This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
It’s the most wonderful time of the year…
Happy Halloween, my fellow odd book lovers!
Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens by Susan A. Clancy
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Book: Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens
Author: Susan A Clancy
Why I Consider This Book Odd: I heard a review of this book on some NPR morning program, possibly Bryant Park though I can no longer recall, and the burning need to read this book got ignited. Honestly! A Harvard Ph.D. psychology candidate angered people with her findings in memory recovery in sexual abuse and for her next project branched out to study people abducted by aliens. Gah! I love, love, love it when science gets involved in the odd. But yeah, the whole premise – researching people who have tales of abduction and then explaining how these beliefs came to be – was odd. The book proved more fascinating than odd, but it’s odd enough, believe me.
Type of work: Non-fiction, psychological study
Availability: Published in 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, it is still in print. You can order a copy here:
Comments: This book was a hoot! I am a sucker for anything wherein I get to read people’s profiles (especially psychological profiles of less than normal people) and this book did not disappoint. But ultimately, this is not a book to groove on the oddness, because Clancy’s explanations of how people really do come to believe they were kidnapped by aliens seem sound to a layperson like me and make for fascinating and not always odd reading. But never fear! The book is peppered with enough oddness to make it worth a read from those who can only stomach the oddest of the odd.
Clancy, whose studies into the repressed memories of sexual abuse survivors, led her into a situation where she was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t. If she revealed her findings that sexual abuse survivors were susceptible to idea implantation, she potentially diminished the real, horrific impact of abuse in the survivor community. In order to show the sound methodology of her study, she would end up harming people, as well as causing harm in communities where all too many people are not believed. It was a political and social minefield, one that eventually caused her to be condemned by those in her very field.
The trouble she experienced in sexual abuse recovered memories caused her to move on to a different study – how is it exactly people think they were snatched up by space aliens. Her research ultimately will not show a reader of psychology books anything new, as abductees are subject to the same influences that anyone who develops odd ideas experiences: Media, night terrors, a willingness to read Whitley Strieber, group delusion and reinforcement, a personal sense of isolation and a need to belong somewhere and an insistence that the commonality of the experiences proves all play a part in making people think they were abducted by aliens. Actually, Clancy utterly disproves that last argument – abductions must be true because all our experiences are the same – by showing that they are in fact, not the same, varying with vastly different details (in Chapter 4).
This is a book that could have descended into farce and while Clancy has no aversion to humor and writes in an at times sardonic manner, she respectfully shows the rich diversity of those with abduction stories. They cut across age, economic class and sex, never falling into stereotypes of drunk rednecks wondering what happened during that lost period after the case of beer disappeared and coming up with ET and a probe, or kooky new-agers who long for abduction like a lost lover. Even though elements of those stereotypes make up some who spoke of their experiences for this book, the abductees defy stereotype and Clancy respects the dignity of all her subjects, even the ones whose tales are violent and unsettling, even those who evidently stank up her car with their body odor.
Elements of this book were hilarious, often unintentionally so. I still giggle like a schoolgirl at the description one man gave of his abductor, a naked, gorgeous alien with cherry red public hair. Cherry. Red. Pubic. Hair. Goodness. Some of the stories have insane logic in them that makes sense sort of until you actually think about them. Like the woman who saw three lovely women in flowing dresses and decided that after seeing them she needed to maintain a macrobiotic diet. These women were omens. What flowing dresses on pretty women have to do with a macrobiotic diet is irrelevant. Just go with it. This is one of the milder examples of insane logic in the book, logic that makes sense in a way until you choke it down with rational thought. Some are less cute, like the man who believes his children half alien, the product between him and a non-human female, children he cannot see but knows are there. How his wife feels about step-kids in the ether is not known. It’s a short leap from silly logic to bad ideas that are quite malignant for relationships and sound functioning.
Overall, this is an interesting read, but for anyone who has gone through a dark patch in his or her life – failed relationships, death of loved ones, loss of job, loss of health – some of the experiences these abductees endure are similar to the ones that cause many of us to drink, take Xanax, or find the Lord. Belief in UFO abduction numbs the pain or it creates a sense of belonging to something inexplicable but mystical and bigger than you. It was very easy, once Clancy laid it all out, how every one of her subjects made it from point A to point B.
This was a quick, easy read and I recommend it. And do I believe in alien abduction? Like my belief in the paranormal – sort of, but not really. I’m still looking for rational reasons for the weirdnesses that have gone down in my own life. I love the odd, and live it at times, but my higher brain makes it hard for me to buy into ghosts and alien abduction. As always, your mileage may, and probably will, vary. Regardless, this was a fun book that wallowed in the odd and I quite enjoyed it.
House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories by Yasunari Kawabata
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Book: House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Why I Consider This Book Odd: I knew it was going to be a helluva ride when I recognized the name of the man who wrote the introduction to the book. The writer Yukio Mishima in 1970, failed to inspire a revolt in the Japanese military and attempted to commit seppuku, a form of ritual suicide via disemboweling. He was then given the coup de gras and was decapitated by a friend who took part in the attempted rebellion. When such a man gives the introduction to a book dealing mainly with thanatos, with a little eros thrown in, you’re dealing with a very odd book. This may be the most deeply odd and disturbing work ever written by a Nobel Laureate, though heaven knows I find more and more incredibly odd works written by unlikely writers.
