langenkamp, she has become fairly insane since killing her more prosaic attacker (Hendrix has to limit the supernatural elements a bit to keep this novel grounded in a more possible reality) and has a terrible drug habit as well, which links her to the character Kristen, played by Patricia Arquette. She’s erratic, and is as ruthless about her survival as Lynnette. She is darkly hilarious, as well.

Marilyn Torres is my favorite final girl in this novel. She is based on Sally from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and is the most self-contained, resilient and reliable woman in the group. She was a Texas debutante who insisted she be able to attend her coming-out ball, even as others felt it was in bad taste, just to give her attacker one final metaphorical fatal blow. She married into extreme wealth and is the woman the others go to when they need help, especially after Adrienne is killed. She is polite, kind, and maniacally focused on doing what she considers to be morally sound. She is also very dignified and proper in the fashion of women raised in big town Texas in the 1980s and 1990s, which rings very true to me.

Dani Shipman threw me for a moment because she was a woman whose brother broke out of an asylum on Halloween and ostensibly found her to try to kill her in the parking lot of a hospital. This to me was clearly a reference to Jamie Lee Curtis’ role from Halloween 2, so her name should have been Jamie, right? Except later in the franchise, when Jamie Lee Curtis’s character is killed at the beginning of Halloween 4, a new Jamie is introduced as Michael Myers niece, and she is played by an actress called Danielle Shipman, who later plays Annie in Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake in 2007. Dani is in a relationship with a woman dying of cancer when the events of the novel get rolling and, in my opinion, is the saddest final girl in the book because she really does have everything taken from her in the end, or at least everything that really matters.

Julia Campbell is based on Neve Campbell’s character from Scream. She kills her two attackers but ends up a paraplegic as a result. She’s my least favorite of the final girls and I am not sure why. Likely because the first introduction to her shows her to be a confrontational, somewhat mean girl, but really, who could blame her. She and Adrienne were the faces of the final girl phenomenon as it played out in the press.

Because I do not want to spoil this book entirely while wanting to talk about Marilyn some, I’m going to discuss one scene from the book that doesn’t really affect how it ends. Dani has been taken into custody because there is some belief that her brother did not commit the murders in the hospital and that Dani killed him unnecessarily. Dani’s wife, Michelle, is dying of cancer and Dani had promised her that she would make sure Michelle was able to die on her ranch, but when Dani is arrested for shooting at the police who wanted to take her in for questioning, Michelle is placed in hospice care. Both Heather and Lynnette descended on Marilyn when their lives began to implode after Adrienne’s death, and Lynnette manages to persuade Marilyn to drive them to see Michelle. Once there, Lynnette’s conscience demands that she get Michelle out of there so she can die at home like Dani promised her. What follows is grimly hilarious, and the only thing that keeps it from becoming an outright atrocity against a sick woman and the nurses who want to keep her comfortable is Marilyn’s innate decency and Texas rich girl ability to control bad situations.

As an orderly seems as if he is about to prevent them from leaving with Michelle’s near-corpse, Marilyn saves the day with her taser:

“You zapped him in the nuts,” the teenaged girl says, incredulous.

“Fucking A,” Heather says.

“I want you to know that I deeply, deeply resent the position you’ve put me in,” Marilyn tells me.

The three manage to get the dying woman into Marilyn’s super expensive SUV and unfortunately the woman loses control of her bowels. Against the wishes of the other two she decides to deal with the situation:

“I am not going to let this woman sit in her own mess,” she says, curving down the exit ramp onto a surface street, heading toward a Ralphs supermarket. “She is Dani’s special friend, and she deserves some dignity.”

When Heather makes a smart remark to this, Marilyn takes her in hand:

Marilyn parks, cuts off the engine, and rounds on Heather.

“This is a natural human process,” she snaps. “We will accord her the respect that any of us would expect if we were in her situation.”

She then barks orders at Heather and Lynnette, goes inside the store to get adult diapers and some water, and once she can comfortably clean up the dying Michelle, she does so without any complaint. She places all the soiled towels and clothing into plastic shopping bags.

“Heather, go throw this away.”

“I’m not touching that,” Heather says. “Just leave it.”

“We are not litterbugs,” Marilyn snaps. “Throw this away or I’ll smack you.”

Heather does as she is told. I just adore Marilyn.

I was hesitant to read this book because I was lukewarm toward Horrorstör and because I’d read reviews that said this book was hard to follow, with too many characters and other complaints about the pacing. That is why I seldom read reviews before I read any book because mileage varies so much in fiction, all the more so in genre fiction, that reviews often lead me astray. I found the book very easy to follow once I realized the key to understanding who the women were and what they represented, and that happened as soon as I noticed there were characters named “Heather” and “Adrienne.” I suspect that if a reader does not have a very strong background in horror films, especially those from the twentieth century, this book may seem confusing at first. Luckily that was not a problem for me. I really enjoyed this look at what becomes of final girls when their monsters are slain, and it’s an excellent meta-look at the trope of final girls, how women deal with institutionalized violence and how hard it can be to rise above what is done to you. Highly recommended.

Come back to tomorrow for a look at a sort of anti-final girl book, a book where there is only one girl who is killed over and over again.

Oddtober 2024: Final Girl Meta – Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

By now, all horror fans worth their salt are aware of the tropes that horror films use. Wes Craven’s 1996 film Scream was one of the first horror films that dissected the tropes as they were happening, showing us the rules to horror movies as they played out on screen. We all should have a firm grasp of horror tropes now. The killer is never dead at the end, no matter how charred his body is, or how riddled with bullets he seems. Taking your clothes off for any reason is a bad idea. The person who says, “I’ll be back in a minute,” will never return. Never for any reason go into the basement when the killer cuts the power lines. Basic stuff.

The rules satirized in Scream also helped define the Final Girl in horror films. Bad girls who drank, did drugs and had sex were going to be killed first, leaving the sober and sexually virtuous good girl as the “final girl” who faces down evil and destroys it (until the killer is resurrected for the sequel). Scream subverted that rule, as Sidney, the final girl, loses her virginity right before she is tasked with eliminating the two doofuses who have been terrorizing and killing people.

Final girls have always played a part in horror films that focus on killers. Their roles are almost instinctual, primal, repeating the same pattern of behavior regardless of the film or the director. Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre gave us blonde, brave but terrified Sally, who escaped when everyone else fell to Leatherface. She didn’t kill the cannibals but she managed to get away, definitely a final girl. Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Laurie from Halloween, Alice from the first Friday the 13th, Sarah from Descent, and, of course, Sidney from Scream all embody the sort of purity combined with intelligence that permitted them to survive at the end.

There are too many examples of this trope to list them all, and there have been a lot of self-aware films like Scream or Cabin in the Woods where the Final Girl trope is explored, but none are as good, in my opinion as Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a terribly underrated mockumentary and black comedy about an aspiring serial killer and his preparation for his first real rampage. All the serial killer tropes are laid out, alongside self-referential takes on how much cardio a killer must engage in to be able to track down running victims, the ridiculous desire for victims to clump together, the equally bizarre tendency for fleeing victims to trip and fall on level ground, and similar rules. But the best bit of meta in this film is the “final girl” trope, which is called the “survivor girl.”

Right about here you may want to stop reading if you have yet to see this film because there will be spoilers.

A quick summary is in order: Taylor, an aspiring film maker arrives in a small town in Maryland with her two member crew to record the preparation of one Leslie Vernon, an ostensibly abused boy with a miserable back story, for his return to the town that spurned him to exact revenge on as many teens as he can. Leslie and Taylor have a weird chemistry that becomes more obvious as the film goes on, as Leslie introduces Taylor and the crew to his serial killing mentor, played by the superb late Scott Walker, and discusses all the cliches and tropes Leslie engages in and uses in his preparation for his rampage. Leslie has ostensibly selected a virginal blonde named Kelly to be his “survivor girl,” and he intends to descend on Kelly and her friends as they hang out in the old Vernon home to get stoned and party. Taylor and her film crew decide they can’t let Leslie kill the teens and Taylor engages in a final showdown with Leslie. The film also features the late Zelda Rubenstein as a librarian and Robert Englund, Freddy Krueger to you and me, as Leslie Vernon’s psychiatrist. His role harks back to Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis in Halloween, and he clearly had a great time chewing the scenery in every shot he was in.

