Laura van den Berg's 'Find Me' captures a memorable apocalypse

Author Laura Van den Berg (Paul Yoon, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux)

Ninety-five years ago T.S. Eliot published "The Wasteland," one of the first and bleakest visions of a shattered modern world. Nearly a century later, we're awash in fictional dystopias. Science fiction writers tilled this stony ground for decades before the current vogue for grim variants of the Way We Live Now made bestsellers out of "The Road" and "Station Eleven" and created a vast marketing category for publishers of YA books such as "The Hunger Games" and "Divergent."

But if the dystopia bubble bursts, as the horror market did in the early 1990s, we may see an entirely new wasteland emerge. What dystopic novels might survive a literary apocalypse?

Laura van den Berg's "Find Me" has a good shot. The award-winning author of two acclaimed story collections, Van den Berg now uses her gift for capturing the disturbingly elegiac qualities of 21st century life to heartbreaking effect in this, her first novel.

Set in a near-future U.S. blighted by disastrous climate change and a baffling, incurable new disease, the book is narrated by Joy, a young woman abandoned as an infant by her mother. Joy spends her first 18 years in a series of grim group and foster homes around Boston. It's a life shaped by isolation, loss and yearning for an unrecoverable past: excellent preparation for the catastrophic events that overtake the country in the wake of a "memory-destroying epidemic."

Within a few months, hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from a mysterious and highly contagious disease that appeared suddenly in Bakersfield. The disease's primary symptoms are silver blisters on the skin, and abrupt memory loss that ends in total amnesia. Nineteen-year-old Joy is seemingly immune. She and others who appear to be immune are brought to a creepy hospital in a desolate part of Kansas, where their health is monitored by a skeleton staff overseen by the ominous Dr. Bek.

The patients aren't allowed to leave the building. They're permitted only two supervised Internet sessions a week, when they catch up with the bad news in the outside world, and check government websites like WeAreSorryForYourLoss.com, which keeps a list of those who've died in the epidemic.

Joy's confinement is elegantly rendered by Van den Berg in the first half of "Find Me." The claustrophobic atmosphere and emphasis on maintaining a normal facade under extraordinarily abnormal and dangerous circumstances evoke novels like Chris Adrian's "The Children's Hospital" and Victor Lavalle's "The Devil in Silver," set in surreal, disintegrating medical institutions. Like those books, "Find Me" teeters between realistic depictions of a fragmenting social order, and a more visionary style.

In an interview last year, Van den Berg spoke of her desire to capture the apocalyptic mood of contemporary life in a novel. "I really wanted to take that weather, that atmosphere, and ask: what might be the tipping point?" Yet the apocalyptic mood here feels more dreamlike and fuzzily rendered than that of other near-future novels. It's unclear why the staff members remain at the hospital, how or if they're paid, or why such a place escapes any federal or local oversight. And the catastrophic breakdown of American society, while well described, happens with somewhat unconvincing swiftness, in service of the plot.

But Van den Berg seems less concerned with creating a believable near-future than she is with depicting a psyche surviving, and perhaps ultimately thriving, despite incalculable trauma. In the hospital one day, Joy watches the Discovery Channel and inadvertently learns the identity of her mother, who is alive in Key West, Fla. "How strange it is to watch her past become animated, to no longer wonder where and how her life was unfolding, but to know."

The latter part of "Find Me" chronicles Joy's search for her mother. As the last inhabitants of the hospital succumb to the virus, Joy alone remains immune and makes her escape. Somewhat improbably, she meets up with someone from her early life who becomes a fellow sojourner across the ruined American landscape. If these scenes lack the visceral power of the novel's first part, that may be because we've grown inured to images of devastation, both fictional and real.

Where Van den Berg excels is in her radiant prose and delicate descriptions of small, strange moments of being. Dozens of children nestled in the treetops; a young man wearing a plastic fur rabbit mask on a bus; a friend's death from the memory sickness.

