The Resurrectionist

Resurrection Shuffle

The Resurrectionist -
The Lost Work of
Dr. Spencer Black
by E R Hudspeth
Quirk Books
ISBN: 9781594746161

Subtitled The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black, E. R. Hudspeth’s book The Resurrectionist is a tale of the fictional 19th century doctor of the title, who specialised in treating mutated humans but who evolves, in the short biography of his, taking up in the first 60 or so pages of this book, into someone who believes that the mythological creatures of man’s past once all existed and that human beings are the natural next stage of various evolutional processes, to get them to their current form. Initially finding no proper evidence to back up to what he comes to believe, he goes absolutely into mad scientist mode and spends his time making various mythological creatures from humans and other animals, patchworking them together to show how the species would have looked in their days on the planet.

It’s a nice little biography done in the best ‘weird fiction’ style... think Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley and H. P. Lovecraft joining forces... and the sinister path of this once respected medical practitioner, forced to pontificate on his theories from travelling side show carnivals (there’s at least one veiled reference to Tod Browning’s Freaks) is quite entertaining and, in terms of the final fate of the character... along with his wife, brother and son... is left much to the imagination of the reader.

The other two thirds or so of the book are a representational printing on the good doctor’s ‘only two copies ever published’ treatise on the matter - The Codex Extinct Animalia - and is mostly pictorial, concentrating on quite wonderful medical diagrams of all the creatures the good doctor manufactured... or indeed discovered or bought from private collectors of such mythological specimens, depending on your interpretation of the ‘biographical’ section of the book. Indeed, I believe the author, E. R. Hudspeth is a working medical illustrator himself so, as you can imagine, his drawings of the inner workings such as the muscles, the skeleture of various key creatures like a mermaid, a pegasus, a centaur, a minotaur etc, are all quite wonderful and certainly worth the price of admission.

Which is why this is, alas, such a short review... there’s a lot of substance to the book but the highlight, which takes up the majority of the page count, is indeed the selection of beautiful medical illustrations of those creatures that the doctor hopes can jog the sense memory so that the human tissue and bone, as it is now, can be stimulated to “unlock the body’s natural legacy of its ancestral past”. I’ve wanted this book for a while now so was delighted to receive one as a Christmas present this year. However, since the book’s first publication, almost eight years ago, something must have happened behind the scenes somewhere. In the back of the book is a web link listed to take the reader who has purchased the tome in question to link to further ‘archival documentation’ and even filmed footage, to further enrich Dr. Spencer Black’s back story. Alas, the link is no longer active so I guess I’ll never know if what I took on board reading between the lines of the biographer is anywhere near to unlocking the final enigma of the man in question.

So that’s a shame but, still, I appreciated The Resurrectionist for what it is and I definitely had a fascinating time with it. Certainly a big recommendation from me if you are into uncanny tales set in the late nineteenth century or admire a good looking medical illustration for sure. This beautiful hardback edition is certainly worth picking up.

Giraffes On Horseback Salad

Dali Soup

Giraffes On Horseback Salad
by Josh Frank, Tim Heidecker and Manuela Pertega
Quirk Books ISBN: 978-1594749230

Well this is certainly an interesting book and one I was completely foaming at the mouth for as soon as I found out about it on Twitter which, fortunately, was a Friday night. That meant I was able to get into London and get my hands on a copy within about 12 hours of discovering the existence of this thing (then didn’t get around to reading it for many months after but, hey, it was something less to worry about picking up later). Giraffes On Horseback Salad is a graphic novel which tries, almost, to do the impossible and both succeeds and fails in equal measure but, in this case, the nature of it’s failure is so consistent with an authentic feel for the material, that it’s partial failure is just another sign of its success, so to speak. Yeah, okay, I’ll unravel that one for you in a minute, after this short lead in...

