Book Analysis & Review: Keeper Of the Children

Keeper Of the Children

by William H. Hallahan

Quite often, horror writers are sensitive to the currents of anxiety that flow throughout a society. And for good reason: in order to write something unnerving they have to be aware of what makes people anxious. William H. Hallahan’s Keeper Of the Children addresses two concerns that American society had in the late 1970s. One was the cult scare that arose after the 1960s when new religious movements, some being authoritarian in nature and often accused of brainwashing,, swept through American society. Groups like the Moonies, the Hare Krishnas, and the Peoples Temple of Jim Jones were thriving and often cast a menacing shadow on those outside the groups. Another fear at the time was the breakdown of the American nuclear family. Divorce rates were increasing and children were distancing themselves more and more from their families, often seeking surrogate or alternative families in other places, some of which were maladaptive. Conservatives blamed the social changes of the 1960s for this, but in reality the rising cost of living contributed more to this than the counter-cultural impulses of the youth since career minded parents had to spend more time at work and less time at home. So the bases of Hallahan’s now overlooked novel were firmly rooted in the fears of his time.

The story starts when teenager Renni Benson does not come from school. Her mother Susan and little brother Top begin looking for her, eventually to learn that she and her friend Pammy, who comes from an abusive family, have gotten roped into a religious cult led by a Tibetan monk named Kheim. This monk is said to be an expert in brainwashing, mind control, and occultism so of course, Susan is scared for her daughter’s safety.

That’s when the absentee father, Eddie Benson, enters the picture. Eddie works for a film production company which requires him to spend long stretches of time abroad. On this particular trip, after working for a while in Europe, he returns home to find his daughter missing. When he learns why she is not home, he realizes his duty as a father is to rescue her even though his absence might be a contributing factor to her running away. Eddie also worries throughout the story that his wife is losing interest in him, something he again attributes to his absence. When his company demands that he leave for another lucrative filming job in Africa with a flirtatious and attractive camera woman by his side, he knows he must sacrifice his career in order to save his family from disintegrating.

Eddie gets together with a group of parents whose teenagers have also been led away into the cult; their plan is to find a way to get their children back. But then, one by one, the members of the group get killed in unusual circumstances. The first one to die is murdered by a walking scarecrow that comes to life, descends from his perch in the moonlight, and enters the man’s house to snuff him. The cult leader Kheim is a master of astral projection, so he can leave his body, enter into inanimate objects, and commit acts of violence and homicide in this way.

From there on, we learn about the lives of the other parents in the group and why Pammy so desperately wanted to join the cult as a refuge from her abusive parents. As these others get picked off in a series of bizarre murders, Eddie realizes conventional means of fighting Kheim will not work, so he joins an ashram run by an Indian yogi and learns astral projection himself. Having learned this occult technique, he engages in fights with Kheim in some unusual ways.

The unreal aspects of the story are the most interesting part of the book. Fights and murders happen while Eddie and Kheim are using their astral bodies to animate marionettes, a giant ax-wielding teddy bear, and a feral cat. You might be tempted to read some kind of symbolism into these hand-to-hand battles, but there probably isn’t any there. These fights are done, mostly in the guise of toys to ornament the violence, making it more of an entertaining novelty than a metaphor. Since the story is pedestrian, a father-hero goes to the rescue of his captive maiden daughter, and some elements are given too much description while others don’t get enough, Eddie’s course in the ashram drags on for too long and the activities of the cult are barely even touched on, there has to be something to prop up the story and keep it interesting. That is why these toy and cat fights are given so much attention. They really are the best passages in the book and the main reason it might be worth reading once.

As for the meaning of the story, there isn’t much here. The social themes of family breakdown and the menace of sleazy religious movements are issues addressed, but as for commentary on these topics, Hallahan doesn’t have much to say beyond the idea that families are important, even more important than career advancement, and cults are bad. This is unfortunate because the author has enough talent to inject some meaningful commentary into the narrative, taking it to another level. Instead he declines to use this novel as a pulpit and makes it an almost entirely commercial form of entertainment. There is a catch here though; while Hallahan could be accused of racism or xenophobia by portraying Kheim, the evil Asian occultist, as the adversary of the story, he counters this by portraying the Chinese father of a cult member in a sympathetic light and also turning to an Indian yogi for guidance on how to defeat Kheim. Thus he provides a clear indication that his opposition is to cults of coercive indoctrination and not to Asian people or immigrants.

