Stephen King's "Skeleton Crew" - 25th Anniversary

Twenty five years ago today, on June 21, 1985, Stephen King's collection of short stories, Skeleton Crew, was published. Nearly three years ago, we here at this site did a piece on "The Mist," one of the more famous short stories from this collection. You can read it here.

The Clown (Heinrich Boll's Asichten eines Clowns) (1976)

The question: Does any one know anything about Ansichten eines Clowns, the 1976 German film directed by Vojtech Jasny and based upon the wonderfully depressing novel, The Clown, by famed German author Heinrich Boll? The answer: No, apparently not, at least not in the U.S.

When something cannot be found, it is best to write about the search for that thing. That's been the philosophy and mission statement of this site for some time. But sometimes, so little can be unearthed that the search itself becomes the story. That is the case with this elusive film.

For those seeking out this film, the Internet offers very little information. Like all films, it has a token IMDB entry, and even a threadbare Wikipedia entry, but little else. The first meaningful link I could find was to the film's entry at a foreign film index, which yielded a number of stills from the film, which I've embedded into this post for your perusal (along with a few other stills I've managed to locate at other sites). As for other sites dedicated to the film, I also located this site, this site, this site and this site, though all are in a language other than my own.

Boll's novel follows the maudlin exploits of a alcoholic pantomimist in post-war Germany. The novel is sad with some very tender human moments. I wonder how the tome's great sense of melancholy was translated to the screen. When I first learned of a film adaptation, I sought it out, to no avail. Back in the 1990s, when everything was coming to videocassette, and then DVD, I thought surely it would arrive somewhere somehow. But no. The film starred the late German actor Helmut Griem as Hans, the title character, whose career has suffered greatly due to his alcohol addiction. But the loss of his career is not what haunts him most; rather, it is the destruction of his relationship with his beloved Marie, played in the film by Hanna Schygulla. The narrative is set against the backdrop of the end of the second World War.

Here's how the back cover of the McGraw-Hill Paperbacks version of the novel I have summarizes its plot:

Hans Schneir, a professional clown and mime, is an artist who specializes in capturing revealing incidents in people's lives and recreating them in pantomime. By way of reminiscing after a particularly disastrous performances, the clown gives a moving description not only of his personal history but also of German society under Hitler and in the postwar period. The clown-narrator's ability to go to the heart of every human being and every issue with tenderness and compassion as well as devastating insight parallels Heinrich Boll's own artistry and immense writing talent. The reader is compelled to share Schneir's obsession with the existential condition of man and to understand his revulsion and heartbreak at the Germany he has seen emerging from the war.

Why, I wonder, has this book not been adapted into a brooding indie film in which the title character is a self-loathing, sorrowful, boozed-up stand-up comedian? This seems like it would make a fine film, whether it be set in post-war Germany or fall 2001 New York City.

Whatever the case, what few stills I could locate are assembled below:

J.D. Salinger and Two Films of 2002

Hipster Hollywood screenwriters have always slavishly worshipped Catcher in the Rye, and five years ago, the cinema saw two products of such idolatry: Igby Goes Down and The Good Girl. Both feature frustrated youths tortured by the quotidian demands of contemporary society. In Igby, Kieran Culkin plays Jason "Igby Slocumb, a put-upon adolescent who always has some clever, post-modern retort to the latest episode of adult hypocrisy. In The Good Girl, Jake Gyllenhaal is "Holden" Worther, a character with his own Salinger obsession, although his character is a bit less self aware. Isn't it gilding the lily to name the protagonist of your Salinger-themed screenplay "Holden"? (The Good Girl also features actress Zooey Deschanel, named for one of the title characters in Salinger's "Franny and Zooey.").

Said the 2002 New York Times review of Igby:

What is it with "The Catcher in the Rye" these days? Is it just a coincidence that in a matter of months, the J. D. Salinger classic has rung two cinematic bells? (Three if you count "The Good Girl," in which Jennifer Aniston's character has an affair with a clinically depressed self-styled Holden Caulfield.) Nor should we forget the plaintively whimsical films of Wes Anderson, which flaunt a Salingeresque sense of their own rarefied sensibility.