Back in 1980, it turns out, when I was 12 (I always thought it was a lot earlier), the Tate Gallery in London (there was only one in those days) briefly displayed a huge retrospective of the work of Salvador Dali. I remember queuing up for hours with my parents to get in (in the days before timed entry and bookings) and eventually getting through the door and being absolutely blown away by it. This definitely made me want to have some kind of job in art and my ultimate career destination in graphic design is not so far off base, I feel. Dali was my painting hero.

Flash forward to sometime in the mid-1980s and my family got their first video cassette player. It was big, silver, had huge diving board buttons and a cassette tray that popped out the top. On the day we got this, I bought some blank tapes and decided to do a test ‘off the air’ recording of something on television that night. The BBC were showing the first of a small season of late night Marx Brothers movies... I think it was just Animal Crackers, Monkey Business (my favourite), Horse Feathers and Duck Soup. I’d never seen one of their films properly before and so I recorded Monkey Business and, when I watched it the next morning, I was absolutely hooked on the Marx Brothers and decided to try and watch all of their movies as soon as I could (and I would, often multiple times when it came to their first eight films... with their first five made for Paramount being their absolute best).

Also, of course, over the next few years I was reading all I could about my various interests and somewhere, while reading various biographies, autobiographies (such as the brilliant Harpo Speaks) and celebrity correspondence, I got wind of a ‘collaboration’ between Harpo Marx and Salvador Dali. Somewhere in the mid to late 1930s they were trying to collaborate on a film which Dali was writing and which would be an extremely surreal Marx Brothers movie (well, aren’t they all). Now, it has to be said, while I was intrigued and excited by the prospect that something like this could have happened at some point, I was pretty sure the resulting movie would probably have made for some hard viewing. The Marx Brothers, if you’ve never seen one of their films, are already extremely surrealist in nature... not just visually, as evidenced by Harpo’s shenanigans but also in terms of the flexible, pun-like nature of the outrageously funny dialogue written for Groucho and Chico. To put them with the world’s premiere surrealist (even though he’d been excommunicated by the movement naming themselves as such at some point earlier) seemed like taking things a bit too far because, Dali’s form of surrealism was of a completely different kettle of lobsters than the brand exhibited by Minnie’s boys (Minnie was the Marx Brothers mother, manager and driving force in their early years). It didn’t seem to me like it could be a good or even halfway watchable ‘fit’ but it was great to imagine just what might have been.

Well, Josh Frank has taken things a whole lot further than ‘just’ imagining’... although, to be fair, he’s done a lot of that too. Basically gathering and unearthing some rare documents including a 40 page treatment of the handwritten ‘script’, such as it was, by Dali... he has made a graphic novel adaptation of the film that ‘might’ have been. Now, it would be terrible to think that this thing is completely unlike the collaboration that ‘almost’ emerged between Dali and ‘team Marx’ but, there is a basic skeleton apparently, in which Frank has filled in the blanks as best as he could imagine them and made the thing ‘play’ quite well... something Groucho Marx didn’t even think was possible of the material. There are 45 pages of text introduction here recounting, among other things, the approach and breakthroughs made by Frank to get this story told and it’s extremely impressive. You can’t, alas, say this is anything like what the original movie might have been, I think it’s fair to say... but, with the help of Quirk Books (who I’ve mentioned on here before as being an interesting publisher), he has done his best, along with fellow writer Tim Heidecker and the extraordinary illustrator Manuela Pertega, to give us an entertaining and very interesting ‘What If...’ version of how the collaboration might have turned out.

Some creative decisions I agree with and some I don’t but I’m not the artist so that’s all beside the point. Frank says he resurrected the spirit of wonderboy genius Irving Thalberg, who loved the Marx Brothers and took them in at MGM when they needed him most, to help him in his collaboration and, while that’s a nice thought... I can’t help but think that even Thalberg, had he been alive (he died very young), would not have green lighted that pitch.

