Face It: Debbie Harry Has Had A Happy and Lucky Life

Elizabeth Hand, a much-acclaimed novelist and essayist, offers an appraisal of Debbie Harry’s new memoir and discovers that the Blondie icon is really ’the girl next door’ who just happened to influence a legion of musical progeny. Hand also suggests other rock memoirs to read in tandem with Face It, to further flesh out the life and times of this fascinating woman.

Early in her new memoir—Face It, written in collaboration with Sylvie Simmons—Debbie Harry recounts an anecdote from her childhood: “One visit, when I was a baby, my doctor gave me a lingering look. And then he turned in his white coat, grinned at my parents, and said, ‘Watch out for that one, she has bedroom eyes’.”

Today that remark would cause parents to run screaming to the AMA’s ethics board, also the local constabulary. Still, gazing at any one of the thousands of photos and videos of Harry from the 1970s and 1980s, you have to concede the guy had a point. The images depict a kind of timeless beauty that goes beyond Harry’s platinum candy-floss hair and Cupid’s-bow mouth. It’s a face that might as easily adorn a mid-century Playboy cover as an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus — archetypes Harry has played throughout her career, from the heavy-lidded bombshell in Mick Rock’s 1978 portrait to H.R. Giger’s artwork for her 1981 solo album KooKoo, and beyond.

“Backfired”, the first single from KooKoo, video by H.R. Giger:

"Backfired" was the initial single released from Debbie Harry's first solo album "Koo Koo." The track was produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards from C...

One of Giger’s videos for the album depicted her emerging from a grey-scale sarcophagus, equal parts alien and sphinx; his album cover showed her perfect facial features pierced by four long spikes. He claims the inspiration was an acupuncturist friend, and that “She [Harry] was very pleased but, I think some people thought it was like voodoo, when you stick needles into a doll and make magic, but that’s not what I meant by it.”

Whatever Giger meant by it, Harry’s embrace of his design underscores her innate understanding that some people respond to great beauty with the urge to destroy it. The opening track of Blondie’s first album was the brilliant girl group sendup “Rip Her to Shreds.” KooKoo’s poster ad campaign featuring the skewered singer was banned in the London Underground: no one wanted to actually see Debbie Harry being ripped to shreds.

If you think this is a lot of column space devoted to Debbie Harry’s appearance, bear in mind that she leads with her chin: Her memoir’s titled Face It. As an artist, of course she’s much more than her looks, even if the latter are what gave Blondie its name. And, as the 1970s ad campaign reminded the buying public, Blondie is a group, not a woman.

Yet it’s impossible to extricate Harry’s image from the band she fronted, impossible to imagine her crystalline voice emerging from anyone else. In some early live videos and recordings, you can see and hear a rougher version: Harry’s moves are awkwardly constrained, her voice strong but occasionally off-key. Sometimes she seems uneasy onstage, gaze shifting sideways as though looking for the quickest way out of the room. Studio alchemy turned her cut-glass voice into crystal, but the eyes that stare out from Blondie’s cover art retain a certain wariness.

For good reason, maybe. Reading Face It, you get a sense that, despite her success, Debbie Harry remains a bit of an outlier. The fact that she’s survived and thrived this long in an industry that eats its young underscores that impression. Still a suicide blonde at 74, she comes across as healthy, active in environmental and LGBTQ causes, and still performing. She’s close to her former professional and romantic partner, Chris Stein, and mostly (one might say relentlessly) upbeat in her account of a career that’s within shouting distance of the half-century mark.

“I am a love child,” she writes. Born Angela Tribble in 1945, Harry describes her birth parents as childhood sweethearts wrested apart by circumstance. They reconnected years later, but her mother didn’t learn her lover was married until she was pregnant, and three month-old infant Angela was adopted by a childless couple in New Jersey.

Harry’s childhood sounds like a middle class idyll, growing up under the benign parental neglect that allowed suburban children to roam the woods and abandoned shacks where hobos holed up, and “play with a few sticks, dig a hole, poke at an anthill, make something or roller skate.” New York City, where her father worked, was “another kind of enchanted forest,” one that she explored with her parents and, when she was older, on her own. She adored movies, fashion, TV, science fiction, radio, listening to big band music and enthralled by the drum-and-bugle corps that rehearsed within earshot of her house, playing the same song (“Valencia”) for hours. “I’ve had a very, very lucky life,” she writes. “But I felt different; I was always trying to fit in. And there was a time, there was a time when I was always, always afraid.”

If she was ever truly afraid, Harry hides it well. I read her memoir looking for traces of the poisoned apple and serpents in the garden but, for the most part, Harry seems to have been inoculated against the former and able to charm the latter. Readers hoping for dirt dished and axes honed or buried won’t find much here. Despite her insistence that “it’s hard for me to find the fun” in Blondie’s success, Debbie Harry comes across as one of those rare people who has found not just a happy ending but a happy beginning and middle, too. Or, as she admits, “Maybe it’s like the King of Comedy said, ‘you just take all the terribly serious and dreadful stories and make them funny’.”

There are some good stories here, though you may have heard a few of them before. Drawing on a series of exclusive interviews with longtime music critic Sylvie Simmons, Face It covers much of the same ground as Cathay Che’s 1998 Deborah Harry: The Biography, a book based on interviews Harry did with Che in the 1990s. Che’s bio includes more detailed accounts of recording sessions, film appearances, and the 1970s downtown scene, along with some of the same anecdotes that crop up in Face It.

Still, Harry’s narrative voice remains engaging in the new book, upbeat and upfront, with few regrets (describing some shenanigans between a coke-fueled David Johansen and Iggy Pop, she does confide that “I had to wonder why Iggy didn’t let me have a closer look at his dick.”) She’s forthright about her own sexual charisma, owning it and using it without apology. From an early age she identified with Marilyn Monroe. “I sensed a vulnerability and a particular kind of femaleness that I felt we shared … That was long before I discovered that Marilyn had been a foster child.” Monroe’s aura suited the teenage Harry. Voted Best-Looking Girl in her high school, she was sexually precocious and unashamed of it in an era where slut-shaming was the norm.

She recalls, “I really loved sex. I think I might have been oversexed, but I didn’t have a problem with that; I felt it was totally natural. But in my town in those days, sexual energy was very repressed, or at least clandestine. The expectation for a girl was that you would date, get engaged, remain a virgin, marry, and have children. The idea of being tied to that kind of traditional suburban life terrified me.”

She’d catch a ride with a girlfriend and the two would cruise a strip known as Cunt Alley, then go dancing. ”I loved dancing. I still do.” There seem few things Harry didn’t love. To crib a line from the late novelist Laurie Colwin, she was The More Life Kid, sucking up experiences the way other kids were downing root beer floats. Her fear of being trapped in the Jersey suburbs spurred her to move, at twenty, into an apartment on St. Mark’s Place (four rooms, $67 a month). Before that, there was junior college, where her boyfriend’s psychoanalyst mother arranged for the young couple to drop acid with Timothy Leary on the Upper East Side. After that, there were jobs at a Fifth Avenue wholesaler, the BBC, and NYC’s first head shop, right around the corner from her apartment.

