This week’s obsession is hell hounds and devil dogs. The monster reoccurs from folklore across the world. What doth their omen foretell? How do writers use it in contemporary stories? And if the beast is real, how can we stop it? Keep reading…if you dare!
Encyclopedia
First, some historical hellhound context to identify and vanquish these beasts.
Cerberus
Underworld Cerberus from Magic the Gathering by Svetlin Velinov | Credit: Wizards of the Coast
Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades, was first written down around 500 BC. He’s probably the most popular hellhound, a guardian of the underworld. But is he formidable? Hercules bagged him for a feat, and Orpheus played a lullaby to put his ass to sleep. Despite the three heads, this dog seems like a pushover.
Garmr
Cover for New Mutants #82, Illustrator Bret Blevins | Credit: Marvel/Disney
Garmr offers a Norse twist on an underworld guardian hound and introduces the word hellhound. As “the hound that came from Hel,” Garmr guarded the gates to the underworld, his fur covered in gore, “bloody on his breast.” Odin just sped past him on a horse. As seen above, Marvel’s New Mutants also encountered the big demon wolf once, and they also just snuck past it. Noticing a theme?
El Cadejo, a South American myth popular in El Salvador, is a spectral dog that presents the duality of good or evil as white and black. When the dog has white fur and blue eyes, it’s benign, but if it’s black with red eyes, you gonna die. Remember this rhyme: Blue eyes and white, that’s alright; red eyes and black, you must stand back!
If you get attacked by El Cadejo, you’re toast. It’s a ghost dog. Weapons can’t hurt it. The dogs look for babies, drunks, vagabonds, and people with grudges, and the ghost dog picks them off lonely roads.
Black Dogs of the Isles
The Black Dog of Newgate, from the book The Discovery of a London Monster Called the Black Dog of Newgate published in 1638 | Credit: Wikicommons
Black dogs of England are demonic ghost dogs, like the ones in South America. England reported devil dogs in almost every county. And they all have hilarious names, e.g., Barghest, Black Shuck, Bodu, Capelthwaite, Hairy Jack, Padfoot, Gytrash, Moddey Dhoo. The dogs approach much like a werewolf. They come out at night, maul passersby, and leave the whole town confused, not unlike the plot of American Werewolf in London. Avoid these creatures!
TLDR Secrets to Defeating Demon Dogs:
Hell Guardians: Surprisingly easy to beat! Sneak past them, use music or Ambien.
Ghost Dogs: Odds here are bleak. But if you can’t beat them, join them. Become the beast and pray for lupine revenge.
Books
Hell Hound | By Ken Greenhill | Paperbacks from Hell | 1977/2017
Hell Hound by Ken Greenhill | Credit: Paperbacks from Hell
Hell Hound is a re-release of a forgotten ’70s horror pulp novel that genuinely creeped me out.
What happens when a dog becomes a killing machine?!
I’m a dog person. I love dogs. I’ve owned them. I watch videos of them. I hung out with one just the other day. But this novel showed me a dark side to dogs.
Baxter is one of those creepy-looking bull terriers. Sid’s dog from Toy Story. The type of dog who’s head looks engineered for biting. Here’s one on the poster for the novel’s French film adaptation
Baxter (1989) | Credit: MK2 Productions
I see why the French liked this book. Baxter’s internal monologue is the same detached, selfish nihilism as Camus. When the dog decides to kill a person, he thinks to himself.
I understand that conditions change; that I must be able to control those changes…I don’t understand it. But I no longer fear things that I don’t understand.
The dog does nasty stuff. Baxter targets old ladies, babies, little dogs, and he befriends a teenage Nazi. Baxter only finds commonality with the teen fascist. They both are struggling to maintain their base, uncivilized impulses.
The humans around Baxter are unpleasant, a collection of suburban loners veering on insanity. An elderly neurotic, a couple stuck in a failed marriage, a porn-addict father who buys soiled panties at the thrift store, and a teacher who keeps a card catalog of every student’s forgotten lives and broken dreams. Perhaps Baxter is just mirroring the lead-paint society of the 1970s?
Today, in 2020s America, no one thinks of dogs as killers. People treat their dogs like children or perhaps royalty. It’s almost socially unacceptable not to like dogs, a preference magnified into a personality flaw.
And yet, with dogs exists a wolf. Dogs are trained to respect humans. And they can be trained to bite humans, too. There’s a reason prison guards weaponize dogs. Sharp teeth, vice-like jaws, surprising strength relative to size, and far superior speed to a human make a dog brutal to fight. The meme that pitbulls eat babies has some truth to it.
And we think of dogs as loyal. But Baxter believes it’s people who are loyal to the far superior species. He explains,
People have a great capacity for loyalty to those who seem to depend on them. I have benefitted from that loyalty, but I don’t understand it. Urinate on their carpets, chew up one of the objects they endlessly accumulate. They sometimes punish, but in their loyalty they always forgive. Does their loyalty have any limits? Some day I’ll know. Soon, perhaps.
And learn he does when Baxter gives up his freedom, becomes subsumed to someone else, and meets a gory demise. It’s surprisingly poetic and has much to say about a world run on petty cruelties. Hell Hound is an incredible book with excellent prose. I recommend it to anyone who likes horror novels.
Comics
Hounds | Sam Romesburg, Sam Freeman, Rodrigo Vázquez | Mad Cave Studios | 2024
Hound is an ultra-violent, anti-war story about British werewolves in WWI and a well-paced, provocative read.
Our narrator is a young boy, a child soldier, sent to the front line to defend Britain.
A Panel from Hound: Illustrated by Rodrigo Vázquez | Credit: Mad Cave Studios
The hells of war will turn the soldiers into hellhounds. The illustrations are well rendered with keen perspective. The color palette reminds me of watercolors and 60s-era war comics, fitting for the balance between military and horror.
A Page from Hound: Illustrated by Rodrigo Vázquez | Credit: Mad Cave Studios
Our hero must confront the beast inside himself while trying to take over a German town. And the beasts that are his comrades in arms. When he encounters the werewolves, the combat is fluid and kinetic, with great sound effects.
A Page from Hound: Illustrated by Rodrigo Vázquez | Credit: Mad Cave Studios
At its core, the story confronts whether humans instinctually lust for blood. Does war awaken that in humans? Man’s latent cruelty may be the core of hellhound legends. Not what if a man is a dog, but what if a dog was as cruel as a man?
Two Panels from Hound: Illustrated by Rodrigo Vázquez | Credit: Mad Cave Studios
Another great release from Mad Cave Studios! They’re putting out cool comics. Check them out at your comic shop or on Hoopla. Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for a review copy.
Film
Cujo | Lewis Teague | 1983 | Warner Brothers
Cujo, the rabid dog | Credit: Warner Brothers
How could I write about Demon Dogs without mentioning Cujo? I finally watched the 80s horror classic, and the crazed St. Bernard touches on a different fear than our previous hellhounds. What if a good dog goes bad? All it takes is Cujo sticking his head in a tree full of bats. Then, he loses all context and starts killing people. We humans try to forget that dogs can go crazy, too.
Pile of the Week
Dog Reading Book During Daytime by 2Photo Pots | Credit: Unsplash
Finally, to cleanse the Bad Dog vibes, look at this dog reading a book. That’s nice.
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Reviewing Fact and Fiction about The Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 1970s
In honor of Black History Month, I discuss an art book about The Black Panther People’s Party, some novels about Black revolutionaries in the 1960s and 70s, and the film American Fiction.
Art
Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emery Douglas | Rizzoli | 2014 | Archive.org
Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emery Douglas | Credit: Rizzoli
The Black Panthers People Party was a political party of Marxist-Leninists fighting for Black power. Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emery Douglas examines art and illustrations curated from the Black Panther newspaper
Emery Douglas’ Illustration from The Black Panther, January 3, 1970 | Credit: Rizzoli
The artist, Emery Douglas, explains how it all started with the pig. Huey Newton wanted a pig to represent the police so the drawing could be updated weekly with another abusive cop’s badge number. He tells the interviewer that it all compounded from there.
Douglas trained in advertising art at San Francisco City Colleges. And while he says his training was professional, he hardly takes any credit for his work. He insists the art was a collective culmination of the people and the party.
Emery Douglas’ Illustration from The Black Panther, May 1, 1971 | Credit: Rizzoli
After founding in Oakland, CA, the Panthers openly carried assault rifles to protect their neighborhoods. The art reflects this, depicting armed militants waging counter-insurgency against an occupying force (The Pig).
Emery Douglas’ Illustration from The Black Panther, July 4, 1970 | Credit: Rizzoli
Once it was illegal for Black men to carry assault rifles, the Panthers organized mutual aid, communities, political education, and electoral candidates, always rooted in material analysis. As the party expanded its mission, Douglas grew artistic techniques, experimenting with collage and illustration.
Emery Douglas’ Illustration from The Black Panther, August 9, 1971 | Credit: Rizzoli
The art was overtly anti-capitalist. This collage juxtaposes the financial papers, corporate logos, and Gerald Ford to evoke the relationship between the market and imperialism.
Emery Douglas’ Illustration from The Black Panther, September 21, 1974 | Credit: Rizzoli
Here’s Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon laughing as a nuke cracks the center of the world. A message confident that the carnage abroad perpetuated the oppression at home.