The relationship between Taylor and Leslie is the most interesting part of this film. Leslie is training to become a legendary serial killer like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, and initially Taylor is enthusiastic, if not a little squeamish, to document Leslie’s preparation. Initially they seem to have an openly symbiotic relationship – she gets to make a (hopefully) well-received documentary and he gets to enjoy the fame and notoriety such a documentary will give him. But Taylor’s humanity rises up, almost predictably, and if I can predict it, that means that Leslie did as well. Taylor discovers that Kelly was not really ever meant to be the “survivor” girl, and that Leslie’s plans for mayhem were far more carefully laid out and prepared for than she could have imagined.

Taylor is watching Leslie get ready to begin his rampage, putting on makeup. The gender role reversal here is very interesting.

In one scene, Leslie discusses the sexual elements of the serial killer versus victim interactions. Killers seldom pull characters out of closets and kill them because closets symbolize a sacred safety in the womb. Final girls almost never use guns because part of the credo demands the girls find and use a phallic-like object to kill their attacker. And since those survivor or final girls are supposed to be virtuous virgins, by using a phallic object to kill an attacker, they are symbolically becoming women while changing roles with the male killer as the penetrator. Leslie wants his survivor girl to be worth all the effort he has put into his plans, especially since his mentor ended up marrying his final girl, and he cleverly sets up Taylor to play a far more hands-on role in his rampage.

As absorbed in the meta as this film is, the interesting connection between Taylor and Leslie gives this film an interesting tension that plays well alongside the humor in the film. Leslie Vernon is intense but he also has a jocular sense of humor, and Taylor’s flustered attempts to control what is happening are outright funny as she cannot help but engage in the exact tropes Leslie has explained to her. In one especially funny scene, Leslie forces Taylor and her crew to leave the house where the teens are partying because he says she has a look on her face. What look, you may ask. “The we can’t just stand here and let this happen look.” Later, when Taylor tries to convince her crew to help her stop the massacre, she utters that exact phrase, which her crew points out is exactly what Leslie said when he threw them out. Later, Taylor realizes Kelly was never meant to be the final girl. Taylor, virginal and nervous, is the final girl, and far from it being a terrible betrayal, it’s clear Leslie made his selection because Taylor was the best possible foil.

Sometimes the one you’ve planning to kill was right in front of you all along.

This film is notable to me because of the very real relationship shown between the final girl and the killer. No long-lost sister, no revenge motive. Just a girl selected specifically by the killer because he knows she is the perfect woman to play the role of the final girl, seeing in her the capacity for survival that she would never have seen in herself. It’s a strangely touching conceit, to create such a bond between killer and final girl, one that is not tainted at the end like Sidney Prescott’s bond with the killers in Scream. The killers in Scream hated Sidney and wanted revenge on her for her mother’s own promiscuous behaviors that broke up families, but they never selected her believing that she could potentially defeat them. The motive was revenge, pure and simple (and also because they were psychopaths…). Leslie’s choice for his final girl is far more personal and, strangely, egalitarian. He picks his final girl because he knows she could defeat him.

If you are a fan of horror movies and you have not seen this film, go and watch it. Even though I spoiled it, there is a lot – a lot – I have not touched on. It’s a funny, violent, creepy and unexpected gem of a film. Check in tomorrow for more on the Final Girl trope.

Oddtober 2024: Murder Ballads, Part Two

Continuing on the topic of yesterday’s discussion about murder ballads that deal with femicide or star-crossed lovers, let’s talk about murder ballads that celebrate killers as folk heroes. When I think of murder ballads, one of the first names I think of is “Stagger Lee,” which is based on a genuine crime that took place on the day after Christmas, 1895. Evidently a man named Sheldon “Stack” Lee shot to death a man named William Lyon. The two were friends, but they had a conversation about politics that led to ill-will and culminating with Bill Lyon snatching Lee’s hat from his head and when Lyon refused to give it back, Lee shot him. The number of people who have performed variations on this song are numerous, among them Elvis, The Ventures, and, incredibly, even a disco-country hybrid by Dr. Hook. The adulation of Stagger Lee seems to be based on his general badassery and the fact that the ladies evidently loved him. I’m including Nick Cave’s take on “Stagger Lee” because I won’t have enough time to discuss his Murder Ballads album in the depth it deserves and feel conflicted about it. I really do need to revisit this topic when I’m not doing Oddtober entries and and spend more time down the murder ballads rabbit hole.

Another criminal as folk hero song I immediately thought of is all the variations on “Tom Dooley.” I include it in the folk hero category because even though the titular Tom shot a woman to death, the focus of the song was less on why it is men need to kill women and more on how Tom handled the death sentence he received. The most famous version of “Tom Dooley” is performed by the band Kingston Trio and it never explains why old Tom killed a lady but instead focuses on how it was he would have gotten away with it had a lawman named Grayson not found him and how very sad it was that the “poor boy” Tom was going to meet his end at the gallows. It straddles the line but since the more famous variations really do focus on how unfortunate it was that Tom was going to hang, it seems more folk-hero-ish to me.

Murder ballads in the United States, when not borrowed from the “boy knocks up girl and kills her” tradition from northern Europe that influenced the songs from the old South and the Appalachians, often focus on rogues associated with the western frontier. You can’t shake a stick at all the songs written about Jesse James, variations of which were performed by Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, The Kingston Trio and many others. One of the more famous versions of the folk hero murder ballad considers Jesse James a sort of dogpatch Robin Hood, lauding him for stealing from train barons and giving it to the poor (which is a very interesting way of looking at his crimes), and excoriating Robert Ford as the coward who shot him. Similarly you’d have a hard time pinning down all the versions of murder ballads praising Robin Hood, either mourning his death (generally by bloodletting to cure an illness) or celebrating Robin Hood’s aim as he killed by bow and arrow those sent to put an end to his generous ways.

And all of that is well and good, but the most interesting folk hero murder ballads I found were in the rap and hip hop genres. “97 Bonnie and Clyde” by Eminem is an autobiographical folk hero murder ballad. He is Clyde, his daughter is Bonnie, and is by his side, an innocent witness, as he disposes of his wife’s body. He’s his own hero, invoking the memory of a beloved but fairly awful couple, likening his actions to those of the duo who robbed and killed their way across Texas and Oklahoma, dying in a shoot-out in Louisiana. Bonnie and Clyde show up in a fair number of folk hero murder ballads in bluegrass and country music, as they too had the appearance of being Robin Hood-style thieves whose deaths at the hands of law enforcement was seen as heroes going down in a blaze of glory. One song in particular sung by Merle Haggard insists that some may see Bonnie as a victim of Clyde’s, forced to do what he told her to do, but that she was the real hero in that rampaging duo, rehabilitating her image in a way.

The most puzzling folk hero murder ballads I’ve come across are by a band called SKYND, a two-person effort wherein the band members have somehow remained anonymous. I suspect fourteen-year-old me would have loved this music but in my current incarnation I have questions. SKYND performs original songs named after killers or their victims and it can be hard to pin down what exactly the band wants to convey, especially when the videos are considered alongside the songs themselves. This is music made for the digital age and the videos are the vehicles that first reach listeners so they seem pretty important in sussing out what this band is trying to do.

SKYND performed two very sympathetic songs, “Bianca Devins” and “Elisa Lam,” about two doomed young women, but their songs about serial killers are not as clear to me. For example, the song about Gary Heidnik, a psychopath who kidnapped prostitutes to keep in his basement as sex slaves, is told from Heidnik’s perspective that is also mixed with a bit of third person narration. The song itself is basically a recitation of Heidnik’s terrible crimes with punchy lines like “the dog food looked good enough, good enough to eat,” making light of the kidnap of one victim on Thanksgiving, and that’s all factual – Heidnik fed the women dog food when he wasn’t forcing them into cannibalizing one of their dead basement-mates, and one victim was indeed taken on Thanksgiving. It could be considered an edgy song about a serial killer until you see the video. The video seems to be painting Heidnik as a some sort of playboy, the white, leggy models he kidnapped looking nothing like the poor drug-addicted minorities he preyed on. He dances with the victims, showing them hanging off of his arm like starlets next to male leads, arriving at a movie premiere.

