Read my books! No AI!

If you write books (as I do), every once in a while a reader will write you out of the blue. This is nice! I’ve cold-written authors myself—in my youth, because I was insufferable, I used to point out mistakes in books to the people who’d made them, but I did it nicely, and authors love talking about their books, so it generally led to a friendly discussion. The people who’ve written me have been more pleasant than my youthful nightmare self. It’s always nice to hear from a fan.

A couple of times I’ve been contacted by librarians, teachers, or (once) a high school nerd club, asking me to participate in a book club-style discussion. I’d just zoom in (or whatever) and chat for a little while. Same thing with my appearance on the Death Coven podcast—just a “cold call” email from a stranger. No money changed hands for any of these events—I treated it as free advertising. Everything was done in good faith, and I never worried about being scammed.

Those were they days, am I right? Because now, if you write books, you get non-stop AI-generated scan emails. If you’ve written me a genuine email recently, I’m sorry if I haven’t noticed it; it was buried under slop.

Usually these emails are from book promoters. They start by praising one of my books (on Impossible Histories: “The blend of honesty, mischief, and deep historical curiosity you bring to the page is exactly the kind of thing readers remember because it lets them wander through the real and the unreal without feeling lost. That’s rare, and it deserves a wider spotlight”) and end by shaming me on my number of Amazon reviews (“You didn’t put that much work in to reach only seventeen readers!”).

(Side note: Please leave me some reviews! Defeat the promoters!)

But at least the scam is apparent right away. I mean—maybe it’s not a scam! Maybe they’re really good at book promotion, and only the AI-generated flattery is fake. But I mean that the basic transaction is transparent: I’m supposed to give money to a person or organization who will they make a more-or-less good faith effort to promote my book with…Facebook ads or something. I get it.

More insidious are the book clubs. I’ve spoken to book clubs before, remember! It’s really nice! The people there have often actually read your book, which is more than can be said about, say, radio appearances. These books clubs are grifts, though.

They don’t sound implausible, really, except for the inevitable and uncanny AI voice. They have a book club! People want to read my book! All they want from me is…maybe a couple discussion questions. An about the author. A high-res image of the cover. All reasonable and easy. In fact, Ava Hoppe, assures me, “If you prefer, we can also work solely from publicly available materials. Just let me know what’s easiest for you.” How nice!

After all the reasonable parts, though, comes the sting.

That’s not how book clubs work, of course! I’m not affirming there was never any payola to be Reader’s Digest book of the month (nor the reverse; how would I know?); but generally people in a book club want to read a book and then talk about it. The author rarely gets involved! We were already stepping outside the norm just be bringing me, the author, in on it.

It’s not like the sudden litany of charges comes as an actual surprise. You can tell something is up early on. I assume everyone is using AI to write emails nowadays, but the emails from these book clubs is aggressively AI. And…this is weird for me to say, since you’d think a scam would have planned all of this out…the whole enterprise doesn’t hang together. The schedule it presents doesn’t make sense.

That price list above comes from the Reading in Reading Book Club (ostensibly so named because they are located in Reading, England; probably actually so named to make things hard to google), and “Jade Organizer” at RiR originally emailed inviting me to a discussion of Apprentice Academy two days hence, at which readers would be “connecting over shared insights and reflections.” When I replied that I had a prior commitment that day, Jade backtracked: RiR would only be announcing the book in two days. There’d be nothing for me to attend. “The only thing we need from you” was the discussion Qs, etc.

Soon Jade was waxing eloquent about how the RiR Book Club was “designed to build momentum and word-of-mouth interest rather than being a one-day event” (silly me!) and its members were encouraged “to post ARC-style reflections or verified reviews on Amazon and Goodreads”…which is good, I guess, but an ARC is an Advance Reader Copy, and the book they’d be reading has been out for over a year. It’s too late to Advance Read it! Surely a good grifter should work through these contradictions and misstatements before starting the con? I felt like the AI was winging it this time.

Also: Not once in the entire discussion, despite several questions on my part, was Jade Organizer able to pinpoint which of the two Apprentice Academy books was under discussion.

