http://artsblog.projo.com/2011/06/new-thrillers-cover-history-and-ter.html

“The White Devil” (Harper Collins, 368 pages, $24.99) Justin Evans’ daring tale of an American ne’er-do-well teenager adrift in the famed English boarding school Harrow, reads like “A Separate Peace” with murder thrown into the mix.

The mystery behind that involves none other than a giant of a literary figure in the form of Lord Byron, himself enrolled at the school centuries before. And Evans smoothly fashions a darkly beautiful tale that turns the alienated, angst-riddled Taylor into an amateur sleuth who must find the killer before other students fall victim to the paranormal madness.
“The White Devil” reminds me of John Hart’s brilliant “The Last Child,” last year’s Edgar winner for best novel. A similar honor may well await Justin Evans and, if so, it will be the first of many. A wonderful book in all respects.

Promotional photo for a stage adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1895

The 20th and 21st centuries had horror to spare–but there’s still nothing quite like the slow build of horror in the hands of a 19th century master like Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, after Turn of the Screw, is probably the best, tightest, and most pure form of the gothic novella in English. And his short story, excerpted below and linked to at full length, is genius. All I need to tell you is that it’s about a young man with the job of procuring cadavers for medical students, and you know pretty much all you need to know to start the chills.

A quick excerpt from RL Stevenson’s, The Body Snatcher:

The supply of subjects was a continual trouble to him as well as to his master. In that large and busy class, the raw material of the anatomists kept perpetually running out; and the business thus rendered necessary was not only unpleasant in itself, but threatened dangerous consequences to all who were concerned. It was the policy of Mr K—- to ask no questions in his dealings with the trade. ‘They bring the boy, and we pay the price,’ he used to say, dwelling on the alliteration - quid pro quo. And, again, and somewhat profanely, ‘Ask no questions,’ he would tell his assistants, ‘for conscience sake.’ There was no understanding that the subjects were provided by the crime of murder. Had that idea been broached to him in words, he would have recoiled in horror; but the lightness of his speech upon so grave a matter was, in itself, an offence against good manners, and a temptation to the men with whom he dealt. Fettes, for instance, had often remarked to himself upon the singular freshness of the bodies. He had been struck again and again by the hang-dog, abominable looks of the ruffians who came to him before the dawn; and, putting things together clearly in his private thoughts, he perhaps attributed a meaning too immoral and too categorical to the unguarded counsels of his master. He understood his duty, in short, to have three branches: to take what was brought to pay the price, and to avert the eye from any evidence of crime.

That paragraph alone should be enough to launch a thousand screenplays.

A little froideur for your balmy and seemingly safe May evening…

http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/ghost-stories-stevenson.html

You are getting younger... and younger...

I was writing my current novel, The White Devil, which is set in a London boarding school I had attended in 1988, and I was doing research. I didn’t want to foot the expense for a round trip to London to refresh my memories. First, because I am cheap; and second, because what I needed was travel in time, not space.

So I contacted some hypnotists. I asked them if they could transport me back to my time at Harrow School, when I was seventeen years old, and, you know… just kind of walk me around, take me on a tour of my past.

I reached one hypnotist on the phone. He sounded like exactly the kind of guy who had learned hypnotism via correspondence course so he get you into his office, reduce you to semi-consciousness, and fondle you. Short discussion.

Then I met a therapist at a conference who hypnotizes writers to get them past writers’ block: a noble calling, I thought. She was a bespectacled, nervous woman with a voice as soft as a baby pillow.

Wary after the call with Dr. Fondler, I asked her to lunch rather than schedule an office meeting. Over salads on a bright summer day in the Village, she told me that hypnotism would do nothing for me and that my writing project would be very challenging.

Why?

“The turmoil of being a teenager—it’s hard to recreate. I can’t do it with hypnosis. You are in your thirties,” she observed. “At your age, you have more in common psychologically with your latency period than you do with your adolescent self.”

I tried not to take this personally.

“I want to create a portrait of falling in love at seventeen,” I said. “When it’s all, just, wild. When you’re experiencing it for the first time.”

“Can’t help.” She grinned at me in a way made worse by her timid demeanor, and my vanity. “Your days of wild love are behind you.”

So I flew to London. I plumbed my memories. I amalgamated and compressed many girlfriends into one figure; I sprinkled on some fantasy; and as always cast the love object in the mold of the Dark Lady of my life, my mediterranean wife—and came out with a hyperverbal, busty, slutty, self-destructive thespian named Persephone Vine.

I wrote. I edited. This week, I published.

And then—with some distance, and in preparation for a few bookstore appearances—I re-read.

Did I do it? Did I meet the hypnotist’s challenge? Did I capture the wild love? I remember relationships at seventeen as being overwhelming, obsessive, polymorphously perverse… but when I re-read the passages what I felt most was sadness.

