Horror and Sci-Fi Classics - The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Both of these books were part of my most recent haul of Dover Thrift Editions, and neither one is very long.

The Island of Dr. Moreau has been adapted into a movie three times. The only one I had seen was the 1996, Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer version. Needless to say, the book was much better. As far as H.G. Wells works, I had only read War of the Worlds previously and this one did not disappoint. Wells uses a well woven together adventure tale to explore the ethics of bio-engineering. You have to constantly remind yourself that this book was first published in 1896. In War of the Worlds, Wells essentially invents all of our notions of invading aliens. However; in Island of Dr. Moreau, he anticipates scientific issues that will not truly become reality for decades. And one of the ending themes, ultimately the return of the beast instincts of the animal folk, is a statement of man's ultimate inability to "cheat" nature. This is an idea that we are only now starting to accept, over 120 years later. 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde piqued my interest because in some biographical article I read about Stephen King, it mentioned that he taught a class at one time focusing on the three novels that made up the "canon of horror", which were Stoker's Dracula, Shelley's Frankenstein, and Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I am a big fan of the first two books, so I knew that I needed to check out Dr. Jekyll. I knew very little of the story previously. I will have to admit, as far as horror books go, there is not much to fear from Mr Hyde. There is not much of a body count, mostly he just darts around and looks "odd". The suspense rests mainly in the slow discovery of his identity by Dr. Jekyll's friend, Mr. Utterson. But I  do appreciate the theme behind it all. Dr. Jekyll believed that there was essentially two separate sides to our souls, a good and an evil. He was ultimately trying to bring out the good only, but ended up becoming Mr. Hyde, which slowly took him over completely. This book doesn't have the blockbuster action of Dracula or the dark introspection of Frankenstein, but at 54 pages, it is definitely worth reading. At least I can say that I have now completed Stephen King's "canon of horror". 

The Grapes of Wrath

I think I was first motivated to read this book about 10 years ago because I read about how it had been so widely banned, most recently as 2002 in George County, Mississippi. Anything that gets folks that upset has to be worth reading. I have always believed that The Grapes of Wrath and 1984 should be required reading for every high school civics class. I really don’t know of a better source for describing the effects of out of control, tyrannical capitalism (The Grapes of Wrath) or out of control, tyrannical government (1984).

There has been a lot written about this, but being a general fan of Steinbeck, this book is written in a very different style than his other work. The actual main plot only occupies roughly half the book. The remaining portions are almost independent sermons about a myriad of topics that relate to the most recent part in the story of the Joads. Many people attribute this to the influence of his first wife Carol, who was much more politically radical than John was. If you wanted to throw a couple of criticisms out there, you could say that it gets a little preachy at times. And you could say that it unfairly portrays entire groups of people/objects unfairly. For example, all religious people are nuts, tractors are bad, banks are bad, all cops are bad, the American Legion is bad, all big farmers are evil, etc. I would defend this by saying that those points are valid only when you think of this novel as a history book, which it is not. It may be set in a real place and real time, but it is a story. And criticizing those things is about as valid as criticizing the Wizard of Oz for making all flying monkeys bad. But needless to say, it did make a lot of people in California mad when the book was released in 1939 and the John Ford movie was released in 1940.

Also, the allegories and symbolism in this novel are way more “thick” than any of his other works. Almost every small description seems to have some relation to the over arching themes of the novel. From the description of the tortoise spreading seeds, to the action of a seed drill, to the way the other children treat Ruthie when she is being selfish, to construction of the dike to hold back the flood water from the box cars, every chapter contains these devices that drive home the plight of the migrants. But one element that is very present here and continues throughout Steinbeck’s work is the idea of nature as a refuge. Nature is shown to be the only escape from man’s tyranny, albeit a temporary one. That is why Muley lives in his cave, Tom lives in the brush, and Noah walks down the Colorado river.  