More insidious than the direct appeal for money is what Ava Hoppe from the Manhattan Book Club tried. She didn’t want any money! She wanted very little for several emails, simply requesting:

When convenient, please feel free to share any of the following that you already have available. There’s no need to create anything new.
• Book cover art
• A short written description or excerpt suitable for a reading spotlight
• Any existing visual assets such as a brief reel, scene teaser, or graphic
• Optional audio or video clips if available

Eventually, though this morphs into:

To move forward, we typically request the following materials: a visual echo, a short scene teaser clip, a brief author bio, high-resolution book cover art, book mockups, and a cinematic style book trailer. These elements allow us to introduce the book clearly and cohesively to our community before and during the spotlight period.

I asked Ava to generate one from publicly available materials, as she had once offered to; but that offer was no longer on the table. In order to move forward I would have to produce a “cinematic style book trailer” on my own—but if I was not comfortable with that task, by strange coincidence the good people at Manhattan Book Club “work with a trusted creative partner, Bridget who can assist in producing these materials efficiently and in line with our requirements.”

Technically, participation is free!

AI is shameless, of course. Even after I pointed out the obvious contradictions, the fact that the meetup group was not a valid link, whatever evidence I could muster, I could never get anyone to admit that there was any AI being used anywhere in their communication. “Importantly, this is not a pay-to-promote arrangement or transactional placement,” one said while also making it clear that I would have to pay for them to promote me.

I had intended to lead some of these guys on and then post our amusing interactions,…but AI bots are so prolix! Everything I write I get six paragraphs back! No one wants to wade through this nonsense (except when it is just praising me, which it often is; I’ll read that!)! I’ve started just replying, “Yes, as we agreed, please send a $20 Amazon gift card to this address,” but so far with no takers.

These emails are, I will admit, only a mild annoyance. I’m too old and cynical to get all excited about some attention, only to be heartbroken when it proves to be negative attention. I went to junior high; I know how it works.

But here’s what is genuinely heartbreaking: I used to get legit emails now and then! It was nice! Now I distrust everything! As Nietzsche wrote, “Not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you, has shaken me.”

For years, one of my pleasures has been looking at photographs of octopuses (posted in various platforms). You know what happened a short while ago: People began posting obviously fake AI images of octopuses. Then they started posting really good fake pictures of octopuses. Now I don’t know if I’m looking at an octopus or not!

Perhaps you say that if I like a picture, what difference does it make if the picture is of nothing. But my interest was not looking at pictures that looked like octopuses. My interest was looking at pictures of octopuses. And now I can’t do it!

I assume soon the entire world and everything I love in it will similarly be ruined. My children will set up AI versions of themselves to call me on my birthday. Entire albums worth of AI-generated photos will get mixed in with my photos, and I’ll never know for sure if that person standing behind me is my late grandmother a generic amalgamation of thousands of white grandmothers. But I’m not complaining about that yet. Right now all I’m complaining about is that the next time a high school nerd club contacts me I’ll chase them away with a pitchfork and never even know I missed out.

Also, if you are an AI-generated bot of any sort, please stop contacting me about exciting opportunities concerning Ode of the Chimera: Serpent’s Refrain (“The story you wrote because no one else was ever going to witness a chimera’s voice”). I did not write this book; someone named Hal Wintry did. I don’t know how the two of us got confused in the minds of (really quite a few) grifters.

Oh, and I guess, Hal Wintry—if you’re out there and you want some AI crook to pretend to market your book, reach out to me. I can hook you up.

“Hal, I know you probably receive messages from everywhere and it is hard to know what is real or not. See this as a real message; I purposely wrote this to you because while I was scrolling through your work, the image of a chimera, bred as a weapon but driven by the human choice to fight, did not leave my head.”
•A sincere email I received about a book I did not write and have never seen

I’ve written about this before, but the meme (as is the custom with memes) keeps popping up, so I thought I’d say it again, and maybe put it in a way that is easy to confirm. This is the thing I’m saying, in italics for emphasis: Ishtar has nothing to do with Easter.