The video itself is unsettling to the point of parody, and I wondered if the singer was mocking Heidnik by showing what might be considered his point of view – a handsome lothario with women clamoring to worship at his feet – but that was not Heidnik’s goal. He wanted sex slaves who could bear his children, and though he felt that he could create a perfect race of mixed-race children (his victims were all women of color), there did not seem to be a religious element to it that justifies showing the women clamoring for their captor. There is something to the idea that Heidnik saw himself as a messianic figure, as he founded a cult that was so loyal that they continued to meet after his arrest (it was a very small cult, around 50 members). The song has lines like “God, He would be amused to see you at my feet,” and “God has a sense of humor,” which leans toward assigning Heidnik a messianic goal, but given all the bizarre choices in the video, I have no idea why the band decided to show his victims as fawning over him.

Heidik’s crimes were actually so horrible that I wonder if that is one of the reasons I have had such a kneejerk reaction to this campy video. He inflicted some of the worst torture imaginable on the women he kidnapped. Heidnik himself was a cretin. Even if SKYND is approaching the song as a parody of the mind of a demented killer, they miss the mark.

Their other videos are similarly head-scratching. I’m all the more uneasy because the people in the comments for these videos seem to understand what SKYND is trying to accomplish yet do not evince any positive emotions for the killers, though the stranger elements of the videos, like Gary Heidnik trying to run human limbs through a blender, cause commenters to praise the loony gore.

Perhaps part of my puzzlement is that I know way too much about some of the people SKYND discusses in their songs, and have known about them in some cases for decades, and immediately can smell bullshit or shallow research into these killers. The lyrics demonstrate a shallow dive, indicating either the worst was tamped down to accommodate a weird hero narrative or were the result of a jaded songwriter who is in on a joke many of us don’t get. But whatever the intention, SKYND’s catalog is mostly looks at socially relevant killers or those who still have online cache, like Jim Jones, the Columbine mass shooting, the suicide whisperer Michelle Carter, Richard Ramirez and more, and are beyond a doubt murder ballads. Some may belong more in the “boy kills girl” category, like the song “Bianca Devins,” but most of the band’s catalogue presents such uneven or odd looks at some foul human beings that I feel comfortable placing the band’s songs in the folk hero murder ballad classification.

Narcocorridos are murder ballads that make more sense to me, and like most gringos, I was unaware of them until Breaking Bad let us know about these songs.

Narcocorridos are songs about Mexican criminals, often cartel members, whose acts of violence and lavish lifestyles fuel folk hero murder ballads about them. The stories of absolutely frightening (mostly) men who distribute drugs, torture and kill their enemies, control the police and live lavish lives are presented in a folk hero manner. Songs praising Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and El Chapo present them as badasses whose lives are enviable, but these songs have also led to the murders of band members who perform these songs. You piss off one cartel boss by praising his enemy, you could very well end up killed yourself. Valentín Elizalde Valencia found this out the hard way. He had written a song that antagonized the Los Zetas cartel and actually received a note during his last performance asking him not to perform the song as a Zetas member was in the audience. Not willing to be controlled, as well as knowing that the note was also a tacit death notice, Valencia played the song twice and met his fate after the show. In fact, the actions Valencia took to play his music and the price he paid are themselves excellent fodder for a murder ballad.

Even more upsetting was the death of Chalino Sanchez. Not as famous as Valentín Elizalde, his story is no less epic and deserving of its own murder ballad. He was killed in 1992 and is considered one of the most influential narcocorrido singers. He too received a note, while on stage, and what it said no one knows, but it’s clear from his body language that it was not a letter wishing him well. Despite this, Sanchez performed his set as usual, and after was shot to death by killers unknown. It was the second time he had been shot that year – his songs clearly rattled some cages – and it is largely believed that narcos killed him.

Frankly I hope a murder ballad has been written to make Sanchez a folk hero. It takes some huevos to read a death threat, choke down the fear, and perform as usual.

There are so many narcocorridos that I have no hope of discussing even a small sampling beyond what I have already presented here, but it is a rabbit hole in and of itself, a reawakening of a story-telling form that began to wane elsewhere in North America in the 1980s because, as a whole, I think society began to find it hard to praise men who killed women because they had sex with them or to avoid marriage, or find much value in such messages. But the hero worship element lends itself better to the modern ear when the murderers are local boys who made good through crime and stayed in power via violence against enemies and law enforcement. They may have been terrible killers but the perception of their roles as badass heroes comes from people who see their narco heroes as people who are self-made and willing to kill corrupt government stooges to remain strong. The notion of the narcos discussed in such songs as heroes is also bolstered by the fact the narco gangs have begun to police themselves, eliminating members who do not abide by certain codes. But like Robin Hood, if you have men in an economically depressed country fighting back against ruthless powers that prefer for the poor to remain poor, the worst and violent narco’s actions can be seen as a blow for the common man. Plus young men really just like to listen to songs about men who do what they want and win at it (until they don’t).

One day I will definitely revisit this topic. I was just looking for some interesting Oddtober topics online and did not expect that a Norah Jones song would lead me down this cavernous rabbit hole that stretches back over 400 years and has spread into numerous musical genres. If you have a favorite murder ballad, share it with me. Your suggestions may well be my next rabbit hole.

Oddtober 2024: Murder Ballads, Part One

Murder ballads. What better time than Oddtober to consider music created to memorialize (or aggrandize) terrible murderers, unfortunate victims or horrible crimes in general. Though these days murder ballads cross into multiple music genres, they are still a popular story-telling vehicle and far more common in contemporary music than I expected when I began looking into them. Specifically, I stumbled across a Norah Jones video for a song called “Miriam” and it caused me to start looking into similarly unexpected songs from fairly anodyne singers and before you knew it, I was down the murder ballad rabbit hole.

Like so many art forms that deal with murder and death, murder ballads are probably Germanic in origin, though such songs were contemporaneous in Scandinavia and the British Isles. Evidently some musicologists and historians disagree, mostly Americans, because when you research murder ballads, you inevitably find arguments between those who feel that murder ballads are a very Appalachian thing and those who feel that murder ballads were a staple of black culture and that whites yet again have taken credit for something they didn’t do. It’s not a theory without merit, as arguments about the origins of jazz and the blues continue to this day even though gadflies have a very hard time justifying their point of view. But it has to be said that neither the Appalachians nor the black communities in North America created murder ballads, though they certainly put their own spin on the traditional songs.

The first known (or at least the first known recorded) murder ballads are “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” or “Matty Groves” from the late seventeenth century, and the “Berkshire Tragedy” from early eighteenth century. The former is a corker of a song, likely from England, telling the story of a young wastrel who goes to church merely to gawk at the pretty ladies and manages to catch the eye of one Lady Barnard, who fancies him and decides to have an affair. When Lord Barnard finds them in bed, he challenges the naked Matty to a duel, killing him but not after being wounded himself. When he returns to his good Lady she tells him she’d rather have the dead commoner as her lover than him and Lord Barnard kills her too. He eventually feels deep remorse for what he did and buries the lovers in the same grave, placing Lady Barnard’s body atop that of Matty, which is more fitting given her noble birth and I think we can all agree makes perfect sense.

“The Berkshire Tragedy,” which some far more learned than I am think is a variation on an earlier song called “The Bloody Miller,” relates the story of a miller who comes across a pretty girl and tells her he will marry her if she sleeps with him. Believing him, the girl sleeps with the miller only to find out he had no intention of marrying her when he begins beating her with a stick. She begs for her life but he cuts her throat from ear to ear (as the story-teller in “Miriam” did to her unfaithful beau, punishing him “from ear to ear”). He dumps her body in the river and when he returns home covered in her blood, he is captured and sentenced to death.

Before he is hanged he hopes his story will prevent any other gross young men from committing rape and then killing their victims, because presumably in the late 1600s, men committing rape by fraud and then murdering the tragic woman was a common enough problem that this song served as a public service announcement of sorts. “This is your brain on drugs, also don’t rape and murder women you promised to marry.”

Murder ballads generally have one of only a few story lines:

–A man defiles a woman in some manner, be it rape or murder or both, and meets a brutal end himself.

–A doomed couple pair up in defiance of marriage or other social constraint, like parental disapproval or class markers, and one or both meet a brutal end at the hands of a jealous spouse or outraged community.

–A paean to rakish or exciting criminals like Robin Hood or stylish highwaymen who often meet a terrible end but are remembered fondly by the common man.