Emery Douglas’ Illustration from The Black Panther, February 17, 1973 | Credit: Rizzoli
The Panther Party was aware of problems right as they started, problems that still lack solutions. Here are illustrations propagating against the prison industrial complex as a new type of slavery. These were made right at the dawn of private prisons in America. Fifty years later, these problems have only gotten worse.
Emery Douglas’ Illustration from The Black Panther, February 19, 1972 | Credit: RizzoliEmery Douglas’ Illustration from The Black Panther, August 23, 1972 | Credit: RizzoliEmery Douglas’ Illustration from The Black Panther, August 14, 1971 | Credit: Rizzoli
The Party also saw the need for socialized medicine, free clinics, and healthcare for all. The Black Panthers saw guaranteed healthcare as necessary for the health of communities.
Emery Douglas’ Illustration from The Black Panther, July 21, 1975 | Credit: Rizzoli
Bloated police budgets wasted money on helicopters in the 70s, just like today. Again, imperialism fuels domestic repression. What happens to helicopters after a war? They get purchased by American police departments.
Emery Douglas’ Illustration from The Black Panther, January 13, 1973 | Credit: Rizzoli
The book gives an excellent introduction to the Panthers. When we consider the party’s propaganda, we see a different story than the one usually presented in media, like the novels considered in this post. It also shows how a revolutionary Marxist party can use propaganda to convince the masses of material inequality created by capitalism.
The party advocated for ending poverty and the draft, funding universal healthcare, and defending against the capitalist class. This edge often gets sanded off the Black Panthers’ story. They approached a rigorous class analysis of America’s class hierarchy and saw that capitalists exploit Black people at home and abroad through imperialism.
I loved this book, and you can check it out for free on Archive.org.
Books
The Spook Who Sat By The Door | Sam Greenlee | Allison & Busby | 1968
Movie poster for The Spook Who Sat By The Door, based on a novel by Sam Greenlee | Credit: United Artists
When spies retire from spy operations, they often write novels to intervene in domestic politics. It’s a frequent fascination on this blog. I liked this book, but it is quite a strange piece of media, almost a cursed artifact.
The author, Sam Greenlee, claims he was the first Black person hired by the US Foreign Service, then became a trained propagandist for the US Information Agency (USIA). Most reportage assumes this is not something…bad. I do! To be upfront, I think signing up to do regime change in another country is evil.
While in Washington, DC, and looking for a government job to support him while he finished up his graduate thesis on Vladimir Lenin, he was recruited to a junior officer training program that led him to the US Information Agency. “A year later I was caught up in the Baghdad revolution,” Greenlee said, “and writing a thesis was the last thing on my mind.”
Another instance of humanity studies as a recruitment pool for regime change where the spies target scholars theorizing about overthrowing the state. This conference also sounds like chapter two of the novel, where Dan Freeman can outwit the competition because of his ability to present himself. He can read the commanding officer’s psychology and present himself precisely as they wish to see him.
During his years before writing in the 1950s, Greenlee facilitated regime change in Afghanistan, a reoccurring American foreign policy goal, and came into contact with Abdul Kharrim Kassim, explained in the Los Angeles Sentinel.
Greenlee doesn’t mention Kassim was overthrown by widely agreed CIA intervention and the help of a young Saddam Hussein, according to Radio Free Europe.
Thus, Greenlee is the basis for the novel’s protagonist, Dan Freeman, drawing on his experience as the token Black agency directors used to deny accusations of racism. The novel’s second chapter seemed inspired by these events, where Greenlee competes against Black professionals also being recruited for the CIA.
While I loathe praising a regime change propagandist, his novel is fun to read. Dan Freeman is the perfect mercenary. He uses the CIA to learn how to become a spy. With that knowledge, he retires and applies his pedigree toward work at “urban youth” charities in Chicago. He tells his funders he’s “helping Black youth.” And that might be true, but he’s doing that by teaching teenagers how to overthrow the state, guerrilla warfare tactics like rifle combat and small explosives, insurrection against the racist American government! And it seems to work. While the ending is ambiguous, Freeman succeeds.
In real life, the revolution did not happen.
In fact, through the use of criminal informants, law enforcement embedded themselves into activist organizations and criminal gangs. As Greenlee wrote this novel, the FBI and CIA infiltrated the Black Panthers People Party.
This novel became subsumed as another piece of propaganda in the “American race war” narrative of the late 60s. The FBI and CIA both promoted and censored the film, perhaps seeing it for a larger purpose.
Or, to put it another way, why was the novel “required reading” at the FBI academy, according to a quote in Our Weekly?
In perhaps the ultimate accolade, Greenlee had a chance meeting with Notre Dame star athlete and one of the first FBI agents of color, Aubrey Lewis, during which the pioneering Black “G-Man” revealed that “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” was required reading at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.
Greenlee had difficulty publishing the novel. After forty rejections, he published with a British house. But after achieving overseas publication, Dell Press, publisher of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, published an American hardcover and paperback edition.
Greenlee helped adapt the novel into a film during the height of the Hollywood Blaxploitation trend. Yet, since its release, the movie has been suppressed, and one still cannot buy a Blu-Ray.
Was some of the controversy cultivated by the CIA? In declassified CIA documents, there are positive reviews of the film in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Sentinel, all linked here. Why are these in the CIA’s archive? Does it imply the agency placed these stories at these outlets? Strangely, the two most prominent newspapers in the country chose to review an obscure novel about an imaginary Black militant armed insurrection in America.
Perhaps it was an interagency beef with the FBI? The story is J. Edgar Hoover’s worst nightmare. It’s also, more or less Charles Manson’s Helter Skelter, the race war that Black people would “rise up” and indiscriminately murder white people. Race war is an imagined narrative, a boogeyman federal agencies use to heighten tension and keep people divided.
Before long Greenlee and his collaborators began to notice theater exhibitors truncating their runs. The manager of the McVickers Theater in the Loop told Greenlee that FBI agents had visited him and encouraged him to pull the film. “They would sit the exhibitor down and gently tell him that this film was dangerous and could cause all kinds of difficulties,” Greenlee said. He also heard rumors that agents had pressured United Artists to stifle the film’s distribution. The Spook Who Sat by the Doorhad lived up to its name, in Greenlee’s view, spooking those in power in the government and the film industry. Soon the film all but vanished from public view.
The strangest thing I found in my research was an actor in the film. Greenlee even recruited a Chicago Black Panther Party member, David Lemieux, to play Pretty Willie, the white passing gangster.
David Lemieux, as Pretty Willie in The Spook Who Sat By The Door | Credit: United Artists
Lemieux insists he was the second youngest Black Panther Party Chicago chapter member. He’s also a veteran of the Chicago Police Department. In 1982, the same year the Back Panther Party folded, David Lemieux joined the Chicago Police Department and remained a law enforcement officer for 23 years as a detective. He had 25 harassment allegations before retiring in 2008, and today, he takes home an annual $60,000 pension. It is a bizarre and incomprehensible life path for a Black Panther to become a cop, who also just so happens to act in a movie about a Black militant insurrection written by a Fed. Lemieux maintains a cultivated legacy, closely tying himself to the history of the Panthers.
Why would the CIA promote this novel/movie if the FBI wanted to censor it? My guess is it gives an example of a violent representation of what the Black Panthers were doing, ignoring all the positive messages the group presented. In a way, it’s perfect propaganda for racists and Birchers to say, “They made a forbidden movie that will incite race riots!”
Will this novel/film incite riots? Probably not. Like all spy novels, it is a power fantasy, but one of Black power. Despite its suspicious origins, I still enjoyed it. You can borrow a copy for free on Archive.org.
The Kenyatta Novels | Donald Goines | Kensington Publishing | 1974
Kenyatta’s Escape (1975) by Donald Goines | Credit: Kensington Publishing
The Kenyatta novels are also about a Black revolutionary but written from the opposite perspective. That is, Donald Goines was the opposite of a CIA agent. He wrote most of his novels on heroin, some of them in prison. His publishers exploited him, his talent remained unrecognized until he died (and arguably, it’s still not recognized), and his life was abruptly ended when he was murdered at 37.
Anyone who’s read Goines’ novels knows that they’re incredible. The novels are experienced, emotional tragedies of American existence in Detroit during the ’60s and ’70s. His first novel, Dopefiend, is a harrowing look at the symbiosis of addiction and drug dealing inspired by the author’s drug dependence. White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief, remains one of the best novels about the injustice inherent to America’s prison industrial complex.
I recently discovered his series character, Kenyatta, four novels about a Black revolutionary who attempts a domestic revolution. Goines named Kenyatta after the anti-colonialist revolutionary and Kenyan President, Jomo Kenyatta. And while the character captures the leader’s spirit, he does not succeed at overthrowing American repression.
Greenlee wrote from the experience of how to overthrow a state, while Goines puzzles his way through it. He realizes drugs are the key, the weapon the state uses to control urban populations.
Kenyatta is strictly against drug use and sale. In the second novel, Death List, he buys a list of every drug dealer in Detroit from an arms dealer and orders hits on the gangs and the mafia. After the FBI sends an army after him, he retreats to Los Angeles for a year, until Kenyatta’s Last Hit, when he does whatever he can to murder a federal drug supplier.
Kenyatta’s focus is admirable, even if it does get everyone around him killed. Goines was the subject of state repression, not the one carrying it out like Greenlee. He knew a Black American insurrection was impossible. America was built as a fortress to prevent a Black Revolution.