But this trend is not new. Even as far back as 1989's Field of Dreams has a connection through is source material according to the Internet Movie Database:

In the novel, the reclusive author whom Kinsella sought out was J.D. Salinger, whose novel "Catcher In The Rye" included a character named Richard Kinsella. The producers of the film adaptation were forced to create a fictional reclusive author (James Earl Jones' character, Terrence Mann), because of the threat of legal action by Salinger, who was reportedly incensed when the novel was published in 1982.

Click here for some photographs of Salinger's town, including one of his driveway.

So what is it that screenwriters, then, now, and everywhen heap worship upon Salinger? Is it because in high school, they, as the unappreciated and socially awkward writers, found solace in his works when their social oppressors were wooing cheerleaders and drinking cheap beer, activities they publicly held in disdain but secretly longed to join? Is it because Salinger captured the inarticulate social revulsion of adolescents and the maturation of those feelings of discomfort into more pronounced forms of adult awkwardness? Or is it because Salinger was cool and trendy in a way that John Grisham or other pop rubbish simply is not?

Perhaps the question is not why screenwriters or bloggers or journalists so adore Salinger. Might the inquiry best focus on why one would seek to translate that admiration into a theme or motif present in one's own work? By naming your protagonist after your own favorite protagonist, do you get to wink ever so slyly at yourself in the mirror and marvel at your own cleverness? Or are there other unforeseen rewards awaiting you, the writer of such things?

Off Duty X

You don't expect me to blog fully on the day before Christmas, do you? In the meantime, then, content yourself with the infographic depicted above, which tells us how nature would reclaim the Earth if humans were to suddenly disappear from the planet. (The original source for the graphic was this October 2006 post from Boing Boing, which in turn cited a post from Treehugger, which no longer exists). The chart in question is very similar to the relatively new tome, The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, who purports to tell that tale as well.

In sum, Excellent Christmas time reading.

Richard Matheson's I am Legend

"The past had brought something else, though; pain at remembering. Every recalled word had been like a knife blade twisting in him. Old wounds had been reopened with every thought of her. He'd finally had to stop, eyes closed, fists clenched, trying desperately to accept the present on its own terms and not yearn with his very flesh for the past. But only enough drinks to stultify all introspection had managed to drive away the enervating sorrow that remembering brought," - Richard Matheson, writing in his 1954 horror novel, "I Am Legend," which relates the tale of Robert Neville, the last man on earth in a world filled with vampire-like creatures, who is coping with the loss of his wife, Virginia, to the vampire plague.

Imagine a contemporary horror novel not unlike George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead film with a gritty dash of Cormac McCarthy's post apocalyptic novel, "The Road." Richard Matheson's novella, "I Am Legend," has the frightful and serious feel of both of those works, but it significantly predates both of them: the former by 14 years the latter by over 50. The blogger 1979 Semi-Finalist has it right when she notes that upon the novella's publication in 1954, "it must have been mind blowing in its revolutionary thinking."

"I am Legend" is set in a future in which a vampire plague has destroyed the world's population. The protagonist, Neville, believes himself to be the last human being on earth, and he has no evidence to the contrary. He spends his nights holed up in his fortress of a home and his days venturing out into the world to slay as many sleeping vampires as he is able. He has only his work by day and the solace of his home by night. But this is no action adventure story (although the forthcoming film adaptation featuring Will Smith may transform it into such). Neville's tale is one of lost love, loneliness, and longing for the flesh in a world bereft of everything he ever knew. Neville attempts to distract himself with music and booze but his thoughts are never too far from the wife and child that perished with the old world. Matheson describes Neville's coming to grips with the post apocalypse as follows:

In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming. Horror he had adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle, and he realized it now, understood it at long last. And understanding it seemed to give him a sort of quiet peace, a sense of having spread all the cards on his mental table, examined them, and settled conclusively on the desired hand.