"I reach for his chest through the plastic. He looks down at my hand like it's a foreign thing. He's breathing again, quick and grasping. His eyes are the color of a bleached winter sky. He can no longer speak, he can only listen, so I will have to invent for him something beautiful."

From this memorable novel's eerie first paragraph to its enigmatic ending, Laura van den Berg has invented something beautiful indeed.

Hand's forthcoming novels are "Wylding Hall" and "Hard Light."

Find Me: A Novel
Laura van den Berg
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 288 pp, $26

Originally posted on LaTimes.com.

‘The Last American Vampire,’ by Seth Grahame-Smith

History buffs with a sense of humor and an unslaked thirst for the macabre will find much to savor in “The Last American Vampire,” Seth Grahame-Smith’s latest, delightfully loopy riff on our nation’s past. The novel takes up where its predecessor, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” (2010 ), left off, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Confederacy and Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth .

Only now, Honest Abe isn’t dead. He has been brought back to life by Henry Sturges, the same vampire who enlisted Lincoln in the ongoing battle between the forces of good (human and vampire) and those evil bloodsuckers in the South who used slavery as part of their food chain. By making Abe immortal, the 300-year-old Sturges has violated one of the prime directives of the Union of Vampires, whose aim is to protect and respect the dominion of humans.

“The world had quite enough vampires already, thank you very much. Too many, in fact. And when too many vampires settled in one place, bad things happened, as recent American history had proven. . . . Vampires possessed of such cruelty could never be allowed to concentrate such power again.”

Horrified by his old friend’s betrayal of the union’s cause, Abe promptly jumps out the window into broad daylight and self-immolates. Grief-stricken Sturges spends the next two decades maintaining a low profile, until 1888 when he receives a summons to the union’s headquarters in New York City. There, the union’s unofficial leader, Adam Plantagenet (born in 1305), shows him five ornately carved wooden boxes. Each contains the mutilated head of one of the union’s overseas emissaries, along with an identical handwritten note.

“No more Americans, Regards, A. Grander VIII”

Plantagenet dispatches Sturges to Europe to track down and destroy the mysterious Grander. And the fun begins.

“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” was a sloppy, turgid mess, gruesome and unappealing as fresh roadkill. “The Last American Vampire” is far superior and is a surprisingly funny, antic sequel that’s like a delirious mash-up of the Web series “Drunk History” and the gothic 1960s soap opera “Dark Shadows.” The novel’s basic premise is clever and efficient. As we learn in a dramatic flashback, the young and then-mortal Henry Sturges arrived on North American soil in 1587, part of the group of English colonists who settled at Roanoke Island more than 30 years before the Mayflower arrived. Not long after, he’s made into a vampire against his will, though he quickly sees the advantages of his fate:

“Imagine experiencing color for the first time. Crystal clarity and three-dimensional sight and sounds for the first time. Imagine having your senses expanded beyond what you ever considered possible. The curtains pulled back on a world you never could have imagined in the static of your little black-and-white mind. That’s what it is to be a vampire.”

The transformation allows Sturges to function as an undead Zelig for the next few centuries — a witness to, and often a participant in, just about every crucial (and usually catastrophic) event in U.S. and European history, from the fate of Roanoke’s lost colony to the fall of the Twin Towers. Along the way, he encounters John Smith and Pocahontas;Victorian author Henry Irving and his manager, Bram Stoker; Abraham Lincoln, of course; Mark Twain; Nikola Tesla; Rasputin; and Jack the Ripper.

As the 20th century dawns, Sturges meets with President Teddy Roosevelt, who has recently taken office after the assassination of President William McKinley. The blustering Roosevelt calls out Sturges and his kind for shirking their patriotic duty:

“ ‘Either you’re an American and nothing else, from your boots to your hat, or you’re not an American at all!’

“ ‘What you ask is too much for one man.’

“ ‘That’s why I didn’t ask a man to do it.’

“A fair point, thought Henry.”