While Keeper Of the Children does touch on some social issues of the 1970s, it ultimately is a work of entertainment. In that regard, Hallahan mostly succeeds, at least when writing about homicidal marionettes and cat battles. Hallahan could have gone deeper, but he didn’t. As such, it’s a fun read even if it is a bit predictable and basic in its methods. It’s amusing in the way a carnival fun house is. Just don’t expect much if you try to look beneath the surface.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Hidden Cities by Moses Gates

Hidden Cities:

Travels To the Secret Corners Of the World's Great Metropolises

A Memoir of Urban Exploration

There is a particular type of human, the kind that, as a child, would lift up big rocks and get a sense of wonder at all the critters that inhabit their own ecosystem hidden from our sight. These types of people get to adolescence and do things like skip school so they can climb through a broken window or a hole in a wall so they can hang out all day with their friends in an abandoned building, smoking cigarettes and telling dirty jokes. Maybe they go on to exploring abandoned tunnels or climbing up scaffolding on construction sites. Motivated by an undying sense of curiosity,
foolhardiness, thrill seeking, and a desire for hidden or forbidden knowledge, these explorers may carry these practices into adulthood, making their urban exploration into an eccentric hobby. Now think about how the introduction of the internet changed the way people socialize. These urban explorers used the worldwide web to reach out to each other, find partners for exploratory travels, exchange tips on safety and locations, and anything else that might be relevant to their lifestyle. This is where Moses Gates comes in; his book Hidden Cities documents the urban excavations he goes on, the cultural scene of urban exploration, and other odds and ends in his world travels.

Moses Gates is an interesting character. He got his post-graduate degree in urban development, something that sparked his interest as he explored the more obscure and remote parts of his adopted hometown of New York City. He approaches the subject matter with a degree of intellectualism. For him, urban exploration is as much an educational experience as it is one of adventure and aesthetic indulgence. Gates usually has some knowledge about the history and architectural designs of the places he visits. This kind of intellectualism might put off some readers who just want to read about the adventure, but for the rest of us it adds another dimension to these excursions, putting these hidden places into context, and detailing how they are living and breathing parts of a functional city-scape. Probably his greatest insight though is that most of these places are blocked off with signs that warn of danger or penalties for entering them illegally. For Gates, these signs are invitations rather than barriers and he extends this thought to say that many people are hemmed in by barriers that do not actually exist. For him, urban exploration is a liberating activity, one that transgresses established rules and frees his mind so that he can always be open to new possibilities. Having said that, Gates does not explore this theme of transgression to any great length in the rest of the book.

Most of the places Gates explores are in New York. There are hidden sections of skyscrapers, abandoned buildings, and subway tunnels, some of which are abandoned and used as galleries for graffiti artists and living spaces for homeless people. His knowledge of New York’s architecture and urban design are interesting as are his appreciation for street art and his friendships with the so-called Mole People, those who use the subway tunnels as their home. His advocacy for the marginalized is well in line with his attitude toward crossing boundaries. He also climbs some of New York’s bridges. His descriptive writing is adequate, but it isn’t great. He gives just enough information to give a sense of what it feels like to stand, illegally, on top of a city bridge evoking giddiness and butterflies in your stomach. But this descriptiveness is limited to the first few places he visits. After describing a couple bridge climbs, he doesn’t go through the bother of writing so much in later chapters, merely mentioning that he did it. This is a big weakness in this book.

Other interesting places he goes are in Paris, Russia, and Ukraine. Paris is especially exciting as he goes on multi-day explorations of the catacombs, sewers, and aqueducts that run under the whole city. He also has an interesting chapter about getting arrested while climbing the bell tower of Notre Dame and being dumb enough to ring the bell in the middle of the night. Underground travels in Moscow and Kiev are similar and interesting for similar reasons. Again, his mixture of historical knowledge and aesthetic awe make these passages good. The other places he visits in Europe, North Africa, and Latin America are less than spectacular in their descriptions.