Type of Work: Fiction
Availability: Originally published in 1961, the copy I read was reissued in 2004 and is still in print. You can get a copy here:
Comments: I finished this book weeks ago but the spectre of writing a review completely stalled me. I kept telling myself to get over here and write but I could not do it. I don’t know exactly why but I suspect it is because I found this book enthralling and repellent. Amazing and disgusting. I consumed it rapidly and wanted then to vomit it back up. Seldom has a book so engrossed me while leaving me so unhappy.
This book consists of a novella, “House of the Sleeping Beauties,” and two short stories, “One Arm” and “Of Birds and Beasts.” Each work is horrific, beautiful, sickening and compelling in its own right.
“House of the Sleeping Beauties”: Again, I find myself at war with other people’s descriptions of what comprises literary eros. Evidently, eros means soulless sex involving eggs, as discovered in Story of the Eye, or it means a misogynistic look at a boring old man’s past encounters with women. How can a book be an example of eros and thanatos when it is all death and no passion? How can it be eros when there is no love, when there is no sex, when there is nothing but the limited emotional range of the protagonist, an aging man who seems to hate all women? How can it be eros when the protagonist has no emotional depth or even revelation in sensation from a sex act? These are rhetorical questions, as I understand why, in a sense, this book falls into the eros and thantos category, but my mind rebels against what many modern critics consider eros. (And perhaps the most important question is why did I read this book so raptly, and I am unable to explain that either, but I did and I suspect most readers find themselves similarly engrossed.)
The tale’s protagonist, Eguchi, is 67-years-old and visits the House of the Sleeping Beauties, a sort of brothel wherein the girls, all very young, are drugged insensate at night so that old men can sleep with them. The word sleep here is literal, because the old men do not have sex with the sleeping girls as they are impotent due to old age. Eguchi hides what he says is his ability to sustain an erection from the Madam in order to be permitted to sleep with the girls (it may all be in Eguchi’s head – one is never sure if Eguchi is really still virile or if it is wishful thinking on his part).
Indeed, the Madam is not concerned at all with Eguchi’s member when she chides him not to do anything disgusting with the girls. “He was not to put his finger into the mouth of of the sleeping girl…” That line haunts me for some reason, but it is clear the proprietress of the House of the Sleeping Beauties does not think Eguchi is capable of any greater outrage against the sleeping girls. And yeah, Eguchi sticks his finger into the mouth of one of the girls. Of course he does. That should almost go without saying. That finger was the only penetration in the story.
Those who visit the house and go to bed with the drugged girls are themselves eventually drugged, but get to spend time with the sleeping girls while they themselves are completely conscious. Though Eguchi tells himself that he could, theoretically, do whatever he wants to any of the sleeping girls without detection, tellingly, he never does. Eguchi’s wants to lay next to a virginal, sleeping girl, because actual sex with conscious women causes him to be exposed to their messy, nasty lives, something he cannot bear.
Another verbose review.
Alice, the Sausage by Sophie Jabès
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Book: Alice, the Sausage
Author: Sophie Jabès, translated by Catherine Petit and Paul Buck
Why I Consider This Book Odd: I initially heard about this book in the sadly ever-increasingly inactive LiveJournal community, Disturbing Books. (Check out the archives over there sometime.) It was every bit as insane and grotesque as I had been led to believe.
Type of work: Fiction
Availability: Published by Dedalus in 2007, this book is still in print. You can get a copy here:
Comments:: This book is a posthumanist hellhole. I say that with nothing but praise.
I could not have loved this book more. In an ocean of chicklit where women strive for beauty and true love at all costs, balancing careers and men and an oh-so-cute bumbling personality flaw, like overshopping or the tendency to be amusingly clumsy, Alice is an anti-heroine who completely destroys herself without ever looking back. Irrational, afraid, unable to see herself as she really is, she commits continual and irrevocable acts of mental and physical violence against herself until there is nothing left for her to do but commit the most lunatic act of degradation.
Alice begins this novella as a beautiful, aloof virgin until a visit with her father destroys her view of herself in a simple yet believable way. Her father tells her she is no Marilyn Monroe and that in order to get by in life she must be nice to men. Alice is lovely, and the reader never really knows why her father says this to her, but those words, uttered distractedly and likely with no greater goal behind them than unthinking misogyny, destroy her sense of self utterly. They create a chasm within Alice that she begins to fill with food, eating ravenously.
Seeking help and comfort, Alice turns to her mother, who is of no help. A vain woman clinging to youth, she dismisses Alice, telling her that as long as she removes all her body hair and doesn’t starve herself, she will be okay. Reeling, and still eating, Alice acts nice to men as her father instructs her, and picks up the first man who really responds to her. She has sex with him, inviting him to visit her the next day. He does return, has sex with her again, and leaves her money, creating a path Alice merrily skips down to her own destruction. She loses her job as a librarian and becomes a full-time whore.
Alice incorporates food and the obviously oral into her acts of prostitution, making the “ice cream cornet” the act that distinguishes her from other prostitutes. I’ll let the reader draw his or her own conclusions as to what an ice cream cornet as a sexual act entails. Alice incorporates food into her sex job, using the money to do nothing more than keep a roof over her head and food in her home.