Goines is often said to have inspired gangster rap music and glorified violence. Although, I don’t think that’s true, as every novel I’ve read ends very tragically. The Kenyatta books are different. The author imagines an American Black revolutionary fighting for a better world through the metaphorical prison of addiction and poverty. Goines wrote all four of these novels in the year of his death, and I think they are the author at the top of his game. Finally, back in print, you can listen to all four on Hoopla.
While reading, I couldn’t help but think about American fiction. Monk, a Black professor, writes experimental post-modern fiction; he gets fed up with how the publishing industry represents Black people in American literature. His book can’t find a publisher because they imply he’s not Black enough. An “urban” novel, “We Lives in the Ghetto,” is a best seller and they want that.
When he has to pay for his mother’s nursing home, Monk gives it to them. He imagines a gangbanger named Stagg R. Leigh and writes “My Pafology” or “FUCK.” Publishers and entertainment executives portray Black men as violent criminals, gangsters, rappers, slaves, or clowns. So Monk gives them what they want. I notice how The Spook Who Sat By The Door and the work of Donald Goines fit into these troupes.
What’s subversive American Fiction is Monk’s entire interior life. Have you ever seen another movie about a Black writer struggling to publish a novel? Or a Black person dealing with the grief of loss? How about a Black person caring for an elderly parent? American publishers and movie studios deny Black artists the space to tell these stories. Percival Everett is astute to notice that representing all Black existence as trauma porn is diminishing, a subtle erasure (the title of the novel).
Maybe Hollywood is changing. Or perhaps the satire only works because things haven’t changed in American race (and class) relations since the novel’s 2001 publication or 1968.
Pile of the Week
Jeffery Wright in American Fiction| Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc
This week’s pile has to go to Monk moving all of his books out of African American Interests to the General Fiction section in the film’s parody of Barnes and Noble.
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Oh, how I love holidays. And on Love’s Holiday, I consider strange love in a memoir, a romance novel, and a comic book about the true Harlequin.
Books
My Father, The Pornographer | Chris Offutt | Washington Square Press | 2016
My Father, The Pornographer by Chris Offutt | Credit: Washington Square Press
Anyone can imagine the horror of finding your dad’s porno stash, but what if you find out your dad was secretly a hardcore pornographer? Chris Offutt explores the strange, illusive, and uncomfortable love of his father, the pornographer.
Chris Offutt is not a pornographic genre author but an Iowa Writers Workshop-educated AmericanLiterary Regionalist! He’s attuned to those awful, persistent emotions that come from living with erratic parents, the feelings sung about in The Mountain Goats album, Sunset Tree. When he calls his dad to share the good news that he sold a short story collection, his father sadly replies, “I’m sorry I gave you such a terrible childhood that you became an author.”
His father is indeed an odd one. Andrew Offutt wrote over 500 books with seventeen pen names. Almost all of his work is pornographic. Science fiction, fantasy, and erotic of every possible genre, virtually all of his work was sexually charged. He published a multi-book series of SF erotic with Playboy, a historical erotic romance with major publishers. Almost all of Andrew Offutt’s work is obscure or out of print today. He died resenting the literary establishment and even his son for finding literary success. The Offutt family personified the literary/genre divide.
The author recalls his childhood in Kentucky. A. Offutt ruled the house like a tyrannical shut-in, subjugating his wife and children into taking care of every household chore and locking himself in his office to write for 14 hours a day and churn out at least a book a month. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t fit into his Kentucky community. Chris Offutt cites a dozen people insisting his father was “a character!” He was a NEET in the 1970s. One neighbor described, “He put four kids through college without leaving the house.” He once told someone who lost an arm, “You better shut your mouth, or I’ll rip off the other arm.”
Yet Andrew Offutt was also a respected SF author and a member of the 1960s “New Wave.” His story “For Value Received” was published in Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison’s second, famous anthology (in fact, as toastmaster of the 32nd Worldcon in 1974, he developed a lifelong, one-sided grudge against Ellison). Andrew Offutt used science fiction conventions to build a surrogate family and have strange sex. He and his wife participated in couples swapping. At cons, they completely neglected the children, leaving them alone in a hotel room with bread and Kraft singles. Strange stuff happens at Worldcon, man.
Offutt obsessively chronicles his father’s life and papers: his abusive letters to his family, his furious correspondence with authors and agents, his client list, and decades-long correspondence with bondage fetishists, who commissioned private porn for thousands of dollars. He looked at so much pornography it messed with his mind. He couldn’t feel attraction while immersed in his father’s archives.
The strangest thing C. Offutt finds: a 4000-page comic of drawn sexualized torture. A. Offutt tried to stop. He tried to throw all his terrible drawings into a river. But he could not stop. Drawing these things was a compulsion, or perhaps a release, as it seems all day Andrew Offutt thought about torture and murder.
How does one love a parent that acts this way? A relapsed and resentful Catholic with an alcohol dependency, intense pornography addiction, severe delusions of mania, guilt, self-loathing, a persecution complex, and no nurturing instinct. Andrew Offutt had his demons but never dealt with them. I’d argue constantly immersing himself in pornography made all of his problems worse. How could anyone be expected to love this person?
And yet, throughout the book, Chris Offutt explains how he did love his dad. And for many years, he wanted him to love him back, but he didn’t know how. A. Offutt’s fans adored him, bringing him strange gifts and buying his work, enabling this strange lifestyle. And his wife was loyally devoted to her husband. She loved a man who truly hated women, saw them as inferior, and struggled to repress violent urges.
Today, erotic writing is more popular than it’s ever been. Worldcon keeps generating more controversy, and most of the 60s New Wave all turned out to be weirdo Republicans. All Chris Offutt has with his father’s papers a lifetime of trauma and an excellent memoir. I highly recommend this book, and it’s on Hoopla.
While reading, I kept thinking of that Mountain Goats lyric,
“Some things you’ll do for money and some you’ll do for fun
But the things you do for love are going to come back to you one by one.”
Heartbreak Incorporated | Alex De Campi | Solaris Nova | 2021
Heartbreak Incorporated by Alex De Campi | Credit: Solaris Nova
The state sees marriage as a financial contract, a business. And when billionaires get married, that’s big business! So, who do the billionaires hire when they cook up a Marriage and Acquisition scam? Say you wanna marry an heiress and steal all her money? Who do you call? Heartbreak Incorporated.
A romance of many sub-genres. It’s a girl living in New York trying to make it as a writer, an enemy’s to lovers romance, a murder mystery, a spy plot!
It starts with Evie, our hapless protagonist, trying to make ends meet in New York. She got a journalism degree for a job that doesn’t exist anymore. She wants to break a big story but can’t bear the thought of hurting her sources. So when she interviews to be a secretary for the love interest and most handsome and fascinating man in New York, everything changes.
It’s an atypical Billionaire Romance love interest, Mishka, a Georgian who left Russia after the fall of the USSR and made his fortune in New York. He seduces people for a living, and his job is a mix of a divorce attorney, private investigator, gigolo, and sexual blackmailer. So yes, of course, he’s also ripped and hot. Then, about midway through, something crazy happens that makes this a paranormal romance, too! I can’t spoil it.
There’s a lot to love about this book. I liked how we always see the darker side of wealth: the plots and scheming, the backstabbing and betrayal. Of course, rich people pay someone to break up their unwanted marriages! And it turns out it’s the perfect premise for a multi-genre romance.
Check out Alex de Campi’s second novel if you love her comics. It was re-released today by Solaris Nova. Thanks, Solaris Nova and Netgalley, for the review copy.
Comics
Harlequin Valentine | Neil Gaiman (Words), John Bolton (Art) | Dark Horse | 2001
Harlequin Valentine by Neil Gaiman and John Bolton | Credit: Dark Horse
It’s the most Neil Gaiman urban fantasy story ever that’s perfect for Valentine’s Day. What if Harlequin, the wacky clown from the Comedia D’el Arte, nailed his heart to your door?
Gaiman’s tale personifies the Harlequin, a mischievous, devil demon theater troupe from 1263. He teams up with John Bolton, the artist on Books of Magic, to tell the tale with a strange art style. Sometimes photorealistic, sometimes abstract, some panels almost reminded me of AI-generated art in a cool way.
A page from Harlequin Valentine by Neil Gaiman and John Bolton | Credit: Dark Horse
Harlequin finds his Columbina, a London woman with a pixie cut and a leather trenchcoat. He haunts her on Valentine’s Day when the stars align, and he’s most likely to appear.
A page from Harlequin Valentine by Neil Gaiman and John Bolton | Credit: Dark Horse
Until, like all Gaiman stories, our hero realizes we are just floating through a world of endless signifiers that can mean anything so that we can define their meaning and wear the costumes, too. And she becomes Harlequin.
A page from Harlequin Valentine by Neil Gaiman and John Bolton | Credit: Dark Horse
The archetype of Harlequin lives on in the 21st century. The most prolific and popular romance publisher, Harlequin Romance, pays tribute to the imp. Just as the English remixed Harlequin and paired her with Clown, DC Comics remixed her into Harley Quinn, the Clown Prince of Crime’s sidekick. In Suicide Squad, Harley acts like this character who dates back to the 13th century, a zany, loopy, silly court jester in love.
Gaiman and Bolton’s story is short and entertaining, with a helpful literary history lesson. It’s available on Hoopla, and I recommend it!