These kids had the wild love. But it was wild like Hobbes’ description of man in a state of nature. They were vulnerable. Confused. Unaware. Raw. And a little bit doomed.

Was that really what it was like?

Or is that just what the serene, middle-aged man thinks of wild love?

The philosopher Hobbes, in calling a life in nature “nasty brutish and short” was trying to cure us of sentimentalizing it.

I suspect that if any of us had a chance to reach back through twenty years—not on a couch; not over a damned salad—and wrap our fingers around that time of our lives, it would be about as exciting, about as romantic, as gripping bare electric wire.

I guess the hypnotist warned me.

This was written as a “guest blog” at BN. Please visit their site at:

http://tinyurl.com/3dm5jpf

The bookstore in Manhattan where I'll be reading

I found a passage to read on Wednesday that will not require me to do an embarassingly bad English accent. Actually I can do pretty decent English accents, but they have to come to me, usually with the help of several drinks. All the characters’ voices are in my head… but they don’t sound the same on my lips.

So, next week I will be all drawl. And no sex scenes.

Wednesday, May 11, 7pm, Tribeca Barnes & Noble, 91 Warren Street, NY NY, 212 587 5389

Saturday, May 14, 3pm, Bookhampton, 20 Main Street, Sag Harbor

Amusingly, the Hamptons reading is with other “mystery” authors such as Lorenzo Carcaterra, and is titled “Tough Guys Talk the Talk and Write the Walk.”

Really? And they booked me?

“Yes, I’m… I’m here to represent the pale, consumptive, anglophile contingent.”

If things get tough, maybe I will vomit blood on them.

An American teenager, Andrew Taylor, arrives at an elite British boarding school fresh from a drug scandal at his New England prep. He bears an uncanny resemblance to the poet Byron who attended Harrow in his day. The face earns him the lead in a play being written by an outcast professor. It also brings him the sinister attention of a white-haired specter in a long black frock first seen strangling one of Taylor’s dorm mates in a cemetery. As a small band of believers come to Taylor’s aid , their research reveals “The White Devil” of the title of Justin Evans’s chilling-to-the bone new novel to be a former lover of the rapacious Byron. Other students around Taylor will be felled by the haunt, but ultimately it wants him. Deliciously frightening, “The White Devil” is a literary scare story in an earlier tradition before vampires ruled the day, or at least the genre. (May 10)

Like many I have accepted the prejudices of Woody Allen, canonized in Annie Hall: that LA is a land of meretricious shallowness where people go when they have surrendered their integrity; when they are tired of fighting the good fight; when they are ready to surrender to the Mephistophelean call of pleasure; when they are ready to bite on the Lotus. In the 80s and 90s, when the movie business was cooler than technology, this used to be associated with the film industry, and the get-rich-quick culture of the deal and the hustle. Hence Woody Allen’s counterpart, Tony Roberts, who gave up theater for TV. “I did Shakespeare in the park, Max. I got mugged.”

But this week my work friends summed up Los Angeles, and why they live there, in a word: SUNSHINE. More than one person said this, as the word that captures the essence of LA (or southern California in general). And when they said the word, they broke out in toothy grins, the way someone might say CANDY. Sweet. Fun. Good. Pleasurable.

I spoke to delightful movie people, who joked openly and comfortably, if not happily, about the vagaries of the movie biz. No more whining about how crazy the business is blah blah blah. More importantly, I spoke to people from other industries: advertising, consumer goods, cars.

And those people said it, too. SUNSHINE.

CANDY.

So the fearsome question, to this 20-year New Yorker. What if LA is not a lotus? (An addictive and fatal drug.) What if LA is candy? (Just… fun.)

And by extension…

What if I don’t have to stay plugged into my personal brand of self-loathing, thanatos, and visionary psychosis, in order to write, to be me?

What if I unplugged and ate candy? What would happen? Is this what happens at forty? You reach the peak of the fulcrum, and have nothing but momentum and flight to soar down over the other side. You are liberated–maybe through hard work and the assistance of professionals–from the ghosts and demons of your first years. You begin to doubt the tales of hell. Maybe hell doesn’t exist. Maybe Woody Allen was wrong and Tony Roberts was right. Maybe it’s possible not to nurse your neuroses, and still be an interesting and worthwhile human being, and plow your field of talent (such as it is), fruitfully.

I am coming back to New York proudly today. I am going to pull behind me, on the tail of this airplane, a long strip of sunshine, a white-yellow-gold ribbon of silk that will whip in the wind, and will be my banner. Wherever I be, here be candy; wife, child, child, and beloved friends, take this and eat it; I may be the last learn; but we are not obliged to add to our own sufferings; it’s a bad habit; when the sun shines, bask.