Each night, a pack of vampires surrounds Neville's home, beckoning him to join them. Knowing he has no companionship, the female vampires lift up their skirts to tempt him. But to go outside would mean death, which is why he hunts by day to thin their ranks as much as possible.


But then, by chance, he stumbles across Ruth, a female survivor apparently unaffected by the plague. At first, she is timid and flees from Neville, who gives chase and captures her in an attempt to keep her safe from the vampires. He takes her to his home and slowly gains her trust. But he is conflicted:

As the moments passed he could almost sense himself drifting farther and farther from her. In a way he almost regretted having found her at all. Through the years he had achieved a certain degree of peace. He had accepted solitude, found it not half bad. Now this . . . ending it all.

He had accepted his fate as a loner; he had come to terms with his isolation. Now, in finding another human being to talk and relate to, he begins to long for the solitude he once had. Although he saw fit to complain of his loneliness, now he preferred it to this new interloper.

Would that he had acted on those feelings of doubt. Like so many new people in our lives, Ruth is not at all what she seems. She is actually sick with the virus that leads to vampirism. She is a spy sent to learn Neville's secrets and spill them to the new vampire society which has arisen. Although she began to feel some sympathy for Neville, she betrays him nevertheless, leading to his capture, imprisonment, and as the novella ends, the likelihood of execution.

Matheson's story is far, far more psychological and dark than the type of rubbish that we have come to expect from modern horror writers. It is difficult to imagine the new film version, written by Akiva Goldsman and Mark Protosevich, directed by Francis Lawrence and opening this coming Friday, conveying this sense of complexity. (The studio picture starring Will Smith is not the first such adaptation; the novella became 1964's The Last Man on Earth and 1971's The Omega Man.). In 1954, writers like Matheson didn't write books as a mere predicate for selling movie rights to Hollywood. They were not attempting to shock for the sake of shock value or fill their pages with derivative postmodernist nonsense. Matheson's novel is less about a plague of vampirism than a man's isolation and avoidance of the world. The tone is a grim and amoral, for "[m]orality, after all, had fallen with society" and Neville is now "his own ethic."

Sound familiar?

Off Duty VI

The perils of my professional career keep me from authoring a substantive post today, but I expect to return to regularly scheduled programming in time for tomorrow's installment of Chronological Snobbery. However, if it is snobbery you crave today, you might investigate the very, very new and entirely unrelated blog, Adventures in Literary Snobbery, authored by one Calliope of New York City. That blog has but two posts, but its most recent entry concerns Kevin Brockmeier's haunting novel, A Brief History of the Dead (about which I myself previously blogged here). In the novel, the afterlife is a city filled with everyone who is specifically remembered by someone - anyone - who still lives. But Calliope writes that this city of the dead may actually be preferable to those in which we dwell while alive:

You die and wake up in a giant city. The city is very much like the ones found on the Earth you knew in life: apartment buildings, divey diners, giant corporations, mom ‘n pop stores, bums on the sidewalks, overflowing trash cans. But somehow, this city – The City of The Dead – is better than anything you experienced while you were alive.

There’s a “what if” game that’s fun to play: What if you could go back to high school (or “your twenties” or “elementary school”) with everything you knew now? What pitfalls would you avoid? What mistakes would you correct? What encounters would you risk?

In The Brief History of the Dead, this is exactly the sort of scenario Kevin Brockmeier envisions for his version of Heaven; not eternal perfection, but knowledge and second chances.

...

The trappings of a universal and perfect heaven are disregarded as illogical; because how could “perfection” be universal? These tiny happinesses are only exist for each individual character and are made all the sweeter because they were given the chance to choose their happiness.

Ah, second chances.

Nostalgic popular culture posts will return tomorrow; thanks for your patience.