Pile of the Week
Love Bears | Credit: The Author
Every year near my apartment, people come outside and sell piles of teddy bears on the sidewalk. I’ve never seen anyone buy one. If I were rich, I’d buy them all.
The Book Piles newsletter returns to review a memoir, a novel and a comic book about finding truth in crime
Thank you for coming to the pile. Let’s consider the psychological impact of closely scrutinized murder.
Books
I Know Who You Are | Barbara Rae-Venter | Ballantine Books | 2023
I Know Who You Are by Barbara Rae-Venter | Credit: Ballantine Books
Barbara Rae-Venter’s 2022 non-fiction memoir details a forensic genealogist’s quest to catch serial killers. With DNA sample left at the scene, investigators can match it with samples collected from millions of people. This book shocked me in ways few things do.
What shocked me is the conclusive proof that our DNA is not private. Enough people took at-home DNA tests (like 23 and Me), and because of genetic similarity between relatives, gene databases contain 90% of people’s DNA.
The author used this research technique to find the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo. The former police officer admitted guilt, and a judge convicted him after being presented with every possible piece of evidence a prosecution could bring against a person: eyewitness testimony, material evidence, and a well-established and analyzed timeline. A true crime writer, Michelle McNamara laid out a clear timeline in I’ll Be Gone In The Dark. Unfortunately, the author died, and her files were given to other investigators.
I Know Who You Are continues the story of the apprehension and prosecution of DeAngelo. Rae-Venter specifies how DNA evidence was used to find him and how police got confirmation samples by swabbing DeAngelo’s car door handle and stealing a used Kleenex. To vastly oversimplify it, an investigator uploads a DNA sequence to Ancestry.com and compares it with other sequences on the site. Rae-Venter built thousands of family trees from possible DNA matches and then researched the individuals on the associated tree.
When they narrowed the suspect profile, the author explained that her co-investigator (a retired detective) couldn’t believe a police officer would do this. They assumed it was someone in the real estate industry who had keys to many locks. It’s just another ominous association between police and real estate.
Of course, it was a police officer. Employed by police departments in both Exeter and Auburn, CA, DeAngelo was a burglary unit officer. He likely learned how to break into houses by investigating many cases where people did just that. In a witness testimony, she recalled DeAngelo cursing his ex-wife and blaming another man for “making him do this.” How weird that, in this case, the actual criminal happened to be the police officer 🙂
The book isn’t just about the Golden State Killer investigation. Rae-Venter explains how she got interested in forensic genealogy, her family history and search for genealogical truth, other non-criminal investigations like reuniting long lost family members, and even tips for aspiring investigative genealogists.
And she confronts the ethical questions head-on, although I disagree with her conclusions. What makes a crime “true”? Can truth be stripped down to the base building blocks of human genetic material? Does one’s right to privacy get trumped by our collective right not to get murdered and catch murderers? These are the questions at the heart of DNA evidence.
The practical concerns are immediately relevant to sexual assault cases. Police departments with DNA evidence now have a much more reliable means of finding these men. The author imagines a future where this could upend how current assault investigations.
Investigative genealogy also has a place in the future of unarmed police response. The author and her co-investigator on the GSK case were both retirees. They solved a cold case for really cheap! Forensic DNA investigations only require biosamples, access to DNA databases and laboratories, and investigator hours. These were unsalaried volunteers. Now imagine a world where this technology scales up to a speed that can solve cases without decades of inactivity.
Of course, corrupt police and prosecuting attorneys can manufacture DNA evidence. Since the American justice system has a quota of people to send people to private prisons, I predict genetic genealogy will convict people than it exonerates. The police could say they found a DNA sample at the scene when they didn’t. How could a defendant falsify the evidence without access to samples or technicians? These are just some horrifying questions to ruminate on throughout the future.
Rabbit Hole | Kate Brody | Soho Crime | 2024
Rabbit Hole by Kate Brody | Credit: Soho Crime
Rabbit Hole, Kate Brody’s debut novel, is a dramatized version of a true crime obsession gone awry. Teddy is a high-achieving English teacher and a woman on the edge. Her sister went missing about a decade ago, her family never dealt with the trauma, and the novel begins after her dad finally committed suicide after an obsessive investigation. Teddy seeks answers.
There are family secrets, a psychic, unprescribed pills, a cam girl, an estranged brother, an illegally purchased firearm, bawdy twists, shocking betrayals, and high-heat sex scenes. The calls come from inside the house, so it’s a domestic thriller but one set firmly in cyberspace. Our protagonist processes her trauma through experiences on the internet.
Reddit acts as a setting, a collection of deranged characters, and the book’s inciting incident. When Teddy pokes her toe in her father’s investigation, Reddit doxxes her, sending her to the titular rabbit hole. Brody fictionalizes Reddit threads and recreates the schizophrenic thrill of a Reddit investigation—look at all these connections and implications! There’s always a Reddit comment to drive somebody just a little bit crazier.
What’s gained from Reddit investigations? Those who dislike ambiguous endings should brace themselves because there are no easy answers or clear conclusions. Does Rabbit Hole make readers reconsider who’s on the True Crime message boards? Sure, there’s a bunch of obsessive freaks (take me, for example), but these traumas also impact the family members. The message boards call themselves “communities,” a misleading name for anonymous people data-mining a dead person’s most vulnerable personal information. These message boards even entice participation from a victim’s loved ones.
There’s the idea that, eventually, the investigation will crack, and the victims will get justice. And
I Know Who You Are offers an example, but I think Rabbit Hole provides a more emotionally truthful outcome to becoming an online vigilante. It hurts one’s spirit.
Comics
Where The Body Was | Ed Brubaker (Writer) | Sean Phillips (Illustrator) | Image | 2024
Where The Body Was by Ed Brubaker (Writer) and Sean Phillips (Illustrator) | Credit: Image
Brubaker/Phillip’s latest book is their funniest: a graphic mockumentary about how a dead body impacts a neighborhood.
The book begins with a map of Pelican Road, 1984. A Cul de Sac of just a few houses. But in the legend, notice #9. Spoiler: that’s where the body was found.
A page from Where The Body Was, illustrated by Sean Phillips | Credit: Image
I grew up in a similar-looking cul-de-sac and had first-hand experience to attest that nothing ever happens here by design. A dead body? That’s something! Just being close to action gives these characters a strange new authority. They know where the body was. Listen to them! They must be important!
Maybe. Or what if the witness is a lying psychopath like Palmer Sneed, the “Man with a Badge.”
A panel from Where The Body Was, illustrated by Sean Phillips | Credit: Image
Palmer’s not a cop, but he acts like a cop. He resented his cop’s father and stole his badge from his casket to spit on him. Eventually, whenever he needed a confidence boost, he would flash the badge and get into or out of trouble. It helps him get laid. Of course, phony cops would get in the way of figuring out what happened to the body. But that’s just it. These guys come out when a body is found because dead bodies can be a conduit for their repressed vigilante tendencies.
Like Batman! There’s a diminutive parody of vigilantism and superheroes in The Roller Derby Girl, a.k.a. Lila Nguyen. In 1984, she dressed in a mask and cape, ran around the neighborhood, and pretended to be a superhero. Yes, that is weird, but not unheard of as something an American child might do since syndicated radio. So if a body is found,of course, the little kid playing superhero would need to fight crime and solve the case. Somebody has to do it!
Three panels from Where The Body Was, illustrated by Sean Phillips | Credit: Image
The real crime fighters are trying to solve the case by pinning it on Ranko, the Homeless Veteran.
A panel from Where The Body Was, illustrated by Sean Phillips | Credit: Image
Because, come on, he looks like a criminal! He’s squatting on public property, and important people in town wish he were gone. He’s the perfect patsy.
I’ll leave you hanging there because this book was a blast! Fantastic art, dialogue, structure, colors, and vibe. Read it! Buy it at a comic shop, or if you’re broke, get it on Hoopla! Thanks, Image and Netgalley, for the Advanced Readers Copy.
Pile of the Week
This week’s pile has to be this sculpture of incredible birds sitting on top of books by Malia Jenson that I found in the Public Art Archive.
A photo of Malia Jenson’s sculpture, “Pile” in Portland, Oregon | Source: Public Art Archive
This week, the pile pertains to art and state ideology in reviews of Frances Stoner Saunders’ history of the cultural Cold War, Who Paid the Piper and Zodiac, a new graphic memoir about the controversial Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
Books
Propaganda was how the West won the Cold War. Frances Stonor Saunders explains the specifics in Who Paid The Piper, a detailed look into the cultural ideological warfare. She focuses on the men who made the propaganda campaign happen and the overlap between the intelligentsia and the intelligence agents.
During the height of the Cold War, the US government committed vast resources to a
secret programme of cultural propaganda in western Europe. A central feature of this programme was to advance the claim that it did not exist. It was managed, in great secrecy, by America’s espionage arm, the Central Intelligence Agency. The centrepiece of this covert campaign was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967. Its achievements – not least its duration – were considerable. At its peak, the Congress for Cultural Freedom had offices in thirty-five countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances. Its mission was to nudge the intelligentsia of western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of ‘the American way’ – Frances Stoner Suanders, The Cultural Cold War (1)
Saunders explains how the CIA funded art around the world in an act of “psychological warfare,” or winning the hearts and minds of Europeans. The war destroyed Allied countries, and even in the countries that “won,” they lacked food, water, and jobs, with rates of 50% unemployment. American leaders in business, military, and government worried that Communism would be attractive to people living under these conditions.
