In Austin Grossman's supernatural novel, 'Crooked,' Richard Nixon meets H.P. Lovecraft

As if American voters didn’t have enough to worry about, in the last few years, the undead and the uncanny have infiltrated the ranks of U.S. politicians in novels like Seth Grahame-Smith’s “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” and “The Last American Vampire” and Christopher Farnsworth’s wonderful Nathaniel Cade books, which star a vampire Secret Service agent bound by blood to protect the president. Fans of those books might raise an eyebrow at the White House’s decision to allow tourists to use cameras for the first time in 40 years. Garlic and silver bullets seem a safer bet than Instagram for your White House tour; stakes too, though the ban on selfie sticks makes it doubtful they’d make it through security.

“Crooked,” Austin Grossman’s clever new supernatural novel, delves into even more arcane territory. His previous works, “Soon I Will Be Invincible” and “You,” deal with superheroes and the world of video game design (Grossman worked as a game developer in the 1990s). In “Crooked,” he riffs on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos in all its eldritch glory and creates an antihero as tormented as any Marvel or DC villain: Richard Nixon, 37th president of the United States.

Nixon narrates “Crooked.” The most impressive aspect of the novel is how Grossman creates a nuanced, funny and moving characterization of a man reviled during (and after) his term of office; a Republican president whose achievements — desegregation in the South, detente with the Soviet Union, establishing a relationship with Red China — were overshadowed by the Watergate debacle and the Vietnam War (which ended during Nixon’s term in office).

“I had an ignoble knack for meanness,” Nixon admits in “Crooked.” “Reporters would get out their notebooks and scribble, nodding, knowing they had a quote … No matter how pure I seemed, righteous all the way through, there was always another me that couldn’t be put down, a sly one, a clever one, a lying one, a vicious one. I could be elected president of the whole goddamned United States but I’d always be Tricky Dick.”

This gift for moral compromise accelerates Nixon’s plunge into the supernatural maelstrom when, as a first-term Republican congressman on the House Un-American Activities Committee, he accuses Alger Hiss, a State Department employee and former Communist Party member, of being a Soviet spy. In our world, HUAC’s actions are often compared to those of a witch hunt. In “Crooked,” Nixon uncovers something far worse than witches: a cabal of Soviet agents invoking Yog-Sothoth, Elder God of the Cthulhu cycle, in a New York hotel room.

After witnessing this, Nixon is unwillingly co-opted as a Soviet asset, which he remains throughout the Cold War. Worse, he learns that the Soviets aren’t the only ones engaging in eldritch rites: In Pawtuxet, Mass., a secret government facility created and overseen by Dwight D. Eisenhower is developing even more sinister paranormal weapons to combat the Soviet threat.

“Strategic alliances with folkloric, extraplanar, and subterranean entities. Field deployment of weaponized paleofauna. Large-scale saturation of target areas with invasive fungal and floral xeno organisms …This is the Cold War now,” the president is warned by Henry Kissinger.

“My government was a stranger thing than anyone knew,” Nixon observes in one of the many deadpan asides that make “Crooked” a droll riff on 20th century politics. During his decades-long journey through the fetid swamp of American diplomacy, Nixon views human and inhuman rivals with the same jaundiced eye. He becomes increasingly estranged from his wife, Pat, who remains loyal in public even as she demands separate sleeping arrangements and reveals that she’s never voted Republican in her life.

Nixon is despised by his colleagues in Congress and the White House, and his closest and most enduring ties are to a pair of KGB operatives, Arkady and Tatiana. Their Boris and Natasha skulduggery enlivens “Crooked’s” middle section, which gets bogged down in Nixon’s thankless tenure as Eisenhower’s vice president and in Nixon’s failed 1960 presidential bid. The action picks up once Nixon takes over the Oval Office, especially after Kissinger becomes his national security advisor. Those who recall Kissinger’s seemingly superhuman flair for diplomacy will not be surprised that he is a 1,000-year-old sorcerer.

Grossman’s own impressive narrative gifts are occasionally undermined by slack pacing. And the supernatural elements are often underplayed — most paranormal incursions are delivered as secondhand accounts. We seldom see any monsters, and neither does Nixon, though we do get enticing references to “the Great Worm at Tunguska, and what’s at Arkhangel’sk, and the pine men, and that which you tried to put down with the bomb in ’49.”

This restraint may be in accordance with Lovecraft’s famous dictum that horror is best invoked by a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces … a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.” But one yearns for more about the kraken that assisted the British during World War II, yanking Messerschmitts from the sky with its tentacles, and the rival magicians associated with the Democratic Party, who “showed their hand at Woodstock.”

