Memento mori, creatures! In this edition, Halloween; Mexican horror stories; Michael Chabon and why does he always dissolve the golem. Don’t dissolve the golem!
Specters of Silicon Valley
Apparently trick-or-treating in San Jose was a bit light this year. Could’ve fooled me—there were lulls, but in between the lulls, there were absolute swarms, just a mob scene of Storm Troopers and inflatable dinosaurs and anime characters in fox masks. I don’t know whether it’s a geographical difference or a temporal vibe shift, but there seemed to be fewer of those edgy costumes, Disturbing Clown or Sexy Disturbing Clown, and more wholesome stuff like hot dogs and bananas. I’m cool with that tbh. A little sexy disturbing clown goes a long way.
Lots of Star Wars; lots of Encanto, Batsmen, a bit of Black Panther, a lot of the kitsune from Valorant (I needed a teenager to identify this one for me). Some Gen X and even Boomer icons: Hawkeye Pierce from M*A*S*H (!), the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man, plus the costumes most gratifying to me personally, a gang of friends dressed as the entire Breakfast Club. (I was the first person to recognize them /o\)
Most unintentionally-traditional was this very sweet teenager: “I’m a Dark Angel. It’s bad! I’m a Christian—I didn’t think about it being bad when I picked it. I hope my mother doesn’t find out!”
Tell me your Halloween observations. I love this stuff. Also lol I got to be the overly-online Catholic friend who suggested that if they couldn’t find a friar’s robes for the kid’s Catholic-school saints parade, they could just grab a Spiderman costume and go as St. Carlo Acutis, patron saint of the overly online….
The Last Houseguest to Be Defeated Is Death
I read Amparo Dávila’s collection of horror shorts, The Houseguest, tr. Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson. I struggle with short stories, and these felt like they often shivered back and forth between being too elliptical for my taste or being too blunt. But they gain in emotional weight from being collected together. A lot of Substack-reading types long for “thick” communities, and extol unchosen obligations—this is my song, I play this song quite often—and it’s good to read a collection where most of the horror comes from those unchosen obligations. The title really gets at this: The houseguest has arrived, and you have to deal with him, and now your home has become his lair.
In style, Dávila favors long, hysterical, comma-spliced sentences, the cadence of someone trying to defend her choices while slowly convincing you that she’s deranged. The story about the person with a philosophy of suffering, who experiences the terrible temptation of requited love, has a certain sardonic humor that I enjoyed while also feeling a bit “I came out tonight to suffer on the stairs and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now”:
My neighbor Senor Rojas seemed surprised to find me sitting on the stairs. Surely what drew his attention was my gaze, conspicuously sad. I noticed the vivid interest I’d suddenly aroused in him. I’ve always liked stairways, with their people who go dragging their breath up them and fall dully down them in a shapeless mass. Maybe that’s why I chose the stairs to suffer on.
Escape Artists
Also re-read Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel set in the Golden Age of comic books. Two anchorless Jewish cousins, the New Yorker Sam Clay (né Klayman) and the Czech refugee Josef Kavalier, win fortune and fame as the creators of the Escapist, a superhero who liberates those imprisoned by dictatorship, rapacious capital, and every other form of exploitation. Clay slowly discovers a secret identity of his own, in the arms of the man who plays the Escapist on the radio. Kavalier disappears in the wake of tragedy, leaving behind more love and more lives than he knows. Then, into adult lives of resignation and self-imprisonment, the Escapist crashes one last time, disguised as a vicious Senator and a comic-reading child….
I enjoyed this book, though also felt a bit ashamed of enjoying it; there’s a sentimental quality here, a corn-syrup aftertaste even to many of its best lines. Like, Chabon writes, “Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity”—and that’s true and tasty… and maybe a little too perfect? Ultimately just a compressed statement of the conventional wisdom, and therefore itself more conventional than wise?
The central metaphor of escape is so good—a kaleidoscope. A defense of escapist entertainment, sure; also a truly poignant portrayal of the ways our escape routes can turn out to be their own kind of prison. That happens over and over again here and it always feels real, flowing out of the story and characters, so that the theme emerges in the book because it emerges in real life.
This book’s weaknesses reminded me a lot of the weaknesses of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, a book I also enjoyed plenty. The biggest weakness in both books is the anticlimactic ending. K&C has this absolutely searing interlude where Kavalier is in the Antarctic, pure white horror; and then we sort of collapse into 1950s domestic dissatisfactions and their inevitable too-easy resolution. Both books create an astonishingly rich world—in K&C you can smell every scene, you step into a vanished past that is more real than the present. But then the novels turn away from the concerns of that big world, away from history and community, and the happy ending is that a boy and a girl are holding hands. I said it about TYPU: “You were telling me a story about two Jewish people that was also a story about the Jewish people, but then you swerve away and tell me the second thing is not what you’re really interested in. But I still am!”
(And/but see this post about Israeli responses to TYPU and its romance of landlessness. History is always the worst houseguest….)
Like, the Golem of Prague appears in this book even though it doesn’t have to. I always believe in putting unnecessary stuff in your novel—and in paying attention to the unnecessary stuff in novels. Often this is where mystery enters, in the places controlled more by an author’s inexplicable obsessions than by his strenuous and acknowledged insights. So nu, what happens to the Golem of Prague? Spoilers for the fate of this clay man, but he comes to the suburbs and dissolves. Gone! Or transformed, let’s say, into the work of the imagination. The golem is in your mind, now, honey. Isn’t that poignant, but also soothing?
Yeesh! It would kill you to care more about the golem?
And last… I do get a feeling, from the two Chabon novels that I’ve read, that he sort of enjoys homosexuality as a setting for tragic unfulfillment, and finds it hard to imagine a homosexual life in which those longings build a future and a home. (The first time I read K&C I described its sexual politics as “reactionary,” which I meant as a backhanded compliment. I’m less complimentary about that now! Because I care more about my own actual future and home, lol.) That said, this exchange toward the very end of the book captures something so real about gay experience: the crosswise life in which the lives and expectations of everyone around you feel somehow “off,” nonsensical, a Wonderland or a phantasmagoria:
“This is feeling very strange to me,” Rosa said. She was gripping the pillowcase filled with Joe’s old sheets in one hand, like a sack, and dabbing at the tears in her eyes with the other.
“It’s been strange all along,” said Sammy.
icymi
Some short movie reviews, mostly biopics for some reason, of everyone from St. Vincent de Paul to the late Loretta Lynn.
Now Playing
TMBG, “Climbing the Walls”
Photo of Czech golem statue by Michal Mañas, via Wikimedia Commons