To beat the Communists, America made several gigantic investments. American industry publicly and overtly committed to rebuilding Europe, but secretly and covertly, they also funded programs to propagandize an American point of view. Thus begins Pax Americana.
There are tragic ironies, like how Europeans saw exhibits of cutting-edge modernist paintings and how American communists at home faced severe repression. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI surveilled and sabotaged them, and Joseph McCarty blacklisted them from employment.
The book recounts what could be called the inciting incident of the Red Scare: The 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf Hotel. Another irony is that a conference for World Peace ignited ideological warfare.
CIA agents in attendance carried out hilariously erudite acts of sabotage, like Nicholas Nabokov (yes, Vladimir’s brother), who asked a question during a panel and tried to get a Soviet musician to denounce the party line and condemn a review in Pravda. Allegedly, Stalin would have murdered or imprisoned the musician for doing this, and that was Nabokov’s point. But it makes N. Nabokov look like a psychopath for trying to trick someone into saying executable opinions.
Life Magazine smeared the attendees of the conference, including the acerbic Dorthy Parker, whose FBI file “…listed variously as ‘an undercover Communist,’ ‘an open Communist,’ and ‘a Communist appeaser’” (53).
Dashiell Hammett also attended the conference; shortly afterward, he’d refuse to testify against his fellow communists, serve jail time, and quit writing in disgust. Arthur Miller was also in attendance; I read Miller’s play, The Crucible, in the 10th grade and taught as a parable for McCarthyism. This disaster conference seems like a direct inspiration for the first act.
The CIA and its many front organizations promoted the “Non-Communist Left” and targeted former Communists like Arthur Koestler and Jackson Pollock. To me, this sounded similar to the way federal police agencies cultivate criminal informants. Both men considered themselves communists who rejected Stalin in the 1930s, and the agency figured, “Who better to fight the communists than the communists?” (62). Agents admit that some artists receiving funding might not have even known about it. We’ll return to dark money’s mysterious role in art funding…
Saunders is concerned with the funding of “freedom and liberty” cultural warfare. She remarks that the Rockefeller family bankrolled the New York Museum of Modern Art from its inception. Nelson Rockefeller even called it “Mommy’s Museum” (258). MoMA was crucial in canonizing American Abstract Impressionism, America’s first “true” art style.
The agency men saw potential in abstract expressionism. There was power in the splotchy globs of paint. One conservative reactionary claimed expressionist paintings hide secret codes, “If you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in US fortifications, and such crucial constructions as Boulder Dam.” (253). Abstract expressionism was a direct reputation to Soviet social realism. The museums insisted these paintings looked fresh, new, and free, and this uninhibited expression made the Soviet paintings, usually depicting people at work, look corny and boring.
The “Abstract expressionism as CIA Op” has made its way into mainstream publications. And a popular counterargument is, how would paintings win a war? Saunders demonstrates that it wasn’t only paintings. Instead, every artistic medium became an ideological battleground with shadowy funding. WhoPaid the Piper? Pretty much everybody. Music and Radio Free Europe, Hollywood movies, literary prizes like the Nobel Prize for Literature, and every cultural product helped manufacture consent for America’s empire.
Who Paid the Piper? is an excellent book. Make sure to get the British edition, Who Paid The Piper, and **not the censored American edition, Cultural Cold War.
But covertly, I brought up this book for a reason. Did all these art spies go away after the fall of the USSR? Did they go online? What happened after the end of history?
Let us consider Ai Weiwei the “Most Dangerous Man in China.”
Comics
Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir
By Ai Weiwei (Subject) | Elettra Stamboulis (Writer) | Gianluca Costantini (Illustrator)
Penguin Random House, 2024
Zodiac | Credit: Penguin Random House
According to Western media sources, Ai Weiwei is one of Earth’s most accomplished living artists. Every article stresses that Weiwei is very popular and known for speaking truth to power by standing up to the repressive regime of the People’s Republic of China.
Weiwei claims Chinese authorities imprisoned him for 81 days for speaking truth to power. Chinese authorities claim they arrested Weiwei for not paying his taxes. Something strange is happening with the artist’s money. Credit Suisse closed his Swiss account, and he also claimed closed accounts in Germany and Hong Kong because he criticized these governments. Interesting…
Ai Weiwei describes himself as “an activist for freedom.” That’s a noble pursuit, and I’m thankful for my freedom of speech, which lets me say that I think Ai Weiwei’s art is thinly veiled propaganda, not to mention lazy, dumb, and obnoxious.
I don’t recommend Ai Weiwei’s new graphic memoir, Zodiac, but it did lead me to look up the artist’s strange career.
Weiwei grew up in a Chinese labor camp with his family. His father, Ai Qing, was a political exile and a poet with many pen names. While Ai Qing was a member of the Communist Party through the revolution, during the 1959 “Anti-Rightist Campaign,” he was expelled. Mao purged the party of everyone who advocated capitalism because he thought these people were a threat to the state. Ai Qing was sentenced to scrubbing toilets. Curiously, this labor camp allowed the prisoners to have jobs and live with their families, which sounds much better and more humane than an American prison.
When Mao died, China embraced capitalism, and Ai Qing was welcomed back into the party and made the president of the Chinese Writers Association. According to Zodiac, Ai Qing’s poems are printed in children’s textbooks today. Of course, the graphic memoir doesn’t mention why his father was expelled from the party. He was writing against communism.
If all history is family history, the son of a political exile capitalist poet would have no choice but to become an iconoclast, a multi-media performance artist with strange financial backing.
For a guy whose dad cleaned toilets, Weiwei could attend four expensive New York universities. The artist discusses his time in New York, hanging out with art scene icons like Alan Ginsberg and getting influenced by Andy Warhol.
In 1986, one of the first Ai Weiwei pieces to receive acclaim was “Condom Raincoat.” I find it vague and bizarre. Somehow, gluing a condom on a rain jacket was meant to bring awareness to the AIDS crisis.
“This raincoat has a hole near the waist which is covered with a condom. The work is intended to describe the AIDS crisis as Ai saw it in New York City” | Credit: Wikipedia
Weiwei lived in America for a decade, from 1983 to 1993. After this, he returned to China and cared for his elderly father. Surely coincidentally, this is right after the collapse of the USSR, when the global balance of power was shifting, and America was assessing new threats to trade dominance.
In 1995, Weiwei “made” arguably his most controversial work and, quite possibly, the dumbest and laziest piece of his career. Consider, “Han Jar Overpainted with Coca-Cola Logo” (1995).
Weiwei stenciled a Coca-Cola logo on Han pottery over 2000 years old. It’s dated between 206 B.C. and 9 A.D. See, it’s a profound statement about how consumerism overruns history by ruining a cultural artifact. He took this idea further and smashed another priceless vase.
AI WEIWEI, DROPPING A HAN DYNASTY URN, 1995 | Credit: Guggenheim
Why would someone do this? Isn’t this just historical vandalism? Why did Western museums exhibit this work? Why is it any different from the way ISIS destroys art? Here are Weiwei’s unsatisfying explanations in Zodiac.
A page from Zodiac, by Elettra Stamboulis (Writer) | Gianluca Costantini (Illustrator) | Ai Weiwei (Subject) | Credit: Penguin Random House
Around this time, Weiwei began work on “Study of Perspective,” a series of photographs from 1995-2003 where the artist gives stuff the middle finger. He flips off cities, buildings, and cultural artifacts from around the world.
This man is praised as one of the world’s most controversial and thought-provoking artists. Really? Are the blurry travel pictures flipping off a painting meant to evoke laughter and derision? It’s like if Kid Rock started shooting on film. Both these photos and the defaced pottery culminated in “FUCK OFF!” an exhibition of the Chinese avant-garde that seemingly featured a lot of gore photography.
Around 2005, Weiwei started doing stuff that got him in trouble. He blogged for Sina. If you read about China, you’ve probably heard of Weibo, a social media app like Blogspot or Twitter, and Weibo acquired Sina. So…anybody could make an account on this website. I cannot verify if Weiwei’s blog differed from the average account profile or if he was invited especially to start blogging on it. Eventually, he was banned from the platform and switched to Twitter, claiming to tweet up to eight hours daily (huh).
2007 brings Weiwei’s Fairy Tale, a 2007 performance piece that, from **what I can tell, was buying Berlin vacations for 1100 Chinese factory workers. Framed as “freedom of expression,” obviously, coordinated vacations for impoverished workers was a provocation against the Chinese government. How would Germany react if China invited migrants living in Germany to tour Beijing? Or America, if migrants in Texas came back from Shanghai?
Sina banned Weiwei for reporting on a 2008 8.0 megaton earthquake that struck Sichuan. The artist as a reporter, too, eh? That’s unusual. The earthquake killed over 68,000 people and left another 4 million people homeless. Weiwei believed the Chinese government was to blame for responding and preparing for this natural disaster. In 2009, Weiwei published leaked classified documents on his blog, claiming the local government cut corners to build a school where over 5000 children died.
Weiwei claims China censored these posts, and I believe China censors media that threaten government leaders. But so does America. So does every government in history. Perhaps there was corruption that led to faulty building planning, but also, as COVID-19 showed us, disasters are great opportunities for insurgent narratives to sew government distrust.
Skeptics of modern art say, “My two-year-old could make that.” Usually, that gives a two-year-old way too much credit, but in this case, I believe a two-year-old could spread a big pile of sunflower seeds on the floor. Perhaps the child wouldn’t know to say the seeds represent Chinese people.