There is also a wonderful economics lesson under a few of the sermons. The farmers complain about how low the prices are and that they can't afford to even have the crops picked. That is what is driving down wages. The more they lower the wages, the more price falls. Of course this is the heart of the effect of currency deflation in a recession. The prices are so bad because no one can afford to buy food. If you paid the workers more, they would buy the food, and the prices would go up. 

I have always thought of how powerful the description is of how the big land owners walk through the Hooverville camps looking for workers. They don't look for the strongest men, they look for the parents with the sickest children, because "they will work all day for a cup of flour".  Also, I love the description of how the workers organized in factory in Akron, Ohio. They were getting beaten up when they tried to unionize. Then one day they formed a Turkey Shooting Club. On a Sunday afternoon, 5,000 men marched down main street carrying rifles, went out into the country and had turkey shoot the rest of the day. Suddenly no more union busters gave them trouble.

But for some reason, one of my favorite lines has always been from Ma Joad.

"Woman can change better'n a man," Ma said soothingly. "Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head".

And then responding to Pa saying "Seems like our life's over and done."

"No, it ain't, " Ma smiled. "It ain't, Pa. An' that's one more thing a woman knows. I noticed that. Man, he lives in jerks - baby born an' a man dies, an' that's a jerk - gets a farm an' loses a farm, an' that's a jerk. Woman, it's all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that. We ain't gonna die out. People is goin' on - changin' a little maybe, but goin' right on".

A Christmas Carol: The Creepy Directors Cut

My Favorite

There are just a handful of stories that have truly stood the test of time and held a place in our common culture of Christmas.  You could place Rudolph, Charlie Brown Christmas, The Grinch, and maybe even A Christmas Vacation in the lexicon.  We all know them backwards and forwards. We watch them each year and enjoy them like we did as children. 

But the top of the Christmas story list has to be occupied by A Christmas Carol.  Essentially a short story that Charles Dickens cranked out over the course of a few weeks in the fall of 1843, it has been re-made and re-made and re-made so many times in plays, film, and TV, that it is has become difficult to even remember what parts were in what adaptation.  Was that scene with Bill Murray, Michael Cain, George C. Scott, or Scrooge McDuck?    

Because obviously I am a huge book nerd, as evidenced by this blog site, every few years or so I sit down and read the original.  It doesn't take very long.  My copy is 68 pages.  The $1 price tag is still on it.  And every time I read it, I am reminded that there are just some parts that intentionally get left out of all the movies and cartoons. They all involve the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.  Here are the creepiest parts:

1) The part where Scrooge watches the thieves sell his possessions, the last of the thieves stole the shirt off his dead body, and switched it with a cheaper shirt.

2) When Scrooge asks "Is any person in town, that feels emotion caused by this man's death?", he is shown a family who he was about to foreclose on.  When the word of Scrooge's death comes, they all get really happy.

3) Scrooge has to also stand over the vision of his own corpse, laying on his bed, bedroom ripped apart by thieves, as animals  that want to eat him scratch at the door.

4) That part where the Cratchit's are so sad?  Tiny Tim's dead body is still upstairs in his bed.  Bob goes up to sit by it.

Merry Christmas!!!!  God Bless Us, Every One!

Dracula...my Halloween season book that I finished after Thanksgiving

This is probably my second time reading Dracula, but I picked to be my official scary book of the fall.  I was possibly influenced by my recent consumption of LORE podcasts.  In one episode on ghost hunters, the host discusses how in popular culture, the main characters of Dracula, Jonathan, Mina, and Lucy, are far overshadowed by our fascination with Van Helsing.  Because deep down, we all want to be monster slayers, or in this case, vampire hunters.

One of the things I love with this book is that it really good late nineteenth century British literature that doesn't try to be incredibly deep, or a "classic".  It is just a really good adventure story.  It is a scary tale, that is further improved by the shifting first person narrative.  All good ghost stories are told from the first person.  It makes them so much more believable. 