Alice’s life degenerates. She still takes care of herself in the manner recommended by her mother – eating and removing body hair – but she sleeps all day when she is not performing sex acts, stops cleaning, becomes super-obese, and becomes so repellent that eventually her clients include only an elderly man who wants to take Alice away from her dank, unpleasant life, and a set of good-looking twins who escaped from an insane asylum, Fulvio and Flavio. She sexually services the twins and feeds them even though they have no money to pay her. When her mother steals the elderly client and runs off with him, Alice is left with only the twins, no source of income, and decides to sacrifice herself to crazy love. Eating until she can barely move, Alice plots her end. While I won’t spoil the ending entirely, the title alone should give it away.
The book, while disgusting to the extreme in sections, is also beguiling in its descriptions of the foods Alice crams into herself. The book even contains a glossary at the end so that the reader knows exactly what Italian delicacies it is Alice consumes. Pastas, pizzas, cheeses, sweets – the reader is tempted to join Alice in her consumption, as dark as we know the end will be if we do. But it is impossible not to be affected by the litany of foods recited in the book, making Alice’s end, though utterly insane, seem just a little bit attractive.
There is no hope in Alice’s transformation into something not quite human. She does transform, but in a horrible way, one without any hope in the future. Alice forces the reader to look hard at what it means to be a human being and how being human can go so terribly, terribly wrong. I am skirting the feminist issues raised in the book because they simply don’t interest me as much as the idea that Alice can only escape negative forces by becoming a monster and eradicating herself. It is hard to say if she has free will to become what she does and to do what she does, but the reader at times understands that Alice is in fact in control of her destiny, that she chooses the horrific life she assumes. In complete contradiction to the idea that humanity instinctively chooses life affirming activities and strives for happiness, Alice embraces disgusting, destructive forces she cannot control and that no one seems willing to save her from. At the end, it is difficult to see that Alice is still a human being, and indeed, she is so inanimate and passive that she does not seem human to the reader at times, her motivations and self-destruction foreign to all except the most mentally ill or nihilistic among us. Alice doesn’t even redefine what it means to be a human female in a difficult world. She simply gives in to a basic, gnawing, insecure atavism that renders her humanity worthless.
Posthumanist hellhole. I love this book. It makes up for every fey, twee, charming little bit of girlie-fic I have ever read. For once, beauty, the right clothes, a clever but plain girlfriend, and the love of a good man cannot save the heroine. For once, disaster is not averted. For once, there is no heart warming end to the book that begins with a gorgeous blonde with an excellent career picking out the right clothes to wear while waiting for Mr. Right. It feels good.
How People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It by Gary Leon Hill
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Book: How People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It
Author: Gary Leon Hill
Why I Consider This Book Odd: There are many reasons, but initially it was the title. It won the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title in 2005. It tries to hide, putting only People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead on the cover and spine, but the title page and a deep cultural knowledge of the weird will prevent this odd book from passing as normal.
Type of work: Memoir, new age, bad science
Availability: Published by Weiser Books in 2005, you can get a copy here:
Comments: I have been a cranky Oddbooks as of late. I may or may not be detoxing from strong, prescription substances in a process that gives me the attention span of a gnat. I definitely am wilting in the searing Texas heat. But neither explain really why I have hated everything I have read recently, normal, odd, informative and just plain whacked. However, despite my sense of humor’s death and my meh tendencies, I do not blame my utter distaste for HPWDKTDATTUBAWTDAI on anything but the book itself. Despite its utter insanity, I took no pleasure in any of it.
I fully admit that aside from a grudging admission that I sort of believe in certain paranormal things, sort of, I am not a fan of the New Age aside from its entertainment value to me. However, I tend to cut those who believe in New Age teachings a lot of slack. Unusual beliefs make the world more interesting. But there are times when bad, bad writing combine with bad, dangerous information, and I am left with nothing but snark. If Penn Jillette read this book, he would shit blood.
It’s not like I came into this book expecting to have what little I do know about science validated by New Age squick. This book is supposed to be about combating spirit possession, which defies science too, but you can prepare yourself for a such scientific suspension when you know you are going to have the YES! of something fun, like expelling unwanted human spirits. That didn’t really happen because the book doesn’t live up to its title in any way. But before I spew bile over some of the stupid science and dangerous information contained in this book, let me give you the quick lowdown. The horribly long title would lead you to believe this book is about spirits who don’t know they are dead and take up residence in hapless humans. If only life were that easy. If, out of 182 pages, 30 have anything to do with spiritual possession, I would be very surprised.
When not discussing holistic parapsychology in depth, it discusses the boringly endless wonders of the author’s somewhat demented Uncle Wally. It confuses the hell out of the reader with who is whom and why they are there (it took three re-readings to understand that Ruth and Wally, the main perpetrators of this unique worldview, were brother and sister, that Ardis was Wally’s wife and that Vic and Lorraine were no relation but were introduced to Wally and Ardis by a pastor – if this sentence seems confusing to someone who has not read the book, just bear in mind that the author throws names at the reader with horrible and irrelevant frequency). While the book was completely misunderstanding science and making assertions that make James Randi write entire columns, it also, interestingly, refused to spell Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ name correctly – umlauts were clearly too good for this book.
If you want a book about spiritual possession, this is not it. If you want a book that mashes together Kirlian photography, a breathless belief that Uri Geller is NOT a con man, vibrational explanations for why Lutherans like to hang out together, astral planes, a complete misunderstanding of human genetics, self-affirmation, a sampling of world religion, multiple personality disorder, using ghosts to explain why capital punishment is a bad idea, and horrible, dangerous exhortations for the very sick to treat themselves, peppered with a few pages of actual possession, then get yourself over to Amazon now.
