Not much is known about African-American author Hal Bennett. His most well-known, yet still obscure, novel is titled Lord of Dark Places. Despite rave reviews from almost everyone who has ever read it, it is still off the radar for most bibliophiles. Maybe it is too transgressive, too ugly, too gut-wrenching for most readers. Maybe some people are too weak to follow a story in which the main character is a villain, an anti-hero, albeit with a certain kind of charm, who is also a Black man struggling with the turmoil of his inner-mind, a psychological space that is neither comforting nor inviting. Maybe those critics and scholars who set themselves up as gatekeepers of intellectualism don’t want us to see this side of the African-American experience. Those kinds of people should be ignored, or at least sidelined enough so that they don’t steal the thunder that Hal Bennett and this novel deserve.
As the story begins, we are taken into the deep south where the twelve year old Joe Market is fishing in a creek. The prose is rooted in the Southern Gothic style and immediate comparison to William Faulkner is legitimate, but that elder statesman of Southern fiction never dragged his readers into the gutters of perversion the way Hal Bennett does. Comparisons with Jean Genet also spring to mind as Joe’s father Titus comes to tell him that his mother just died while he was having sex with her. The father goes on to rape Joe, and, to the reader’s probable surprise, Joe admits that he secretly enjoyed it. Throughout the course of the novel, Joe repeatedly returns to this memory along with one other memory, the time he played the infant Jesus in a church play with the Virgin Mary, acted by a prostitute who he would later sleep with.
While those three events had a powerful impact on the development of Joe Market’s mind, there is something else that permanently shapes and ruins his self-perception. His father declares himself the prophet of a new African-American religious movement and takes his son with him. The two of them travel around the South, preaching in revival tents until the spectacle at the end of each meeting is revealed: Joe takes off his clothes, stands naked in front of the audience, showing them his enormous penis while Titus tells the audience that, for a small fee, anybody can have some private time with the young boy to bask in his divine glory. In actuality, this means Titus is pimping his twelve year old son who has sex with every customer be they young old, male, female, gay, straight, or anything else. The long term effect of this is that Joe grows into adulthood thinking his sexuality has a divine special purpose (I’m not sure if Steve Martin lifted this joke in The Jerk from Hal Bennett or not), and even worse, Joe deludes himself into thinking he is a black messiah, a new Jesus Christ.
Semiotically speaking, Joe’s phallus is a signifier that carries a lot of meaning with it throughout the entire novel. During childhood, Joe’s father teaches him to call it by the name “Willy”. After Joe settles in New Jersey, he re-christens it with the more northern and more adult-sounding name “Dick”. Finally, around the time he meets his bride-to-be, he renames it “Christopher” after the Catholic saint. He also names his son “Christopher” after his own penis. Through the use of male names and name-changes, Joe’s penis is personified, taking on a personality of its own, a centralized object in his life, almost becoming an entire character in itself. The name changes represent stages of growth in Joe’s life and as the novel progresses, it becomes obvious that the erect phallus connotes and associates itself with death. The life-giving, creative force of masculinity is, when wielded by Joe Market, inverted into a tool of destruction, slaughtering all who come into contact with it like a machine gun gone out of control.
In terms of semiotics, another key observation to make at this point is the absence or presence of boundaries. Within the confines of African-American sexuality, and within the Black community in general, Joe Market lives without boundaries. He has sex with anybody who pays for it and goes even farther by having sex with his father on a routine basis. In one graphic scene, father and son have male on male on female sex with a prostitute. But when encountering the white community, Joe is confronted with boundaries that humiliate and confuse him. In New Orleans, he encounters a white woman who insists on having sex with him, but she will only allow him to penetrate her through the barrier of a metal fence, a boundary he is able to see through but not cross. The fence is a barrier he can partially penetrate but it also restrains him at the same time. Afterwards, Joe goes away feeling frustrated, confused, and scared especially because the white woman threatens to call up a lynch mob if he reuses to have sex with her. The world he sees on her side of the fence, and what she says and does on that side, is one he can not fully comprehend, let alone participate in. Between the white woman and her fence, he feels accepted and unaccepted in her world simultaneously.
The other significant encounter Joe has with the white world is when Tony Brenzo enters the scene. While Joe is working as a gay street hustler in New Jersey, Tony, a vice squad cop, decides to arrest him. After pleading for mercy, Tony agrees not to book him if he enrolls in school and finishes his high school education. This is done and the two go on to become best friends. Tony’s main concern is that nobody has ever respected Joe for his mind, only taking interest in his body, particularly his penis. Tony may seem like an angel at this point, but as the story goes on, he becomes a little more complicated. As a cop he is honest when it comes to arresting murderers, robbers, and other hard criminals, but when it comes to smoking pot and having sex with prostitutes, quite often in threesomes with Joe, his morals are a little bit lax. Hal Bennett had a true talent for portraying the complexities of his characters’ minds; everyone in the book has inner conflicts and moral ambiguities like Tony’s and this goes a long way in making each one of them take on a distinct life of their own. By the end of the book, you feel as if Joe, his friends, and the people in his neighborhood are people you actually know.
While in nigh school, Joe meets his future wife Odessa, a pretty, morally upright church-going girl under the strict domination of her mother. Joe sees her as an opportunity to go straight, in more ways than one, and they later have a son together.