Still, those who love deconstructing the supernatural literary references in series like “True Detective” and “Lost” will find much to savor in “Crooked,” which also carries an important message we should all heed as our presidential candidates hit the campaign trail: “If the old gods rise, it will represent a significant realignment of the electoral landscape.”

Crooked
Austin Grossman
Mulholland/Little, Brown: 355 pp., $26

Originally published on LATimes.com.

J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and 'The Fellowship' of fantasy writers

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (Haywood Magee / Getty Images)

In a pub in Oxford there lived some writers. Not nasty, dirty decadent writers, whose books were filled with intimations of sex and an oozy smell, nor yet dry, bare Modernists with a horror of heroics or fantastical things: These Oxford writers were Inklings, and that means heterosexual white male Christians who created some of the most enduring works of 20th century fantasy.

The pub was the Eagle and Child. In the decades since the Inklings first met inside its wood-paneled rooms, their faerie landscapes have become a pop cultural theme park on a global scale, encompassing Westeros, “World of Warcraft,” Dungeons & Dragons, “Star Wars,” Renaissance fairs and goth emporia. The most famous Inklings were J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, but over the years the group included, among others, the anthroposophist poet-philosopher Owen Barfield, fantasist Charles Williams, Lewis’ older brother Warren, known as Warnie, and, eventually, Tolkien’s youngest son, Christopher.

The story of these literary soul mates has been told before, but Philip and Carol Zaleski weave their story into a highly readable group biography called “The Fellowship: Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams.” Authors and editors of books on spirituality and prayer, they keep their focus on the Christian elements in the Inklings’ lives and work. They also make ample room at the high table for Williams and Barfield, minor writers who nonetheless had considerable influence on their friends, especially Lewis, a literary magpie who made liberal use of images and ideas from the other Inklings in his work.

Tolkien, Lewis and Barfield all studied at Oxford. The three also served in World War I, an experience that was especially pivotal to Tolkien in his creation of a Middle-earth ravaged by war and its aftermath. Poor eyesight kept Charles Williams out of the military, and his family’s genteel poverty meant he could afford only two years at University College London. Yet all four ended up closely associated with Oxford, where their weekly gatherings at the Eagle and Child or a member’s university rooms served as a movable feast for this “group of Christians who like to write.”

“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out,” C.S Lewis remarked in 1960, long after the Inklings had dissolved.

Tolkien was the philologist and Anglo-Saxon scholar, Lewis the Christian apologist who wrote on medieval allegory before earning fame with a science fiction trilogy, wartime BBC broadcasts on Christian faith, and later “The Screwtape Letters” and Narnia books. Owen Barfield loved English folk dance and wrote the influential “Poetic Diction,” developing a theory of language that anticipated later developments in the study of consciousness, as well as what became known as New Age thought. The disarmingly fey Williams had no problems reconciling his Anglicanism with a belief in magic and the tarot, participating in esoteric rites such as the “Ceremony of Consecration on the Threshold of Sacred Mystery.” He invented the supernatural thriller in novels like “The Place of the Lion” and “The Greater Trumps,” books that created a genre we now call urban fantasy.

Williams came to Oxford after joining the Inklings. He soon became a ixture there, drawing crowds to hear him lecture on Milton, Shakespeare, romantic love, the Arthurian mythos. His eccentric views exasperated and sometimes infuriated the far more conservative Tolkien. Williams viewed his own wife as “his Beatrice, muse and model of perfection,” none of which prevented him from developing passionate, if mostly platonic, relationships with younger women. At least one of these involved ritual sadomasochism, of which Williams wrote in a letter to his paramour: “I am sadistic towards you, but … I wouldn’t hurt a fly unless it made it perfectly clear that it liked it. And then only a little. And then only for the conversation.”

The Zaleskis do an impressive job of compressing a huge amount of material into a smooth if occasionally dense narrative. Still, in our own multicultural landscape, it’s difficult to muster much enthusiasm for the Inklings’ countless heated arguments on Catholicism versus Anglicanism or the critical head-butting with F.R. Leavis. Their scholarly machismo made it possible for Lewis to do a very public volte-face from heartfelt atheism back to Christianity but never entertain the thought of a female Inkling.

But during World War II, Lewis generously opened his household to schoolgirl evacuees. He helped them with their homework, told them to buy books on his account at Blackwell’s and paid the Oxford tuition of one young woman, “on the condition that the gift remain a secret.” All this time, Lewis maintained a strange, decades-long relationship with the much older mother of a childhood friend. After her death, he made a blissful late-life marriage to the American writer Joy Davidman, whose death inspired Lewis’ powerful “A Grief Observed.”