I am not kidding. This book is that bad. I find this book so troubling because there are actual five-star reviews of it on Amazon. Given how much really frightening information is online these days, it is far more likely that someone with cancer will read on the Internet about the wonders of pendulums for locating cancer in the body and find more faith in such bunk than in PET scans than they read that same information in this book. But that doesn’t change the fact that this book exists at all, and I hate it when the bizarre has the potential to be so damaging.
This book has bad science out the wazoo. For example:
For decades, Kirlian photographs have made visible the human aura through interfacing ultra-low electrical current with the body’s biological life field. Dr. Valerie Hunt’s EMG machines display the electrical activity that exists around our chakras and throughout the human meridian system.
[…]
As do Sufis and theoretical physicists, Drunvalo [Melchezidek] believes that everything in the universe vibrates. Hence everything in the universe can be described by its wavelength.
[…]
The genes in our body are equivalent to software programs on a disk in a computer. But the behavior of our cells is not programmed by our genes.
[…]
Say your perception is that the world is toxic, dangerous and a threat. “Genetic engineering genes” will rewrite the other genes to respond not to the actual environment (which may not be toxic, dangerous and a threat), but to your perception of it.
Bad science doesn’t offend you? How about a really questionable approach to mental illness:
Take Charge: A Guide to Feeling Good is a book Wally wrote and published in 1987. In it he considers, among other things, the likelihood that suicides for which there seem to be no cause may in fact result from the kind of spirit attachment we are talking about.
[…]
“It seems likely that today’s still-controversial use of electroshock, or electroconvulsive therapy, for the treatment of acute depression, may prove effective, when it does, for the unacknowledged reason that it drives possessing earth-bound spirits out of the magnetic aura of the subjects being shocked.”
I can’t bear to type it out, but the book quotes Edith Fiore on page 74, listing all the major signs of depression and calling them “common signs of spiritual possession.”
General Batshittery
“Keys were bending in people’s pocket’s,” Wally told me. “Geller had twelve hundred people chanting: ‘work, work, work, work.’ These are words – that change reality.”
[…]
For instance, Timestream’s facilities are located in the third plane of the astral world on a planet named Marduk. [Timestream is a spirit group of dead scientists the author claims includes Marie Curie and Albert Einstein.]
[…]
The problem with affirmations is that sometimes they work, and more often, they don’t. Robert Williams, who teamed up with Bruce Lipton for the videotape The Biology of Perception, the Psychology of Change, says he knows why this is. We have been talking to the wrong mind.
[…]
William James said through Susy Smith “On the astral plane man makes his own environment.”
But worst of all it its dismissal of Western science and its treatment of disease based on Hill’s Aunt Ruth and Aunt Ardis and the people who sold them snake oil. Both had cancer, both refused treatment other than surgery, and both managed, in the luck that the divine lavishes on the feckless, to survive.
From his Aunt Ruth comes this complete over simplification and misunderstanding of cancer and its myriad treatments:
“Cancer is an immuno-suppressive disorder,” she told me. “The treatments they were offering me suppressed the immune system. To deliberately do something that would suppress the immune system when you’re already about to succumb to an immuno-suppressive disorder makes no kind of sense.”
It goes on from there to tout the sort of information that kills people.
Ardis had refused chemotherapy and radiation following her surgery in 1974… Then she and Wally discovered Getting Well Again, a book by O. Carl Simonton, a medical doctor and Air Force Major, who had previously been a salesman whose success he attributed to Napoleon Hill’s classic book, Think and Grow Rich. Simonton’s techniques were based on Positive Prosperity Visualization.
So, after surgery, “I employed his tactics of visualizing at the time PacMan, the TV game? Just visualizing PacMan eating up all those cancer cells,” said Ardis.
[…]
Next she (Ruth) and Wally went to Topeka for a conference for the effects of megadoses of Vitamin C on terminal cancer.
At that conference in Topeka, Ruth discovers pendulums and learns to “read” them and diagnose what was wrong in her body. This is discussed on pages 83-84. She later, on page 122, decides she got breast cancer because of mercury in the fillings of her teeth.
“…when I learned about the relationship about the meridians and the relationship between teeth and the mammary glands, I don’t think there is any question that the amalgams in the teeth that related to the left mammary gland had something to do with that cancer.”
Then Ruth’s luck ran out, though she did last 16 years, and her cancer spread all over her body, even into her bones. She died of cancer in 2002, hopefully not in as much pain as it seems she was when in she consulted her pendulum.
Several nights before she’d had excruciating pain in her liver – couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, finally at 5:00 in the morning, Ruth asked her pendulum: “Is this a message?” And it swung wide, yes. “And if I get to understand the message, will the pain go away?” It said yes. “And so I started interviewing my liver.”
It is tempting to comment to each of these quotes, but they speak for themselves. Note also that only three of them had anything to do with spirits invading the body.
I think if one is going to read New Age and books of a religious theme, especially those that are clearly going to be utterly insane, the least they can do is concern themselves with the topic their title says the book is about. In bizarre non-fiction, one does not expect the best of writing, or even a coherent narrative. That is why, to the right mind, odd non-fiction can be so fun. I do not fault this book for wandering around and using two word sentences in awkward places hoping to connote a depth that is not there. Rather, I loathe this book for pulling a fast one and tricking readers into thinking they are going to read the non-Catholic version of Malachi Martin’s Hostage to the Devil, a truly interesting book about spiritual possession, and for cramming the book full of inappropriate, at least to the stated topic at hand, bullshit about science, health and peace of mind.