I mean, most of the rest of the meme above is silly too, and maybe silly in a way we can tease something interesting out of, but start with the part you can check yourself in a couple of minutes.

Here’s the evidence: Easter is only called Easter in England. In Germany it’s Ostern, which is pretty close, but in Denmark it’s Påske; in the Netherlands: Pasen; in France: Pâques; Italy: Pasqua; Greece: (transliterating) Pascha; Russia: Paskha; etc. These words all derive ultimately from the Hebrew word for Passover, Pesach. It’s not hard to see.

If Easter derives from Ishtar, that means the Ishtar connection would have to somehow secretly maneuver from Mesopotamia to England (or perh. Germany) without being noticed by any one of the intervening countries. How did that happen? Remember, it’s not like the Greeks or the Romans used a word like Easter and then forgot it; there’s no evidence they ever referred to Easter as anything that sounded like Easter. Constantine would have called it something that sounded like Pasqua.

I can tell you (and I think I am right when I assert) that Ishtar’s symbols are (not the bunny and the egg but) the lion and the star; but I could be lying. I’m not, but I could be deceived. How much primary-source research do you think I’ve done on Ishtar? Every primary source I’ve read about Ishtar has been translated! I could easily be wrong!

But what kind of conspiracy would it take to deceive me about the words for Easter in various European languages? And if the loose phonetic connection only occurs in two languages all the way across Europe…isn’t that more likely to be a coincidence?

And without the cute (but very approximate) Ishtar/Easter homophony, what is left? Rabbits were not really associated with Ishtar, but even if they were—rabbits only got themselves associated with Easter in the seventeenth century, and only in Northern Europe. How’d that connection lay dormant through the centuries to pop up all of a sudden far away from Ishtar’s homeland?

It’s true that the English word Easter may have come (our source on this is Bede) from the British pagan goddess Eostre; however, Eostre herself only appears in that one mention by Bede, and medieval etymologists are notoriously unreliable. It’s just that no one has ever proposed a better suggestion! Since the vast majority of Easter customs are shared across many countries that definitely lack a goddess Eostre, her influence, if she did exist, probably ends with her name.

But the interesting part is: What if it didn’t? Or (leaving Eostre) what if Ishtar really did provide the name of Easter? And what if Ishtar really was knee deep in rabbits and eggs? What if name, egg, and bunny all came from Ishtar? The good people at IlluminatiTV assure us that therefore Easter is “at its roots…all about celebrat[ing] fertility and sex.”

Well, if we take “at its roots” to refer to the actual distant origins, it would (again, if it weren’t all false) be true. But surely the meme is supposed to be a gotcha! “You probably thought Easter was about Jesus, Aunt Matilda, but surprise! because it’s actually about sex checkmate mikedrop!” Again, remember every part of this meme, including the sentence fragment at the end, is wrong, but if it were right, would Aunt Matilda be pwned?

Like so much occult wisdom (and this is fresh in my mind as I reread Foucault’s Pendulum) the Ishtar theory is just a blunder in how to view the world. You can’t just dig down, find a hypothetical essence, and call it a day. Customs are palimpsests, and after a few layers the original becomes muffled and then muted. It just doesn’t matter. The Ku Klux Klan was originally a Shriners-style pranking organization; does this fact, now revealed, change how much you like the Klan? College fraternities were originally academic study clubs; must I now abandon my prejudices against fratboys?

One may as well say that Easter is, “at its roots,” Passover. That statement has the benefit of being true, while still useless, in the sense that it misrepresents the holiday of Easter (and also Passover).

What Easter means, what Easter is, is determined by the couple-billion people who celebrate Easter. That’s how meaning works! Even if Ishtar had started the party, the current celebrants don’t need to keep inviting her…

…unless they want to. I mean, she sound fun.

Remember last month, when everyone was talking about Bad Bunny for minute? Well, everyone was sharing this little social media post. To quote:

For a moment, the stadium went quiet.
No beat drop.
No flex.
Just truth.

Good grief! I thought at the time. Has any text ever been more obviously AI-generated?