The traditional categories are seen over and over again, with a lot of crossover, and for this first part, I’m going to talk about the “kill loose women” and “doomed lovers” categories. The themes from “The Berkshire Tragedy” and “The Bloody Miller” show up in American murder ballads from the nineteenth century to current day. “The Knoxville Girl” was first released on record in 1925, and was already well-known by then. The song borrows heavily from its source. A man named Willard is courting an unnamed American girl from Tennessee and pressures her to sleep with him. She does, and, eventually, one evening on a romantic walk, Willard brandishes a stick and begins to beat her to death as she pleads for her life.

A version of this song was recorded by The Louvin Brothers in the 1950s in a bluegrass style, and in their version, Willard evidently justifies his actions because he believed she had a “dark and roving eye” that made it impossible for him to marry her.

In short, she slept with him before marriage so she was probably a slut and you can’t turn a ho into a housewife so best to beat her to death and toss her in the river. Don’t worry, though, Willard does go to jail for life. His unnamed victim is almost meaningless in this song, with the focus being on Willard’s desire to be rid of a woman who lacks virtue, and it depends on the listener’s reaction as to whether or not she is being truly villainized in this song, but her lack of a name and that Willard was not executed points in the direction of this song being a cautionary tale for young men who have extramarital sex and then regret it. Best not to sleep with young women or you’ll have to kill them and who has time for that, am I right?

Yeah, I have the jaded eye of a modern woman but it is interesting how seldom these femicide ballads are told from the perspective of the woman on the other end of the beating stick. Still, the element of punishment also helps the modern listener, even if the punishment is seen as little more than the natural end to trusting a loose woman. However, in another murder ballad that is directly based on an actual, verifiable murder, the male aggressor does not receive much sympathy.

I first learned about the story of the 1828 murder of Maria Marten in my early days in the true crime rabbit warren, as well as seeing it mentioned in paranormal books. Maria was an English woman in Suffolk who succumbed to the libidinous charms of one William Corder, a conman and rakish rogue. He was not her first dalliance, as she already had two children born out of wedlock. Maria predictably became pregnant and gave birth to Corder’s child and, you’ll never see this plot twist coming, he agrees to marry her to shut her up. When she pressured him too much he tried to handle the situation in a novel manner – he told Maria they had to leave town quickly and elope because the police were about to arrest Maria for bearing so many children out of wedlock. He spoke of his plan in front of her family, but of course Maria never made it out of Suffolk as Corder took her to a red barn and shot her. He then went on with his life, writing letters claiming he and Maria were happy in London.

However, Maria’s family were uneasy, and her stepmother most of all. She claimed that Maria’s ghost appeared to her and told her that William had killed her and where to find her body. Her stepmother finally got authorities to listen to her and Maria’s body was found exactly where her stepmother said it would be. William Corder was arrested and later executed for her murder. Interestingly, he comes up in my (excruciatingly long) essay about anthropodermic bibilopegy – books bound with human skin – because his court proceedings were bound in his skin and placed on display in a museum in Bury St. Edmond. Corder’s reputation took a harder hit, even though the woman he killed was of loose virtues, because he had behaved as a complete asshole his entire life. One would wonder how much better he would have done had the balladeers been presented with a man with less theft and fraud on his record. This story appears in several ballads, two of which are named “The Murder of Maria Marten” and “The Red Barn Murder.”

Murder ballads of the “romantic variety” fairly infest country music. Waylon Jennings’ “Cedartown, Georgia,” Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone” and “Kate” come to mind but most notable to me is Willie Nelson’s The Red Headed Stranger album. It’s a concept album devoted to the idea of the titular stranger as a murderous drifter with a gun. The album’s killer may or may not have murdered his wife but he definitely killed the woman who tried to steal his horse. “El Paso” by Marty Robbins flips the script a bit, as the killer takes out the man who was his rival for his lovely Felina, but is shot down by vigilantes, only to die in Felina’s arms. Still killed a man but this time the woman survived so that’s something and I’m clinging to it.

We get to see the perspective of the female murderer in some country songs. The trio formerly known as the Dixie Chicks sang a song called “Goodbye to Earl,” explaining why Earl had to die. He was a vicious abuser and deserved the murder the three twangy Furies inflicted on him. Martina McBride’s “Independence Day” tells the story of a woman who burned down the house to kill her abusive husband, told from the perspective of the daughter who understands why her mother did what she did. Interesting how murder ballads wherein the female is the killer are generally killing to avenge or prevent abuse. It kind of reminds me of the now-adage that men fear women will humiliate them while women fear men will kill them. That quote is attributed to many women, but most notably Margaret Atwood, who interestingly features in a short story a doomed woman who sings a murder ballad from the perspective of the woman being murdered. It seems fairly likely that “The Knoxville Girl” influenced this story, as one of the lyrics is:

Oh Willy Willy, don’t you murder me,
I’m not prepared for eternity.

Willie, Willard, the end is the same – a gal upset a man and he had to kill her.

I think Norah Jones’s “Miriam” is very interesting because the murderess is singing to her friend Miriam who slept with her husband. One day when I have more time for research than Oddtober permits, I’d love to pick this topic back up again and see how many murder ballads are from the perspective of a female killer, and then subsection that into the number of times a woman kills a woman. In fact, this is a topic that requires the sort of deep dive that I would need to devote a month of research to handle properly so please know this discussion is wildly incomplete. I couldn’t begin to catalog all the “boy sleeps with girl then kills her for being such a whore” or “boy loves girl and kills his rival for her hand” songs in folk or country music. And god help me if I try to venture into rock music. Nick Cave’s album Murder Ballads is worth an entry all on its own. But then “I Used to Love Her” by Guns ‘n Roses immediately comes to mind and I sort of hate that song so I sense any further attempts in this vein will spiral into another fifty thousand word OTC entry.

Still, it was interesting finding hip hop and rap murder ballads. One unexpected gem was Plan B’s song about a fictionalized murder victim who fell at the hands of the very real Camden Ripper. “Suzanne,” the woman in the song, was a prostitute who was savagely murdered, and the tone of the song is one wherein Suzanne is a mourned victim, not a nasty girl who got what was coming to her. She was a savaged woman whose screams permeate the song.

This also makes me wonder how many songs there are out there that focus on serial killers. I stumbled across one such musician and her body of work and plan to discuss it in the part two of this discussion because it straddles the line between just serial killer storytelling and borderline hero worship of such killers. Frankly, the “killer as a folk hero” strain of murder ballads is also heavy with femicide but ultimately is a bit more entertaining. Come back tomorrow and see what I dug up, and until then, if you have a favorite murder ballad that falls into the “kill her because she’s a slut” and “star-crossed lovers doomed to die” categories, or subverts them as the Plan B song above does, please share in the comments.

Oddtober 2024: Revisiting The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths by Corrine May Botz

Book: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths

Author: Corinne May Botz

Why I Consider This Book Odd: The book documents unexplained deaths as depicted in the form of miniature, almost dollhouse-like scenes. This book is bizarre, creepy yet utterly charming.

Type of Work: Photography, essay

Availability: Published by Monacelli in 2004, you can get a copy here.

Comments: I discussed this book fifteen years ago, back when this site was still I Read Odd Books. I had been thinking about reposting the discussion because it’s such a great book and having posted it so early in my book blogging “career,” it seems worth reposting it because few current readers have likely seen it. Add to that that Corrine May Botz is giving a talk on December 8, 2024 for Morbid Anatomy and this seems like a perfect time to repost this extremely cool book that covers the work of a decidedly odd, very gifted woman. What follows is more or less an unaltered repost, though I’ve rejiggered parts of it to conform to the way I now handle quotes and photos.

This book is amazing. Though the content is likely a bit morbid for most to consider it a coffee table book, had I coffee table, it would definitely be prominently displayed on mine. The book discusses the career of Frances Glessner Lee, a woman Corinne May Botz describes as:

“…brilliant, witty , and, by some accounts, impossible woman. She gave you what she thought you should have, rather than what you might actually want. She had a wonderful sense of humor about everything and everyone, excluding herself. The police adored and regarded her as their “patron saint,” her family was more reticent about applauding her and her hired help was “scared to death of her.”