Vladimir Nabokov, novelist and synaesthesist

I hallucinated smells from my mid-teens to my early twenties. To tell the truth, I never really thought about it–which is to say, I never understood it was unusual–until one Christmas Eve dinner when we had another family over. I can’t remember how it came up, but somebody made a reference to Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography where he claims to have had olfactory hallucinations.

“Oh yeah. I have those all the time,” I said.

“Me too,” said my sister. Both my parents admitted to the same.

Needless to say the other family looked at us like we were completely crocked.

Which we may be.

What’s funny is that my smell hallucinations disappeared for twenty years. After the first year or two out of college, they just stopped.

Then, two weeks ago, they returned.

Body odor and marijuana smoke. (Friday night, while in a closed car waiting to pick up my wife.)

Cat pee. (In my office. I asked my co-workers, and they said it smelled like disinfectant to them. No way.)

Baking pastry. (In my son’s laundry. Again: no way. (Sorry kid.))

Hyacinths, where there are none.

Listen, you may not believe me. It’s Spring: there are hyacinths. It’s New York City. Pastry is being baked. Cats are peeing. Pot is being smoked. It’s reasonable to assume that I might be smelling these activities. (Or is that reasonable?)

And, you know, maybe I’m wrong.

But I think I know when a smell is there, really there; and when a smell is there, isolated in some neurological pocket–existing on the nerves, and not in the nose.

But to me, that doesn’t make it fake. In fact, it makes the scents more interesting. Like a gift, or an artifact. Since the smells are being created, by someone or something. An arbitrary grace note. A red flaw in the marble. Something brushing past me in another dimension, in an alternative Springtime; where things, I guess–possibly in a very good way–are stinkier.

Actor Christian Coulson as Tom Riddle

Team WD just found out that Christian Coulson, the actor who played Tom Riddle in the Harry Potter movies, is doing the audio for The White Devil. Allow me a moment to dissolve into Harry Potter fan-dom.

I “read” all the Harry Potters… on audio book. Jim Dale’s BRILLIANT readings made a great series even greater, to me. Just a few months ago I finished the whole series, listening to it on iPod, staying up much, much later than I should have in hotel rooms on business trips, unable to turn off the Deathly Hallows. So to have the six-degrees of Harry Potter audio linking Jim Dale-JK Rowling-Tom Riddle-Christian Coulson…moi… is cool.

I’ve been an audio book nut since young childhood, when a family friend bought my sister and me an 8-LP set of The Hobbit, read by Nicol Williamson, better known as Merlin. He was brilliant. What’s amazing is how English actors deploy all the dialects of the UK to fill out a world of characters. I can still do a pretty decent Northern English accent after listening to Nicol Williamson’s “ayup” dwarves for hours and hours. My sister and I repeated that LP set endlessly. So much so, we actually found some errors in the abridgement.

I’m looking forward to Mr. Coulson’s take on the accents in my book. There’s not a lot of variety, compared to Middle Earth, or Hogwarts; but I hope he”gets” Andrew’s defensive American drawl; Persephone’s semi-nasal machine-gun patter; Fawkes’s brainy sarcasm; and Dr. Kahn’s Shakespearean bellow. Scrambling to get my hands on a recording. Will report.

It’s one of the Japanese ghost stories I read as research for this book. Old school. Hold onto your ears.

It begins: “More than seven hundred years ago, at Dan-no-ura, in the Straits of Shimonoseki, was fought the last battle of the long contest between the Heike, or Taira clan, and the Genji, or Minamoto clan. There the Heike perished utterly, with their women and children, and their infant emperor likewise–now remembered as Antoku Tenno. And that sea and shore have been haunted for seven hundred years…”

http://www.sacred-texts.com/shi/kwaidan/kwai03.htm

And no, I cannot turn off the writer. I listen to him breathe there in his bed, and I think–”Geez, I didn’t quite get the lung sounds right.” “My coughing was off.” I mean, I came close. The scenes where the mother and father watch their child devolve into fatal tuberculosis… it hit the notes.

But there is writing, and there is real.

In real, it’s all patience. It’s providing attention, in case you miss something, in case there is some revival and something important happens–a smile? a memory? a secret hoard? You’re all emphathy.

In fiction, it’s hitting the beats, it’s technique, description, trying to find that angle or comparison that makes the reader feel that they leap into the room. The writer helps the reader be empathetic. But the writer is working too hard to be empathetic themselves. The writer is a sweaty waiter rushing between tables.

With real death, the minutes crawl. The minutes leap ahead. You are impatient, checking your blackberry. You are patient, watching him eat, breath, adjust his oxygen mask.

Ahhh, goodbye, goodbye, what else is there to say. All your love flattens to the width of a page. You can’t read it aloud, you can’t give it to him to read. Shove it in your pocket, or burn it with a match. In this hospital room, no one will reprimand you, no one is watching you. You are his witness, and your own; there is no third person.