That wasn’t just a name — it was a declaration.

Well, every day since that day has answered my question, and the answer, it turns out is yes. Everything is now obviously AI generated.

I’m not here to lecture you about AI. Although this substack is (and I hope this was clear already) 100% human generated, I do try not to lecture people. Except about prose! About prose I am literally (?) insufferable!

Look again at that reprehensible Bad Bunny post. All the tells are there, especially the strange need LLMs have to assert what something is not before asserting what it is.

He didn’t just perform.
He introduced himself.

I call this tic the AI doubleback. It is everywhere. Here’s another bit of slop that someone pushed out to me because I like Jack Benny.1

Viewers did not simply tune in for jokes. They returned for a relationship.
[…}
Television did not change their chemistry. It magnified it.

Notice how nonsensical these sentences would be even if they were not framed in this irritating format. But (as the AI would say) they’re not just nonsense. They’re doubleback.

Look, I’m not claiming I’m totally pure. I once forgot the word “obnubilate” and rather than flip through a dictionary for an hour I gave a vague description of the definition to ChatGPT and it got it on the second try. We’re all doing what we can.

But prose is too important to hand over to these creepy robots! And this prose is bad. Even without the doubleback tell the prose is bad. “Their pauses still echo, reminding us that respect on stage can quietly change what audiences believe is possible”: That comes from the Jack Benny “essay,” and it does, in fact, have a tell (the use of the word “quietly”; AI loves to say “quietly”); but it’s terrible irregardful. And that doubleback is omnipresent!

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And now Joe Quesada (I’m a comics guy), in his own substack, writing a personal story that he artfully ties in to advice on panel composition—how does he choose to write it?

It wasn’t nostalgia.
It was an itch. A pull.

&

This wasn’t a critique.
This wasn’t guidance.
This was a dressing down in front of an audience.

That drivel is an AI-y as the Bad Bunny bit! But this is Joe Quesada writing about his own life! These are his memories! And he’s a professional comic book writer! He was editor-in-chief of Marvel! And he couldn’t even be bothered to compose it in his own voice? What good are memories in someone else’s voice?2

Please locate an infinite amount of additional examples effortlessly on your own.

Perhaps AI will get better at concealing itself and stop using tells like the doubleback. Or perhaps, as more and more online content is AI generated, AI will absorb the new AI prose as data, iterate around it, and really lean into the doubleback style (try some triplebacks?). Who (not me) knows?

The real danger, of course, is that we the humans will absorb enough AI prose that we will simply think it is how prose works. A friend of mine pointed me to his “new favorite essayist” who may indeed be writing actual things on her own—except she keeps slipping in doublebacks like:

The Americans had not merely broken from Britain. They had written a document insisting that the entire premise of the old world was a lie…

In this world, a person’s worth was not self-determined. It was assigned, and the assignment was meant to be permanent.

That’s not as bad, right? but it’s still far from the best way to compose those thoughts. Intentionally or not, those sentences got AIed.

Or now Julia Angwin, in her new, presumably human-penned anti-AI NYT opinion piece (probably paywalled), slips several ugly doublebacks in, the worst of which comes almost at the end:

What Grammarly made wasn’t a doppelgänger. As the writer Ingrid Burrington wrote on Bluesky, it was a sloppelgänger…

Ezra Pound (not someone I usually look to for advice about life or the world) once wrote that as prose decays, so a civilization decays, and: “The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.” I’m not sure how one confuses diseases with pastries, but whatever; follow the metaphor; it’s the robots doing it now.

They’re not giving us jam tarts.

They’re giving us TB.

or throw your hard-earned change at me

Any account I could give would be more notable for the incompetence of its narrator than for any fresh insight it might cast on the already over-documented events of that Thursday. Yet that I was present at what has proved to be one of the seminal events of the last twenty or thirty years may permit me to go on self-indulgently and at some length about my experiences. My grandfather, who churned the sand beneath his feet one June morning at Normandy has exercised a similar privilege in his day, and I can do no less than to follow in his example. And perhaps apologize to the future for being there at its conception, which is no less than our parents owe to us, and theirs to them.