Another facet of this book that is interesting, but also underdeveloped, is the culture of urban explorers. Gates’s main travel companion is a photographer named Steve who drinks and smokes heavily and is prone to injury. The others are people he meets online, a cast of characters that includes artists, drop outs, permanent globe trekkers, drifters, wanderers, druggies, secretive tour guides who survive by leading urban exploration tours, and those who like to have sex in unusual places like the top of the Brooklyn Bridge. This isn’t a sociological study of this subculture and Gates doesn’t go into much detail about it Doing so might have made the narrative a bit more complete.

The rest of the book is just “stuff” and by that I mean travel experiences that might have been exciting but aren’t described well and sometimes feel irrelevant to what the book is intended to be about. A good case in point is a passage where Gates describes how much he is suffering because he has to take a dump on a very long drive to La Paz, Bolivia. This part isn’t just irrelevant and uninteresting, but it also sticks out in a sad way because he waxes more poetically about this situation than he does about anything else he writes about.

Hidden Cities is the kind of book you only read once. Moses Gates writes in a way that brings everything to the surface so that there is no question about what he intends to say. There isn’t much room for interpretation. It’s got some interesting ideas and Gates does a good job of making urban exploration look appealing, but the weaker parts drag it down overall and neutralize any merits the book might otherwise have. I can’t say Hidden Cities is bad, but like a magazine article, it’s ephemeral and certainly not destined to be a classic.

 

Book Review: Black Cola

Black Cola

by Frank Laric

They say that living a good life is all about the choices you make. You can extend the thought to writing and say that writing a good novel is all about the choices the author makes. A good author knows what to emphasize and what to diminish, what to include and what to exclude, what to put in the forefront of the narrative and what to place in the background. Frank Laric, the virtually unknown author of Black Cola, does not make effective choices in the writing of this oddball novel. But then there is something about his bad decisions that make this somewhat of a uniquely interesting read.

The concept behind Black Cola is that two racist businessmen and a Nazi chemist concoct a soda, sold under the titular name, that sterilizes the people who drink it. The three conspirators market the drink to African-American people although some white people take a liking to it also. Sales are wildly successful, but when the birth rate begins to rapidly decline, people get suspicious. A criminal investigation is made, and the three businessmen end up on trial.

Amiel Gruensvig began his career as a chemist for the Third Reich during the reign of Hitler. After the war, he flees to America and finds work in a cola bottling company. Louie Duval is a Cajun businessman from Louisiana who hates African-American people because when he tried to rape a Black woman, she defended herself by slashing him with a knife. Sam Waters is a Texas businessman who meets Duval in a bar where they begin hatching a plot to ethnically cleanse the African-American population. They launch the Black Cola corporation and that is where they find Gruensvig. Then there is Velma, Sam’s wife who knows all about the conspiracy, but refuses to cooperate with the investigation until she gets called as a witness during the trial. None of these characters have any redeeming qualities.

Strangely enough, Sam Waters’ lawyer, named Bud Winthrope, is made the central character of the plot. Bud and Sam are old friends, but Bud, a married man himself, is having an affair with Sam’s wife Velma. This love triangle is used as the central theme to tie all the plot lines together. In fact, this affair is the most prominent theme in the whole book, so much so that all the other themes take a backseat to it. Considering that the story is supposed to be about an attempted genocide, it appears to be an odd choice for a central plot line. But considering that Velma becomes the key witness in the trial, it functions well at holding the whole narrative together.

Velma is also involved in subplots relating to the other three conspirators. She struggles to keep her marriage with Sam together in one thread. She also gets assaulted by Louie Duval and attempts to help Gruensvig escape to Mexico to avoid prosecution. Why she wants to help the Nazi is never clearly explained.

Otherwise, Sam and Bud are the most well-rounded characters. Sam is unapologetic about his crime and feels he is being betrayed by society for putting him in jail. He also pins his hopes of being found not guilty on laying all blame on his partners, dishonestly trying to convince the jury that he got tricked into doing something he didn’t want to do. Sam also knows that Velma and Bud are sleeping together and he gives Bud permission to carry on as he is. In fact Sam is so enthralled with the idea of Bud and Velma’s adultery that you might wonder if he has some kind of cuckold kink. All of these subplots involving Velma find their way into the courtroom proceedings.