However, what we have here is an amazing collaboration between the writers and artist involved. The text and images combine to weave a spell, mostly in greyscale but with the odd dashes of colour, which... as mind-bendingly surreal and ill-fitting the spirit of the original collaboration is... roots it in 1930s America and allows it to sit well with the movies that the brothers would be making at the time. It’s tastefully and sympathetically done and although the book doesn’t really come alive until Groucho and Chico arrive in the main narrative... and maybe flags towards the end... this adventure of Jimmy (played by Harpo out of costume and with a large talking role which, from what I know of the sound of his real voice... would never have been allowed to happen) and his love affair with ‘The Surreal Woman’ which causes chaos in the world, is a truly beautiful work which I would be proud to have on my bookshelves, if I had any free bookshelves. As it is, I’m proud to have it stacked up on a huge, precarious pile of other books which I can put my hand out to steady as I pass it by.

The quality of the dialogue and the appropriate nature of it is easy to demonstrate...

Groucho: “Oh, and only pocket the spoons this time. Last time I nearly impaled myself on a fork in an overcoat.”
Chico: “Ah, you crazy. Forks don’t wear overcoats.”

Or how about...

Groucho: “You know what a paradox is?”
Chico: “Why, sure. Everyone knows what that is. I shot two pair-a ducks and cooked them in a nice soup.”

And it certainly delivers on the throwaway Groucho lines too... “Next time let’s take something more seaworthy. Like Esther Williams.” Other times, intriguingly, there are some obvious set ups and, though you know exactly how Groucho or Chico would have responded to it... and, in fact, did respond to these same set ups in various movie adventures, the writers drop the more Marxian response and sail off in another direction. I’m assuming that’s deliberate, by the way, because I’m sure these guys must know the Marx Brother’s work inside out. And probably the right way round, too!

My biggest grumble here is that there’s barely any Harpo in it. The Jimmy character played by Harpo is pretty much any one of many ‘straight romantic leads’ who found themselves coupled with the brothers. So this is like the Allan Jones or Zeppo Marx characters which would sometimes pop up and Jimmy only very vaguely and, not very often strays, into ‘Harpo’ territory. I’d like to say this is probably as Dali intended but I noticed, when some of the original script pages were reprinted in the back (along with Dali’s handwritten notes and sketches for some of these things) he has scenes assigned to Groucho and Harpo which, in the graphic novel version... have been switched to Groucho and Chico. So I’m not 100% sure why this decision in adaptation was made unless... as is more than possible... various treatments and script fragments by Dali were in complete contradiction to each other. I’m guessing that may be the case.

The illustrations are wonderful and, despite the chaos of the content of these drawings, the panels are easy to follow and there are some nice layouts including some wonderful double page spreads where words and images snake away between the two pages without, I’m glad to say, confusing the reader.

Ultimately, this was both more and less of what I wanted from this book but, like I said, its failure I suspect is more coming from the way the original movie might well have failed in its intent, with such a mixture of ‘brands’ being compromised with Dali and the Marx Brothers seeming to be just a slightly ‘out of kilter’ fit. I think lovers of both the artist and the comedians will take to this book like a duck to soup though and, honestly, the interior artwork is just wonderful and worth the price of admission alone. Giraffes On Horseback Salad is a brave and exciting labour of love which, at the very least, will keep you interested and intrigued as you make your journey through it’s alluring pages. I’m certainly glad I bought this one and it definitely a solid recommendation from me. Don’t miss out.

Horrorstör

From Orsk ‘til Dawn

Horrorstör
by Grady Hendrix
Quirk Books 2014
ISBN: 1594745269

I think Horrorstör was another one of those books I found by accident on Twitter. If social media is good for anything it’s getting great recommendations about films and books from like-minded people (also for initiating phone sex or, if you’re really lucky, eventually finding your life partner but, you know, those are other stories). The novel is by a guy called Grady Hendrix and, as is typical with a lot of Quirk books (such as their excellent Dracula’s Heir - An Interactive Mystery - reviewed here) it’s a book that I just couldn’t imagine working in any other format than print.