Stephen King's "The Mist" (1985)

"In the market, my muse suddenly shat on my head - this happened as it always does, suddenly with no warning. I was halfway down the middle aisle, looking for hot-dog buns, when I imagined a big prehistoric bird flapping its way toward the meat counter at the back, knocking over cans of pineapple chunks and bottles of tomato sauce. By the time my son Joe and I were in the checkout line, I was amusing myself with a story about all these people trapped in a supermarket surrounded by prehistoric animals. I thought it was wildly funny -- what The Alamo would have been like if directed by Bert I. Gordon. I wrote half the story that night and the rest the following week," - Stephen King, describing the genesis of his novella, "The Mist," in the "Notes" section of the paperback, Skeleton Crew, p. 568 (Signet Books: New York, 1985). The long in the works film adaptation of King's short story opens in theatres tomorrow.

What is the most frightful in Stephen King's novella "The Mist" is not the advancing horde of unseen monsters hidden by a dense and mysterious fog. Rather, it is the psychological machinations of a group of citizens hiding from them in a local grocery store. More than two decade's ago, in 1985, "The Mist" appeared in Skeleton Crew, a collection of King's short stories. (Originally written in 1976, it had been published in an earlier form in 1980's Dark Forces). The premise: A commercial artist, David Drayton, and his young son , Billy, venture out to the grocery for supplies after a particularly devastating thunderstorm hits their lakeside community. Following the storm, a strange and unusual mist has begun to overtake the city. As the story progresses, Drayton and the others in the market learn that lurking within it are vile prehistoric creatures who feast upon anyone bold or foolish enough to venture outside.

Thus, along with other archetypal members of the community, the two Draytons find themselves trapped the large supermarket, unable to flee, unable to contact relatives, and unable to acquire any information of any kind. To cope with their new found horror, some try to escape, some fill themselves with booze, while others, including Drayton, attempt to formulate some type of long term plan. Slowly, but surely, the local eccentric, Mrs. Carmody, recruits a number of citizens to her camp of religious zealots, all of whom believe that the mist is a punishment for a higher power who must be appeased, ultimately, by a human sacrifice.

Back in the day, reviews were mixed. Of course, from its premise, it seems like pure and utter schlock. But one reviewer praised King for "escalat[ing] our worst anxieties into a hyperbolic fairy tale."¹ Others dismissed his tale of "gooey monsters at the supermart"² as "the stuff B-movie drive-in double- features are made of"³ (although depending upon one's perspective, those descriptions may be compliments after all). The New York Times noted that it "begins as a powerful evocation of a small Maine community dealing with the terrifying aftermath of a storm, but it quickly deteriorates into a hokey sci-fi thriller full of gigantic spiders and insects created presumably by human tampering with nuclear energy."⁴

Barry Boesch, writing for the Dallas Morning News, observed:

As interesting as the horrible monsters outside are the emerging monsters inside as the people try to deal with their panic and stress at being thrust into a seemingly hopeless, life-threatening situation.⁵

Boesch poses the most interesting question in his review. Of whom should the reader be more frightened, the dinosaur-like monsters waiting in the mist, or the human beings whose social order begins to deteriorate inside the supermarket? "The Mist" is at times a fascinating psychological study of its characters. But King has always been a better storyteller than writer of pop literature. His dialogue is oftentimes awkward, his descriptions of scenes and characters clunky, and his resolution to a narrative generally unsatisfying. In mid-novella, it devolves from a stark psychological drama to self-caricature; Mrs. Carmody transforms from an ominous old crone to a hysterical cult leader, who exclaims things like:

It's expiation gonna clear away this fog! Expiation gonna clear off these monsters and abominations! Expiation gonna drop the scales of mist from our eyes and let us see!

...

And what does the Bible say expiation is? What is the only cleanser for sin in the Eye and Mind of God? Blood.