By the end of the trial, it becomes more clear that the lawyer Bud Winthrope is the lead character. He is written about with the most detail, but in the end his motivations remain unclear. His desire to be with Velma is understandable enough, but his loyalty to Sam Waters is highly questionable. Even though he has maintained a long standing friendship with Sam, an outspoken white supremacist, he claims to be against racism and expresses no cognitive dissonance between their mutual admiration and Sam’s repugnant beliefs. To make it worse, Sam is not just a run of the mill ordinary ignoramus, but he was actively involved in a plot to commit genocide. That goes far beyond ordinary rudeness or petty crime. But Bud insists that Sam is just a great guy who made a bad mistake in life and deserves to be forgiven. It is impossible to tell who the real Bud Winthrope really is. You might draw the conclusion that he turns a blind eye to Sam’s rotten character for the sake of getting closer to Velma, making him no more than a piece of human crap. If it is the author’s intention to send that message then he could have made it more obvious because if that is the intended meaning, it is so subtle that it is almost indiscernible.

The trajectory of Bud’s life is a strange one too. Before and after the trial, all the culprits directly associated with the Black Cola company die off one by one until only Velma is left. Finally Bud gets her all to himself, but then he loses her too. He deals with all this by running into the arms of the Catholic church, finding redemption in religion. But Bud is such an unemotional character that he has no real inner struggle to complement the events of the story; he is stoic in a way that does not come off as strength of character, but rather as insufficient character development on the part of the author. All the religious preaching at the end of the book, especially at Sam Waters’ funeral, reaffirms Bud’s belief that the racists, Sam and Velma, were good people who just made some a bad mistake. These religious apologetics in the end sound more like a cop out on the author’s part. The author’s point isn’t entirely clear, but he appears to be saying that racists are people too and God loves all people so therefore we should be forgiving. That’s all fine and good, but it dodges the question of how we should deal with racists in the real world. Supposing we do get forgiven by God and go to Heaven in the end, what are we supposed to do about racists who hurt people here in the meantime? Religious salvation simply defers the problem to the afterlife. This is a bit irresponsible, don’t you think?

So considering this book is supposed to be about an African-American genocide, you might wonder how Black people figure into the narrative. Actually they do, but less you than you might be inclined to think. Charley Yates is the father of a middle-class African-American family in Atlanta. He also belongs to a militant, secretive Black Power activist group. Through them, Charley gets assigned the task of assassinating one of the Black Cola conspirators during the trial. That is Charley’s whole story. He is a two-dimensional character and his act of violence serves a narrative function by altering the defense’s strategy during the trial. Otherwise, the militants are involved in the death that happens at the end, but overall this subplot is subordinate to everything else that happens in the story. The militants are portrayed in a neutral light, being written about as neither benign nor malevolent. Still, it is strange that a book that supposedly addresses the subject of the evils of racism would place its African-American characters in such a minor role. I don’t know who Frank Laric is, but I’m quite convinced he is white.

As an author Frank Laric does not always make the best choices. This novel gives the appearance of addressing racial injustice and yet the core story is about an adulterous relationship and how it plays out in a soap opera courtroom drama. Even worse, the story is primarily about white people, most of which are unapologetic, or at best passe, about their bigotry. The theme of racism is only superficially addressed in some dialogue, testimony during the trial, a funeral eulogy, and the big kumbaya fest at the end. The theme of racism is like an afterthought used as a cloak to dress up an otherwise mediocre story about a love affair between two married people. However, if there is anything admirable about this novel it is the tightly wound plot structure. All the subplots and narrative twists feed directly into the progression of the trial. At a technical level, this is well written. It really just suffers terribly because the author has his thematic priorities all out of order.

Black Cola is not a great novel by any standards that can be thought of. What makes it most interesting is the way in which it inverts common sense logic about what to place in the foreground and background in its structure, making it a slightly challenging read even if it is ultimately a failed work of art. And despite the way in which it leaves no loose threads or plot holes in the end, it can stick in your mind simply because it isn’t obvious what the author intends to say. The meaning of the book is not entirely clear. Black Cola is a very rare paperback so if you happen to come across a copy, it would be worth picking up for its value as a collectible vintage book. It might even be worth reading once just because it is such an oddity, but you probably wouldn’t want to read it a second time.