During Odessa’s pregnancy. Joe joins the army with his closeted gay friend Lamont. They get sent off to the war in Vietnam which turns out to be a traumatic experience for Joe. But before joining the army, Joe was getting lost on the straight and narrow path he had undertaken. He began smoking more marijuana than anyone could imagine a man being able to handle and he begins losing his mind. He hatches a bizarre scheme to kidnap and kill his boss’s pet turkey in order to convince Lamont to join the army with him (trust me, it makes more sense when you read the book for yourself), but when he is holding the dead turkey in his arms, he begins to think of it as a crucified messiah. It is at this point that the author begins to plummet the depths of Joe’s twisted psyche.
The war is traumatic for two reasons. One is that he sees an African-American airplane pilot die after being shot in the crotch. Joe is bothered by this because he sees a Black man entering death in a state without sex, neither man nor woman; the wound where his genitals used to be is neither penis nor vagina. From then on, Joe becomes obsessed with his own penis and struggles internally with his own sexuality, especially in his attraction to men. Then during a combat operation, Joe shoots a Vietnamese man. Here we see how he begins to suppress his emotions and embrace his identity as a dealer of death. At first he feels guilty and sick to his stomach, but he suppresses these feelings. From that point on, he goes through the same cycle every time his behavior results in someone else’s pain or death: killing then guilt then stoic unemotionalism. His constant pot-smoking and sexual intercourse help him to escape from anything negative he might feel.
After Joe returns from the war, his infant son Christopher ends up dead in his crib. Joe blames Odessa for this and begins abusing her physically and emotionally in some of the most heartbreaking passages of the novel. But nobody ever said this was going to be a cheerful read. Other bad things happen too. Tony asks Joe to be an informer a heroin dealing case that might involve Joe’s boss, neighbor, and sometimes sexual partner China Doll. Tony and Joe also grow closer together as romantic partners while other people die and Joe’s life continues to spiral out of control. Finally, China Doll has an orgy at her house on Halloween night that turns into the wildest ending you might ever read in a novel. It is at this orgy that we get the deepest insight into the confusion of Joe Market’s mind and once we get these insights we can also see there is a twisted moral code, shocking in its revelation, that Joe follows. In his mind, he does terrible things to people because he wants to save them from the world. He hurts people to help them. When he kills, he thinks he is saving people from the agony of life. Note that Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved has a similar motivation when she murders her own daughter. When Joe beats Odessa, he does so because he loves her; he thinks he is no good for her and he wants her to leave him for a husband who is better. Joe is the Divine Redeemer and Savior who does terrible things to good people for the sake of liberation from the horrible world we live in, or so Joe tells himself in the tumultuous haze of his inner mind. This is sad because Joe’s friends all love him. He is charming, fun, and charismatic; the people around him see a lot of potential that he is unable to see in himself. And they are not entirely wrong. As a reader you will find him to be a monster, but through understanding his tortured soul, you still might find an ounce of sympathy for him despite yourself.
Lord of Dark Places has its share of flaws. Some passages are sloppy, some events seem haphazard and improbable. There are a couple loose threads in the story lines. But the strengths of the book are so powerful that these minor problems have little impact in the end. Bennett takes a lot of chances, almost too many it might seem. As a life story and character study of Joe Market, it is hard to pinpoint what the maain theme of the book actually is. It combines pornography and transgression with commentaries on race relations, gender issues, psychology, the atrocity of war and violence, and the general existential dread you might feel when confronting the bigger picture of the world. It examines identity in relation to sexuality, masculinity, bisexuality, and the African-American community. It takes a nuanced look at police relations with Black people. It addresses the issue of what it means for members of any race to be American. There is even a noir-like murder-mystery subplot that comes in more than half way through the novel. The writing isn’t really about just one thing; it brings all these elements together in a way that should have resulted in an overblown mess. But thanks to Bennett’s unique talent, it doesn’t. If the novel is trying to deliver one single message, it might be that the hyper-sexualization of African-American men can have destructive consequences if their sexuality is not guided by a strong, developed mind. But Bennett doesn’t write like the kind of author who wants to preach. He lays out all the blood, guts, and semen on the table so you can make of it what you will.
Other great things about this book are the well-drawn, ultimately unforgettable characters that harmonize so well with each other in the narrative. Joe’s friends explain sides of himself in ways that he can’t see and he does the same for them. The complexity of Joe’s character comes close to perfection; as a reader you want him to overcome his insanity no matter how bad or brutal he gets. The way the developmental events of his childhood keep resurfacing also works well as a narrative device and as a psychological indicator of Joe’s mental association and motivations. There is also the humor. This book is hilarious at times like Joe’s plot to kidnap the turkey, what Cheap Mary makes Joe do when she blackmails him, and the scene where Odessa’s mother walks in while Joe and Tony are double penetrating China Doll. Finally, there is the plot twists and the harrowing emotional turmoil. As the story goes on, corner after corner after corner gets turned in rapid succession, making your head spin. The unpredictability factor and shock value are high and by the end of the book, you might feel as if you have taken about fifty succeeding punches to the head. You might as if you’ve just spent a round or two in the ring with Mike Tyson. The ending might make you have a nervous breakdown. Is that good? Anything that can make you feel so emotionally drained at the end is great art no matter how unpleasant the experience might be. Writers of garbage like John Grisham or Ayn Rand will never make you feel anything this emotionally potent. That is why they aren’t true artists and Hal Bennett is.
Hal Bennett, it’s unfortunate you aren’t alive today to receive all the accolades you deserve for Lord of Dark Places. It is like the Mt. Everest of transgressive literature and reading it is like climbing to that peak. It is a hidden peak that only few have approached but maybe it is better for us to hold such a repulsive, grotesque, and beautiful secret for ourselves. There is no other book like this and there never will be again. Congratulations and all hail to the King Hal Bennett, whoever it was that you were.
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