Sturges becomes an undercover U.S. agent, his work dovetailing handily with his quest to stop the elusive A. Grander, who is still slaughtering vampires. He swiftly earns the respect of his boss, as Grahame-Smith recounts in one of myriad deadpan asides: “When Teddy Roosevelt uttered his immortal line, ‘Speak softly, and carry a big stick,’ he was talking about Henry Sturges.”

The action unfolds at a breakneck pace, and if the novel is more picaresque than tightly plotted thriller, that just adds to the gleeful, “can you top this?” tone and the sense that the author is very much in on the joke. This time, Grahame-Smith wisely withholds most of the gore until the final pages, when it’s doled out generously and in service of truth, justice and the American way. Grahame-Smith’s legion of fans will revel in the proceedings.

And new readers will swiftly find themselves learning things they never learned in civics class, chief among them the basics of vampire hunting: “(1) Don’t get near the head, and (2) when in doubt, run away.”

Originally posted on WashingtonPost.com.

'American Grotesque' resurrects William Mortensen's photos

It's hard to imagine two 20th century American photographers more diametrically opposed than the macabre visionary William Mortensen and Ansel Adams, poster boy for so-called straight photography. Google Ansel Adams and you get a Sierra Club Calendar-ready black-and-white photo of the Grand Tetons. Do the same for William Mortensen and you get what appears to be an etching of a naked nubile witch perched provocatively on a broomstick.

Odds are that Adams rings a bell but that you've never heard of Mortensen, subject of a splendid new book, "American Grotesque: The Life and Art of William Mortensen," the most extensive work on one of the strangest and most compelling artists of the 20th century.

Yet at the height of his fame in the 1930s, Mortensen was perhaps the best-known practitioner of his craft: the first photographer-as-celebrity. Born in Utah in 1897, he studied at the Art Students League in New York, traveled briefly to Greece before returning to Park City, where he dated a young woman named Willow Fay. In 1921, he loaded his motorcycle's sidecar with photographic equipment and drove to Hollywood, where he acted as chaperone to Willow Fay's 14-year-old sister, Vina, one of his first photographic models.

Determined to find work as an actress, Vina soon changed her name to Fay Wray. She sent her mother copies of the photos Mortensen had taken of her, artfully draped in crepe de chine. Wray mére subsequently hot-tailed it to Hollywood. There she confronted Mortensen and, in an eerie foreshadowing of his work's later disappearance from the public eye, destroyed the glass negatives he'd taken of her daughter.

In Hollywood, Mortensen worked with Cecil B. DeMille — he was the first photographer to shoot still photos on set rather than posed in a studio. He went on to photograph Jean Harlow, Lon Chaney Sr., John Barrymore, Rudolf Valentino and Norma Shearer, and he created a series of disturbing masks for Chaney's star turn as a wheelchair-bound stage magician in "West of Zanzibar," a lurid film directed by Tod Browning, later notorious for "Freaks."

From the outset, Mortensen's subject matter was unabashedly theatrical, bizarre and often louche. He was an ardent admirer of Goya and Daumier, and with his Hollywood access to costumes, sets, makeup and masks, would create elaborate tableaux vivants in his studio. He mastered the bromoil process early on and later developed and refined his own techniques for lighting, multiple exposures and the like. He was most famous (and later infamous) for retouching prints (though seldom negatives) with the abrasion control process, which used razor blades, carbon pencil, ink, powder tone, sable brush, eraser, pumice. The resulting images are almost indistinguishable from etchings or paintings.

As the years passed, his work increasingly tended toward the gothic, a trend enhanced after he met occultist Manly P. Hall in 1926. This is when Mortensen began to produce his best and strangest work, the "Pictorial History of Witchcraft and Demonology." Many of these photos are gorgeously reproduced in "American Grotesque" for the first time, along with equally strange and compelling images that first appeared in Mortensen's two masterworks, "Monsters and Madonnas: A Book of Methods" and "The Command to Look: A Master Photographer's Method for Controlling the Human Gaze."