This, of course, is evidence of Boesch's point that the monsters within are as scary as those without, but it doesn't seem to be the type of thing someone trapped in a supermarket would actually say, however crazed the situation. With a handful of loyal comrades, Drayton escapes the clutches of Carmody (who is shot and killed), the confines of the supermarket, and the creatures of the mist. But the story flashes forward several days to a hotel room where Drayton is chronicling the bizarre events of recent history. He and his followers have found temporary solace from the mist and its monsters. King then offers only this as an ending:

That is what happened. Or Nearly all -- there is one final thing I'll get to in a moment. But you mustn't expect some neat conclusion. There is no And they escaped from the mist into the good sunshine of a new day; or When we awoke the National Guard had finally arrived; or even the great old standby: It was all a dream.

(Emphasis in original). What is amusing, and irksome, about this ending is that King acknowledges he had no satisfactory resolution, but he then self-referentially makes note of that fact as if to forestall criticism on that very point. He suggests that his ambiguous non-ending is superior to a more definite closure because tidy endings are, apparently, square. The attempt did not go over well. Writing in 1985, and quoting the next paragraph in the story after the one quoted above, Davin Light of the Orlando Sentinel concluded:

But suddenly, King seems to run out of energy. And then he tells the reader he's run out of energy and dismisses it in much the same way he introduces the book. The ending '' . . . is, I suppose, what my father always frowningly called 'an Alfred Hitchcock ending,' by which he meant a conclusion in ambiguity that allowed the reader or viewer to make up his own mind about how things ended. My father had nothing but contempt for such stories, saying they were 'cheap shots.' '' I'm with his father.⁶

King commits the same sin twenty years later in Cell, his 2005 novel of a zombie apocalypse caused by cellular pulse. There, King ends the story with another non-ending: the protagonist holds a cellular phone to his zombified son's ear in hopes that it will restore his life to normalcy. There is no conclusion, there is no answer, there is no resolution to the story. The narrative ends with the reader not learning what ultimately comes of the son or his father. The reader is left to decide whether they find happiness again or only death in their new world.

One wonders if King had always intended such ambiguous endings in "The Mist" and Cell or if he, as Boesch suggests, merely ran out of energy and surrendered.

It has taken some time for the novella to make it to the silver screen. On May 14, 1996, Bryan Byun, posting in alt.books.stephen-king, related that he was "looking forward to the film version [of 'The Mist'] by Frank Darabont (Shawshank Redemption). If anyone can do true justice to the story, I think he can." The film adaptation of "The Mist" opens nationally tomorrow, eleven and a half years after Byun's post. Written and directed by Darabount (no stranger to King's work as the director of 1994's The Shawshank Redemption and 1999's The Green Mile), the film stars Thomas Jane (The Punisher) as Drayton and Marcia Gay Harden (Miller's Crossing, Pollock) as Carmody. For years and years and years, Darabount had been struggling to turn the short story into a motion picture. He has been linked to the project for so long that his efforts were being discussed at the dawn of the Internet. Byun, and others like him, were expecting him to helm an adaptation not too long after his success with The Shawshank Redemption. On October 10, 1994, Eric Parish, posting on the rec.arts.tv.mst3k and alt.tv.mst3k Usenet newsgroups, noted that "[t]here will be a movie of 'The Mist' coming from Castle Rock someday, directed by Frank Darabont, who did 'Shawshank' . . ." On June 28, 1996, Bev Vincent wrote on alt.books.stephen-king that "Darabont is supposed to be working on "The Mist", but I have not heard that it is anywhere beyond the pre-production." But delays and distractions kept the film in development hell for more than a decade.

But will it be worth the wait? Darabont will no doubt set the film in the present and bestow upon his characters all of the accessories of modern life (cell phones, Blackberries, irony), none of which will be able to penetrate the mist. The question is whether Darabont will run out of narrative gas as King did in the original novella, although these days, such a maneuver would lay the groundwork for a sequel, if the film rakes in a sufficient amount of box office dollars. Having worked so closely with King over the years, though, Darabont may be unlikely to significantly alter anything his patron author set to the page two decades before.

