Hello Readers,

We’re back! And I return with a nice cheery issue about books that explore…the ways in which cruelty compounds itself across generations! Though not every act of cruelty either at the individual level, the systemic level, or both, plants a seed for future cruelty*, all of them have the potential to do so. I don’t know if we really should need arguments against cruelty, but the frequency with which cruelty is ultimately returned seems a pretty good one to me. There is also something in these books and their relationship to cruelty that I think potentially resonates with Cristina Rivera Garza’s distinction between “vulnerability” and “helplessness,” (which has become a vital framework for how I understand contemporary capitalism) but I don’t quite have that relationship in my head yet. (It’s from her book Grieving, which you should also read.) Perhaps it is about intentionally leveraging the compounding nature of cruelty to further destabilize targeted communities? (Which immediately makes me think of how the War on Drugs was used against anti-war activists & Black communities.) Or maybe it’s about how cruelty can be snuffed out with an enveloping community? (And that’s why some currents in our politics & our economy work really hard to prevent the creation and sustenance of enveloping community.)

This is also something of a noir issue, as three of the books fall squarely in the genre. I don’t read a ton of noir, especially once I finished An Exaggerated Murder, but it is still an important genre in my reading life so it should make the occasional appearance in this newsletter.

Josh

*Now that I’ve typed that I’m very curious about books exploring how seeds of cruelty FAIL to grow. If you can think of any (Everything Matters! by Ron Currie maybe?) I’d love to hear about them.

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YESTERDAY

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes

In a just world, we’d say ”Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, AND Dorothy Hughes,” when talking about the roots of American noir and detective fiction, and I’d say that even if In A Lonely Place were her only book. With perhaps the exception of the works of Patricia Highsmith, I can’t think of a book that contains more seeds or (to mix a metaphor) to establish more templates for the modern thriller than In A Lonely Place. There’s something to be said for how, if it were released today, it would most likely be marketed as a feminist response to woman-in-peril thrillers, even though it was written in 1947. Something about the hollowness of the “he’s a product of his time” argument, something about the deep roots of patriarchy, something about how we’re not going to market or shop ourselves to a more just world.

For all its depth and complexity, I think you could read a relatively simple main idea from it. Every man who goes to war could come back a serial killer. With the corollary that in our misogynist society, when he does come back a serial killer he is likely to kill women.

There is, potentially, one major unanswered question of the book and I’m not exactly sure how or even if Hughes would phrase it, but as I read it, the question is Why did the male police officer believe the heroine? The easy answer, of course, is, because she was telling the truth, but if the simple fact of telling the truth was all that was needed in order to be believed, well, we know it’s not. And so we have an ending that really should be totally obvious, almost boring even, but ends up feeling like a shocking plot twist. I’m going to talk about the potential power of stating the obvious in the next book, but as I’m wrapping up this bit about In a Lonely Place I’m now seeing another potentially revolutionary statement of the obvious; one easy path to justice is to believe the people telling the truth.

Buy In a Lonely Place from Porter Square Books

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TODAY

All Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby

All Sinners Bleed is an overt parable of how systemic racism (and other bigotries) breeds individual evil; about how cruelty always returns even if it does not return as directly as we’d like; about how you do not need to be directly guilty of past crimes that created present power for you in order to take responsibility for them. I don’t really read/connect with books this overt (a shocking revelation to readers of this newsletter I know), but Cosby is a thrilling writer & I found myself returning to All Sinners Bleed night after night despite its significant currents of brutality. There were some interesting twists and a satisfying resolution with an additional bit of surprising comeuppance. I don’t know if I’ll get to it, but it made me want to read more of Cosby’s work. (And I’ll certainly recommend his work at the store.)

But also, sometimes we need to say what is obvious. Sometimes it is almost revolutionary to say what is obvious. (Told you I was going to get back to this idea.) People miss obvious things all the time. Sometimes people purposefully ignore obvious things. Other people exercise power by denying those obvious things and the more books/media/people say those obvious things, the harder it is to maintain that denial. And as fascists and white supremacists continue to demand we deny the truths we all see with our eyes or remember with our brains, as an entire major political party is based on the denial of the most obvious facts, saying these simple obvious facts (American society is racist, climate change is real, Donald Trump is a criminal, capitalism is the problem) becomes even more important and also, sadly, potentially more dangerous. I don’t know if Cosby was aiming for any of that, but one of the cool/neat/powerful things about books is they can hit targets their authors never even dreamed of sighting when readers actively bring themselves to their reading.