It was an East Coast summer camp with a name that was, at the very least, well-intentioned. I suppose the whole camp was well-intentioned, the product of progressive thinking and intensive library research. If this were a longer or more ambitious narrative I would take pains to portray and individuate each member of its staff…but I would then be misrepresenting events. They were, in fact, nearly faceless, nearly identical, indeterminate even as to age and gender. They all had long silver hair, and were all, even the girls, named Harry. Their leader was an older man with a mustache, a doctor of philosophy and of medicine, named Mr. Kearn. He was a shadowy figure, they were all shadowy figures, speaking mainly to our parents and the press. In fact, there might have been only one Harry, multiplied in my youthful imagination (like the number of breasts my mother had; God help me I remember three).

There was, of course, a typical camp hierarchy, or at least a hierarchy I have taken for typical. There were counselors, who taught crafts and sent you to bed. The younger kids, K through third grade, had teachers, and spent all day in classrooms. There may have been several other hierarchical tiers I have elected to omit here. The camp had an ideology of some sort, but I have forgotten it, or they had: It wasn’t exactly emblazoned on the gates. I assume the camp had a schedule too, but it was kept from us, and half the time from dazed, wandering counselors as well.

A thousand Disney movies or after-school specials will give you enough of an idea of what camp itself was like, and I will not burden us both with the weight of description. It was not bad. It was (fine; fine; let us be reminded, then) nature hikes and canoeing, singalongs and wallet making (for the youngsters, maybe), activities so trite I hesitate to affirm their existence with a mention, all happening at prescribed times. There were prescribed times to sleep, and to eat, but the times kept changing, and I never really caught on. I’m not even sure why I was there, that summer; I had never been to a sleep-away camp before. There was perhaps a problem at home. My friends at camp were if not exclusively still primarily my two bunkmates: Alan, who was our ringleader, and Dan, who was strong but stupid and very nearly blind. I even had a girlfriend of sorts, whose name was Ellen, and her neck was beautiful. She wasn’t really my girlfriend, but I liked her, and she seemed to like me, and we had talked once or twice; I would like to sound tender when I speak of her. Because she may be listening. They called me Jay, and I was what? maybe twelve.

There was a certain counselor whose mother motored into camp every Wednesday to check up on him. She would stand by his side constantly, outside the bathroom door if necessary, and only leave at night. He was from somewhere out in the country, and he spoke about politics with an improbable hick accent, while his mother never spoke at all. He believed everything he had ever heard or seen. One Wednesday, it will be important to note, he had me running what they called a fitness trail. We would jog together, the two of us, until we came across a balance beam, or a sham udder of dangling steel rings for the old hand-over-hand, or a barricade to climb. After the heroic surmounting of the obstacle we’d jog some more. This was not the day of the great events. This was Wednesday. This was one day before.

The counselor’s mother had walked from the other end of the trail, and our paths crossed at the chin-up station. She stood and watched while we drew ourselves up at the bar. Her son shrieked orders at me, in an accent I had previously only seen on TV (which I will not attempt to recreate here): “No, those are pull-ups, change your hands. No, don’t use your toes.” The toes upset him so much he had to stop chinning himself. “I said don’t use you toes.”

I couldn’t figure out what that meant, and asked him, or tried. I was pretty out of breath from the three or four chins I had already done, and frightened. The bar was too high for my toes to even touch the ground.