That’s because... and here’s the novelty value of this novel right here... the book is designed to look like an IKEA style catalogue. In fact, the entirety of the novel takes place in a branch (and surrounding car park) of a big chain store called Orsk which, as the writer explains soon enough, is an ‘all American’ furniture store in ‘Scandinavian drag’ that specialises in being a more cheaply produced version of IKEA but without letting on to the general public that they are really an American based company.

So the design reflects the look of a typical IKEA catalogue, starting off with a fold out plan of the store on the front inside cover (echoing a map in a fantasy novel too, I guess) and the best way to walk through it. This is followed by various ads, coupons and diagrams that you might find in a real store catalogue. There’s also a plan, of sorts, in the fold out back flap but, unless you want a spoiler, I would advise you not to look at that until after you’ve finished the novel. And, of course, everything is expressing the Orsk Ethos and there are website details and bar codes etc., built in as part of the design. Since I am a stickler for such things (anally retentive), I did actually type in the email address for the Orsk website into a browser and I can tell you that it redirects you straight to the Horrorstör page of Quirk books just in case... I dunno... in case you want to buy another copy for someone, I suppose. And, with all the detailed ‘customer experience’ blurb in these sections of the book, you often get the pun which I never got tired of throughout my whole time reading the book... to the effect of, if you have any questions... “just Orsk”.

Then the book settles down to an, admittedly squarer format, standard paperback design but with each chapter starting off with a big splash page diagram of a specific piece of ‘build it yourself’ Orsk furniture. As you progress through the book, the furniture diagrams get more unusually customised to something more horrible as the story progresses from what is essentially, at the start of the novel, a satirical and smart comedy which takes time to ridicule the poe faced seriousness of the IKEA style ‘shopping philosophy’ and various management style buzz words and customer service concepts... before shifting tonally into something which is more out and out horror as the novel continues. And it’s pretty good too, I’d have to say... with a few reservations.

So after these brief design shenanigans, the novel opens properly with that time honoured tradition of comparing both customers and employees alike to zombies. Yeah, the writer plays with this presumably because he embraces the idea, I guess, that if you’re going to have a horror novel set in an area principally built for shopping then you at least have to acknowledge the debt that ‘shopping horror’ owes to the late, great George A. Romero’s classic zombie sequel Dawn Of The Dead. I guess that’s just a given. As it happens, though, anybody expecting a zombie novel needs to shift their expectations because that’s not what we have here. In fact, if I were to compare the novel to anything else in the horror genre, it would be the Silent Hill video games and movies, I think (one of which is reviewed here).

However, whatever you are expecting from it, this book is not just a novelty idea which creates expectations of zombie horror... it’s actually a very well written, pretty funny at times, intelligent piece of satire. In fact, the writing style is sheer Douglas Coupland, if I were going to compare the writer to anybody else... probably unfair but I suspect if you like Coupland’s prose then you’ll probably not take long to get into Hendrix’s use of wordage here.

The little digs and pokes at the IKEA brand and, I suspect, quite a lot of other shops are quite wonderful too...

“Rather than follow everyone and walk right past Basil, Amy decided to go the long way. Defying the intentions of an entire think tank of retail psychologists, she walked backward through Orsk, starting at the rear (the checkout registers) and moving clockwise through its entire digestive tract towards its mouth (the Showroom entrance at the top of the escalator). Orsk was designed to movie customers counter-clockwise, keeping them in a state of retail hypnosis.”

... and I particularly enjoyed the little truths which come out about real life stores like IKEA, which I know  everybody tends to get lost in. I once heard that if you just look backwards, everything makes sense and you can get out of there quicker... something I would recommend to all shoppers who don’t feel the need to be so forward thinking about furniture purchasing. The shop philosophy is quoted often by a ‘model employer’, a manager called Basil and the central heroine, Amy, is always quite healthily cynical of the brainwashing methods of the corporate mindset. I love that the way through the store is named by Orsk “The Bright And Shining Path” and I love that the clunky, build it yourself furniture can only be assembled by customers using their “Orsk Magic Tool” which is incompatible with screws on other brands of furniture. This actually reminded me a lot of what Apple has become these days... a company who has lost site of being in any way customer friendly and changes the various connections and leads to their stuff so they are incompatible with a) anybody else’s products and b) even their own slightly older products in a constant attempt at getting people to constantly upgrade and line Apple’s pockets with the usual IT world advances, often known more technically as... “money for old rope”.