Raised in an ultra-traditional, very wealthy family, Lee spent a good majority of her young life thwarted, though she was exposed to home decorating skills that would stand her in good stead when she began making the Nutshell Studies. Unable to attend college as she wanted, once her parents died, Lee started to come into her own, both metaphorically and literally, as she then had plenty of wealth to support her interests. She met a man by the name of George Magrath, a medical examiner who testified in criminal cases in New England. Magrath enthralled the young Lee, and it was through Magrath and his knowledge that Lee began to see what would become her life work.

Interested in promoting proper examination techniques to coroners, who were then mostly untrained in criminal investigation, she founded a library at Harvard (where her parents had refused to allow her to study) that contained over a thousand rare books she had collected. With her inherited wealth, Lee set up the George Burgess Magrath Endowment of Legal Medicine, and though she did not have any formal training, she was respected as an authority in what would later become forensic sciences.

However, it did not go unnoticed to Lee that students could seldom get any hands-on training, due to many factors, the main one being that few crime scenes of interest occurred when students were in training sessions. That caused her to create the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. These death scenes in miniature were physical reenactments of baffling cases, set up meticulously so that students could study them and analyze the clues and evidence in the scene, and come to an appropriate conclusion. Some were suicides that looked like murders, accidents that looked like suicides and some were murders that the killers tried to make look like either suicides or murders. The goal was to encourage students to study and find all pertinent information the scenes provided. She held seminars using her miniature scenes as visual aids. She made it clear that it was not always necessary to find the cause of death, but rather the scenes were “exercises in observing and evaluating indirect evidence, especially that which may have medical evidence.”

The sheer amount of work that went into the Nutshell Studies, as well as Lee’s incredible attention to detail, astonishes me. All of her skills and knowledge were poured into the miniature scenes. Working from crime scene photographs, she would construct detailed scenes, filled with information – some relevant, some not. The models she created worked, in the sense that one could raise the blinds, a tiny mousetrap would spring, and the coffee pots were filled with coffee grounds. With her knowledge of interior design, Lee selected wallpaper and furnishings that matched the socio-economic and class structure of the victims in the studies. She agonized over the scale of everything, making endless adjustments until the entire scene was in perfect scale.

No less attention went into the dolls, representations of dead people. Stuffed carefully to ensure flexibility, clothing hand made (even down to Lee hand knitting silk stockings for the dolls), and posed with care, these dolls became macabre representations of terrible ends. Though Lee never felt as if her dolls looked realistic enough, she had no qualms about creating dolls that showed the extremes of violence and death.

Though Botz observes this in decidedly more eloquent prose, as I read the essay about Frances Glessner Lee, I could not help but think that her choice of life work was a huge middle finger extended towards her parents and society as a whole. Her parents refused to let her get a college education and taught her that she “shouldn’t know anything about the human body.” Yet she ended up in a career where she attended autopsies and created representations of terrible crime scenes. Better yet, her career brought her into close proximity with lots of attractive, unmarried young men, a situation that had to be satisfying to her even though most of them saw her as a maternal figure, sending her Mother’s Day cards. Once her parents were dead, Lee did not set back the clock and get the education she wanted, but rather used her inheritance to become involved in legal medicine, a subject of which her father heartily disapproved. Though some of her class prejudices showed up in her works – she was reluctant to show crime in upper class settings – her quiet assumption of a decidedly unfeminine career, as girlie as making dollhouse scenes may be, was a blow for her personal freedom as well as a chance to do that which interested her.

The book is primarily made up of photographs and information about the scenes Lee created. Each scene collection has a numbered picture at the end that shows all the various clues and information one should have gleaned from the scenes, as well as analysis of what one could potentially think of the information. For some of the scenes, at the end of the book isa sort of answer key, so one can see if what one saw in the scene had any relevance to a crime. It’s an interesting diversion for those of us interested in the macabre, looking at these scenes and trying to puzzle out what Lee wanted us to see, absorb and interpret.

Oddtober 2024: The Obscenity Trial of Remy Couture

Ahh, where would we be during Halloween without a good moral panic now and then? Because in some respects, that is the only way to scare seasoned horror fans. It’s a simple formula for fear: take a normie who doesn’t understand that special effects are a thing, mix that with one part idiotic police and two parts puritanical prosecutor, cut it with half a soupcon of angry online Christian moms and you find yourself worried that watching Terrifier 3 could send you to prison.

The case I want to discuss today didn’t make a huge splash when it happened in 2009, but the Remy Couture obscenity trial was a chilling attempt at censorship and moral grandstanding using a legal and judicial system so infested with idiocy that it hardly seems like it could have happened the way it did. I cannot emphasize enough how stupid the case against Remy Couture was.

Remy Couture is a French-Canadian special effects makeup artist who created two very gory films to showcase his skills. The films in question, Inner Depravity 1 and Inner Depravity 2, may strike some as disgusting, and, to be frank, the subject matter and execution were a bit puerile (the first film opens with the silly slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to taste”), but overall any sensible person should have been able to see that the two films were Couture featuring his work in two very extreme shorts. Both films depict the same, masked drug addict who preys on women, killing them, raping them after they are dead, and at times keeping their bodies in barrels so he can defile them again later. The second film features the same killer but this time he has an “apprentice,” a boy whose body language and appearance kind of reminded me of Cha-Ka from the 1970s television show, Land of the Lost.

In 2009, a German Internet user came across the videos and reported them to Interpol as depictions of genuine snuff. Evidently the German man could not read English (or French because I believe Couture’s site at the time had both languages to describe the films) and Google Translate was still pretty new, so perhaps we can understand his alarm. After all, this is hardly the first time such a thing has happened. In the 1990s, national disgrace Charlie Sheen came across a copy of one of the notorious Guinea Pig films, specifically, The Flower of Flesh and Blood, and was so convinced it portrayed genuine torture and murder that he contacted the FBI. Mistakes happen.

But surely one would expect that French Canadian law enforcement might read the description of the films before going off half-cocked and accusing him of murder, but they didn’t. Eventually the investigators were able to piece out that his films were not literal depictions of murders, and when they did they then shifted gears and Couture was accused of obscenity in the first trial of its sort in Canadian history. Ultimately in 2012, Couture won the case against him, but he had to spend $30,000 CAD to defend himself, and the Canadian tax payers had to pay a cool million for their chance to participate in a moral panic.

I had seen the two films in question before charges were brought against Couture, but I didn’t associate them with his name until I read an article about his legal woes and sought out the films in question. When I realized I had seen them before, I could hardly believe anyone was so naive and lacking in the ability to judge films using common sense and context that they could both believe the films could, in any way, depict something that actually happened, or that it would be considered obscene in a time when horror films can be very detailed in their gore.

Please do not think what follows in any way impugns Couture’s skills in his field, because he is pretty good at what he does. But it does beggar belief that anyone felt the two short films depicted actual violence or were anything worse than what one could see in the Saw franchise or in necrophilic exploitation films like Nekromantik. Human beings love them a panic and Remy Couture accidentally gave those people what they wanted – a stupid witch hunt.

I don’t want to upload the videos to this site because it is recommended that only those over the age of eighteen watch them, but if you are interested, you can find the videos here. There are enough warnings on the site that hosts them to cover their behinds and hopefully indemnify me if some middle-schooler clicks over there from my site. Both films involve rough content. Women are bound, attacked, sexually defiled, mutilated and even victims of extremely casual cannibalism. Half of the time, the brutality is so over the top that if it were not so dark it would be funny. Honestly, the little apprentice is pure comic relief for the right sort of jaded viewer (hi!).

On its face, there is no way an intellectually honest person could have believed that Couture recorded his own acts of actual depravity or that the intention behind the two films was to “corrupt morality.” ID1 literally begins with a full-scale police investigation, as cops and forensics personnel are examining the semi-nude body of a sexually violated woman whose death is later shown in graphic detail. If the murders in the film were accurate depictions of genuine murders, it should have taken no more than half an hour to run down the details of the case to determine which police jurisdiction had investigated the murder. Moreover, someone is videotaping the law enforcement investigation from multiple angles without trained investigators noticing someone using 2005 technology hovering around them in a muddy, wooded area. The video taken of the investigation clearly could not have been police video, as it is visually in keeping with the rest of Remy Couture’s style, and is identical to the style used in the later depiction of the murder in the film.