Around this time, in 2011, Weiwei was jailed for 81 days in China, allegedly for thought crimes. He said things that were too controversial for the Chinese government. The Chinese government claims he didn’t pay his taxes.
After his release, he took sanctuary in Germany and spent years devoted to “understanding the migrant crisis” and traveling to hot zones in 41 countries for a documentary. His exhibit “Law of the Journey” focused on migrants. Of all the artist’s pieces, this is my favorite. His writing on migrants is elegant and based on first-hand experience. He even blames “the West” for the global migrant crisis, and even though “America” is more accurate, this is closer to truth than the condom jacket.
A picture of the “Law of the Journey” by Ai Weiwei | Credit: Collater.ai
Fast forward to today. Weiwei has embraced AI art with a cornball-titled exhibit, “AI vs. Ai.” In the Guardian, Weiwei claimed that any art AI can copy is meaningless and that learning to paint realistically is “worthless.”
I enjoy political art, but not tepid propaganda. So much of Weiwei’s work equates transgression with freedom (like flipping off a building or breaking artifacts). The notion is that craft and dedication aren’t worth pursuing, and art should just be some ephemeral experience that makes the viewer say, “Huh?” This ridiculous insistence that the only art worth making pisses off governments (except never America).
This week, Weiwei’s graphic memoir was released. The author tells the conventional story of his life. This graphic memoir is undoubtedly the least exciting thing about Weiwei. Like much of the artists’ work, it seems like assistants made this book. How is this a memoir if Weiwei didn’t write it? It’s a biography with too much oversight from the subject! I dislike Gianluca Costantini’s illustrations: dull, flat, line drawings without shading or depth that evoke coloring book pages. The Chinese Zodiac structures the story as a vague gesture to Chinese culture but not much deeper than the back of the lunch buffet placemat.
Weiwei explains his life in stories to his son and considers his life, art, and ideology of “freedom.” It leaves much to speculation because the artist moves through each subject quickly and offers platitudes instead of reflection. Now, for the real heads, there’s a $275 deluxe edition with a signed print…of an illustration that Ai Weiwei did not illustrate. I can’t decipher that signature, but Weiwei did not draw that picture.
Zodiac Deluxe Edition | Credit: Penguin Random House
I should commend the artist for opening up my perspective to how art and propaganda function in the 21st century, but perhaps different from how the artist intended.
Pile of the Week
And finally, here’s this week’s pile. I am the skeleton angel living on a cloud, filling my head with strange and paranoid truths.
Pile of the Week, 1/23/24 – Credit: the author
Expect this newsletter on Tuesday now! Yes, I know it’s Thursday. And you can even subscribe by email with Beehiiv.
Considering occulted fraternities in America by reviewing true crime, Among the Bros, and the comic Fraternity
Let’s initiate ourselves into a clandestine brotherhood of reading piles. This week’s reviews consider how fraternities harness rituals and drugs to influence reality.
Books
Among the Bros | By Max Marshall | Harper | 2023
Among the Bros By Max Marshall | Credit: Harper
So that’s what a frat’s like! In his 2023 true crime expose, Max Marshall details a 2016 drug bust at the College of Charleston to reveal how fraternities function within drug-dealing economies.
The story centers around two brothers of the Kappa Alpha fraternity, Mikey Schmidt and Robert Liljeberg. Both boys rushed Kappa Alpha but went on divergent paths. Rob looked like the all-American boy: A student and a fraternity president. Secretly, he loved to party and move weight. Our lovable fuckup protagonist, Mikey, looks like a suspect. A college dropout and a chauffeur at a famous club, he developed supply connections within the Atlanta trap scene. The two boys shared a passion for dealing drugs in felony weights.
Frats seem like the perfect place for drug dealing. They’re closed markets with high demand. Customers aren’t price savvy and took public oaths to keep secrets from each other. The Fratboy kingpins primarily sold three drugs: weed, cocaine, and benzodiazepines (Xanax, benzos). They ordered powered benzodiazepine on the dark web and pressed it into pills at rented AirBnBs, then traded pills for weed or coke with other dealers. They distributed these products through frat houses across the south with a pyramid structure of dealers.
In the background is the collectively accepted insanity of fraternities. Every year, people die gruesome deaths in a hazing ritual. The organizations exist to enforce segregation. Marshall points out that the founders of Kappa Alpha saw themselves as the youth wing of the Ku Klux Klan. He also remarks how almost every president and business executive is a fraternity alumnus. What seems like a problem of childish excess is a symptom of a much deeper problem. Fraternities are the incubators for America’s highest institutions.
The story only gets crazier, with high drama, deep betrayals, lengthy prison sentences, and a surprising amount of dead people. Even Waka Flocka Flame makes an appearance. Among The Bros was an entertaining read that implies horrifying conclusions.
Comics
Fraternity | Jon Ellis (Writer) + Hugo Petrus (Illustrator) | Humanoids | 2022
Fraternity by Jon Ellis (Writer) + Hugo Petrus (Illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
Frats are secret societies. Fraternity, a 2022 comic from Humanoids, takes this to its heightened conclusion: are frats covens of wizards summoning Satan?
The comic follows two lifelong friends, Wyatt (Black) and Jake (White); they go to college together, and immediately, a fraternity starts using Satanic ritual magic to ensnare Jake. How does the magic work, exactly? Consider the ritual of the frat party.
A page from Fraternity by Jon Ellis (writer) and Hugo Petrus (illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
Old mansions exist across American college campuses. In those mansions, young men invite over strangers, do secret hand signs, and exchange libations. Sure, this is “just like any party” except for the paddles, the exclusive sub-rooms, and the tendency to consume so much poison one blacks out and forgets everything.
Odd. Now, consider the initiation rites. The men enter a room and do secret rituals, promising always to work to progress the fraternity’s goals. These rituals are passed on from generation to generation. The practices often involve participants doing cruel, humiliating sexual acts.
A page from Fraternity by Jon Ellis (writer) and Hugo Petrus (illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
The magic must sort of work, right? Why else would a secret brotherhood commit to doing the same silly rituals every autumn? The Sorority Sister Whore of Babylon, laid over this 24-panel grid, suggests the deeply sexualized nature of the Greek system. Sex becomes a means of control and mental programming. Consecrate rituals to Greek deities with sex magic.
A page from Fraternity by Jon Ellis (writer) and Hugo Petrus (illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
Is there any way for your average goddamn independent to resist these demonic forces? Well, it’s a Humanoids comic, so we must harness some demons, too. Wyatt ends up making friends with Antaura, a God of Headaches. He’s not as powerful as the weird, Cthuluian Frat gods, but hey, headaches suck.
A page from Fraternity by Jon Ellis (writer) and Hugo Petrus (illustrator) | Credit: Humanoids
Fraternity is a fun, violent, short read on Hoopla and Kindle Prime. I hope to see more from debut writer Jon Ellis, and I have enjoyed watching illustrator Hugo Petrus make comics with Marvel and DC.
Pile of the Week
A pile of rocks with a cow’s skull on it. I found this picture in the New York Public Library Image Archive
Here is a pile of rocks with a cow’s skull on it. I found this picture in the New York Public Library Image Archive by searching “Book Pile.” This week, the coveted Pile of the Week Award goes to NYPL’s digital archives! Look for your strange images here.
Considering Art, Prayer, and Deep Reading this New Year
Happy New Year to you and your book pile! I start the new year gently, and this post discusses asking the universe for artistic guidance and highly specific reading pile pleasures.
Books
Living the Artist Way
By Julia Cameron
2023, St. Martin Essentials
Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way was my favorite inspirational read last year. It offers a sustainable system for cultivating creativity. Basically, journal, pay close attention, go on walks, and pray. But that’s easier said than done!
Cameron’s newest book, Living the Artist Way, is out today and goes deep into the fourth tool,
Guidance. Structured as a six-week course, Living the Artist Way offers a workbook of advanced study for introspective journaling.
Living the Artist Way by Julia Cameron
Cameron writes in the first person to discuss the spiritual impact of prayer and art on the artist (her). Guidance is The Artist Way’s deepest, most mystical, or elusive tool; the author calls it “woo woo.”
And yeah, guidance might be God or the human spirit, and asking for it is a lot like praying. Through dozens of examples, she convincingly suggests that asking the universe for guidance builds confidence, intuition, and relationships and deepens artistic practice.
I think of the monks making a beautiful painting out of sand in Samsara.
Buddhist monks creating a sand mandala in “Samsara.” | Credit: Oscilloscope Laboratories, NYT
“What if it’s just my imagination?” Cameron asks for guidance and then answers, “What if it’s not?”
In the high-tech 21st century, where anything that can’t be coded into a computer isn’t real, it’s easy to forget God, praying, and our souls in the universe. Praying is what other people do. That’s not for busy metropolitans like me!
But what if it’s not?
Living the Artist Way offers practical application for prayer in an artist’s practice structured as a journaling workbook. The workbook encourages artists to pray, and the author says the word often. She describes daily prayer rituals, calling friends to offer prayers, asking others for prayers, and incorporating prayer into artistic practice. The journaling prompts hint at a process of deep introspection that can be described as meditative, neither exactly secular nor religious.
People who already pray and meditate would probably see the benefits as obvious. But skeptics like me? We have valid reasons to distrust organized religion. Some of us naively read Richard Dawkins as teenagers.