Harry writes memorably of the eccentrics who flourished outside the city’s mainstream in the late 1960s, people like Moondog, the legendary composer who was a fixture at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty Third, wearing his Viking helmet and cape; or the creepier Scientologists and members of the Process Church of the Final Judgment. She went to shows by the Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Sun Ra, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman; engaged in happenings where she chanted and played “anti-music music” with the First National Uniphrenic Church and Bank; got involved with a performance art hustler who, in the midst of extended foreplay, stopped the proceedings to let a stranger film her.

“I felt shocked, furious, betrayed, and disrespected, but I was also very turned on. I wanted to knock his teeth in and fuck him at the same time. I finally climbed onto a small pedestal and posed like a statue,” she writes.

The incident captures an essential strength, Harry’s instinct to grab power from men who try to exploit her. She doesn’t subvert the male gaze: she returns it, often with a grin that shows that she’s not just in on the joke but its perpetrator.

In 1968, she signed on as backup singer in a baroque folk band, The Wind in the Willows, started by a high school friend and her husband. “I knew I wanted to be a performer — I was still vague on what kind, but at least I knew that.” The band’s eponymous debut tanked. She left the Willows and moved in with one of its drummers, who introduced her to heroin. On the upside, he encouraged her to get a job waiting tables at Max’s Kansas City.

Again, there’s a parade of famous names who were habitués. Hendrix and Janis (“who was lovely and a big tipper”), and especially Warhol’s crowd — Edie, Holly, Jackie, Candy, Viva, Taylor Mead and Gerard Malanga. Warhol later immortalized Debbie Harry in a portrait, but the sweetly self-deprecating description of herself waiting on an imperious, silent Miles Davis gives a nice snapshot of an artist not quite ready for her closeup, “in my little black miniskirt, my black apron, and my T-shirt, with my long hippie hair au naturel — limping from a terribly infected foot injury.” She takes sitar lessons, quits Max’s, shacks up with a handsome older guy in LA until his girlfriend finds out, returns to the city, gets a job as a Playboy bunny for eight or nine months (throughout Face It, Harry is vague on exact dates). She’s been knocking around the city for almost five years, always on the sidelines, when she decides to move back to New Jersey.

“I got a job working at a health club and I started dating a guy who was a painting contractor. The normal life.”

Noooo! Run, Debbie, run!

Face It’s chronology grows fuzzy here. Che’s bio states she went to Beauty School, and in Face It Harry mentions working at a hair salon. But by 1972, Harry is making forays into the city, sans boyfriend, to catch the New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center. At some point there was a fling with David Johansen, and a friendship developed between Harry and the band, helped by the fact that she had a car and could ferry them around the city, “all so skinny, they were able to squeeze six across the backseat and four across the front.” The contractor turned out to be a controlling stalker, the inspiration for Blondie’s 1979 hit “One Way or Another.”

Blondie – “One Way or Another”, live in Asbury Park, in 1979:

Harry ditched him and began to home in on her own musical ambitions, inspired by the Dolls.

“… they were sexy and playful and so much fun,” she writes. “I figure now that what attracted me so much to their shows was that I wanted to be just like them. In fact, I wanted to be them. I just didn’t know exactly how to get it rolling.”

A chance encounter at Max’s with singer Elda Gentile, sometime partner of the Dolls’ Sylvain Sylvain, led to her joining Gentile in the Stilettos, a trio “enamored of the Dolls,” which meant Harry was now in a campy girl group inspired by a group of guys who camped it up in makeup and glitter. It was after one of the Stiletttos’ shows that Harry met Chris Stein, a shadowy figure in the audience there with his girlfriend, who’d previously been involved with Dolls’ drummer Billy Murcia. (Here as in other accounts of 1970s NYC punk, all roads eventually lead to the Dolls.)

Soon after, Stein became the Stilettos’ bass player, Harry’s friend and eventually her lover. The band played gigs at Club 82 (with David and Angie Bowie in the audience), followed by a stand opening for Television at CBGB. Harry says of this period that “My role in the group was to be the relatively reasonable one and to calm things down, which I guess showed up as ‘quiet’ onstage.” Whether or not she chafed at this, she and Stein left the band, along with two other band members. They performed first as Angel and the Snake, then Blondie and the Banzai Babies. Their original backup singers were soon replaced by Tish and Snooky Bellomo, who ran the legendary vintage shop Manic Panic and later fronted the Sick Fucks.

Harry writes that few people in the mid-1970s were playing the kind of retro music they did, which may have been the case. The AM stations in the NYC Metro area promoted soft rock — brain-numbing earworms by Bread, America, Loggins and Messina — while WNEW-FM, the city’s flagship ‘underground’ station, went heavy on what was then called art rock (now prog) by the likes of Genesis, Yes, Renaissance, Gentle Giant.

But teenage listeners like myself knew that WNEW DJs like Vince Scelsa and Scott Muni could and did indulge their own eclectic tastes and obsessions. Jonathan Schwartz played Frank Sinatra; Alison Steele, the Nightbird, played Stephen Sondheim, Tonto’s Expanding Headband, Lothar and the Hand People, and Kraftwerk, whose 1974 album Autobahn opened the airways to what became disco and electronica, genres Blondie and Harry latched on to years later. The station helped break Bruce Springsteen, with The King Biscuit Flour Hour’s broadcast of a live concert of “Greetings from Asbury Park.” I also recall one of their afternoon DJs starting to play a new album — the Laughing Dogs? The Ramones?— then ripping it from the turntable to throw it across the studio on-air.

But that’s another story. The point is, even uptown and in the suburbs, the 1970s created a far more fertile musical playing field than often depicted, allowing for the cross-pollination that made a band like Blondie possible. In 1972, you could hear Lou Reed sing about Candy Darling giving head on AM radio. The same year, Lenny Kaye’s hugely influential two-record Nuggets anthology was released, and a year later, George Lucas’s groundbreaking movie American Graffiti spawned a hit soundtrack double album featuring classic 1950s/1960s rock and roll.

Those two albums reacquainted a generation of listeners to songs they’d heard and loved as kids — I was one of them — while providing what we’d now term a curated experience of classic garage, proto-punk and rock and roll music. Motown could still bring people flocking to the dance floor in high school gymnasiums. Add T. Rex, Ziggy Stardust, and Transformer to the mix, and you had a heady musical cocktail for young listeners to imbibe (and bear in mind the legal drinking age then was 18). Thus the New York Dolls, Magic Tramps, and, eventually, Blondie.

Harry’s account of Blondie’s golden years is impressionistic, gliding over material that’s been covered in more depth elsewhere, and there aren’t that many photos (it does feature some cute pictures of Debbie Harry as a child). There’s some interesting stuff about her film work, including the tantalizing fact (mentioned twice) that she was offered a part in Blade Runner (the record company made her turn it down). But anyone hoping for a clue as to how Harry, Stein, and their bandmates created the string of hits that began with “Sex Offender” and continued with “In the Flesh,” “Hanging on the Telephone,” “One Way or Another,” “Dreaming,” “Atomic,” on through the genre-busting ‘Heart of Glass,” “Rapture,” and “The Tide is High” will be out of luck.