I especially liked how, in the later passages of the book where the easy comedy of the first half has given way to a more brutal horror, Amy exploits a known design flaw in one of the shoddier cabinets made by Orsk to escape certain death. It’s not, however, all just satire of shopping... Hendrix also has little digs at a few other things, one of them being those stupid reality TV shows about ghost hunters. Two of the characters are trying to catch paranormal activity in the store after hours and their critique of the shows that do this kind of thing already is quite ‘on the nose’ in some ways. And I also love the circular nature of the writer’s observations when two of the characters get lost in the store and, rather than be just because the Orsk stores are designed like IKEA, it’s actually because a paranormal phenomena has manifested itself to make them lose their way but, for a while, they just assume it’s the inscrutable nature of The Bright And Shining Path that is leading them astray.

I said I had a couple of reservations and they are as follows.

Okay, so number one is a really weird grammatical thing where the writer uses the word apprehend in a passage in the second half of the book rather than the word comprehend, which is what I think he meant when you read the sentence back over. That one really grated because I tend to expect commercially published novels to be properly proof read (which, alas, most of them aren’t, these days).

The other slight problem I have is the tonal shift. The characters are such nicely drawn, comical characters that when the horror starts, it kinda doesn’t live up to the marvellous comedy writing in the first part of the book. Although it’s not always overtly gory, the book does have its moments and the brutal torture of some of the characters you are following seems a bit unnecessarily grim at times. However, even when the writer is throwing all this horrible stuff at the reader, the characters always manage to stay true to themselves (except when experiencing certain trance states of mind, which I guess is pretty much acceptable). So although some of the horror content like body constriction and eye gouging is pretty intense, the central protagonist, Amy, still manages to carry the story through on the weight of her fictional shoulders and, by the end of the book, she stays true to herself.

Other than these slight niggling problems, though, Horrorstör is a really nice piece of writing and I had a really good time with it. I especially liked the Epilogue where the story picks up a number of months later. The characters never seem to quite do what you think they’re going to do in this and the last little part of the narrative is a really nice touch. Ultimately, I’m not sure how regular readers of ‘horror fiction’ would do with this but I’m sure readers of standard, contemporary writers would enjoy this. One of the more enjoyable pieces of fiction I’ve read over the last few years and a solid, oak panelled recommendation from me.

Dracula's Heir

Heir Raising

Dracula's Heir: An Interactive Mystery
by Sam Stall 
Quirk Books 
ISBN: 9781594742859

Well this is a very nice idea, I must say.

In this modern age where the Kindle and other such reading devices have, for better or worse, taken such a hold on the international reading market, it was nice to hold in my hands a rather unusual volume which prides itself, almost, on giving the reader an interactive experience which is more of a tactile one. That is to say, although I’m sure the contents of this book could be fairly accurately reproduced in an electronic form, to do so would be to miss the point somewhat and take away a lot from the charm of the book... it would lose almost everything in translation to a virtual realm, I fear.

To explain, Dracula’s Heir comes with the strap line “An Interactive Mystery” but, this is not interaction in the sense that most youngsters would understand it today. This is a puzzle of a book, a whodunnit if you like, with the emphasis being placed more on the “Who is the vampire?” aspect of that question at the heart of this story. But the way in which the story within the story is presented, reveals another mystery... Why is the author of this work in danger? If you solve the riddle of who is the vampire and just what their link is with the original Bram Stoker novel Dracula, then you will also, I expect, have the answer to the original question of the fictional author’s own hasty mortality.