Of course this book essentially gave birth to every thing we associate with the modern vampire story, however the 1897 vampires were significantly stronger.  People forget that Dracula can come out in the daylight, he is just weak.  He can also shift his human appearance, shape shift into animals, turn into a mist to go through cracks in walls, command wolves, and influence the weather.  When he attacks people, it can go on for weeks or months before he finally turns them. And the corner stone of fighting vampires, is the Holy Host, wafer. Yes that method is of course too religious for modern tales, but in nineteenth century Britain, that was serious ammunition.    

Random thoughts: The Keanu Reeves 90's movie wasn't that great of adaptation, (for instance, the real Count is much more frightening than Gary Oldman), but in every Van Helsing part in the book, I pictured Sir Anthony Hopkins. Also, now I really want a Kukri knife; because you never know when the Count might rise again.

Crime and Punishment...why did I do this again?

I guess by late spring I had read several non fiction books and I was looking for a change in pace.  For some reason or other I picked up Crime and Punishment again.  Also for some reason, I wrote in the book when I finished it for the first time.  I finished it on November 22, 2002, at 12:30 am.    I must have been proud.  I was living in Peach Tree apartments in Martin and spending my lunches at the park in Union City where I probably read most of this.   I was proud again on August 3, 2017 at 11:00 pm.  It took me most of the summer. When you say, hey this is a Dostoevsky book that was translated from Russian to English, it makes in sound hard.  But in reality, if you can read hard books written in English, you can read any translated book.  English is the hardest.  

Anyway, a few take aways....Raskolnikov is a total self absorbed asshole for 503 pages of this book, then falls in love with Sonia while he is a prisoner in Siberia, then becomes possibly normal just at the end of the story, page 504.  But even in his transformation with love, we really don't know if he actually feels bad for murdering two people.  

The interrogation by Porfiry Petrovitch heavily reminded me of Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Bastards.  He starts off as your friend in a far direction and works his way in.

Apparently people in Russia have two separate names, a formal type and an casual type, like a nickname.  That, and the names that seem very similar, can make following the plot a little tricky.

What makes this book so long is not the page count, but the lack of short, declarative, narrative.  There are many series of pages with no paragraph breaks, much less narrative quotes.  

I am not going to write an essay on the genius of Dostoevsky, he definitely took care of business.  His novels read like a psychology and philosophy text book with a plot.  My favorite lines are the zombie apocalypse dream he describes to Sonia in the last few pages.  

Anyway, I am ready to move on to a little easier pace of books.  Maybe I will get back with old Raskolnikov, Sonia, Dounia, and company in another 15 years or so. 

The War of the Worlds

I think in the process of getting older I have endeavored to appreciate the pioneers in creativity.  Like when you listen to a Chuck Berry song, it is easy to go, "Sounds like normal rock n roll", but the thing is, in the mid to late 1950's, nobody was playing the guitar like that.  When you watch the original Star Wars, it is easy to say, "The special effects are ok", but the thing is, in the late 1970's, that was a huge leap in movie making.

So, in that same line I try to appreciate the real pioneers of Science Fiction.  SciFi (and it's close cousin, Horror)  is one of those genres that is done so poorly, so often, that is is easy to dismiss it as pop culture junk.  But if you seek out the original creators and their original work, such as Shelley, Stoker, Wells, Verne, Matheson, etc., you will find some great work that stood equal with their peers in the 19th and 20th centuries.  And if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, these guys are the most flattered writers in the Western Hemisphere.  Their ideas have been copied and re-hashed so many times it is mind boggling to consider it. 