1 Bolotin, Susan. "Don't Turn Your Back on This Book," New York Times, June 9, 1985.
2 "Skeleton Crew - Book Reviews," Playboy, July 1985.
3. Graff, Gary. "King Gives His Imagination Room to Roam," Lexington Herald-Leader (KY), June 30, 1985.
4 Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. "Books of the Times," New York Times, July 11, 1985.
5. Boesch, Barry. "Wide-Ranging 'Skeleton Crew' Looks at Internal, External Monsters," The Dallas Morning News, August 4, 1985.
6. Light, Davin. "Too many Bones, Not Enough Meat," Orlando Sentinel, July 14, 1985 (quoting the final pages of King's novella).

Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Popular fiction about the end of the world can be epic (Stephen King's The Stand and Robert R. McCammon's better Swan Song) or awful (King's Cell). Thus, a reader should always raise an eyebrow upon learning that a popular novelist has taken on the Armageddon genre, as that is usually a cue for very bad genre fiction. Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a post apocalyptic novel, succeeds in a way that places it in a class of its own. McCarthy, author of All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men, did not prepare us for the marvel that is this very grim book.

At only 241 pages, the book is -not- one of those epic, 1,000 page tomes in which a miscellaneous group of "good" people link up and combat a miscellaneous group of "bad" people who have linked up after America has collapsed. (An aside: Really, when did the definition of "epic" evolve in literature to mean a book of more than 850 pages and in film to mean a work with a running time of three hours or more? Scope is irrelevant.). What impressed me about The Road was its intensely dark and gritty nature. As the novel begins, a number of years have passed since some cataclysmic event, which is never directed explained but is obviously a nuclear holocaust. A nameless man and his young son (who has no memory of the world as existed before its fiery end) are making their way southward through the United States and attempting to avoid any trouble they might encounter along the way. They worry about shelter and starvation and do all that they can to avoid murderous road agents. They see only decay and death and the results of same. Their fate is to live and exist day by day in this world.

McCarthy is not writing about good versus evil or action adventure. He chronicles the struggle of a man and his son to survive in a world which cannot by its very nature survive. The man, obviously, has some difficulty reconciling this new world with the old. One particular passage , in which he fleetingly recalls his long gone wife, resonates with readers:

Rich dreams now which he was loathe the wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

See p. 111 (emphasis added).

There's a joy in revisiting a place like that which you have not seen (or sometimes even thought of) in a decade. But, if you do so often enough, you do indeed commit violence to your memories. The past is, after all, a place which should be only occasionally conjured up in one's mind. But, sometimes, we cannot resist the temptation to revisit it even when we should not. When nostalgia forces us to do so again and again, we begin to remember our subsequent visits, and not the original, which imbued the locale with meaning in the first place. That is why, at least for now, I have no immediate plans to reread this book which I so enjoyed.

Stephen King's Cell

Newsflash: Last year's Stephen King novel, Cell, is not very good.

Prior to reading his attempt at zombie fiction, it had been quite some time since I had purchased a new King book. (In fact, it was Christmas of 1989 when I received and read The Dark Half.). I should have stopped reading his mighty tomes in the 1980s, but I could not resist the temptation of purchasing a King book about a zombie apocalypse. What can I say?

Sadly, the book offers merely the typical zombie motifs (stereotypes?) and adds little to the genre. King tries to add a twist by calling them "phone-crazies" (an awkward name the creatures earned because their transformation into the undead or living dead or walking dead was prompted by an electromagnetic pulse sent out by cellular telephone). If you have seen any zombie films (whether they be the old school George Romero films or more modern quick paced ones like 28 Days Later or the Dawn of the Dead remake, you have little reason to turn to King's latest offering of pop horror. You get the same flurry of action and confusion following the immediate aftermath of the post apocalyptic event, the same grouping together of dazed survivors (who, throughout the course of the narrative, prove to be more flinty than they seemed, or who perish due to their failure to prove more flinty), the same initial inability to cope with the sudden transformation of the world, and of course, the germination of an idea or scheme to thwart the zombies (at least temporarily). As zombies have become trendy in comics and film, the formula remains the same (with only Danny Boyle of 28 Days Later and the Shaun of the Dead guys truly adding something along the way). King really adds nothing to the equation (which is not surprising as he was last innovative during the Reagan years).