My only consolation that this book exists at all is that those who are truly mentally and physically ill will likely not stumble across it in a weakened state and believe they are spirit infested, that Vitamin C can cure and pendulums help treat terminal cancer, or feel morally responsible for their illness because cells can, somehow, mutate to reflect a negative thought.
The Menstruating Mall by Carlton Mellick III
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Book: The Menstruating Mall
Author: Carlton Mellick III
Why I Consider This Book Odd: Carlton Mellick III wrote it. That’s your gold standard to predict oddness.
Type of Work: Fiction
Availability: Published by Afterbirth Books in 2005, you can find it here.
Comments: First thing I have to say is that I like Carlton Mellick III (CM3). I like him a lot. I would say bizarro fiction is in my top two fiction genres – the other being traditional mystery, oddly enough – and as the genre’s most prolific writer, there is no real way to love bizarro and not love CM3.
This having been said, I had issues with The Menstruating Mall. These problems annoyed me to the point of anger in another venue, which was weird because generally I don’t take fiction quite so personally. I considered whether or not reviewing it here after foaming at the mouth so ill-advisedly, but after considering why I disliked this book, I decided to go ahead and review it here because ultimately, only one of the issues I had with the book really had anything to do with the actual writing of the book, the only thing one should ever mentally associate with the author.
The Menstruating Mall is about a cast of stereotypes – the white kid who thinks he is black, the goth chick, the hot chick, the self-righteous Christer, the redneck, the closeted homosexual etc. – who find themselves unable to leave the shopping mall. Because the mall is discovered to be menstruating, people stop coming in, and those who cannot find it in themselves to leave hope that once the fertility cycle is over, they can leave. But before that can happen, murders begin and the stereotypes find themselves picked off one by one by a murderer who challenges the stereotypes that define them.
This book is both an homage to Luis Bunuel’s “The Exterminating Angel” and Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None.” It is not just a book about liberation from consumerism – it is about liberation from all the mindless forces that compel our behaviors. The deliberately stereotypical characters are humorously and deftly handled, and when some deviate from what is expected of them, it is refreshingly unpredictable. Most of the book is an entertaining read. The only quarrel I have with the book that I can lay at CM3’s feet is that I wanted more. In a way, this is a backhanded compliment, because when I have written fiction and people have commented they wanted more, it was flattering (yet my attitude is generally that what I write is what you get – go figure). In The Menstruating Mall, I had this intangible feeling that CM3 got tired of writing this book. The last three pages easily could have been 30. Mellick made his readers care about the cast of characters enough that what happens at the end is as interesting as what happens in the beginning and middle, and it could have been fleshed out more.
The rest of the issues I had with this book had to do with its appearance and editing. The font size annoyed me to no end. I didn’t actually measure it, but it appears as if the book is in 18 point font. In some of CM3’s earlier works, such large font gave an appearance of a sort of fairy-tale, children’s book vibe. Even if used ironically, it was a bad choice for this book, which is decidedly inspired by mature tales and contains decidedly mature material.
An end result of what I call YELLINGLY LARGE FONT is that the reader, when ordering the book, thinks they are getting a novel, or at least they are if they go by Amazon’s page count (the book itself, extra annoyingly, has no page numbers). This was a novella at best. It is hard not to be annoyed when you realize that a 200+ page book would have been a 50 pager had conventional publishing standards been followed.
Another end result of YELLING LARGE FONT is that any and all editorial errors are all too evident. All books have editorial errors. I recall recently reading a supernatural mystery published by a major publishing house wherein “of” was used for “have.” This was not done in conversation to show a character whose command of grammar was poor. It was done throughout the entire book. After what seemed like the millionth “he realized he should of gone to the hospital/toilet/remedial English class,” I had to put the book down. It was just too painful. Most of the time, editorial errors are not too egregious but even in casual reading, I sometimes find spacing and punctuation issues in even the most immaculately edited books. It happens.
But when confronted with 18 point font, a book better be edited pretty closely. I realize most readers are not as overwhelmingly anal as I am, but The Menstruating Mall’s editing set my teeth on edge. Word substitution (here for hear, phase for faze), misspellings/mistakes (exists for exits) and spacing problems distracted me heartily. Some may place editing in the purview of the author, and to a certain extent it is, but publishers have copy editors. Authors should catch errors in their works but take my word for it – when you’ve worked on even a short story for more than a week, your brain will matrix in what you meant to write, blipping over what is on the printed page.
But most annoying to me were the illustrations. This is utterly subjective, but I did not like them. Most reviews of the illustrations are positive, that needs to be said. The illustrations are parodies of ads of mall stores, and despite the crude drawing style, they were clever enough at first. But the joke wore thin for me as the ads lost their cleverness and became cruder and cruder, more and more pointless. On some level, this may have been intentional to show the mind-numbing horror of mall shopping and advertising in general, but the drawings were not good enough or the jokes clever enough to justify the sort of pointless crudeness. At some point, inversions of advertising became ill-conceived cartoons that just crapped everywhere, which again may have been the point. If it was the point, it seemed too heavy-handed. When someone who finds poo as funny as me gets bored, it may be the art and not the reaction.