Also, please note that it is fucking dark. So dark, I was actually a little surprised that I kept returning to it. I feel like Cosby earned it, but still, this will not be for some readers. CW: Violence, gore, torture, school shooting.

Buy All Sinners Bleed from Porter Square Books

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TOMORROW

Celebration by Damir Karakas translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac

Imagine the confluence of events that would lead you to join a fascist or Nazi organization. No. You have to. We have to know this about ourselves because it is one of the ways we learn how fascism & Nazism endure. It is also one of the ways we can discover organizations of society that resist or even prevent fascism. This isn’t really a “know your enemy” argument (especially given the specific book I’m writing about) so much as is it “meaningful self-exploration is a responsibility individuals owe their communities” argument.

You can tell the story of a life so it is obvious how one ends up joining the Ustasi and you can tell the story of the same life and it is mysterious how one ends up joining the Ustasi and they can both be true. Perhaps the answer here in Celebration is simple; when the world has made you feel every second of your powerlessness you’ll do many things to feel powerful for a second. Perhaps there is a way to see death as a problem that can be solved by merging an idea of your life with that of The State, an entity, you have convinced yourself will be immortal. Perhaps we can be so tired of everything we endure that any offer of any kind offered at the right time will be accepted.

In some ways Celebration is structured like a mystery novel. A question is posed: Why did Mijo join the Nazi-affiliated Ustasi? and then the novel provides three scenes that offer clues. You could quite easily come up with an answer; those seeds of cruelty mentioned in my introduction, plus a formative moment of nationalist elation, plus a childhood of grinding poverty. Simple. But also, the scenes presented are almost pathologically threadbare of the familiar signifiers of foreshadowing & narrative coherence. They almost oppose the idea of solved-mysteries. Think Haymaker in Heaven crossed with Train Dreams.

I think I wanted to get to clearer ideas about fascism both when I started reading Celebration and now as I’m writing about it, and maybe, eventually I will, but right now, I just can’t shake a few of the images of this book. They are just so vivid and haunting. And you want them to be significant in a very specific way, because, at least in our current batshit world, we want specific answers about some of the problems the book seems to consider, but, it feels to me like they also very specifically resist that. (Maybe they are intended to break our usual meaning-making through interpreting images mechanisms, working in “a tree is a tree is a tree’ space.) Which all makes this a very difficult project to pin down. Which means maybe I can land this on the idea that cruelty can be very easy, and fascism succeeds because it promises easy answers, so, almost by definition, any art that aspires to be antifascist needs to be, in one form or another, difficult to pin down.

Preorder Celebration from Porter Square Books

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FOREVER

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps edited by Otto Penzler

There can be something thrilling about books and stories churned out for cash, written as fast as possible with a decent familiarity of the genre, and the need for a paycheck. All of that grind can sometimes produce moments of the divine. I don’t know if that mechanism is a million monkeys with typewriters deal or a shifting to an altered consciousness deal or some version of professional gambling with artistic output (if there’s a difference) but there is something really wild when you hit an incredibly beautiful sentence in a dime novel. (It’s akin, I think to those moments happen after a party or something has gone on far too long and you’ve had far too much to drink, but you end up talking brilliantly with the people still around you.) And even though most of the time transcendence is elsewhere, you can still have fun. I mean, fun was always the goal anyway. A talented hack, a competent craftsperson can show you a good time.

And sometimes it can be clear how much fun the writer is having. I don’t exactly know how, but sometimes you can just tell the writer themselves is getting a kick out of seeing how far they can push things (and not in that gross contemporary edgelord way) or get away with.

I read a lot more pulp when I was writing An Exaggerated Murder, and since I don’t see myself working on anything in that vein again anytime soon, so I don’t know when (if ever) I’ll get back to it at all. But it’s an interesting expression of the written word that has been important in my life, so it bears mention here.

Buy The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps from Porter Square Books

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