Recent years have brought a wealth of memoirs from women who served pivotal roles in the creation of punk and its descendants: Patti Smith, Carrie Brownstein, Kim Gordon, Viv Albertine, Linda Yablonsky, Chrissie Hynde, Alice Bag, as well as associated works like Sarah Marcus’s Girls to the Front and Vivien Goldman’s Revenge of the She-Punks.

So what’s the takeaway from Face It? Read in tandem with Che’s biography, Face It fills in more of Harry’s childhood. It also includes reproductions of some of Harry’s collection of fan art sent to her over the years — paintings and drawings inspired by her album covers and the like, sweet, often touching work that confirms her iconicity even as it demonstrates the down-to-earth qualities that make Harry seem so accessible, the former girl next door you’d like to have as the attractive old woman in the retirement condo adjoining yours. It would have been nice to see a picture of the Debbie Harry Barbie doll she mentions, and more (any) photos of her in 2019. But if you’re looking for the face in Face It, and those of anyone else connected with the band or the NYC 1970s downtown scene, check out Roberta Bayley’s Blondie: Unseen 1976-1980, or Chris Stein’s fabulous Chris Stein/Negative: Me, Blondie, and the Advent of Punk, which showcases Stein’s remarkable, too often overlooked talent as a photographer. And New York Rocker, the memoir penned by former Blondie bassist Gary Valentine, has funnier and far more detailed accounts of the band’s early years. But I’m still waiting for an account of the romantic and professional relationship between Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, one of the most successful and intriguing artistic collaborations of the last forty-odd years.

The “terribly serious and dreadful stories” Harry mentions — a terrifying rape; heroin addiction (hers and Stein’s); the horrific, debilitating autoimmune disorder that consumed Stein for three years — are dealt with swiftly and in no great detail. Which is understandable and perhaps an admirable example of restraint — do we need another account of a rock star’s substance abuse and recovery? — but leaves a huge lacuna in Harry’s story. Harry’s refusal to linger on the trauma of sexual assault may be more of a generational thing: in the 1970s, women who were raped (I was one of them, too) were advised not to fight and, afterwards, to try to forget it ever happened. If you can’t make the terrible stories funny, don’t dwell on them.

Ultimately, Debbie Harry comes across as an impressively talented and genuinely nice human being, also a happy one — a rare combo in life and even more so in the music business. “I’m still here,” she says. “I have had one fuck of an interesting life and I plan to go on having one.” It’s telling that that she lets someone else — her manager —  bring up her legacy (on the book’s second-to-last page): “He told me, ‘I hope that you say something about how you broke ground as a female artist in a business that was a man’s world, and how difficult it was as a woman to do what you’ve done.’”

Harry’s response is typically modest: “I just got on with it. As much as possible, I found a way to do what I had to do.”

In The Drama of Celebrity, Sharon Marcus writes, “The more singular a celebrity, the easier they are to replicate.” The ultimate proof of Debbie Harry’s singular influence can be seen in her musical progeny, who are legion. Madonna, Courtney Love, Lady Gaga, Babes in Toyland, Bikini Kill, Shonen Knife, Sleater Kinney, Pussy Riot, Angel Olsen and countless others didn’t need to mail Debbie Harry examples of their fan art. All they had to do was open their mouths, and sing.

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Some high quality footage of "Blondie" singing Sunday Girl...

Originally published on Please Kill Me.

Paul Tremblay’s supernatural storytelling balances terror with psychological insight

Ghost story season is upon us: Those hoping for the perfect balance of terror and psychological insight that makes for the most frightening reading should flock to “Growing Things,” Paul Tremblay’s new story collection.

Tremblay’s bestselling novels “A Head Full of Ghosts,” “The Cabin at the End of the World” and “Disappearance at Devil’s Rock” all play with the traditions of supernatural writing — ghosts, unreliable narrators, folklore, urban legend — and the strongest tales in “Growing Things” continue this exploration of what the genre can do. The disintegration of family, particularly of a father who once formed its center, crops up in many of these stories. In the title work, two teenage sisters hole up in their house, trying to avoid a green apocalypse that began in the soybean fields of the Midwest. Their father has disappeared, but not before warning them: “Don’t answer the door for anyone! Don’t answer it! Knocking means the world is over!” It’s one of the collection’s more conventional pieces — you can see where it’s going from the outset — but the last two lines still resonate with a “The Lady or the Tiger?” urgency. (The late, great editor Gardner Dozois once said that something like 90% of a story’s impact comes from its last line. Tremblay is an expert at them.)

Other stories also stick to the more well-trodden side of the tracks. The meth-head narrator of “Swim Wants to Know If It’s Bad as Swim Thinks” recounts her final breakdown to her daughter. In “Our Town’s Monster,” a real estate agent’s disclaimers to a young couple include “There’s a monster in the swamp. It eats cats and dogs; small, unwanted children, you know the type, and the occasional beautiful woman.” The titular heist of “The Getaway” goes awry with deadly, and uncanny, consequences for its perpetrators. Here, the more conventional grisly tropes are enhanced by Tremblay’s moody evocation of a decaying Worcester, Mass, and the despairing blue-collar workers abandoned there when its factories closed.

Tremblay’s best work probes the nature of horror fiction and those who write it. “Something About Birds” soars into terrifying heights. Ben, a diehard horror lover, interviews William Wheatley, a retired author of weird fiction whose final story, “Something About Birds,” exerts a disturbing power over his interviewer. (Wheatley’s name invokes that of filmmaker Ben Wheatley, whose “A Field in England” remains a highwater mark in modern horror cinema.) As a macabre souvenir from his favorite writer upends Ben’s life, we’re reminded that, in horror as well as fairy tales, no gift comes without cost. The story’s last line made my hair stand on end.

Tremblay continues his deconstruction of the genre with “A Haunted House Is a Wheel Upon Which Some Are Broken,” in which a family’s dissolution is recounted as a choose-your-own-adventure story. “Notes From the Dog Walkers” begins as a comic epistolary tale, but the amusing daily missives from a trio of dog walkers take a darker turn as one of them, KB, grows unhinged by an obsession with the dog’s owner — a writer whose body of work and taste in books seem not dissimilar from Tremblay’s own. KB’s long digressions suggest s/he may be more than just an ardent reader of horror, and also provide some of the collection’s more perceptive insights on the genre. KB’s references to the fictional author as “Mr. Ambiguous Horror” slyly send up Tremblay’s own ambitious forays into experimental narratives, represented here by less successful stories that bear the fingerprints of Mark Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” and Dan Chaon’s “Ill Will.”

Two of the collection’s standouts again hew to more conventional forms. The brilliant “It Won’t Go Away” features another horror writer in extremis. “It’s Against the Law to Feed the Ducks” ventures into Shirley Jackson territory, as a family vacation turns apocalyptic, though with a surprising, and uncharacteristic, glimmer of hope at the end.

“Why horror?” KB asks the unnamed writer, and proceeds to answer the question.

“You’ll … say it’s because of the hope of horror and it’s because of the horror of hope. You will not elaborate or explain or expand. Neither of us will be entirely sure what you mean, but we’ll think you’re close to a truth, and what else can we ask for?”