Ultimately, this book will stay in my collection because I like CM3. I love Fay Weldon and I have absolutely no idea why she thought it a good idea to write She May Not Leave, which was one of the worst and most pointless reads of 2007. But it’s still on my shelves because I love Fay. I think that is the fate of The Menstruating Mall, to be kept but never read again, simply because I love the author, find his body of work admirable and want his complete bibliography some day.
The CIA’s Control of Candy Jones by Donald Bain
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Book: The CIA’s Control of Candy Jones
Author: Donald Bain
Why I Consider This Book Odd: The title sort of gives it away, and conspiracy theory always falls into the realm of odd for me.
Type of Work: Utter fiction masquerading as non-fiction.
Availability: This book cannot seem to stay in print. Initially published in the 1970s, this hot mess was reissued and has since been taken out of print again by that bastion of quality publishing, Barricade Books. I am not questioning Barricade’s publications choices – were it not for publishers like them, where would this site be, in certain respects. Rather, I am referring to the actual quality of the book itself. I suspect that given a ream of paper, a rusty razor and some Elmer’s glue, I could have created a less brittle, more even-paged, smoother-spined, perfect bound book than what I got in the mail. This book was new and looked like it had been mangled by a wolf in a sauna.
But really, it says something when Barricade Books still has the Turner Diaries on its back list, but drops this dog turd of a book like it’s inside a paper bag and set on fire. It says a lot. It says, “This book has less appeal than a crappily and awkwardly written book by a neo-Nazi about the impending race war.”
So given my overall snert at the quality of content as well as the quality of the book itself, I am not even linking to the vastly over-priced copies on Amazon. If, after reading this review, you still want to read this book, send me an e-mail at ireadoddbooks at gmail dot com. Talk to me real pretty and I’ll send you my copy. It’s called sharing the love. (Book has been claimed! YAY!)
Comments: One of the best things about conspiracy theory is that it is generally interesting. It may be crazy. It may make you doubt your own sanity as you read it (why yes, there IS something lizard-like about the British Royal family). But I defy you to read anything by David Icke, Jim Keith or Tex Marrs and not be entertained.
Never has conspiracy theory been more boring than it is in the hands of Donald Bain. He seems a competent enough writer, so the perhaps the problem lies not with his skill as a teller of odd or improbable tales, but rather the material he was given to work with. If conspiracy theory is to be offered with not even the slightest amount of “proof” other than the hypnotically induced memories of someone claiming CIA-connections, then it needs to have an element of the outrageous in it. Black helicopters. Lizard people. A vast international conspiracy of bankers and politicians who have sex orgies in between attempts to take over the world. Something. Anything more than a weird man who hypnotizes his equally weird wife and TA-DA! She was controlled by the CIA because, you know, she says she was.
Seriously. Aside from the fact that she told her lawyer some weird stuff, a picture of Candy Jones in a black wig (a former model in a wig – the hell you say!), and a handful of people who claim Jones acted weird in candlelight and around oriental music, there is no other proof that Jones was ever involved in the CIA. Her assertions that she carried messages all over the world for the CIA are all the reader has to go on in order to have even the tiniest sliver of belief that makes conspiracies so tantalizing. After reading this book, one gets the impression that Candy Jones, far from being a victim of the MK-ULTRA CIA program, was really a mentally fragile woman who either manipulated or was manipulated by her husband, the radio host “Long John” Nebel, who was either a whackaloon in his own right, or a complete dick. Since it feels sort of weird to speak ill of the dead, let’s go with the former.
Here’s the story in brief (or as brief as I can manage): Candy Jones (real name Jessica Arline), was born into an affluent family and had elaborate memories of really bad childhood abuse that left her subject to developing a split personality (I have no desire to debate whether or not MPD or DID exists). She became a model, did USO tours overseas in the Pacific front in WWII, developed a tropical disease, and was treated by a doctor who later recruited her to work for the CIA.
She was susceptible to the offer because a terrible first marriage left her deeply in debt with no way to pay for her aging mother’s medical bills and her sons’ private educations. Since she was traveling anyway for work, excessive travel would not raise an eyebrow. So she became a CIA mule, all payments were made directly to her debtors (thus eliminating a fabulous element of proof), and she was subjected to “vitamin” shots that clearly by her own descriptions were not vitamins. Moreover, she was frequently hypnotized so her other personality, Arlene, could handle stuff when things got too much for Candy. According to her memories, Candy was starved, beaten, sexually abused and programmed to commit suicide all by CIA operatives.
All of this came to light because she exhibited a weird element to her personality after she married John Nebel, and had issues sleeping. Nebel, who was evidently Art Bell before there was an Art Bell, naturally took it upon himself to hypnotize his wife so she could sleep and all of this came to light. Nebel, who had an interest in the bizarre, off-beat and paranormal, evidently never once thought it odd that he, a psychiatric layman, would hypnotize his wife, and given his love of the conspiratorial, he never once questioned her stories.
But the stories are not that interesting. Never does the reader know what messages Candy delivered. The reader never sees Candy in action at all. We simply know of what she supposedly did through interminable hypnosis session after hypnosis session. No action, no sense of real belief in her recollections, so overall, this book was tiresome.
But even a boring book can be disturbing. I was set on edge during the scenes where Nebel goaded his wife into giving him the responses he wanted. It was unnerving, and as someone who loathes descriptions of torture, these sections came dangerously close. Nebel, in the face of all compassion and reason, assumes the role of the men whom his wife thinks tortured her, drawing out information. The section where he forces Candy to reveal a sexual torture scene, forcing her to relive mentally what she thought happened, was a torture scene in its own right. That anyone then or now thinks this appropriate, or done in a spirit of mental health or greater justice, is insane.