And yes, I’ve previously encountered books that discuss uniting prayer and art with “magick.” Idolizing Satan, tapping occult symbology, walking down the left-hand path, nerd boy crap. Or there’s also David Lynch asking you to pay $1500 a year to learn mantra meditation.
The book extolls readers to ask the universe for what they need and be attuned to the universe to listen, particularly for making art. Cameron’s approach is much gentler and more human than the magickal wizard stuff. In a way, Cameron is just a really nice, thoughtful friend who surrounds herself with really nice, thoughtful friends. After writing Morning Pages, she recommends using a separate notebook to ask for guidance. Ask whatever you want. Questions like What should I write next? Or How do I make my painting better? Answers come, she insists, perhaps through divine intervention, perhaps through believing in your own inner strength to live your fullest life.
So, who’s talking, exactly? Or who’s listening? Is it our subconscious mind? Cameron describes how, after a lifetime of cultivating this, she might just be following intuition. Perhaps our own voice can be one of the wise truths learned from meditation.
But what if it’s not? A strict objectivist might oversimplify things there. They might say daily journaling and intention setting provide buzzwords like mental clarity and action orientation. But Cameron stresses guidance can be unclear, deliberate, and slow. Sometimes, it might discourage action and encourage self-acceptance.
A few people said the guidance could be a picture. The author discusses the topic with dozens of friends who consider guidance might be ancestor spirits, a stillness in the universe, or God, and multiple speakers don’t try to explain it. They just swear by it.
I really adore The Artist Way, and Living The Artist Way offers dozens of helpful examples to put the tools and rituals into daily practice. I recommend the new book to people who enjoy creative, inspirational writing or self-help. Asking for guidance is a resolution I’m setting for myself this year.
Comics
Revenge of the Librarians
By Tom Guald
2022, Drawn and Quarterly
I was looking up the word “Librarians” at the library, which is a silly and discursive thing to do, and it led me to Tom Guald’s 2022 collection, Revenge of the Librarians, winner of TK the Eisner for Best Humor Publication. This type of silliness is exactly what I found in Guald’s book.
Take this one about book piles, for example; it is literally the point of this newsletter.
And I think Guald installed a camera in my apartment and took pictures of my desk????
Many of Gauld’s strips represent book piles. We pilers are not alone in the world. Other people are willfully surrounding themselves with precarity.
I felt like Violet and found this strip relatable as I shoved old basement paperbacks in my suitcase and left my socks and underwear behind at my parent’s house.
It’s fair to say that these comics make me feel seen, even though they often depict faceless stick-figure silhouettes. Finally, a gag comic for pile people, folks who spend time equal time reading and reformatting piles. This might be how lesbian readers feel for Alison Bechtel, or British wizards feel for Alan Moore.
The comic reminds us to appreciate the librarians. The ones who pile for their livelihood. I hope to one day join their ranks.
I’ll be reading all of Gauld’s previous books. I recommend this book as a present to anyone who thinks of themselves as a “bookhead,” if you dig these comics, he’s posted scores more on his Instagram and Tumblr.
Pile of the Week
The first pile of the year has been set very intentionally. I continue to work on my novel like a skeleton angel in heaven.
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Merry Christmas! Happy Solstice! Io Saturnaia! While I no longer participate in Catholic mass for Christ, I enjoy Christmas as an idea, a ritual, with all its pomp and bombast.
But I can’t help but notice the darkness within Christmas’ heart. Perhaps you feel a lurking Holiday dread, reader. Fear of large crowds, overstimulation, and rejection from the tribe.
This post is for you. Lean into the dread and let us discuss the horrors of Christmas.
Books
The Christmas Beastery Credit: Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Publisher: Fantagraphics
The Christmas Beastery Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Writer Benni Bodker Fantagraphics, 2023
This week, I considered the Christmas Beastery, which brilliantly illustrates Christmas horror. A beastery is a collection of monsters, and Christmas has a surprising amount of them. Naughty children, beware: Christmas is a time for PUNISHMENT!
Mortensen’s pen and ink illustrations use shadows to hint at an inescapable void: darkness under the bed where monsters live. Each line is used to etch ancient demons that cannot die, surviving the centuries to terrify children.
Santa Claus has a barely concealed eerieness, watching us sleep, judging the children, and forcing his elven slaves to make toys. That horror is literalized in Krampus, the most popular Christmas monster with his big-budget Hollywood adaptation (sellout). I love how Mortensen represents the many regionalizations of Krampus.
Krampus, Credit: Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Publisher: Fantagraphics
But there are more monsters I’ve never heard of, like the Icelandic Grýla, a gigantic troll sorcerous who carries 15 sacks on her tail to carry children’s bodies to her cave. A Christmas feast!
Grýla, Credit: Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Publisher: Fantagraphics
Or the French Père Fouettaro: he’s Father Whipper! He hides in the shadows and beats children with a cane. I find this illustration deeply unsettling.
Père Fouettaro, Credit: Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Publisher: Fantagraphics
The beastery even includes little monsters, like the Kallikantzaroi, little werewolves that come out on Christmas, squeeze through the chimney, and steal all the food.
Kallikantzaroi, Credit: Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Publisher: Fantagraphics
Even The Wild Hunt, from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, has a Christmas connotation, where undead riders on black horses with red hot eyes storm the town, eat the food, and torture the children. Sounds like a Davos Conference!
The Wild Hunt, Credit: Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Publisher: Fantagraphics
This book is amazing. If you like Krampus, folklore, pen and ink illustration, or if you are a TRPG dungeon master writing a Christmas campaign, this book is for you. I read it from the library on Hoopla, but I will buy a copy.
All I Want For Christmas is Utahraptor By Lola Faust 2023, Independently Published
All I Want For Christmas Is Utahraptor, Credit: Lola Faust
Shifting gears into Mormon Raptor Romance. I saw this pitch-perfect Harlequin cover parody and had to read it. I stayed reading about the strange world where humans and dinosaurs live in harmony and sometimes mate together, an anti-Jurassic Park. As you’d expect, the steamy descriptions are very amusing or likely very erotic to some readers.
Consider this Christmas Kiss,
A passage from All I Want For Christmas Is Utahraptor, Lola Faust
Of course, most of humanity rejects Raptor Romance. They cannot admit the truth: love is love. But Holly Hottie and Rocky Raptor prove the bigots wrong.
Lola Faust has published a dozen more dino-romances in case you try this one and find out it’s you need more. A perfect XXXmas read with an 8.5/10 heat level fireplace.
Film
A scene from Eyes Wide Shut, Credit: Warner Brothers, Flim.ai
Eyes Wide Shut | Dir. Stanley Kubrick | Warner Brothers
My favorite holiday movie is Eyes Wide Shut, wrongly read as a Christmas movie. The rituals therein predate Christ. Eyes Wide Shut is a Saturnalia movie, just as Christmas is the Christianisation of Saturnalia, Rome’s feast to Saturn, the God of Agriculture.
Every twelfth month in Rome, “slaves [had] license to revile their lords.” In the film, consider Bill is the slave, and when he sees the orgy, he’s reviling his lords. In 217 BC, the Phoenicians conquered the Romans at the Battle of Lake Trasimene, and the Romans adopted Greek rituals into the holiday, particularly cult sacrifices to Baal. That’s what the cloak people are doing in their Long Island mansion. We sublimate brutal Pagan holidays in Christ, just as our Puritanical overlords kept what the patricians do secret from us plebs. An Eyes Wide Shut party is a modern invocation of the leader’s urge to meet under candlelight, wear cloaks, and do sex-magik-murder.
Some allege Kubrick got killed for making this movie. Maybe so. Yet a quarter-century after release, billionaire sex cults are common. Multiple presidents and Congressmen were probably at that orgy party in the movie. The Epstein case opened all our eyes wide shut: we know the truth, but there’s nothing we can do about it.
I enjoyed Hot Star’s recent analysis of Eyes Wide Shut, where he speculates which lines were overdubbed by the studio and why (spoiler: Prince Andrew).
Pile of the Week: The Boxes in My Parents’ Basement
In my parents’ basement are boxes of books I like well enough to keep but not display in my piled-pilled apartment. Piles of Vertigo comics, alt-lit, David Foster Wallace, book-noted literary classics that are indisputably good, but why would I display a $0.99 copy of Candide covered in highlighter? Why do I keep them? To see how my brain develops over time is what I tell myself each week as I write and consider my reading piles.
As the year winds down, and the darkness reaches its peak, I search for strange reading. This week we consider a human art project, an art thief, Sigmund Freud’s cigars.
A friend pointed me toward Andrew W.K.’s weird vision journal. Remember Andrew W.K.? The 2000s pop-rock act about partying? I loved him as a teenager. He just married Kat Dennings. Congrats, you two!
Andrew W.K. and Kat Dennings — Credit: Instagram
Andrew is also allegedly an Illuminati clone, music industry plant, and Satanic magician. Who alleges this? Andrew, allegedly.
Reading between the lines here, Andrew W.K. created a persona named Steev Mike to add mystique and magical ritual to his music. Steev Mike is Andrew, but the side of him that networked into the music industry shaped the music into accessible pop-hits and got a Cartoon Network reality show, Destroy Build Destroy! A career as a motivational speaker. Steev Mike is a David Lynchian characterlike the Mystery Man from Lost Highway.