The second film, strangely, is less skilled than the first. In ID2, at about the 3:37 mark, a bound woman’s arm is cut off just above the wrist and it is clearly faked. The bleeding stump looks like something you’d see in a professional horror film from the 1980s. Again, no shade against Couture, but the only way someone could have looked at that scene and worried that it was real was someone who really hoped it was real. Couture did not have film industry money behind him as he made these shorts to showcase his talent. That there may be some elements of the films that don’t deliver perfect believablity is to be expected, and it is astounding that any law enforcement professional could have watched the film and think any of it was real. Then when Couture cuts off another limb, he cinematically films himself taking a bite and then tossing it to his little Sleestak/feral hobbit to gnaw on. The whole scene is shot to include the perspectives of Couture and the woman being killed, which points in the direction of it being staged. Additionally, all of the women portrayed in the films were actresses there on their own free will, and candid behind-the-scenes shots show them laughing and interacting with Couture.

So eventually it became clear no one was killed in either film. Unwilling to let it go and chalk up their idiocy to a mistake, the Crown decided to charge Couture with obscenity with the intent to corrupt morality. They classified the films as violent pornography with no higher artistic purpose and therefore a threat to public morality. That on its face should never have happened because Couture was clear when he posted those videos – they were essentially exhibitions of his skills as a makeup artist, not an attempt to create pornography. Imagine a Tom Savini proof-of-concept video being used to prove he wanted to corrupt morality. Think about snippets of Greg Nicotero’s work being mistaken as an attempt to prove zombie films are obscene and without artistic merit. But it was staggeringly dense to claim ID1 and ID2 sought to degrade public morality because both films are foul. The public whose morality would be challenged by either film was very small because most people who watch horror content are not taking notes. They aren’t looking at a demented drug addict wearing nasty masks and his little companion gnawing on arms and having sex with rotting corpses and thinking, “You know, working a day job and raising my kids in the suburbs is a loser’s bet. I want to take my son, force him to be a cannibal and live the life of this shambling, filthy necrophile.” Luckily the jury agreed with my assessment and found Remy Couture not guilty in spite of shrill protests from a vocal minority that if you supported Remy Couture’s right to freedom of speech and expression, then you support violence against women.

Unfortunately, while that verdict ended the legal witch hunt against Couture, it hasn’t stopped breathlessly naive people who have no idea Google image lookup is their friend from taking stills from these two films or images from other Couture projects and insisting they depict actual victims of Satanic murder or are hijacked to use in politically charged lies. One particular image of a woman with a crucifix impaled through her throat has been used to fan the flames of Satanic Panic or in political scapegoating. Don’t worry, the actress in the photo is very much alive, the woman whose face is presented next to the gory image is not the actress in Couture’s image, and if that woman was killed for being a Christian, a pox on everyone who demeaned her death in this manner.

No matter how many years pass from the massive Satanic and moral panics from the 1980s through the early 1990s, the sparks that could ignite another witch hunt are always there, burning quietly but steadily, just waiting for a loosely hinged True Believer or political/judicial official in need of a moral platform to spill the gasoline that will save no one from physical or spiritual harm but can burn Western civil rights to the ground. It seems as if Remy Couture’s career did not end due to the absolute lunacy that was unleashed on him when a German internet user had a bad night, but his legacy is still haunted by people completely misrepresenting his work as genuine atrocity, sometimes with racist implications. This particular week of Oddtober 2024 is pretty gross in terms of content, but out of all of the topics I will discuss this month, this is the grossest and the one that should scare you the most.

Oddtober 2024: The Bug Collector by Wrath James White

Book: The Bug Collector

Author: Wrath James White

Type of Book: Fiction, novella, extreme horror, body horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It is possibly the most disgusting book I’ve ever read.

Availability: Published by Bad Dream Books in 2024, you can get a copy here. I read the Kindle version.

Comments: About a million Internet years ago, I could not bring myself to discuss in any amount of detail Edward Lee’s short story, “The Dritiphilist.” Remember that? We were so young then.

I’ve toughened up over the years. I’ve been dragged down some nasty roads. I’ve read the now infamous Swamps of Dagobah Reddit story. The stomach-churning Jolly Rancher account barely registers as gross these days. Outside of horrific depictions of child and animal abuse, very little fazes me anymore. But I do have to say that even taking into account the cover and that Wrath James White has been known to get his gross on, I entered into this novella without wholly knowing that it was going to be one of the most intense splatterpunk novels I’ve ever read.

In my defense, I thought the cover was hyperbolic, and I processed the idea of a bug collector through the lens of a documentary about “bug chasers” I saw around twenty years ago called The Gift. At the time, the concept of bug chasing was still new, and the documentary was shocking to a lot who saw it. The bug chasing in the documentary was specifically HIV, and the film looked at men who made the decision to deliberately acquire the virus. It wasn’t disgusting, but it was unsettling and extremely sad in places. I recall specifically one young man who broke down crying as he tried to explain why he wanted to develop HIV and far from it being a sexual fetish for him, it was an acknowledgement that he knew he could end up dying but he felt infection was so inevitable that he just wanted to get it over with. In some way, not having HIV made him feel like an outsider in his community. Due to antivirals and the vastly improved life expectancy now for people who acquire HIV, some young gay men call HIV “gay diabetes” but even as late as 2000, treatment of HIV was dicey, giving a lot of weight to a decision to engage in such sexual nihilism.

Wrath James White took that nihilism and took it a step farther with the notion of “bug collecting.” The protagonist, a man who is evidently named Joey but god help me I somehow walked away from this reading experience without any memory of his name, collects sexually acquired infections. He wants all of them. At once. And he gets them, after spending years engaging in very disgusting sex with equally unsavory partners. He has no equivocation about why he is seeking out around thirty sexually-acquired infections. He is driven by the power of fetish:

My fetish had destroyed my health and ruined my life. I was a victim of my own paraphilia.

He developed his fetish as a result of a random sexual attack when he was a child. He later was shown a public safety film about STDs (or STIs as they are now called), complete with photos of diseased and suppurating genitalia, and with his childhood abuse in mind, those images became his default arousal fodder. Some pre-adolescent boys’ first sexually titillating images were of breasts or even images of staid but interesting heterosexual porn. Joey was turned on by disgusting pictures of bodies ravaged by disease.

Joey engages in a lot of risky behaviors to get his diseases but he is not an “ethical” collector because before the diseases rendered him a shambling, rotting, nose-less zombie, his appearance did not initially warn off prospective sex partners. Though he deliberately had sex with people he hoped would give him diseases, he didn’t consider that perhaps those people would not appreciate a two-way disease exchange. A prostitute he failed to disclose his diseased status to takes him hostage to punish him because, in a bizarre twist of fate, Tina was what is called a “super carrier.” She can be infected with any number of sexually transmitted diseases without showing symptoms, meaning she had no idea she was sick while she was infecting other people. She’s out for revenge and tortures Joey but as she does so, she wants him to explain why the hell he decided to do this to himself and to her and it’s right about here that I am going to stop discussing what happens in this book other than to leave you with the following quote from Miss Tina:

“What the fuck kind of sick white boy shit is that?”

One of the things I struggle with in regards to this sort of horror is that it so often violates basic story-telling tenets. We are told, not shown. Characters are one-dimensional. Plots are absolutely predictable. And editing is sometimes dicey (which I’ve mellowed about over the years but it still is something that leaps out at me).

But somehow this disgusting book works better than its peers and I think I understand why. White uses a traditional story-telling framework, flips the scripts on sex and presents his audience with a repellent take on One Thousand and One Nights. The Bug Collector is Thirty and One Infections and he’s Scheherazade to Tina’s Sultan. Ultimately, he’s more doomed than Scheherazade, and he’s telling stories to delay the inevitable rather than save his life, but the structure is there and it justifies a passive, recitation of events. In a story like this, you must be told rather than shown. The familiarity of the story framework also takes away the sting (and stink, frankly) of this sort of content because we get to keep an arm’s length prurience, hearing about disgusting events without immediacy, reserving urgency for Joey’s current plight.

One other issue I think I sorted out was the tendency for White’s characters to hold forth rather than speak. In this regard, Joey is not engaging in a traditional conversation. He is literally telling stories to save himself. Interestingly, I’ve dinged Edward Lee for this, with his hillbilly rapist discussing deep philosophy with a cop come to arrest him, and may need to reread some of his work and see if my reaction to it is similar to the reaction I had to Joey’s elevated language in The Bug Collector – amusement. There is something quite funny about this man whose appearance resembles an extra on The Walking Dead speaking like a college professor as he explains his appalling fetish to a street prostitute. And this is a book that needs some levity to be sure, so it was welcome rather than discordant.