 

Book Review: Please Kill Me

Please Kill Me:

The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

According to Ed Sanders, lead singer of The Fugs and author of books on the Manson Family murders, a counter-current existed in the hippy subculture of the 1960s. While most hippies were middle or upper class kids who could afford the luxury of turning on, tuning, and dropping out due to the financial security they could return to if they left the scene, there was another growing faction of hippies that came from a blue collar background. Some of these people suffered from abusive parenting or strict religious upbringings. This underbelly of the hippy underclass were more negative and nihilistic in their outlook, being hard drinkers and hard drug users, prone to carrying switchblades or chains, and not afraid to use them. Some of these people drifted into motorcycle clubs like the Hells Angels or other biker gangs of the counter-culture while some began morphing into a hard-edged scene of their own. Those latter people were the seeds of what came to be known as Punks. Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain is an oral history of the proto-punk and first wave of the punk music scene, mostly centered in New York City’s Lower East Side, gradually spreading across America and eventually into Europe.

In the early 1970s, Legs McNeil and some friends saw a cultural trend emerging in the downtown music scene of Manhattan. It was a reclamation of primal rock and roll, a return to three minute songs, fast paced with high energy and high volume, confrontational lyrics, animalistic wildness, and a tough, streetwise attitude that could only have emerged from the scumpits of New York in its most decadent and crime ridden decade. McNeil and company put together a magazine dedicated to this new trend and called it Punk. The magazine caught on, the name stuck, and the rest is history. Maybe it is a history that some cultural critics wish we could forget, but staying true to its defiant nature, it, hasn’t been forgotten and probably won’t be as for a long time, just like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki won’t be forgotten either. This book chronicles those origins and early days of the scene, piecemeal in a collage of quotes from articles and interviews involving people who were clear-headed enough to be able to speak about what they saw.

Obviously the story doesn’t start in 1975 with the first publication of Punk which had a drawing of Lou Reed on its cover. It starts in the 1960s with The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol’s Factory. Amphetamines were the drug of choice in the Factory and the scene started to attract rough trade, the types of people who didn’t, or didn’t want to, fit in with the hippies. Andy Warhol became the manager for The Velvet Underground and they became the band that inspired thousands of others to become musicians despite their unpopularity during their short career.

Then came band manager Danny Fields, the man who signed The Doors to Elektra Records. He discovered MC5 and The Stooges, brought them to New York, and found himself on the wrong side of the record industry’s executives as those bands were a bit untame, too dangerous, unmarketable, and unable to make millions of dollars for the investors. But The Stooges’ front man Iggy Pop caught the attention of David Bowie and his band found a lifeline in the music industry. Meanwhile, while glam grew bigger in England, its glitter rock counterpart in New York took off with the New York Dolls, a band that performed in drag even though they weren’t gay. They weren’t just ordinary transvestites; they looked like the kind of street walkers that would haul you down an alley and stomp your head in with their platform shoes, not even bothering to steal your wallet. Their brand of rock picked up where Chuck Berry left off with Johnny Thunders playing guitar in a way that made you feel like you were standing under a jet airplane as it flew ten feet over your head and a freight train went by five feet off to your side.. Lead singer David Johanson’s advice to young musicians was “don’t worry if you can play well or not. Don’t worry about how good your equipment is. Just get up on stage and play.” This embodies the approach to punk rock. It was never about technical perfection. It prioritized feeling and energy over talent and the feeling conveyed was gritty, violent, mean, dirty, and aggressive. And it was always exhilarating.

By the mid-1970s, the venues of Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s had become the world’s epicenters of punk. Bands like Television, Richard Hell and The Voidoids, Ramones, Dead Boys, The Heartbreakers, The Dictators, and the Patti Smith Group were reaching national stardom. Then Malcolm McLaren arrived in New York and envisioned marketing punk rock in England. He brought some bands over to London and a scene around the Sex Pistols took off. When McLaren brought the Sex Pistols to tour in America, they became a media sensation, punk became a fad and a commodity, and when the Sex Pistols broke up along with most other American punk bands, the first wave of punk was more or less over.