“Growing Things and Other Stories”

Paul Tremblay

William Morrow: 333 pp., $25.99

Originally published at the Los Angeles Times.

Movie monster maker Milicent Patrick finally gets her due in ‘The Lady From the Black Lagoon’

As a teenager, indie horror filmmaker O’Meara became captivated by Universal Pictures’ 1954 “Creature From the Black Lagoon.” Its eponymous amphibian star — a scaled, humanoid figure fondly known to generations of sci-fi geeks as the Gill-man — was the last of Universal’s classic monsters, joining the studio’s pantheon alongside Dracula, the Frankenstein monster and his Bride, and the Wolfman, among others. The Gill-man was also, as O’Meara learned to her delighted amazement, the first — and at the time, only — movie monster to have been designed by a woman.

Yet as she researches her new creative crush, O’Meara’s delight swiftly turns to bewilderment and anger.

Patrick’s design for the creature had for decades been credited to Universal makeup artist Bud Westmore, who fired her rather than have her role in its success become known. “Milicent’s incredible life should have earned her an honored place in film history,” O’Meara fumes, and with good reason. “But few even recognize her name.” “The Lady From the Black Lagoon” sets out to right that wrong, as O’Meara goes in search of this mostly unknown, if perhaps ultimately unknowable, artist.

Born Mildred Elizabeth Fulvia di Rossi in 1915, the woman — who later became Milicent Patrick — was the middle child of three. When she was 6, her father, Camille Charles Rossi, a structural engineer, was hired to work on William Randolph Hearst’s vast California Central Coast retreat, La Cuesta Encantada, better known as Hearst Castle. Rossi soon became the project’s construction superintendent, reporting to Julia Morgan, California’s first licensed woman architect and the castle’s designer.

Like other children whose parents labored there, Mildred frequently visited this dreamland, with its 2,000-acre private zoo and constantly shifting human menagerie of celebrity guests. But her father seems to have navigated Hearst’s kingdom uneasily, fighting nonstop with Morgan, and was dismissed after a decade. In her diary, Morgan called him “unduly revengeful,” and the superintendent of Hearst’s ranch said that Rossi “seemed to glory in human misery.” He was, perhaps, the first monster in his daughter’s life.

A gifted artist, Mildred received three scholarships to Chouinard Art Institute, which served as an artist/animato incubator for nearby Walt Disney Studios. The school later became CalArts. In early 1939, she was tapped to work for Disney’s storied ink and paint department.

Staffed entirely by women, it was housed in a separate building on the Disney studio campus, where the so-called Ink and Paint Girls reproduced tens of thousands of animators’ drawings onto celluloid, a mind-bogglingly laborious process. As Patricia Zohn wrote in a 2010 Vanity Fair article, “their job was to make what the men did look good … at an average of 8 to 10 cels an hour, 100 girls could only, in theory, turn out less than one minute of screen time by the end of the day.” At Disney, Mildred worked as a color animator (then considered a special effects technique) on “Fantasia,” contributing to four sequences, including the legendary “Night on Bald Mountain,” where she created gorgeous color pastel animation for the demonic Chernabog — “the most magical Disney character” for O’Meara and generations of monster lovers.

Mildred left Disney in the wake of the 1941 animators’ walkout, a strike that irrevocably changed the way the studio functioned. But Mildred wasn’t among the strikers. At some point, she had embarked upon an affair with another Disney animator, Paul Fitzpatrick. His pregnant wife found out and killed herself and their unborn child. The tragedy left Mildred and Fitzpatrick free to marry, and also estranged Mildred from her family. When, after a few years, she and Fitzpatrick divorced, she took on the name Mil Patrick. At some point she refined this to Milicent Patrick. She claimed to be Disney’s first female animator — probably not true, but close enough — and further embroidered her background by saying she was an Italian baroness.

She certainly looked the part, as one can see in a promotional film and photos from her time at Disney — strikingly beautiful, with long black hair and a regal air that not even Ink and Paint’s utilitarian smocks could diminish. She continued to create art, including illustrations for a collection of off-color jokes, but mostly seems to have worked as a model.

Then, in 1947, she met William Hawks, brother of filmmaker Howard Hawks and also a producer. She began to get uncredited bit parts as an extra — water nymph, flashy woman, tavern wench — in mostly forgettable films. She became involved with actor Frank L. Graham, best known for voicing the lascivious Wolf in Tex Avery’s cartoon short “Red Hot Riding Hood.” A few months into their relationship, in September 1950, Graham committed suicide. His will contained a note that read, “To Mildred, I leave nothing except the pleasure she will have knowing that now she won’t have to decide whether I am good enough for her or not.” Also, a postscript: “Gee, I wish Mildred had called me back yesterday morning.”

By this point — nearly halfway through O’Meara’s book — readers may be thinking, “Gee, I wish we’d get to the Creature.”

This is the heart of O’Meara’s story, and it’s a good, if infuriating, one. O’Meara writes that, in 1952, while working as an extra on the Universal lot, Patrick met the head of the studio’s makeup department, Bud Westmore. (I recently came across a 1948 publicity photo online of Patrick holding the monster’s mask from the film from the same year “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” with a handwritten note saying that she helped make the mask and also did its fine detail painting.) Westmore oversaw makeup for that earlier film, so it’s possible that Patrick met him at that time, and that Westmore was already familiar with her work when, in 1952, she was hired as makeup designer for the B picture that became “Creature From the Black Lagoon.”

Unfortunately, none of her preliminary or finished sketches seemed to survive.

But others familiar with the movie (including Chris Mueller, who sculpted the Gill-man’s mask) state unequivocally that Patrick designed the creature, a graceful, elegant and surprisingly sexy monster whose influence extends to Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 Oscar-winning homage, “The Shape of Water.” During previews, it became clear that Universal’s new monster flick was going to be a hit, its audience reactions fueled, no doubt, by an underwater pas de deux between the Gill-man and his female, human prey that still retains an erotic charge. The studio decided to capitalize on Patrick’s involvement and send her on a publicity tour with the tagline, “The Beauty Who Created the Beast.”

Westmore, known to be difficult and controlling with underlings, hit the roof.

O’Meara summarizes memos from the publicity team (they can be read in Tom Weaver’s in-depth “The Creature Chronicles,” one of O’Meara’s sources) detailing their battles with the makeup chief. The upshot: Patrick was sent out with masks of several Universal monsters, including the Creature, and was renamed “The Beauty Who Lives With the Beasts.” Even this wasn’t enough for Westmore. He struck Patrick’s name from the credits, replaced it with his own and, when she returned from her successful, nearly monthlong tour, had her fired.

At one point, O’Meara rages, “Several [people] expressed doubt that [Patrick’s] story could be more than an article, let alone fill an entire book.” The truth is, much of the book is padding, and it often reads as though it were written for a young audience, with long passages and footnotes explaining who Hearst was, what a scream queen is, and so on.

If Patrick left any diaries, journals, letters or the like, they’re not quoted from here, though O’Meara does speak with others intrigued by her history (including Mindy Johnson, whose 2017 “Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation,” delves deeply into the role of women in the studio’s early years).