How exactly did Joey get all those diseases? What does Tina do to him and does he deserve it? No way am I gonna quote from any of those passages. Nope. Absolutely not. Read it and find out.

This sort of horror is not for everyone. It’s written for a very specific audience, the sort of reader who understands the appeal of horror that seems like it is the result of a bunch of horror writers having a drink and egging each other on to see who can come up with the foulest narrative. It’s okay if you aren’t that sort of reader, but if you are, this is one of the better examples of this sort of extreme body horror.

It’s interesting that in a genre that generally causes me no small amount of existential despair I found two examples that work, this novella and May Leitz’s Fluids. I must be getting mellow these days. Still, step cautiously. This really is a gross book that revels in being gross. If you are into that sort of thing, you’ll be as happy as a pig in mud with White’s latest offering.

Oddtober 2024: 10 Best Horror Movies Directed by Women by APac

I discussed an APac ‘zine back in September, focused on the best revenge movies written by women. The list as a whole didn’t really ring cinematic bells for me, but the inclusion of the, frankly, terrible She-Devil, gave me the opportunity to hold forth on Fay Weldon’s The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil. So it all worked out in the end.

10 Best Horror Movies Directed by Women gives me a lot more to work with, as I’ve seen most of the movies included and one of them is in my own personal top ten list of the best horror movies of all time. However, I need to state again that the ‘zine creator assembled a master list of horror films directed by women so if your own favorites are not on this list, they are likely on the master list, and she worked hard to create a list that features films that hopefully alert the readers to at least a couple that may be new to them.

And I also feel like I should mention that the stylized drawings have an interesting asymmetry to them that adds to the unease most of us enjoy when considering horror films. That may seem like a “faint praise” comment but I often concentrate on talking about text more than visuals so I felt it necessary to say. These APac ‘zines have a very specific and interesting visual appeal.

I won’t spoil the whole list but I will say that I had no idea American Psycho was directed by a woman, and had never heard of the movie, La Captive, directed by Chantal Akerman. It is wholly new to me and I really want to see it now. It looks like I can only see it if I subscribe to the Criterion Collection, and I may just do that.

The movie that impressed me the most with its inclusion is Near Dark, directed by Kathryn Bigelow. It is one of my top ten, top five, actually, horror films. I was in high school when it was released and it was a revelation. Vampire movies covered a lot of cultural ground, to be sure. I was culturally aware of the campy Hammer vampire films but they were not easily available to rent or watch in suburban Dallas in the 1980s. I’d seen plenty of older Bela Lugosi/Lon Chaney vampire films and, of course, the grandfather of them all, Nosferatu. The vampire films that focused on female characters were of the campy sexy Hammer variety or overtly sexy variation on Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla story. All of them, even the American films, had a very British and refined air about them. Moody castles, hereditary titles, ancestral wealth – even the excellent The Hunger took place in a rarified place of wealth and privilege in a world foreign to Farmers Branch, Texas.

While I am sure there are films that predated Near Dark that focused on the common person’s experience with vampirism in settings far less luxurious than a well-appointed castle, Near Dark was the first one I ever saw and it was a revelation. Horror films with a democratized setting, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, existed, but Sally and Franklin were irritating and the cannibals were… unpleasant, to be sure. Near Dark’s characters were low-brow and decidedly southern, but were also good looking even as they were grubby. Set in Oklahoma, the environment was one I recognized, a place where you might have to worry about a Leatherface with a chainsaw or maybe a creepy serial killer wearing a burlap bag as a mask while brandishing a pitch fork, but not so much vampires. It felt new, adding dimension to old monster legends.

The film features two actors I’ve always had a crush on, Lance Henriksen and the late, great Bill Paxton. The radiant Jenny Wright plays a major role as the love interest, Mae, who turns Caleb, portrayed by a very young Adrian Pasdar, into a vampire. The group of vampires she travels with are none too pleased she foisted Caleb on them but agree to give him a chance. Things do not go as well as one would hope, though Caleb does at times acquit himself well, and the film is filled with blood, gore, fights, and southern charm that clearly inspired the presentation of its spiritual descendant, True Blood.

No spoilers here, friends. The above synopsis is barely a synopsis but if I discuss much more I won’t be able to stop typing. If you haven’t seen this film, you need to, and if you’ve seen it, you need to see it again. But I will direct you to one of the best scenes ever in a vampire film, the prelude to a massacre that should not be this funny but is. Bill Paxton was born to chew this particular scenery.

I know a lot of people consider this a “western” vampire film and they can have their opinions but this is a southern vampire film to anyone who has actually lived in the more western edges of the American South. Lance Henriksen’s character fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. Characters have southern accents so thick you can cut them with a knife (or extra sharp spurs, as it were). It’s southern to me, and since I’m from the South, I feel comfortable with my assessment.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed the ‘zines I got from APac. I have several others I could potentially discuss for Oddtober, and if I get into a bind and need a quick list to go over, I may well do that. We’ll see. If you would like to get a copy of this ‘zine, you can get one here. The artist, Amèlie Paquet, has a considerable list of interesting horror and feminist ‘zines, so be sure to give her store a look.

Oddtober 2024: Plastic Soul by James Nulick

Book: Plastic Soul

Author: James Nulick

Type of Book: Fiction, science fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It answers questions that science fiction has tried to address for years, among them: What fuels the desire for humans to clone themselves and what do the clones really think about the experience? Nulick takes us from the collective soul to the plastic soul and it’s eerie.

Availability: This book is available for pre-order for both an “artist” edition as well as a “jank” edition.

Disclosures: James Nulick is a friend of mine.

Comments: James Nulick has spent the last few years traveling down two different paths. He first introduced readers to his Drake® world in his short story collection, Haunted Girlfriend in the short story, “Body by Drake.” Set in the not-too-distant future, Drake® Corp is almost as important as the government and exists in a world that is only dystopian because it so resembles how we currently live taken to its logical conclusions of ecological destruction, sociological quagmires, and a growing separation between the rich and poor. We saw more of this world in the short story collection Lazy Eyes, a familiar but uncomfortable sense that the roiling inequities that plague us now will take root so deeply that our futures are cast in stone before the calendar pages even get a chance to turn.

As he created Drake® world, James was also exploring an interesting idea that human beings are cosmically linked to one another in ways we don’t often see and seem impossible. In his novel, The Moon Down to Earth, unlikely characters share the same thoughts. A super-morbidly obese Hispanic female shut-in, a mixed race young man who wants to be a rapper, an elderly racist widower living in a trailer – their thoughts at times mirrored each other in a way that pointed toward the mystical, almost as if the much-derided “hive mind” was at play. He later expanded these connections in Lazy Eyes, where animals and humans began to exhibit those cosmic links with each other. The dead live, the voiceless communicate, and the lines of human and animal experiences are blurred.

These two paths meet in Nulick’s latest novel, Plastic Soul. When I first read this novel, the realization that Nulick had been world-weaving all this time, culminating in this unique, frightening yet strangely hopeful novel, was humbling. For years James Nulick has been tossing crumbs for his readers to follow, world-weaving in a manner that in itself seems as magical as the tendrils he sees that hold us together. It’s tempting at times to discuss the existential questions this novel raises, but it almost seems like an insult to me to explore this novel with a larger philosophy to guide you. Philosophy has little place in magic, I think. Any real philosophical examination of this novel would necessitate the use of quantum theory and I am not Richard Feynman. This novel made me feel, at times, as if I were one of the apes who found the obelisk at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and now I feel the urge to make tools.

I decided to discuss this book for Oddtober 2024 because it is, at times, so very creepy. This novel is cinematic, the sort of book that creates profound visuals. A medical facility that cloaks unethical activities behind a veneer of sterile luxury juxtaposed with the sort of secretive suburban childhood familiarized in early Spielberg films. Fleets of cars chauffeured by a slender, attractive Asian man named James (private car ownership has been banned in the Drake®-driven universe). A wealthy home with grounds devoted to bee cultivation. A thrift store with couture-priced designer labels. This novel fairly cries out for a cinematic adaptation.