Despite writing a well-regarded children’s book, “The Silver Trumpet,” Barfield never succeeded as a novelist. His interests grew increasingly esoteric: After reading Rudolf Steiner, he became an anthroposophist, then for decades languished as a London solicitor. The Zaleskis poignantly depict his near-total eclipse by the success of his friends, to whom he remained touchingly devoted.

So one delights in Barfield’s late-life success. Invited to teach in the U.S., he becomes an instrumental figure in the counterculture movement, his work on language, consciousness and Samuel Taylor Coleridge admired by Theodore Roszak, David Bohm — and Saul Bellow, who, somewhat bizarrely, became fascinated by anthroposophy.

Christian faith was indisputably one strand of the Inklings’ creative DNA, but what then to make of all those elves and heraldic creatures and otherworldly voyages, the underlying obsessive strangeness of so much of their fiction? More than “mere Christianity,” what stands out today, 83 years after the Inklings first met, is their shared passion and abiding love for the British Isles, a haunted landscape irradiated with meaning, from its ancient languages to its folklore to its trees and pubs and villages and footpaths and prehistoric barrows. One is left with the impression that within each of those hearty, laughing, church-going writers, there beat a pagan heart.

Hand’s short novel “Wylding Hall” will be published this summer.

The Fellowship
The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams

Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 615 pp, $30

Originally posted on LATimes.com.

Book World: ‘Finders Keepers’ by Stephen King

Stephen King’s superb new stay-up-all-night thriller, “Finders Keepers,” is a sly, often poignant tale of literary obsession that recalls the themes of his classic 1987 novel “Misery.”

At the center of this story is John Rothstein, a novelist whom Time magazine once crowned “America’s Reclusive Genius.” His best-selling trilogy — “The Runner,” “The Runner Sees Action” and “The Runner Slows Down,” is considered “the Iliad of postwar America.”

When the teenage Morris Bellamy reads the first two books, he falls in love with their antihero, Jimmy Gold, “an American icon of despair in a land of plenty.” But Morris finds the third novel, in which the protagonist settles down and takes a job in advertising, a sell-out and an unforgivable betrayal. A smart, deeply troubled kid who’s already done time in juvie, Morris hatches a plan to break into Rothstein’s New Hampshire farmhouse. His hope is to find the new Jimmy Gold novel that Rothstein is rumored to have written since retiring from public view. But when Morris’s plan goes disastrously wrong, he ends up, at age 23, sentenced to life in prison.

That’s where the fun begins — for the reader, if not for Morris Bellamy.

More than three decades later, another teenage boy, Pete Saubers, is living with his family in the same house that had once been Morris’s childhood home. Like Morris, Pete is in thrall of the Jimmy Gold novels, though he has other things on his mind. His family is struggling to get by after his father was injured when a madman plowed a Mercedes though a crowd waiting in line for a job fair. King fans will recognize that tragedy as the seminal event in his novel “Mr. Mercedes” (a much less enjoyable book than this one). They’ll also recognize several characters from that novel, including retired police detective Bill Hodges, now a private investigator. After Pete discovers the trunk with Rothstein’s stolen notes, King begins to weave this web of characters, coincidence and connections with dizzying speed and dazzling facility.

“Finders Keepers” — the second in a planned trilogy — may be a twisted love story, but it’s also a love letter to the joys of reading and to American literature. Rothstein’s books evoke Updike’s Rabbit novels, as well as works by J.D. Salinger, John Cheever and Richard Yates . Pete reads D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and realizes too late its lesson that “money from nowhere almost always spells trouble.” And Pete’s favorite English teacher mentions Theodore Roethke’s sublime “The Waking.” That poem’s most famous line — “I learn by going where I have to go” — could serve as a mantra for Pete, who at every step must make life-altering decisions about Rothstein’s literary legacy, his family’s financial well-being and his own survival. In one sense, sweet-natured Pete is not so different from vicious Morris: Both, “although at opposite ends of the age-spectrum, are very much alike when it comes to the Rothstein notebooks. They lust for what is inside them.”Near the end, one of Rothstein’s many fans muses, “I was going to say his work changed my life, but that’s not right. . . . I guess what I mean is his work changed my heart.”

Readers of the wonderful, scary, moving “Finders Keepers” will feel the same way.

Hand’s short novel “Wylding Hall” will be published this summer.

For more books coverage, go to washingtonpost.com/books.

Originally posted on WashingtonPost.com.

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.