“Any idiot can do chin-ups if he points his toes,” the son told me. “You’ve got to curl them up, towards your knees.” He gave me a brief demonstration, folding his feet up, toes pointed skywards. “You’ve got to do it this way, like Jesus on the cross.” I gave it a try but found I couldn’t chin myself with my toes in that position. “See?” (he continued). “This is how Jesus was when he was on the cross.” I dropped off the bar, ready to demand an explanation about how anyone could have his feet nailed in such a ludicrous position, but the mother already had her hand on my shoulder, and was drawing me to one side. I was looking past her neck, to see the son chinning himself repeatedly, feet flexed. “He’s got a problem,” she whispered to me, through my tangled yellow foolish tresses. “He’s got a lot of problems, you shouldn’t blame him.” She had no accent, and was very articulate. I don’t mean she had the same accent I did, or some received accent; she had No Accent At All. She proceeded to tell me a story about her son’s childhood, which, she said, would explain everything. The story went on for a long time, and all the while the son was chinning, chinning, in the background past her neck. It was a beautiful story, although it has largely faded from memory, minor in light of the next day’s events. It was long and beautiful, and excited me very much, and, when she was done, I ran back to the cabin, past the chinning boy, still chinning. I couldn’t calm down. I jumped up and down on Alan’s bed, because mine was a bunk bed with Dan’s, and I could hardly jump on that. Thinking about that story was the first time I had ever thought about several things, things that seem juvenile now but were very exciting at the time: infinity and infinite regresses, and paradoxes, and something that was not sex, but darker and more spidery.

Alan and Dan came in with their Camp Calicut shirts and their greasy hair. “What are you so excited about?” Alan demanded. His eyes bulged like a toad’s; it was a disease I had forgotten the name of and was forbidden, by Alan, to speak of anyway. I don’t think he liked having something happening that he had not orchestrated; I don’t think he liked the idea that I was excited and he wasn’t the reason.

My mind rapidly paged through the file of possible lies. Devirginity? Killed a man? “Rider had some of his buddies over and they were all smoking blunts, and they gave me a toke,” I lied all in one breath.

“I know,” lectured Alan, “exactly how you feel.” He proceeded to narrate an unlikely story about a farmer’s daughter who grew a secret marijuana crop in the exact center of her father’s wheat field, a farmer’s daughter he’d met six months before while bicycling across Arizona. However unlikely it appeared at the time, really, really, who knew what Alan, or the world, was capable of?

There are a few ephemera from that night. A dinner, for example, and a game of rugby. Some cousin with whom he claimed he’d had sexual intercourse had sent Dan a letter with a five-page purity test enclosed. Dan could hardly make out the tiny print, so I read out loud while the three of us invented answers. I lost an extra point for Rider and this afternoon, but that hardly mattered. I think by the end we were all claiming we had experienced sexual intercourse with Dan’s cousin, perhaps simultaneously. My thoughts were elsewhere, pondering the (God save me) hermetic mysteries of infinity, partially revealed, like the jockey waistband peeking out of my counselor’s shorts as he strained on the chin-up bar. There was no way I was going to be able to sleep, and this fact was so painfully obvious that Alan swiped me a bottle of sleeping pills from Dan’s overburdened Little Black Bag. Dan was busy at the time pretending to look at a girlie magazine, with little success but much pathos, and hardly noticed. The bottle was translucent brown, as such bottles are, and bore Dan’s mother’s name on the label: I took three pills. I took three pills. I took three pills. I passed out listening to Alan’s faltering voice sing along to a CD press of a scratchy ’twenties recording by Yodelin’ Jimmie McBadger, who, Alan said, had once worked as a brakeman and scattered marijuana seeds off the back of a cross-continental train. Through Arizona, I thought last; he must have tooled through Arizona.

Methylphenidate hydrochloride, a mild stimulant, has often been used to control hyperactivity in children, but there is no reason to believe that the homey wisdom of folk medicine would not prescribe a sedative for the same symptoms. I am not qualified to diagnose Dan as hyperactive—it would have been but one of his problems, his many problems, if true—I am simply mildly rephrasing and repeating Dan’s own explanation for why he had sleeping pills with, he assured us, his mother’s blessing. “To keep me out of trouble” was his short version, and God knows I know what he means. Any mischief I might have been able to dream up the next morning would have been squelched by a newfound difficulty in thought, let alone motion. But I didn’t dream up any mischief anyway; no, I didn’t dream up any mischief (the implication, you see, is that someone else did).

Alan.