In this narrative, the timeline of punk history is actually pushed into the background so that most of the discussions are about the people and events happening in the scene. Some of the people quoted or interviewed may not carry name recognition for people unfamiliar with the territory. There is an extensive glossary at the back for those who need it. Some of the major stars of punk don’t make any direct contributions to the narrative while their friends, girlfriends, groupies, managers, roadies, and various others do. The effect is like being at a party and hearing all these people reminiscing about those bad old/good old days.

And the kinds of things they talk about could be seriously disturbing to people who aren’t ready for it. The early New York punk scene would have been a goldmine for psychologists who study social dysfunction. The scene was loaded with violence, heroin addiction, alcoholism, promiscuity, prostitution, and all around bad behavior. Some passages might make you feel grimy or nauseous. MC5, the band that played at the Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago 1968, find themselves in a riot when they try to play at the Fillmore East. Iggy Pop gets beat up continuously, loaded on drugs, sometimes falling off the stage, throwing bottles, raw meat and peanut butter at the audience, and going so far as to slice himself up with broken glass. The Ramones find each other because they are a bunch of complete weirdos. Johnny Thunders becomes the most notorious junky in rock history. Wayne County bludgeons Handsome Dick Manitoba with a microphone stand after some misunderstood friendly banter, breaking the Dictators’ lead singer’s collar bone and putting him in a wheel chair. Johnny Blitz of the Dead Boys almost dies after a brutal stabbing. James Chance assaults members of the audience during a concert and then cuts his face with a broken bottle when the bouncers try to throw him out. Stiv Bators one-ups Alice Cooper’s stage show by hanging himself with a noose, no props involved, during a Dead Boys show at CBGB’s. Nancy Spungen gets killed allegedly by Sid Vicious who soon after dies of a heroin overdose. Some luminaries of the scene, namely Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, and Lou Reed don’t appear in such a favorable light by the end of the book either. Punk rock was a musical genre started by and for fuck ups. Like the porn industry, it attracted a lot of unstable people. But we’re still feeling the effects of it now.

Having said that, there is a lot of gallows humor in these pages as well. The Stooges use a picture of Elvis Presley as a target when they feel like shooting holes in the walls of their house. Sid Vicious uses water from a toilet full of vomit to shoot up amphetamines. Iggy Pop gets arrested while wearing a dress and then tells the guy who picks up at jail that it isn’t a woman’s dress, it is a man’s dress while the police laugh at him. Cheetah Chrome gets arrested after throwing an air conditioner out of a hotel room window, hitting a police car, and the police tell him to put his pants on not realizing that his flesh colored leotards actually are pants. A studio engineer gives Johnny Thunders a shirt because he feels sorry for him, thinking his ripped t-shirt means he is too poor to afford nice clothes. Sid Vicious meets a friend on the street outside the Chelsea Hotel; the friend says he is going to pick up a vacuum cleaner at a friend’s apartment and Sid Vicious thinks “vacuum cleaner” is New York slang for a bag of heroin and insists he wants to get a vacuum cleaner too. And so it goes on.

This book only scratches the surface though. McNeil and McCain select the most outrageous stories and elements of early punk. There are a lot of bands that go unmentioned and the second wave of hardcore punk is never brought up, nor is the corporate commercialization of punk in the 1990s, the pretentious and dull grunge scene and crappy MTV punk. Parallel scenes like new wave, no wave, post punk, and underground metal get almost no space here either.

Please Kill Me is a great book and a must read for anyone who is curious about the roots of the most dangerous and influential musical movement in history. I have heard a lot of talk these days about transgressive literature and art, but punks in the beginning were living a transgressive lifestyle, one that put their lives in danger on a daily basis. It was reckless abandonment and rock and roll excess taken to its extreme limits. It shouldn’t be a surprise that most of these people died before the age of thirty, and yet Iggy Pop, the biggest stooge of all Stooges, is still alive and thriving. I guess whatever didn’t kill him really did make hims stronger. And I still think it’s odd that he became a professional golfer. All of the bands mentioned in this book provided the soundtrack to my high school years and reading about the people who made the early punk scene a reality is truly mind-blowing for me. I can’t praise this book enough.