The novel introduces the reader to a world wherein the rich can clone themselves in order to ease their loneliness, only to realize that the human will is no less forceful in medically manufactured human beings. There is a cloying creepiness that is reminiscent of the more clinical elements of David Cronenberg films (if Dead Ringers comes to mind when you read this novel, we can be friends), there is a nervous anticipation as the reader waits to see what will happen when clones are shipped to live with their genetic donors, and a sickening feeling that Nulick is showing us how easily we will be victimized by the very technology we hope will save us, both us and the other living creatures we create.

Ultimately, in science fiction, we’ve learned that even with the best intentions fueling our actions, there is never a good outcome where human clones are concerned. Even when cloning is cloaked with the idea that it benefits mankind, we still have human beings we classify as The Other so we can justify harvesting their organs, forcing them to do dangerous work, or, in the case of Plastic Soul, being used to cure the loneliness their DNA donors experience in their wealthy, exclusionary lives.

To inject a little bit of humor into this very serious discussion, this novel also addresses the age old question of what it is human beings do with their clones: Would you have sex with your clone or robotic replicant if you were able to? James also answers the mostly unasked question of how the clones feel about the option even being on the table in the first place.

If I seem like I am dancing around what is happening in this novel, it is because I am doing just that. To discuss the reasons why people do what they do in Plastic Soul, the real, deep, evolutionary reasons, will absolutely spoil the novel. But I can convey the visuals and give an overall sense of theme by following the book’s layout and telling you a bit about the characters whose names are the chapters in the book.

“MRS NARCISSUS/Sylvie Biusom,” sets up the visuals and overall tone of the novel. Sylvie was named for Sylvia Plath, but unlike her namesake, she lived with her father and was abandoned by her mother. Of course Sylvia Plath’s father, Otto, did not abandon her – he died – but Sylvia as a child interpreted his absence as an abandonment and it affected her for the rest of her life. Sylvie, who was actually abandoned, also carries the impact of that abandonment and it has thwarted her. She does not like people, she loathes being touched, but for all that she adores her father, she still longs for companionship outside of just his company. Her father, a very wealthy man, likes to keep bees, much as Otto Plath did, and Sylvie helps him as much as she can with beekeeping.

Sylvie’s haughty officiousness hides a deep loneliness even as she denies experiencing any sort of sexual attraction because she so dislikes human connection. So how does a person like Sylvie achieve any sort of happiness in life? Watching the Blip – a future means of watching visual media – she sees an ad from The Chrysalis Institute. The ad features a woman sitting across from a mirror image of herself, and asks the question:

How much would you pay to have an honest conversation with yourself?

It turns out she would be willing to pay a lot, and she sends for a driver to take her to the Institute so she can pay outrageous sums so she can recreate herself and in eighteen months have an honest conversation. At a clinical but luxurious facility, she is treated deferentially and given all the details she will need to clone herself. It takes about a year, using proprietary nutrients and chemicals, to grow a clone to adulthood, and another six months to train the clone in language. The clone also has all her memories, which means, presumably, the clone will know all of Sylvie’s motivations in creating a clone in the first place.

There are three extremely important things those who commission clones must understand. The first is that all clones must be older than twelve years old when they leave the Institute to ensure no one creates a clone to engage in pedophilia, an arbitrary age cut-off that seems significant only to those who created the rule. The second is that they must not ever have sex with their clones. The third is that all clones are outfitted with a sort of kill switch so they can be terminated at will should the need arise. It is extremely expensive to commission a clone so generally one assumes that people would not want to kill a clone unless they were billionaire psychopaths, and it should also sow a bit of unease that there is some worry that a clone might need to be killed for some reason, necessitating a kill switch in the first place.

The place on the clones’ bodies where the kill switches are located should also sow unease. A lot of it.

Sylvie names her clone Jenny, a name with a heavy biological implication. Sylvie also notices that the driver who ferries her around is somehow always the same man, an Asian man named James. When Jenny is finally delivered to Sylvie, their meeting is touching and glorious but… There’s always a but in stories like this. Jenny states plainly the real difficulty in commissioning a clone.

When you created all this, without asking, of course, did you ever consider what I might want?

How can it possibly occur to a “woman born” human that an exact replica of themselves, with their memories and equal intellect, will not want to have that conversation The Chrysalis Institute promotes?

“BRO BOT: Joey Osbium” is the most important chapter in the book and therefore the one I will discuss the least because the scope of his life cements how terrible the new world really is. After a childhood spent sharing a room with his older sister, creating a deep bond with her, and falling in love with his best friend who was heterosexual and likely never picked up on Joey’s adoration and sexual attraction, Joey becomes a grown-up orphan. His parents die, his sister marries and seldom bothers with her younger brother, and when Joey begins to fall in love with his fellow partner at his law firm, he more or less retires. His family left him with an extraordinary amount of money so he does not need to work, and when his loneliness becomes too much to bear, he too decides he would like to have a conversation with himself.

The end of Joey’s chapter is so uniquely considered and beautifully-executed that it is almost impossible to describe.

“PLASTIC SOUL/Daria Moore Thompson, M.D.” is the most disturbing chapter, and Dr. Thompson is a deeply loathsome woman. Though at the end of the book she comes very near to experiencing an upswing in her character arc, her innately disgusting nature taints the small amount of good she manages to bring to the table. Dr. Thompson has a husband who adores her, a fairly nice life and income, and a wardrobe of designer clothing, but she is appalled that she is aging and her unrequited love for one of the founders of The Chrysalis Institute warps her psyche so profoundly that she inflicts disturbing harm on one of the clones who lives at the Institute, a clone made in the image of her beloved.

Yes, founders of the Institute cloned themselves and permit those clones to be used for research or as unpaid labor, and likely do not care what happens to their mirror images when the lights go out. A huge clue as to what is happening comes from Dr. Thompson:

Honeybees are the most perfectly socialized beings on the planet, and we can learn a lot from them…

“THE PERFECT BODY/Iyama Siyos” is the final chapter and it is through Iyama’s eyes that we finally see the genuine evil being wrought at the Institute. Iyama represents the good that man does in spite of himself and is far better than those who created him. In his late teens, he is a clone who must remain at the Institute, as he is a clone made for research. He knows he is made in the image of an Institute bigwig, he knows he has “siblings” born naturally to his DNA donor, and slowly understands his role in a technological machine that does not endow him with the same humanity as those who are “woman born.”

Iyama is in love with James, the slender Asian driver, and it is through his genuine emotional and sexual attachment to James that influences how Iyama finally decides to deal with his lot in life. Nulick deviates from the cinematic nature of the novel by showing a realistic escape attempt. No massive explosions. No gunfights. No final speech from the mad scientist. Just a naive, scarred-up boy, who is human regardless of what “woman born” scientists think about him, trying to take control of what happens to him, endowed with a youthful hopefulness that steers him away from simple compliance.

It is through Iyama that the horrors become clear through the eyes of a teen who feels unease when he should feel rage, who feels genuine love rather than self-serving lust, who at the end may not really know that he has, indeed, suffered.

Throughout the novel, the not-so-distant future element is grounded by framing it with current events. Dr. Thompson was born the day the Challenger exploded. 2020 is referred to as a “difficult year” and the events of that year described as a specific attempt to control ecological problems. In its way, these revelations are humorous, compared to the rest of the text. Nulick also gives us several stories of people who used body parts obtained from Chrysalis clones that are darkly hilarious. Sometimes having a conversation with yourself cannot solve your problems so imagine the issues that may arise when a new tongue does not make you feel better about yourself.

As you read this novel, there may be moments wherein you think Nulick needed an editor with a heavier hand to eliminate repetition in these individual stories. The repetition is not a bug, it’s a feature, and it is necessary to spell out what is really happening in Nulick’s world. The experiences at The Chrysalis Institute are nearly identical. There is a common interest in expensive labels and designer clothes. The color orange is important. And the bees. Drones, queens, many-chambered hives.

When I step back and look at the way Nulick meticulously set up the two paths of work that led to this common destination, it makes me feel something akin to jealousy because it is impossible not to marvel at this sort of long term vision. This is a book I highly recommend and hope this discussion does it justice. You really need to read this and when you do, please come back and tell me what you think. And always remember, as we learn in Sylvie’s chapter, with all apologies to Jane’s Addiction, we’ll make great pets.