"The Command to Look" developed a (literal) cult following after Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, name-checked Mortensen's work as influential in "The Satanic Bible" [1969]. Feral House has reprinted Mortensen's long out-of-print book in a handsome new edition with an excellent intro by Larry Lytle and an amusing afterword by Michael Moynihan on Mortensen's influence on modern Satanism.

In the 1930s, Mortensen left Hollywood and founded his own school of photography in Laguna Beach, where his students included Hollywood cinematographers and silent film stars. His photos appeared in Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times and Theater Magazine, among many others. His how-to books, written with his friend George Dunham, went into multiple printings, and his name was used to sell photographic equipment: "Made for Mortensen — Available To You!"

He was the first photographer to become a name brand, as Lytle writes in "American Grotesque": a precursor to Warhol, Mortensen's influence can be seen today in the work of Cindy Sherman, Joel-Peter Witkin and fashion photographer Steven Klein, to name only a few.

So if Mortensen's name and work still don't ring a bell, you might blame Ansel Adams.

The photographers sparred publicly in serialized essays that ran in the pages of Camera Craft magazine in 1934. Adams' contribution was "An Exposition of My Photographic Technique," in which the relatively unknown photographer laid out the tenets of the San Francisco-based f/64 Group he'd organized two years earlier with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, among others.

In his essay, Adams stated: "Photography is an objective expression; a record of actuality." Mortensen's essay, "Venus and Vulcan: An Essay on Creative Pictorialism," countered that "the ideal they [Group f/64] have set up of complete literal recording is a very primitive one — a good beginning but not an end in itself."

Tragically, Mortensen was on the losing side of this particular artistic skirmish. According to critic A.D. Coleman, the artists and critics associated with Group f/64, especially Adams and his friends Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, "loathed Mortensen with a passion bordering on religious crusading. By the time Mortensen died [in 1965], they'd seemingly won the war between their camp and his, and had long since adopted a scorched-earth policy."

Mortensen's work soon disappeared from critical discourse, and even his photographic archive (somewhat mysteriously) all but vanished. In a letter published in the World Journal of Post-Factory Photography [August 2000], Coleman "lays the blame for that squarely on the doorstep of Newhall, Adams, and the others whose active hostility to Mortensen's work virtually ensured that, at his death in 1965, no respectable repository would have considered acquiring and preserving his materials."

"American Grotesque" recounts this conflict, and much more, in a long-overdue assessment of Mortensen's work and aesthetic philosophy. The book includes a thoughtful biography by Lytle; the complete text of "Venus and Vulcan"; and A.D. Coleman's influential, caustic essay "Conspicuous by His Absence: Concerning the Mysterious Disappearance of William Mortensen," along with a stunningly reproduced gallery of Mortensen's images, many of them published here for the first time.

Group f/64 abhorred Mortensen's manipulation of "reality," his unabashedly Romantic stance. The Newhalls found his photos and philosophy "perverse" and in bad taste.

This is often true. Mortensen's work embraced the gothic, the occult and the trappings of sexual fetishism (especially bondage). Some of the photos reproduced in "American Grotesque," like "Untitled (abduction by monks)," are unintentionally hilarious. Others are merely camp. He had a legendary predilection for shooting female nudes and as his career declined produced way too many of the cheesecake photos he himself had once deplored.

Yet much of Mortensen's work retains its power to haunt, if not shock, viewers whose sensibilities have been numbed by a 24/7 news cycle reliant on disturbing imagery. He believed that "the Grotesque becomes important. … It is recognizably our world that Romance deals with, but somehow transfigured by mystery and surprise, and illuminated with strange lights."

And his writings, especially on the uses of propagandist images and the limits of straight photography — "a good beginning but not an end in itself" — have proved to be amazingly prescient in our post-Photoshop, Instagram world. He recognized early on that visionary photographers could "push their optical equipment to strange extremes, not to reveal unimportant detail, nor as a mere technical stunt, but because the result is beautiful. … [They] represent a phase of pictorial photography whose very existence is barely glimpsed, and whose potentialities are at this time unpredictable."