After reading this book, I was torn as to what it was I had really read. Had Jones and Nebel concocted the story as a book idea – both were writers before they married. Had Jones hoodwinked Nebel? Had Nebel manipulated a mentally ill woman into creating a conspiracy fantasy, something his life work makes it clear he would have found fascinating and enjoyable?
Ultimately, I don’t think either Jones or Nebel had ill-will or created anything from whole cloth. I think a fragile woman prone to nervous fantasies married a man who had little sense and a desire to uncover uncommon truths. Together they created this really bad attempt to tie Candy to the MK-ULTRA project, not out of a desire to deceive, but rather it sprung from their respective weaknesses.
Regardless, it was a horrible book. YMMV, but far better, more intriguing, and frankly, believable conspiracy theory exists. Give this one a miss.
The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths by Corinne May Botz
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
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: 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 is a 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.
See some of the pictures of Lee’s scenes under the jump. These are reenactments of crimes using dolls, but if you are of a sensitive nature, bear in mind that violence is depicted.
Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Book: Story of the Eye
Author: Georges Bataille
Why I Consider This Book Odd: Oh God, where do I start…
Type of work: Pornography, fiction
Availability: Originally published in 1928, this book was re-released by City Light Books. You can get a copy here.
Comments: (ETA on 1/19/14: I have found myself rethinking Bataille lately. I’ve read a bit more of his body of work, and while I suspect I will always have a negative and visceral reaction to this work, I also think I need to reconsider this book and write about it when I do. Specifically I need to look into why I had such a visceral aversion to this book because I think a reasonably considered visceral aversion may actually be what Bataille was going for. At any rate, I felt I needed to post this disclaimer in the event anyone else reads this old discussion.)
It seems unfair for me to completely dismiss Story of the Eye as an enormous turd polished to a sheen by specious intellectualism. I loathe the inverse of this attitude when applied to the books I love. For example, I frequently get a DIAF feeling when I think of Harold Bloom’s contemptuous and elitist dismissal of Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, the latter whom he seems to dislike simply because of what he considers her overuse of em-dashes. But it is my opinion that only a critic could find much to love in this odd book, because the subject matter is so repellent, the narrative so useless in terms of depth of story-telling, the plot so outrageous and the character development non-existent. Some people call this style of writing surrealism. Good for them, but I call shenanigans. In order to find any connection to the book, one has to downshift into sheer critical analysis, refusing to answer questions of whether or not one considers a book good versus whether or not one simply finds a book relevant to a certain critical way of thinking.
In certain respects, it all boils down to personal taste, even amongst true critics. My personal tastes rebelled against Story of the Eye because it seemed to me to be an exploitative, meaningless look into perverse sexuality that, while it may have explored elements of rebellion, was just a puerile examination of the disgusting, pushing limits just to push them, telling a pointless story in order to shock. After reading a bit about Georges Bataille’s childhood, the whys and wherefores of the book make a bit more sense to me, but just understanding the author’s motivations does not, in any way, ensure the content can connect with a reader.
I felt a bit hypocritical hating this book as much as I did, for the Harold Bloom reason I mentioned above. Moreover, people like Sartre and Susan Sontag have argued for this book’s relevance, as both a text of transgression and an excellent example of pornographic use of eros and thanatos, respectively. The book influenced the interesting and delightful whackaloon Bjork. There are people likely far smarter than me who think Story of the Eye has literary merit or social merit. de Sade, whose works never raised this level of enmity in me, may not seem that different to some readers.
But for me, there is a stark difference between Bataille and de Sade. De Sade’s works sprang from a need to fight against the limitations of cultural norms, religion and law. His tomes of rape, necrophilia, BDSM, sexual servitude and moral degeneracy were an extreme attempt to strike a blow for personal freedom during a time that was both personally stultifying and socially tumultuous, a nihilistic rage against the machine. Story of the Eye is just a disgusting tale filtered through odd and sad events in Bataille’s life. There is no surge for a greater breath of freedom reading this book, just an unsettling feeling that one is being forced to read a foul practical joke.
The book is quite short – a novella, really – and comes in at 103 pages. I read it twice trying to get a handle on the content, hoping I could find a critical thread that impressed me. I failed. In short, this is the book:
A young man recalls his sexually disgusting past with a distant relative, the equally perverted Simone, and the mentally fragile Marcelle. He and Simone explore their bizarre sexuality via lots of masturbation, urine and eggs. Yes, eggs. They include Marcelle, who is driven insane at an orgy and ends up institutionalized. They break her out of the booby hatch, only to have her commit suicide. They have sex next to her dead body and Simone urinates into her open eyes, as you do. To avoid an inquest into Marcelle’s death, the two go to Spain with a debauched nobleman. There are disgusting bullfights that involve impaled mare bladders, more weird sexuality involving eggs, eyes, bull testicles, and urine. Then there is the sexually-charged murder of a priest, the removal of his eye and its use in sex (Simone’s love of globular, soft objects and their relation to her nether regions is possibly the unsexiest thing I have ever encountered…). Then they disguise themselves and flee. Fade to black.