But many specific details of her life as a working artist remain scarce.

O’Meara even visits the artist’s niece, who talks to her for hours about her aunt, and gives the author access to Tupperware filled with Patrick’s papers and ephemera. “The answers to almost all of my questions about Milicent were in these boxes,” O’Meara states, but she shares nothing of what she learns, except in the vaguest terms.

We learn that Patrick is “a friendly and warm person,” with “a warm personality,” “well-spoken, friendly and charming.” “Socializing was easy for Milicent,” and Graham’s suicide “caused her to lean harder than ever on her friends.” There are no interviews with friends, and no citations for quotes, including comments like “[Milicent] loved looking glamorous. It made her happy” or, “How marvelous that she refused to try to fit into the boy’s club [sic], that she was unapologetically herself,” or, later, that she was “beset by loneliness.”

O’Meara, unsurprisingly, identifies with her subject. Like Patrick and many other women, O’Meara has her own experiences of being harassed, abused and treated contemptuously by men in the film industry. Still, her book could use less of the author’s own rage and occasional fangirl gushing, however well deserved, and more about its subject, a woman whose father was said to “glory in human misery,” who knew firsthand the devastating effect of suicide, and who submitted a memo totting up the damage to her wardrobe for the Universal tour (amounting to nearly $4,000 in today’s money).

“One cocktail dress—completely ruined.

One cocktail dress—beading broken and lost.

One gabardine suit—shrunk and can’t be repaired.

One lace coat—burned, torn, and shrunk—ruined beyond repair.

One afternoon dress—torn but repairable.

One pair of earrings—cut in half by pub. man and stones lost.

One velvet blouse—torn, can be repaired.”

All of which makes one wonder if Patrick was accompanied on tour not just by masks but by the monsters themselves.

“Women are the most important part of horror because, by and large, women are the ones the horror happens to,” O’Meara writes.

“Women have to endure it, fight it, survive it — in the movies and in real life. Horror films help explore these fears and imagine what it would be like to conquer them. Women need to see themselves fighting monsters. That’s part of how we figure out our stories. But we also need to see ourselves behind-the-scenes, creating and writing and directing. We need to tell our stories, too.”

Patrick died in 1998, at age 82, largely forgotten except for a coterie of devoted fans. O’Meara has seen to it that she won’t be forgotten again. Her book is a fierce and often very funny guide to the distaff side of geekdom and reproduces photos and examples of Patrick’s work, many previously unpublished. That alone would be worth the price of admission to the world of this complex, brilliant artist.

“The Lady From the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick”

Mallory O’Meara

Hanover Square Press, 351 pp, $26.99

Originally published at the Los Angeles Times.

For Stieg Larsson fans, a new voice — and an even darker side of Sweden

It’s early to be pegging the year’s best books, but “The Wolf and the Watchman,” Niklas Natt och Dag’s stunning debut, is sure to be one of them. A longtime cultural columnist and blogger for Swedish magazines, Natt och Dag brings a reporter’s eye for detail to this feverishly dark historical thriller, first of a trilogy and published in more than 30 countries. Even readers inured to grim depictions of Sweden in the work of writers such as Henning Mankell or Stieg Larsson may be taken aback by Natt och Dag’s 1793 Stockholm, a hellish place that seems mired in the Middle Ages, despite the gradual encroachment of Enlightenment ideas.

The watchman of the title, Mickel Cardell, is one of the ragtag crew employed by the city’s police force to arrest vagrants, prostitutes, orphans and others who struggle to survive in Stockholm’s cesspit streets. A veteran who lost his left arm during Sweden’s ill-fated war with Russia, Cardell works at a beer cellar, where he keeps order with a carved wooden prosthetic — a formidable weapon for dealing with truculent customers. Very early one morning, he’s awakened from a drunken stupor by two children who have found a body in a nearby lake that’s little more than an open sewer.

“The waves lap against the shore, churning up a pale yellow froth. Something rotten — a dark lump — is floating a few meters out. Cardell’s first thought is that it cannot possibly be a human being.”

But it is, or was, a human being, so horrifically mutilated that it causes the hardened Cardell to experience a panic attack. The corpse is brought to the attention of Cecil Winge, a young lawyer turned investigator who works with Stockholm’s police chief, Johan Gustaf Norlin. Set during a period of political and social unrest, with rumors of the French Revolution muttered in the alleys, corruption is rampant among the Stockholm police. In the shadows of this chaos, Norlin and Winge, two righteous men, know their days with the force are numbered, especially Winge’s. In the last stages of consumption, with only weeks to live, Winge has nothing to lose by joining forces with Cardell to uncover the identity of the unknown man, whom they name Karl Johan, and his murderer.

“So this man has had his arms and legs shorn away in turn,” Winge calmly observes to Cardell, before noting even more disturbing details.

Yet even more nightmarish are the descriptions of everyday life in a society where numbing poverty is ubiquitous. Naive farm boys who come to Stockholm fall into paralyzing debt, with dire consequences. Crowds gather to cheer an executioner, himself a condemned man so drunk it takes minutes for him to cleave his victim’s head from his body. Those soldiers who survive attack by Russian warships subsequently die of typhus by the hundreds. Female victims of sexual assault are thrown into workhouses indistinguishable from prisons, where they are tortured. Most sinister of all is the Eumenides, a secret charitable order made up of the city’s wealthiest men that supports the workhouses, which takes its name from Greek myth. The Eumenides, “the Kindly Ones,” are also the ravening Furies.

“The Wolf and the Watchman” is exceedingly grim and often grisly, but, in the elegant translation by Ebba Segerberg, it’s never lurid. Natt och Dag has spoken of his admiration for Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose.” Like Eco’s novel, “The Wolf and the Watchman” is a cerebral, immersive page-turner whose detective is a rationalist trapped in a world ruled by superstition, fear, and men whose humanity has been debased and erased as surely as Karl Johan’s.

“What kind of wolf are you, then, Mr. Winge?” asks a man under interrogation. “A good wolf? A skilled hunter?” Winge replies, “No wolf at all, I’m afraid. What I do, I do not undertake in order to satisfy my bloodlust.”

Yet even a righteous man may fall prey to his darker impulses. Winge’s ongoing struggle to maintain a precarious balance between justice and vengeance, as well as his own life and imminent death, gives “The Wolf and the Watchman” a moral heft reminiscent of works by Graham Greene.

Natt och Dag takes some narrative risks. Divided into four parts, the book focuses on Winge and Cardell’s investigation in its first and final sections, with Winge himself growing sicker and more corpselike every day. The middle two sections jump back to the previous spring and summer: Each follows a different character whose connections to victim and killer are only gradually and chillingly revealed. It’s a strategy with an impressive payoff, as scenes that initially seemed to serve as stylistic or historical flourishes instead prove crucial to the plot, fitting together as precisely as the gears of the pocket watch Winge obsessively takes apart and puts back together.