Adams and Group f/64 may have won a battle over photography's future, but nearly 50 years after his death and decades of obscurity, Mortensen appears to have won the war. His archive now resides in the collection of the Center for Creative Photography, along with those of Adams (one of CCP's founders), Weston, Cunningham and Van Dyke.

Hand's forthcoming novels are "Hard Light" and "Wylding Hall."

American Grotesque: The Life and Art of William Mortensen
Edited by Larry Lytle and Michael Moynihan
Feral House, 287 pp, $45

The Command to Look: A Master Photographer's Method for Controlling the Human Gaze
By William Mortensen & George Dunham
Feral House, 232 pp, $20 paper

Originally posted on LATimes.com.

Book review: ‘Revival,’ by Stephen King

"Revival" is Stephen King’s latest novel. (Scribner)

"Revival" is Stephen King’s latest novel. (Scribner)

Stephen King’s splendid new novel, “Revival,” offers the atavistic pleasure of drawing closer to a campfire in the dark to hear a tale recounted by someone who knows exactly how to make every listener’s flesh crawl when he whispers, “Don’t look behind you.” King has always been generous in acknowledging the inspiration for his fiction. With “Revival,” he names Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1894), one of the greatest supernatural tales ever written.

King updates Machen’s fin-de-siècle setting and erotic subtext, in which a 17-year-old girl is subjected to a primitive lobotomy that allows her to glimpse the terrifying abyss that underlies our world. “Revival” opens in a place nearly as remote from our modern world as Machen’s gaslit London: rural Harlow, Maine, in the early 1960s. Jamie Morton, the novel’s narrator, recalls an incident from when he was 6 years old, the youngest of five children in a boisterous, big-hearted clan. He’s outside playing with his toy soldiers when a stranger appears:

“On top he was wearing a black-for-church jacket and a black shirt with a notched collar; on the bottom blue jeans and scuffed loafers. It was like he wanted to be two different people at the same time.”

The stranger is Charles Jacobs, Harlow’s new Methodist minister, happily married, with a beautiful young wife and toddler. Jacobs quickly befriends Jamie (and King immediately deflects any intimations of child abuse — this is not that story). He brings the boy to his garage to show him a wonder: a realistic tabletop model of the countryside, complete with what appears to be a real lake and miniature power pylons. With a wave of his hand, Jacobs illuminates the vista. Streetlights glow, and a figure of Jesus walks across the surface of the lake.

Jamie is amazed, even when Jacobs shares the secret of the apparent miracle: electricity, which the minister later says is “one of God’s doorways to the infinite.” Fascinated, the boy becomes a surrogate son to Jacobs, a role Jamie will continue to play long after tragedy strikes and Jacobs disappears.

All of the novel’s themes are contained in that early scene: the tug of war between science and belief; the ability of a good huckster, whether preacher or carny, to hold a crowd rapt with the promise of healing. Most of all, the novel explores the nature and abuse of power, whether it’s love, religious faith or Jacobs’s lifelong obsession, electricity.

King spins this story slowly and with great compassion for his characters, damaged as many of them are by grief and loss, addiction and disappointment; the teeth marks left by time gnawing away at youthful love and ambition. The dead-on details of Jamie’s 1960s childhood — van-choc-straw ice cream, the smell of Vitalis, a half-smoked joint hidden in a Sucrets box — give way to the joys of learning to play an electric Yamaha as Jamie embarks upon his eventual career as a session guitarist.

Happiness is notoriously difficult to make interesting in fiction. Idylls are created only to be destroyed. But King’s narrative never surrenders to mere nostalgia or contempt for the broken world that Jamie, like the rest of us, must live in as he ages.

Decades after Jacobs leaves Maine, he and Jamie meet again at a carnival. Here the former preacher, now calling himself Dan the Lightning Portraits Man, astonishes onlookers by using “secret electricity” to perform impossible feats on audience volunteers. Afterward in his workshop, Jacobs uses his secret electricity to pull off another miracle: a bit of electroconvulsive therapy that cures Jamie of his heroin addiction.