Robert Blake as The Mystery Man from David Lynch’s Lost Highway — Credit: Ciby 2000, Flim.ai
To promote his 2021 album, God Is Partying, the one with Satanic overtones, Andrew self-published his mission journal. And I found it fascinating, like looking directly into an artist’s brain.
Let’s take a look at a few pages. Here’s Andrew willing himself to create a mythos larger than the music.
A page from Andrew W.K.’s Vision Journal — Credit: Andrew W.K. Music
Here, we see Andrew considering the idea of manufacturing a life crisis, pivoting to life coaching, and hiring bodydoubles to impersonate himself.
A page from Andrew W.K.’s Vision Journal — Credit: Andrew W.K. Music
He explains what he envisions for the ultimate Andrew W.K. experience.
A page from Andrew W.K.’s Vision Journal — Credit: Andrew W.K. Music
If D.L. = David Lynch, and M.D. = Mulholland Drive, then basically thinking about Andrew W.K. is meant to evoke the uncanny, Lynch-esque feeling of weirdness, that something deep, dark, and demented is going on below the surface.
Is this journal genuine? Maybe, but probably not. Certain pages are. I think other pages were written to unite the artist’s career into one cohesive statement. Like, is he a mastermind that planned this epic, behind the scenes story from the beginning? Or is he a performer able to incorporate the world into his art? Or a magician? Is this notebook all one big ritual, a blueprint sent to himself in the past? Perhaps.
It might even be a eulogy to the idea of Andrew W.K. The tracklist of W.K.’s 2021 album hints that the act is complete. He created it; he destroyed it. I’m excited to see whatever he builds with the ashes.
A screencap of the final tracks on God Is Partying (2021) — Credit: Spotify
Books
The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession | By Michael Finkel | Knopf | 2023
I ask myself, what is the purpose of art? What is its value? Stéphane Breitwieser tried to answer this by stealing three hundred European art pieces. He would walk into museums, unscrew frames off the wall, use a razor blade to cut canvasses from their frames or pickpocket priceless heirlooms. He loved Renaissance art, copper, silver, ivory, and oil paintings. Truly cultured taste! He kept all the art in his attic, never selling any of it, trouncing across the contingent with his lovers like Bonnie and Clyde. Then, it all comes to a tragic end. I don’t want to spoil exactly how sad this story gets, but I found this portrait of a thief to be a sublime biography.
“The single most valuable work of art he stole was Sybille, Princess of Cleves by Lucas Cranach the Elder from a castle in Baden-Baden in 1995. In 2003 The Guardian estimated that its value at auction would be more than £5 million (£8.7 million or €10 million adjusted for inflation in 2023).” — Credit: Wikipedia
Comics
Through Clouds of Smoke: Freud’s Final Days | Words By Suzanne Leclair | Illustrations by William Roy | Humanoids | 2023
Sigmund Freud, Illustrated by William Roy — Credit: Humanoids
This graphic biography considers Freud narrowly through his love of cigars. I love this premise. As Freud famously said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But don’t you want to know what was up with the doctor’s cigars?
Briefly, it’s mentioned that the doctor saw smoking as a substitute for masturbation; smoking cigars kept him productive. Yet it’s also what killed him. The doctor seemed to know that the tobacco was giving him cancer. The illustrations show his near-torturous commitment to smoking.
Freud’s Oral Surgeries, Illustrated by William Roy — Credit: Humanoids
Freud’s cancer got worse as he fled Austria and Nazi persecution; the cancer in his mouth contrasts with the cancer in Europe. I found this biographical comic to be fascinatingly told and perfectly illustrated. There are even endnotes and a bibliography for a rigorously researched comic. If you’re interested in Freud or philosophy, you’ll enjoy this short read. One can always expect a quality from Humanoids.
Pile of the Week
Lately, I’ve been experimenting with TRPGs as writing prompts. Hope to show you some soon on NickyWebsite.com
Pile of the Week 12/17 – Credit: author
Thanks for reading! Here’s the newsletter archive for all your reading needs.
It’s buying season. A perfect thing to buy a lover is a book. They don’t need to read it to enjoy it; they can put it in a pile and look at it, and by sheer proximity, they will absorb its wisdom.
Novels
Alice Knott by Blake Butler — Credit: Riverhead Books, Penguin
Alice Knott By Blake Butler 2020, Riverhead Books
Alice Knottis about burning priceless works of art. Remember those videos where extremists destroy art?Alice Knott wonders what would happen if masses of people started destroying priceless art. She films it, slashes paintings, bakes them in pizza ovens, and blows them up with fireworks. At the beginning of the book, Alice Knott is dissociative, angry about the vandalism, claiming to be a victim. But we learn that in a dissociative fugue, she remembers who torched all the paintings. She did! And doing this untethers her from herself and reality.
The vandalism inspires copycats to go into museums and stab paintings or smash statues. Liberatory burning commences among the masses. Paintings are an asset for rich families to transfer wealth generationally. Museums codify values, aesthetics, and ideals by displaying the empire’s plundered wealth. When the priceless works burn and shatter, systems shock, states lose control, and people start having new ideas untethered from the past and creating something new. Intentional destruction is a form of creation.
Blake Butler, the author, has previously considered this idea of how burning art imbues new meaning with his novel Scorch Atlas. This book encouraged readers to burn after reading and even had a launch where readers could buy pre-destroyed, burned copies, just a bag of ash. The book, too, is about finding a crumbling book in an apocalyptic world. (source: this great video about Ergodic Literature).
In AliceKnott, we get glimpses of the future world without art. The narrator describes a commercial for a dementia drug, where a spider basks in pharmaceutical goo absorbed through its skin. The world lacks storytelling technologies and vocabularies to make sense of their existence. It seems like the only art left is Alice’s videos. But the narrator doesn’t report societal collapse, mass agony, or even loss of electricity.
The author claims inspiration from The Crying of Lot 49, a favorite novel of mine. I see the similarity. Imagine Odepia won the auction at the end of the last chapter, and inside the lot was a collection of priceless paintings; this is her late-life crisis. Yet despite his fixation on flames and burning earth, Butler has more optimism for the future than Mr. Pynchon. The book is not anti-fire; it’s not a warning against fire; I read it as welcoming the oncoming fires. There’s optimism about starting anew.
From what I can tell, the only way to read Alice Knott is in hardcover, which I feel adds to its mystique and impermanence. It has no e-book, paperback, or purchasable audiobook — although I got the audio version from the library. A strange, thought-provoking novel for fans of fires, art, and transcending one’s self.
The Night Stalker (The Kolchak Novel) by Jeff Rice 1974, Moonstone
A journalist teams up with the Los Vegas police to fight a vampire, and the book inspires a TV show that spawns a genre (X-Files, Buffy, Monster of the Week). I watched the show years ago and always meant to check out the Kolchak novel. Unpublished until the show came out and was long out of print until Moonstone Publishing brought it back (and kept it easily readable with an ebook and audio version). The novel is surprisingly good. As an urban fantasy novel, it’s an early example that hits all the troupes. It offers a detailed portrait of Vegas, an interesting vampire, and mythological and historical researcher, culminating in an action-packed investigation with a tragic twist.
The way Jeff Rice, the author, metafictionally inserts himself into the manuscript, claiming Kolchak is a real guy who actually sent him this authentic diary about vampires, is a fun nod to Dracula, a novel that’s a fake diary claiming to be real. Kolchak is also a deeply 1970s character, a paranoid detective drawing paranormal conclusions, a grownup Scooby Doo. Consider the context of a fictional character investigating a “Night Stalker” when Richard Ramerez, the real media dubbed Night Stalker, was actually killing people, and the “Serial Killer” narrative was on the news and in the theaters with slasher movies at the theaters and less than a decade after the Manson murders. In this fictional story, the private investigator teams up with cops and wonders if these serial killers are all monsters and demons. Kolchak teams up with the local police department to reveal the vampire, but they burn him. He gets fired and has to leave Vegas with a hitman on his tail. The police totally burn him. I wonder when Kolchak will inevitably get rebooted and probably investigate Bigfoot school shooters and Mothman terrorist cells.
Regarding comic books, I have one golden rule: the pictures better look really good. Nature’s Labyrinth succeeds. Its story is troupe-y; a bunch of people have to kill each other on a murder island, like the Hunger Games, Battle Royal, The Most Dangerous Game, or …And Then There Were None.
A two page spread from Nature’s Labyrinth — Credit: Bayleigh Underwood illustrator, Mad Cave Studios
The setup offers strange, action-packed stuff to happen. Lady twin martial artists attack our hero, and then a few pages later, they blow up for some reason. Our hero immediately concludes, “Who cares?”
A page from from Nature’s Labyrinth — Credit: Bayleigh Underwood, illustrator, Mad Cave Studios
A page from from Nature’s Labyrinth — Credit: Bayleigh Underwood illustrator, Mad Cave Studios
The art sells the over-the-top zaniness and graphic gore. Consider how this page plays with a nine-panel grid to show a hero falling into a bottomless pit, submersing the bottom three panels in darkness.
Amazing art on top of pure pulp. Comics live! This is the first book I’ve checked out by Mad Cave Studios, but it won’t be the last. The trade paperback comes out on December 19th. Thank you, Mad Cave Studios and NetGalley, for the ARC copy.
Pile of the Week
Year end pile compiling and a sneak peek at my Favorite Books of the Year post coming out this week.
A pile of some favorite reads from 2023 — Credit: the author
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