On some level, I wanted to read this text as a sort of bizarre coming of age tale, but it doesn’t work that way. There is no commonality of human experience. That’s okay – the thing I like best about odd books is that often, the commonality is lacking. Bizarre books take me to a place I would not ordinarily see. But having read very dark fiction, truly disturbing non-fiction and all sorts of stuff in between, I haven’t in any way felt as alienated by a piece of fiction as I was by Story of the Eye. I know there is all sorts of symbolism with fluid, eggs and eyes, but ultimately it didn’t matter for me. The content was too outre and too specialized for the meanings to matter.
As always, your mileage may vary, and to be honest, this book is worth reading by odd book fans simply because it is so disgusting and insane. But be aware that I say this in the same way my high school teachers often urged us to go to college so we wouldn’t be at a loss at cocktail parties (got the degree, paid off my student loans, and nary a cocktail party has come my way). The main reason to read this book in my opinion is so that you can say you have. You may get nothing more out of it than that.
Letters to Rollins by R.K. Overton
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Book: Letters to Rollins
Author: R.K. Overton
Why I Consider This Book Odd: Best collection of insane but utterly fake letters ever. I ordered this book not knowing the letters were fake, and throughout the book, I kept clinging to hope after hope that these letters were real. Mr. Oddbooks and I laughed until our bladders hurt upon reading the first letter from Carl Plaske. This book is meta and was meta before any of us were hip enough to use the word meta.
Type of Work: Humor
Availability: Published in 1995 by Rollins’ 2.13.61 Publications, this book is out of print. Worse, drop shippers on Amazon give the appearance that there are copies of this book to be easily had, making finding a copy an annoying experience. (Drop shippers are people who make listings for books they do not have, hoping someone will order it. Once they get an order, the drop shipper then desperately tries to find a copy of the book to fill the order, generally ordering a less expensive copy from someone else on Amazon and having it shipped directly to the buyer. Letters to Rollins is a circle jerk amongst drop shippers, each listing it and each trying to get it from the other when someone orders it. Mr. Oddbooks found this at a used book store when I realized I had been duped by a drop shipper who was relying on other drop shipper listings to get the book. Seriously, when you use the Amazon Marketplace, don’t buy from anyone with less than 97% positive feedback.)
So bear the above in mind if you click this link to get the book. Or better yet, send Rollins a real letter and ask him to get this book into reprints.
Comments: This is by far and away the most hilarious and random book I have read in a while. Based partially on insanity, and partially on the trope that Rollins released an album called “Nap TIme” in 1993 to capitalize on his extraordinary appeal to children, this book contains “letters” from an angry Christian woman, a strange 13-year old girl, a psychotic from Henry’s youth, a youthful offender who wants Henry to send him a letter dammit, an oily publicist, a man playing a one-sided game of Battleship with Rollins, a small child, a golfing instructor who gives Henry advice on how to avoid common golfing mistakes, and several others.
Utterly random, utterly insane, I cannot help but think this book was inspired largely by the real mail that Rollins actually received (Charlie Manson contacted Rollins out of the blue after seeing him on television). But for me, a diehard Henry Rollins fan, the true odd delight inherent in this book comes from the fact that people who do not know Rollins’ career may not know these letters are ringers and read this thinking it true. Mr. Oddbooks, who is not quite the Rollins fan I am, did not know even the most outrageous letters were fake until I told him. Not even the letter from KROK radio seemed to give it away.
Oh why can we not live in a world as random and hilarious as the one that peoples Letters to Rollins?
Best lines from the book:
From Kimberly Evans, a 13-year old “fan” who renamed Henry “Smokey” and sent him a pic of her cat, whom Rollins evidently kissed at one of his concerts (the girl, not the cat):
Are you mad I didn’t tell you my dad was a cop? I was afraid that if I told you you wouldn’t want anything to do with me or my letters. I know you’ve had problems with the police in the past, so I decided not to say anything.
I know my dad tried to raise a stink, and I’m glad the night court judge saw things your way…”
From Carl Plaske, a former classmate Rollins once punched who is going slowly but clearly insane, a state presaged by going berserk in an ice cream truck:
I guess I went kinda nuts. I turned up the volume and blasted that stupid theme from “Love Story” out those shitty speakers, scaring the neighbor kids and killing a dog as I drove 50 miles per hour down the sidewalks. I eventually hit a UPS truck. My license got revoked for a year but no one pressed charges. They were okay to hire me at Puppet Town, even if they’re idiots.
From Karl Plaske’s father, Joseph Plaske, after Carl went over the edge and started stalking Rollins to the point the FBI considered him a menace and Carl ends up institutionalized:
The institution where he is currently residing does not allow its patients to have writing instruments of any kind, so I have transcribed from his 12′ by 12′ rubber cell wall a letter he wrote in saliva and blood during the incident:
Henry Henry we all scream for Henry
Take his curly shoes and run from the cave.
If you have any insight into what this may mean, please contact me at the address above.
From his publicist, the man behind marketing the infamous “Buddy Ebsen” doll:
Henry,
How is your hand? My face is still puffed up, but the x-rays showed no concussion, and I’m not going to press charges.
As your ex-publicist, I wanted to say that it has been a pleasure being your publicist, and I’m sorry we had to part under such less than satisfactory circumstances.
From the Project 213, a group of Rollins fans who have been abducted by UFOs:
I send you this letter primarily to let you know that we exist and are helping other Rollins fans know that they are not alone in their dealings with the growing alien tide.
Yeah, I know, there are some purists out there who will not consider this book odd, per se, and I say bite me. I want to live in the bizarro world of fake Rollins letters, which makes me odd, and the book is therefore odd by association.