“The Wolf and the Watchman” makes sly use of the conventions of the modern police procedural: the coolly clinical investigator and his brawling sidekick; the furtive dance between corrupt police commissioners and their politician puppet-masters; even the coffee-swilling Stockholm policemen who avidly avail themselves of the still-novel beverage. The last 50 pages provide plenty of twists to satisfy thrill-starved readers, but it’s the final haunting sentence that raises gooseflesh and leaves one reaching to turn up the light.

Elizabeth Hand’s  novel “Curious Toys” will be published this fall.

THE WOLF AND THE WATCHMAN

By Niklas Natt och Dag

Atria. 373 pp. $27

Originally published at WashingtonPost.com.

Femininjas: Women in Fiction Fight Back

In Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium series—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.—a disaffected teenaged rape survivor, Lisbeth Salander, kicks ass and takes names. Readers and critics hailed Larsson’s creation as groundbreaking. To pick just one representative case, Michiko Kakutani, in her review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, calls Salander “one of the most original characters in a thriller to come along in a while: . . . the vulnerable victim turned vigilante; a willfully antisocial girl.” One would think the critics had never seen a woman in pants before, let alone one who can hold her own against the patriarchy.

And perhaps they never have, in which case introductions are a couple thousand years overdue. “Let no man think I’m a trivial woman, a feeble one who sits there passively,” Euripides’ Medea announces. “No, I’m a different sort—dangerous to enemies, but well disposed to friends. Lives like mine achieve the greatest glory.”

Ah, Medea—the first bad girl of literature, if one discounts Lilith, who’s never given a chance to voice her own opinion of Adam before he dumps her for Eve. Medea, the raging fury, is most remarkable not so much for her extensive list of crimes, knowledge of poisons, or lack of what modern readers might call sympathetic traits as for her unrepentant, single-minded desire for vengeance against her two-timing lover, Jason. First she poisons his innocent bride, gloating at the news of her anguished death. Then, with her own hands, though not without some protracted anguish of her own, she kills her two young children by Jason. Refusing the grief-stricken Jason a final embrace of the boys’ corpses, she gives him a terse kiss-off—“Your words are wasted.”

Medea might cast a cold eye on Larsson’s characterization of Salander as a near-anorexic, childlike waif who musters almost superhuman powers in her own quest for vengeance. Emphasizing Salander’s youth and gamine appearance evokes some disturbing similarities with Bella—the weirdly infantilized, profoundly unsexy narrator of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series—and with Fifty Shades of Grey’s equally dumb and vanilla BDSM protagonist Anastasia, whose college education might have benefited from a SparkNotes reading of Mary Gaitskill and Mrs. Gaskell.

Whatever might be said about these popular 21st-century novels, they can’t be described as feminist works, books that advocate for, and present a vision of, equality between women and men. Larsson’s novels come closest, although their depiction of Lisbeth as a sociopath, irrevocably and pathologically damaged by her rape, is an uncomfortable reminder that, in popular culture, rape survivors are still defined by their trauma. Recent statistics indicate that one in six women will be the victim of a violent sexual assault or an attempted assault. Add to that the number of sexual assaults that go unreported, and you have a vast number of potential sociopaths.

The truth is that many of us who survived rape have gone on to live relatively normal lives, despite suffering from post-traumatic stress and other psychological disorders. I sometimes wonder if the success of books such as Twilight and Fifty Shades is itself a form of mass PTSD or Stockholm syndrome—a reaction to the ubiquity of violence against women and to the way in which stories of sexual violence, real or feigned, have become a culturally accepted form of entertainment; and a reaction to the often intolerable pressures of living in a world where power is still mostly in the hands of men.

But even Larsson doesn’t venture far enough into this battleground. Lisbeth, for all her violence, does not reject her objectification in male fantasies. However, some recent novels feature female protagonists who do, genuinely, transgress in this way. They are, to borrow a coinage from poets Charmira Nelson and Kai Davis, “femininjas”: women characters who utilize stealth, exile, and cunning, not to mention subterfuge and hand-to-hand combat, in their efforts to fight back.

• • •

“This is the story of Bella,” Helen Zahavi writes, opening her debut novel, Dirty Weekend. “She’s no one special. England’s full of wounded people. . . . You must have seen them. You’ve probably passed them. You’ve certainly stepped on them.”

First published in 1991 to considerable controversy, Dirty Weekend was republished last year in an electronic edition after being out of print, and thank God for that. Unquestionably ahead of its time, the book has been unjustly forgotten, despite (or maybe because of) its Hollywood adaptation directed by Michael Winner of Death Wish infamy.

Zahavi’s novel takes place in Brighton, also the setting for Graham Greene’s great noir Brighton Rock. (Dirty Weekend’s original cover art features a crushed stick of Brighton rock, the phallus-shaped candy that gave Greene’s novel its name.) Bella has a few things in common with Greene’s innocently oblivious heroine Rose. Both have symbolically charged names; both come under the microscopic, deranged scrutiny of sociopathic men; both undergo a powerful religious experience during a nightmarish narrative of Brighton’s underworld.

A minor difference is that Rose’s epiphany revolves around self-deluding religious belief, whereas Bella’s involves the inexpert yet highly satisfying deployment of a hammer into a man’s face.

Bella lives in a spectacularly grim basement bedsit: lightless, clammy, smelling of drains. She’s a “good loser”:

All she wanted was to be left alone, which didn’t seem a lot to ask. She expected little, and received less, and thanked her gods for what she got. . . . it was a dull, grey life, a mutant kind of life, an abortion of a life. But it was hers, and she accepted it.

Bella is one of “the women men don’t see”—to crib the title of a classic story by the American writer James Tiptree Jr., whose real name was Alice Sheldon—until she is seen, in the worst possible way, by a psychotic voyeur in a flat that overlooks hers. Zahavi’s descriptions of Bella’s initial contact with her stalker, Tim, are terrifying; they eschew the sickly pornification of such encounters in too many novels and films. Instead, Zahavi captures the horrific banality of a stalker’s obsession, how in repetition it becomes ritualized sexual behavior.

“Cheap women buy cheap curtains,” Tim says when he first calls Bella, who has an unlisted phone number.

I can see the shape of you through the material. When you have the light on I can see you moving about. I like the way you move. I like looking down and seeing you move and knowing you’re in there. I can tell by the way you move that you know I’m watching you. You’ve got a kind of look-at-me way of moving. It’s naughty of you, to move like that, when you know I’m watching.

The stalker becomes more suggestive, and more threatening, until Bella finally takes action and contacts the one person she believes can help her—not a member of the local constabulary or rape crisis unit, but an Iranian self-professed clairvoyant who goes by the unlikely name of Nimrod. It’s one of the novel’s longest and funniest set pieces, and not without its own horrors: a former journalist, Nimrod lost a hand for his political beliefs. He elicits from Bella the revelation that she used to be a prostitute, then asks, “Tell me what frightens you.”

‘Everything frightens me.’
‘What above all?’
‘Men,’ she said. ‘Men frighten me.’
‘You’ve known many men. You know their weakness. You know their cowardice. What is there to fear?’
‘Their hunger frightens me. The way they look at me frightens me. What I read in their eyes frightens me.’
‘And what do you read?’
‘What they want they must possess. What they can’t possess they must penetrate. What they can’t penetrate they must destroy.’