But the two part when Jamie questions Jacobs’s act and his old friend’s real intentions. “All your customers are actually guinea pigs,” Jamie notes. “They just don’t know it. I was a guinea pig.”

Years later, Jamie sees a Web site for evangelist C. Danny Jacobs, whose old-fashioned tent revival show advertises that “God heals like lightning.” Jamie finds himself drawn back into Jacobs’s malign orbit, even as he begins to track down those people who have been “healed” by the evangelist’s secret electricity but display disturbing side effects.

And here the narrative starts to dovetail with Machen’s masterpiece. King’s restrained prose explodes in an ending that combines contemporary realism with cosmic horror reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction and the classic film “Quatermass and the Pit.” The tormented relationship between Jamie Morton and Charles Jacobs takes on the funereal shading of an Arthur Miller tragedy — albeit one electrified by the power to bring the dead to life.

Hand’s short novel “Wylding Hall” will be out next year.

Revival
Stephen King
Scribner. 403 pp. $30

Originally published on WashingtonPost.com.

Book review: ‘Belzhar’ by Meg Wolitzer

”Belzhar,” by Meg Wolitzer (Dutton Juvenile)

Meg Wolitzer’s 2013 bestseller, “The Interestings,” featured a group of precocious teenagers who met at summer camp in 1974. Wolitzer’s gift for capturing youthful exuberance and insecurity in that book suggested that she’d also be a natural at writing a young-adult novel.

“Belzhar,” her first work aimed at a younger audience, is narrated by 15-year-old Jam Gallahue. For almost a year, she has been inconsolable over the death of her boyfriend, Reeve, an English exchange student. When the story opens, Jam has just arrived the Wooden Barn, a boarding school in rural Vermont that’s “sort of a halfway house between a hospital and a regular school. It’s like a big lily pad where you can linger before you have to make the frog-leap back to ordinary life.”

The school eschews drugs for treating depression or other mental illnesses. Internet and cellphones are banned. Instead, Jam and four other students are subjected to what might be called the Plath Method. They’re chosen for a class called Special Topics in English, whose elderly teacher assigns just one book a semester. This time, it’s Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar.” She also gives each student a red leather journal. Their homework: Read Plath’s novel and write in the journal twice a week.

Sound like an easy A? It turns out to be a wrenching, complicated experience. As the weeks pass, Jam and her friends discover something unnerving. The process of reading Plath and reliving their own traumas by writing them down transports them to an eerie, magical way station, a place they call Belzhar (pronounced “bell jar”). In Belzhar, Jam and her classmates find that their lives are frozen in eternal replay mode: Each relives the moments leading up to his or her trauma, but it’s an unending “before” with no “after.”

This metaphor for the grieving process makes for an uneasy amalgam of teen angst and the supernatural. Wolitzer’s first novel, “Sleepwalking,” written more than 30 years ago when Wolitzer was a college student, also deals with young people obsessed with Sylvia Plath. The teenagers in “Belzhar” seem to have been magically transported from that period to 2014. They don’t speak or interact much like contemporary adolescents. Reeve is the most egregious example, spouting lines from ancient Monty Python routines. And the perfunctory references to “The Bell Jar” seem more like canned fodder for a book group Reader’s Guide than an attempt to illuminate Plath’s life and work.

Still, Wolitzer works her own dark magic toward the end of her tale, when, as the semester draws to a close, the five friends are forced to choose between remaining in Belzhar or resuming their lives. As Jam confronts the truth about Reeve’s death, these last few chapters rewrite everything the reader knows about her — and what Jam knows about herself. And, despite its flaws, “Belzhar” finally demonstrates the power of words to heal.

Hand’s most recent novels are “Radiant Days” and “Available Dark.”

Belzhar
Meg Wolitzer
Dutton. 266 pp. $17.99. Ages 14 and up

Originally published on WashingtonPost.com.