So I picked up The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells a few weeks ago.  This was my first Wells novel.  I have to say that I didn't know much about the story other than the old tale about the radio broadcast in 1938 that made a real state of emergency and I have seen the Tom Cruise re-make.  Which has some narration by Morgan Freeman so of course it is good.  Anyway, I was really impressed with the far reaching ideas that all started with Wells.  This book was published in 1898.  The high tech accomplishments at the time were the Maxim machine gun, the bicycle, and the glider.  There was no powered flight.  There was no space travel.  Yet somehow he almost essentially invented the idea of the alien invasion, the flying disk, the tentacles that grab people, the idea that aliens would have over developed brains and communicate through telepathy, the ray gun, and a host of other alien invasion/apocalypse ideas that have permeated every piece of SciFi over the past century.  I was particularly  struck by the tentacle scene in the house when the curate is killed.  It seemed straight out of The Abyss.  His visions of London could be in an episode of The Walking Dead.  The conflicts between the humans and the aliens could be straight from Independence Day or 10 Cloverfield Lane.  And although I didn't expect to have this opinion, the Tom Cruise adaptation is actually not that bad of job. 

Anyway, I plan to continue my exploration of the roots of SciFi.  I think some Verne is next on my list!   

Slaughter House Five - Vonnegut is a Genius and I am so over it.

So this is not the first time I have read this book.  I read it in my early 20's sometime.  I loved it.  Vonnegut pulled off the perfect anti war novel.  He really is a genius.  And what other 20th century literary great had a scene in freaking Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield?

But a couple of weeks ago, for some reason I decided to pick it up again, and this time I read it with my older mind and thoughts.  I was disappointed.  Most books that I re-read as I get older, I find that I appreciate more.  But there is something about this one that worked the opposite way.  Over 10 years ago, I got Billy Pilgrim.  I got that he was an outsider and saw horrible things that nobody else got. It made him sad and be alone all the time and slowly drove him into believing that he was living on another planet, living in an alien zoo with a 20 year old Hollywood actress.  So, Billy Pilgrim's innocence and his descent into an alternate reality showed how horrible the rest of society was.

But this time when I read his story, I just didn't see it. Even though Vonnegut alludes to Billy Pilgrim being an allegory for Christ, he just isn't.  Billy Pilgrim is just a self absorbed goof-ball.  He does not show one bit of compassion or even general human interest toward basically anyone other than his insane author friend, Kilgore Trout.  Such lines like these really struck me as summing it up:

When his mother is visiting him in the hospital and talking to his only friend in the bed beside him: "And on and on it went - that duet between the dumb praying lady and big hollow man who was so full of loving echoes."

Of his mother "She was a perfectly nice, standard issue, brown haired, white woman with a high-school education."

Of his son Robert: "Billy liked him, but didn't know him very well.  Billy help couldn't help suspecting that there wasn't much to know about Robert."

He is traumatized by visiting the Grand Canyon as a child.  Although his wife is loving and devoted, he hates her.  He hates his fellow soldiers.  He hates America. He pretty much has contempt for everyone he meets.

Who thinks this shit? And the more I thought about it, I realized there were some really good parallels in other literature in this era (50's and 60's).  Catcher in the Rye, Catch 22, and Fahrenheit 451, all display similar themes, although not quite as obnoxiously.  It pretty much goes like this, "I am different and smart and completely miserable.  If you are happy in this world you must be stupid and worthless.  So, I am going to just wander around and complain and mope.  And this is going to so justify my existence."  

In fact, at the end of all of these books, the protagonist ends up living in some type of isolation (mental hospital, alien zoo, Sweden, out lands with other hobos), away from all of the stupid, common folks.

What is the motivation behind all of this?  Sure, bad stuff happens to Billy (his father and wife dying, stuff he sees in war).  And encounters bad people.  So freaking what?  That is life!  But he does absolutely nothing, no action what so ever.  There is nothing new about the "individual versus society" theme, but in earlier periods the struggle was treated different.  The individual actually did something.  Tom Joad (Grapes of Wrath) saw a lot of bad shit too.  Know what he did?  He freaking killed a bad guy!!!  Imagine that! I guess I just have a different mindset about the world when it come to literature.  I want to see things how they are, the beauty and ugliness in all of it.  Spare me the pseudo intellectual judgment.  You aren't necessarily and better or worse than the others so give it up.  Do something!

So to summarize this rant....It is the freaking Grand Canyon.  Enjoy it!