Bella’s responses become a litany: she is creating her own ritual. And as many rituals do, this one demands a sacrifice. Nimrod gives her a switchblade, along with a brief lecture:

‘For most people,’ he said, ‘The world is divided into murderers, victims, and spectators . . . . You must choose what you will be.’

‘I want to be a spectator.’

‘You don’t have that option.’

‘So I have no choice.’

‘You have a choice.’

‘What choice?’

‘The only choice . . . . Take the knife.’

She does, and she goes hunting.

We’ve been through first-wave, second-wave, third-wave, and now fourth-wave and no-wave feminism. In their gleeful nihilism, books such as Zahavi’s might be seen as exemplars of post-wave feminism. In Dirty Weekend, Zahavi unapologetically stacks the deck against the Y chromosome. Bella is a modern Circe: within a short time of meeting her, each man she encounters turns into a grunting, heaving, lust-addled pig, and she slaughters every one of them.

“You see them on the screen,” Zahavi writes of the men whose fantasies repeat in every medium, “trying not to smirk as they sit there in their freshly laundered linen . . . . And running through it all, bubbling away beneath the surface, you hear the self-justifying snivel of the unrepentant rapist.”

Bella’s killing spree is a fantasy of another sort, a distaff fantasy. Like the eponymous heroine of Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel about a twentieth-century witch who strikes a deal with Satan to escape male tyranny, Bella upends the usual relation in which men see in women only what they want to see—objects of lust. She casts her spell, and now men see only what she wants them to see. She is Wedekind’s Lulu with an Italian automatic, and the ending of Dirty Weekend is an obvious homage to Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s unforgettable silent film Pandora’s Box (1929), down to the confrontation with a knife-wielding serial killer who preys on women, in both versions named Jack (as in the Ripper). Only instead of dying in Jack’s embrace, as Louise Brooks’s Lulu does in the film, Bella guts him.

“To stab him, she discovered, was to know him,” Zahavi writes, and as Bella savages the beast, it would take a heart of stone not to cheer.

Or perhaps not, if you’re a man. Dirty Weekend’s final lines are as minatory and sinister as anything in recent fiction. Mothers, lock up your sons.

• • •

Cara Hoffman’s So Much Pretty (2011) opens with a description of another anonymous victim:

They are looking for someone with blond or dark brown or black hair.

Someone with blue or maybe brown or green eyes. She could be five foot six or five-eight. Her hair could also be red, could be an unnatural color like pink or white.

It is likely she weighs between 110 and 140 pounds and may have a scar or bruise on her throat.

She would be working somewhere unseen. Working as a waitress or secretary or laborer. She could be a student. . . .

She could be hitchhiking or taking public transportation, could be walking. She could be named Jamie, or Catherine, or Liz. Alexandra, Annie, Maria. Any name at all. . . .

As we are well aware, it is easy for a woman who fits this description to just disappear.

As we are well aware, it is easy for any woman to disappear. Perhaps the sole common denominator in the novels discussed here is women’s deeply embedded fear of annihilation. Not necessarily fear of death or murder, though those are certainly on the table, but the far more generalized, frightening, existential dread that the critic John Clute calls “vastation”: a fear of obliteration, of being swallowed by the abyss, of being erased.

Again and again in these novels, a woman’s sense of her own identity comes under threat, and we witness it dissolve like a body in lime.

In Sophie Hannah’s The Other Woman’s House, Tana French’s Broken Harbor, Mo Hayder’s Gone, and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the danger appears to come from a husband. In Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, set in the hothouse adolescent world of competitive cheerleading, it comes from another girl. In other books, it’s an entire culture—California’s porn movie industry in Christa Faust’s Money Shot, the Arab world in Zoë Ferraris’s City of Veils, the diseased American heartland in Hoffman’s So Much Pretty.

Hoffman is a former journalist who covered upstate New York’s rust belt. In So Much Pretty, her first novel, that experience bleeds into her characterization of Stacey Flynn, a small-town reporter investigating the disappearance of a young local waitress named Wendy White. The hard-drinking Stacey is fueled by rage; she isn’t obsessed with vengeance but rather with justice:

‘You know, I spent most of today on the phone with the Bureau of Crime Statistics . . . . I looked up the names of all the women who were murdered this year—and the subcategory of all the women who were murdered by their boyfriends or husbands or guys they’d dated. . . .

‘If you wanted to make a memorial for those women who died in that kind of violence throughout history—which no one does, of course—but if you did you would be carving names at roughly the same rate the crimes are being committed. If you wanted a historical monument—you know, one that had casualties, beatings, rapes, disfigurations—you’d need something like the Great Wall of China.’

Hoffman isn’t interested in designing a memorial for those women, but in righting the balance of power between men and women—and not through discussion or education, political empowerment or economic equity, but by the means men have traditionally used: violence, directed at both guilty and innocent.

She creates a heroine who becomes a real-life action hero—Alice Piper, the precocious fifteen-year-old daughter of almost pathologically optimistic artists who moved upstate from the Lower East Side in search of a more authentic, rural life in the town of Haeden, a place that’s been literally poisoned by the agribusiness that bought out its failing dairy farms.

A casual friend of the missing Wendy, Alice is a loner who wishes the kindly older girl hadn’t graduated from high school before Alice started her freshman year. Hoffman—for whom fairy tales such as Peter Pan and Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories are obvious reference points—has said that she’s given her young protagonist the sort of origin story one usually associates with superheroes, though Alice has no actual superpowers. She is, however, an exceptionally gifted child and a superb swimmer. Her one close friendship is with a similarly intellectually precocious boy who, like herself, is an outsider among Haeden’s claustrophobic, small-minded populace. Hoffman doesn’t mince words in her depiction of Haeden, or of anything else for that matter. As Stacey puts it in a diatribe directed against her male employer, Scoop:

‘You’re here because you are comfortable around stupid people. You know they’re easy to exploit. And the cost of living is cheap. There’s about one hundred of you who are even capable of abstract thought! And even those people are nearly unintelligible. . . . I don’t need to learn how to speak your fucking language, because your language is being eradicated, thank fucking God! Do you know that word? “Eradicated”? Your life, your way, your language. And for a good fucking reason. It’s all bullshit!’

Scoop merely gapes at Stacey in disbelief: “He had never in his life seen anyone behave like that.”

Poor Scoop should get used to it. Stacey isn’t the only woman turning a Medusa’s gaze upon the men of Haeden. Alice is young enough, smart enough, strong enough, and idealistic enough that when her ideals are shattered, she adopts a scorched-earth policy toward evildoers. Like Zahavi’s Bella, Alice is a maenad with a mission.

Wendy, the missing waitress, shows up dead after having been abducted, held captive, and repeatedly gang-raped. In the hallways at school, Alice overhears a group of boys talking about the rape and realizes they are the perpetrators.

She doesn’t go to the police with the information. Instead she starts to educate herself by reading about similar crimes.

“These were things I didn’t know about,” Alice realizes.

My mother and father never told me about these things. They gave me books to read. Theory and philosophy. Ideas about why the culture is the way it is. But we didn’t talk specifically about who was doing these things. . . . It was a big gap in my education.