To find the solution to this conundrum, you read through the book and, at various regular and random intervals, you come across sealed or ‘bound in’ pieces of printed paraphernalia which you can study at your leisure to help in finding clues to the story at hand. This is a sequel to the original novel but it takes the premise that Dracula was actually a true account of the happenings involving the real people in the book... and that Stoker’s account of their adventure is seen from the time of the events to be a highly fictionalised fancy instead of what it is for the people in the book... a recording of the nightmarish events of their very real life.

Starting off with an author telling how he came to be in possession of all the wonderful artefacts dotted about the book, we then start reading the post-Dracula journal extracts of the Dr. Seward character from the original novel, and this account is what takes up the bulk of the book, taking little pauses here and there while you study the wonderful clues and “interactive” items dotted throughout; such as handwritten letters, old photographs, a reproduction of two pages of a Victorian newspaper, an extract from Renfield’s journal and even a mysterious unpublished chapter or Bram Stoker’s Dracula which was withheld from publication at the request of Jonathan Harker, in case it caused him unnecessary embarrassment should the contents of that chapter, which takes place very early in the original Stoker novel (before he has even met Count Dracula), come to light. This fictional “lost chapter” again takes the form of a smaller book or pamphlet attached to one of the pages of the actual book.

I have to say upfront, one way in which this book falls down a little, is because I was pretty sure I knew who the vampire in this tale was right from the introduction of a particular character into the narrative and, alas, the writer’s attempt at misdirection to point to other characters within the story just reenforced that belief which, at the end of the book, turned out to be the correct solution to the mystery. That being said, it’s such a wonderfully presented thing, and fairly well written (although I’m not sure Stoker would have used some of the words which frequent that mini chapter, or at least not have spelled them like that) that I am quite happy to dismiss the obviousness of the book’s final solution because I had such a great time reading this one... even though it’s a fairly quick read.

Another great thing about it is the illustrations in the book by Roland Sarkany, which really do depict events as they happen in Dr. Seward’s journal and take the form of truly beautiful black and white plates detailing some of the action in the story. Now, I have to say that in one sense the illustrations are an intrusion, because they do kind of break the fourth wall of the book, so to speak, by illustrating something which is being presented as fact, but there is certainly room in the premise to the extent that the fictional author of the story has prepared the documentation for publication... which presumably also meant him commissioning illustrations for this work. However you want to justify it though, intrusion or not, the illustrations are fantastic and give it another little lift which the various clues and artefacts found in the pages are also doing... making this tale a rare and tactile experience for people who like to really engage with a book in ways in which an electronic device can only hollowly mimic, without properly replicating the actual experience of holding this volume in your hands and working through the clues as they are presented.

At the end of the book, there is a sealed section with a few more pages, once it’s been clarified... and anyone reading this will surely know this is coming so I don’t think this would constitute a spoiler... that the fictional author has gone missing. The arrival at the publishers of the long letter, the contents sealed in the end section, is from the actual vampire of the tale and explains the connections and the full details of the web of deceit which you will find revealed to you as you read through the book. At the end of the day, there’s nothing truly revelatory about the contents of the sealed section if you have been paying attention throughout the story, but it does give a sense of closure to the proceedings and, although this end section probably wasn’t needed, it certainly didn’t detract from the content of the rest of the book and, all in all, I have to say that I had a really great time with this tome, which was an unexpected Christmas present.

Definitely recommended for lovers of the Dracula myth and for people who like minor puzzle solving. I’ve since found that the publishers, Quirk Books, have put out at least two more ‘interactive mysteries’ of a similar nature... one written by Sherlock Holmes’ Doctor Watson and another one which involves the early days of Bruce Wayne and his more famous alter ego, Batman. All I can say is, on the strength of this wonderful little journey of a story, those two are definitely going on my Christmas list this year. A lovely present and a corker of an experience, even if the mystery itself is perhaps a little too easy to solve.