What struck me while reading the book, though, was not the plot's deficiencies or lack of originality. It was the realization that King is not a very good writer. That may not be news to you, dear readers (and I can't say that I am surprised, either) but for those of us who really haven't read his work since the dawn of the first Bush presidency, it is of note. Perhaps I am a more mature reader than I was in the winter of 1989 (I hope). Perhaps King was better in the late 1970s and early 1980s (when he was young, new to the publishing industry, and still hungry for mega-success rather than routinely churning out books en masse). The same thing happens to aging rock stars, why not aging writers? Or maybe, and perhaps most likely, he was never anything more than a guilty pleasure and I didn't notice during my youth in the 1980s.

The dialogue in the book, which is obviously important to any narrative, is stilted and awkward. Crafting good dialogue is very, very tricky. King's dialogue is just odd. People don't speak as he presents them , and it is obvious. Some authors write dialogue the way they themselves speak, or the way they think they do, or worst of all, the way they themselves write (and not speak). King's attempt at clever dialogue is even more stilted.

If you've made it this far into the review, you may be wondering, why bother to make the statement that King is not a good writer? Isn't that akin to a multiparagraph entry on the sky being blue, grass being green, or Kevin Smith being overrated? Perhaps. But really, what I find disturbing is that it is evidence of a trend. Nostalgia, aided and abetted by the onslaught of media and consumerism, resurrects many, many things which were popular when we were young. Without fail, those things that are brought back into our lives inevitably disappoint. Whether they be television shows, movies, or whatever, the things we enjoyed during our youth turn out to be embarrassments when we revisit them decades later.

Oh, well. That's what I get for buying pop fiction, right?

A Brief History of the Dead

Since I read two years ago, I have been recommending to all interested parties A Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. Here's the premise: There is an afterlife - a purgatory of sorts in which people arrive immediately following their demise. They remain there, in an ever growing city, so long as some living person remembers them. (It appears that this must be a personal memory, i.e. the person who remembers them must have physically encountered them rather than knowing them from television or media.). Once the last living person who remembers that deceased person himself passes away, the original person vanishes from the city-purgatory (presumably, though not necessarily, venturing on to heaven or hell). There are very interesting observations on memory, wistful nostalgia, acquaintanceship, and death in Brockmeier's novel. Here's the catch: On Earth, there comes a great plague, which thins the population to a tiny sliver. Since so many people die at once, a corresponding many vanish from the purgatory-city (since many of the people who remember them have themselves died). To boot, people who wind up in the purgatory city remain there for a very short period of time (as opposed to a number of decades) because those recently deceased people cannot now rely on living people to remember them for very long. As the living population slims, the few people who remain in the purgatory-city begin to wonder why they remain and exactly what, if anything, they have in common.

Writes one blogger: "I just can not stop thinking about who would be in my city." Indeed.

According to the book's mythos, if you remember a friend, an acquaintance, or even a random passer-by, that person will remain in the city for as long as you live, even if that person does not remember you. Your seventh grade crush, the creepy guy lurking outside your office building ten years ago, or the girl at the end of the bar you couldn't muster up the nerve to talk to and never save again, all of them are in your city. (No word on celebrities, though.). Presumably, even if your memory has mostly faded, they will be there. An interesting concept, and as the book ends, the reader desires it to continue, which is a rare thing these days."

Brockmeier is a young (or relatively young) Arkansan, although he's not written too many novels. I bought another book of his recently, but I've still yet to read it. "A Brief History of the Dead" was based on one of Brockmeier's short stories, which was originally published in The New Yorker in 2003. (You can read the original short story here.).