Quick study that she is, Alice immediately grasps who is doing these things, and who did them to Wendy:

Men raped her, men killed her, men dumped her, men found her, men are examining her remains, men are looking for the men who did it. Then the men who did it will be represented in court by men, and a man will make the decision based on laws men made throughout the legal history of this country.

Like Zahavi, Hoffman has no compunction about stacking the deck against the opposite sex. It would take centuries, perhaps millennia, to compensate for all those female corpses. Alice and Bella are simply making up for lost time.

“Research is essential in making any rational decision,” Alice states in one of the novel’s most chilling lines. So Much Pretty isn’t satire, but there are Swiftian echoes in Alice’s actions and in her revelation that “my parents, whom I love, were utterly wrong.”

All the boys I had ignored or pitied or excused throughout school were also something else. They were something entirely different.

After Wendy White’s body was found, I saw the world as it was for the first time. When her body was found, I was also found. I woke up in her grave and gazed down at my legs, took in the power of my lungs, my biceps, my hands, and knew what they were for.

The ending of So Much Pretty is controversial and shocking. On her high school’s Spirit Day, when many of the students wear costumes, Alice dresses in a mermaid wig and glitter makeup, pulls a gun out of her backpack, and starts shooting boys. It’s a horrifying scene, difficult to read, difficult even to write about, especially for a parent, which Hoffman is. The final body count is seven: Alice kills the boys who preyed on Wendy; she also kills innocent male bystanders. As her chilling earlier revelation has made clear, Alice’s response to the boys’ behavior is rational and in kind, with a Glock 37 pistol. She’s now playing the same game they are, only on the girls’ team. She’s just leveling the playing field.

One of the police officers—a woman—who books Alice as a possible suspect notes of the prisoners with whom Alice is briefly incarcerated,

Alice Piper, if she was guilty, had done something I’m sure a lot of them dreamed about. Hell, I think there’s girls not even in jail who’ve had those feelings.

There’s a lot of angry girls in here. That’s just how it is. Put two and two together. You can see it in their faces. None of them were shedding tears over what happened at Haeden High.

Hoffman says that So Much Pretty is only in part about male hatred of women. It’s also a full-bore attack on the commodification of violence against women, so deeply embedded in our culture that we no longer notice how sick it is.

“Every single day, every half hour, someone is disposing of a woman’s life,” she said in an interview. “And that is very entertaining in this country. Look at CSI—it usually begins with a female victim. Look at the news. As much as possible, media links to sex. You see a piece about a man who sets his girlfriend on fire; the picture is of her in a bikini.”

In popular culture, women who don’t play by the rules tend to either be killed or to choose their own annihilation. Even Beth, the manipulative, perhaps sociopathic head cheerleader who wreaks havoc in Abbott’s Dare Me, in part because she’s spurned by the girl she loves, deliberately takes a near-fatal swan dive in front of a packed gymnasium during the team’s final competition.

Alice Piper isn’t self-destructive. Alice Piper doesn’t fit the diagnostic criteria for a sociopath. She’s not impulsive; she has no record of violent behavior; she’s not a compulsive liar, or antisocial, or emotionally detached. She’s a precocious child who has an abrupt and terrible moment of clarity when she sees the world for what it is—a place where the balance of power is determined by violence, lies, and cunning. To seize power from the enemy, one must learn to use his weapons.

In this, as in so many other things, Alice is a quick learner.

• • •

Amy, the charmingly narcissistic antiheroine of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), really is a sociopath. The “treasured only child of creative-genius parents,” Amy is a wealthy writer possessed of her own creative genius, though we don’t see it in action till halfway through Flynn’s sublimely clever novel.

Gone Girl opens with the frantic efforts of Amy’s husband, Nick, to prove himself innocent when Amy goes missing. Their living room shows signs of a desperate struggle.

Nick knocks back more than a few stiff ones after Amy disappears, and just about everything suggests that he murdered her. The most damning evidence is Amy’s diary, which recounts all the sweet little events and memories they shared during their marriage, and Nick’s gradual unraveling after he loses his job. As one entry reads, “Being married to Nick always reminds me: People have to do awful things for money.”

Do the awful things include bludgeoning your sweet, patient, loving wife and then dumping the body in the Mississippi? Poor Amy!

But two hundred pages in, we find ourselves reading about the real Amy. “Not Diary Amy, who is a work of fiction (and Nick said I wasn’t really a writer, and why did I ever listen to him?), but me, Actual Amy.”

Unlike Diary Amy, Actual Amy is a cold-eyed chameleon who expertly impersonates the kind of woman she believes a man wants. In fact she’s more basilisk than chameleon, and herkilling gaze nails both men and women; her tongue drips acid and some nasty truths: not only are we faking it in bed, but we don’t really like football, either.

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. . . .

Cool Girl . . . is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: ‘I like strong women.’ If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because ‘I like strong women’ is code for ‘I hate strong women.’)

Gone Girl topped out at number one on Publishers Weekly’s hardcover fiction bestseller list. It’s a brilliant novel, witty and creepy and often hilarious. But I have to wonder how many women laughed out loud once Actual Amy took over the page, and how many boyfriends and husbands cringed. Nick isn’t a rapist or an abusive partner. He’s sexy, intelligent, and mostly supportive. He communicates well and seems eager to please his romantic partner. His mortal sin is to be taken aback when, after two years of marriage, Amy stops pretending to want to be a Penthouse centerfold:

I hated Nick for being surprised when I became me. I hated him for not knowing it had to end, for truly believing he had married this creature, this figment of the imagination of a million masturbatory men, semen-fingered and self-satisfied. He truly seemed astonished when I asked him to listen to me. He couldn’t believe I didn’t love wax-stripping my pussy raw and blowing him on request. That I did mind when he didn’t show up for drinks with my friends. . . . That awful phrase men use: ‘I mean, I know you wouldn’t mind if I . . .’ Yes, I do mind. Just say it. Don’t lose, you dumb little twat.

• • •

In “The Women Men Don’t See,” Tiptree’s notorious 1973 story, Mrs. Parsons and her daughter are vacationing in Mexico. When their plane crashes, they’re marooned in the Yucatan with a fellow American who feels his job is to “protect” them, even as he casually contemplates rape:

The woman doesn’t mean one thing to me, but the obtrusive recessiveness of her, the defiance of her little rump eight inches from my fly—for two pesos I’d have those shorts down and introduce myself.

At the story’s close, the narrator is stunned when the Parsons opt to take their chances with an alien spaceship rather than remain safely with him. “Do all Mrs. Parsons’s friends hold themselves in readiness for any eventuality,” he wonders, “including leaving Earth?”

Maybe. “What women do is survive,” Mrs. Parson tells him at one point. “We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.”

What women do in the books mentioned here doesn’t consist of survival so much as sabotage. They throw bricks and rocks and flaming bottles into the chinks of the masculine world machine, then pick up a gun and fire into the turning gears. If rape and other sexual violence, religious servitude, and the politically determined inaccessibility of contraception can be seen as acts of war, stories like these may not just be a means of escapism. In the mind’s eye, they might be weapons, to be picked up, opened, and deployed.

Originally published on BostonReview.net.