The morning, or the better part of that day, let me reemphasize, had the somewhat blurred aspect of that photograph your grandfather has of his “sainted” mother, greasy glass kissed daily for “nigh” twenty-odd years. Ellen was spied by my various informants (junior campers, ostensibly bought off with trading cards but really just kids willing or desperate for the excuse to ninja-crawl under bushes and cork their faces black in broad daylight) slinking off towards the lake with her two bunkmates. Ellen’s sinister bunkmates: these were: first: Brittany, a ridiculously perky and photogenic hoyden who bossed everyone and mimed forbidden acts on popsicles at snacktime. Also a rather enigmatic girl named Emma who was much more important than I will pretend she is here. Because she stayed in the background, almost like a mountain. She wasn’t very big, but she was almost like a mountain. Alan was up to something, too, and could be heard muttering dark prophecies into his cupped palms. Still three-quarters unconscious, I helped Dan study the day’s menu board, and, after the lad had reported our findings to Alan, I found myself instructed to collect and preserve as many eggs as I could at lunchtime. Eggs on the menu, collect the eggs, he said. Turned out served scrambled, but Alan Undaunted declared he had an “alternate supply.” I just wanted to go to sleep.

There was quite a scandal going on because that morning some ten year-old, Calicut’s only French camper, had urinated on the floor of his cabin “because that’s what they do in Marseille,” and a bevy of Harries was busy trying to contrive a disciplinary action that would appear neither racist nor too permissive. At one point they dropped the on-the-floor aspect of it altogether and changed the crime to Unauthorized Micturition, declaring that there had always been stipulated times for “going to the bathroom,” which our ten year-old friend (his name was Carl) had neglected to observe. But a few counselors started leveling charges of bathroom imperialism, and the words “Marseillaise” and “racism” were bandied about until Harries decided that, in lieu of a punishment, Carl would be given an award ceremony. All this fuss was in the periphery: everyone’s main concern was the fact that Carl, before his brilliant “Marseille defense,” had attempted to cover up his crime by dousing his cabin with an entire bottle of his mother’s perfume (suspiciously secreted in his suitcase). Fumes. This meant that three ten year-olds would be without a home for a few days, and everyone was espousing a not-in-my-backyard policy for their relocation. Especially for Carl, because not all the sympathy or suburban Marxism of the Camp Calicut counselors would get them to sleep under a loose-cannon pisser. The girls could be seen to smug and prance about, unworried. But we were all declaring not in my backyard! except me, and Alan and Dan, who were up to something. I just wanted to go to sleep.

Ellen was vague and uncommunicative around three, which was my prescribed time (aided by young spies) to bump into her. But everything was vague and uncommunicative to me, the haze I was in. Semicomatose, and yet for the first time I noticed the tips of El’s ears, which curled like the calyx of the opening Cosmos bipinnatus. The comparison sounds extravagant, but I swear it is true. I started to give her a lecture on the tubular tongues of the nectar-feeding flowerpecker, but slurred my words overmuch, and she soon left, thank God. I don’t know what I was thinking. Before I had only noticed her neck. I just wanted to go to sleep.

Ellen, whose neck or ears was not all that preoccupied me, those times I was preoccupied with her. She had that adorable fuck-that-noise attitude you find so often in the elderly (what? what do you find adorable in the elderly?). She told me (later) that she had realized young that eventually everyone becomes bitter ’n’ disillusioned, that eventually everyone perceives everything to be drek, and she might as well start there with that perception, and avoid all the bother of future disillusionment. If you give in before they start torturing you, U. S. Army survival manuals somehow neglect to advise, you cannot be broken. If you have no position to begin with, you cannot fall off of it. Dammit I chose to whisper those coordinates to the Nazis who captured me; I’m not weak, I’m just a douchebag. But unlike Ellen I still had some idealism left at the time, I was twelve, I still had some capacity to be fooled. Nietzsche may permit himself always to be deceived, lest he ever doubt the truth, which is a good take on giving-up-ahead-of-time in its own way. But to ever not be deceived? Really, what are the odds of that (O mother, who whispered accentless things to me)? And what was it I wanted to do again?

The Main Building, pride of Camp Calicut, forged from the living heart of a single onyx stone (one prankster told us; the fabrication doesn’t even make any sense), a large, salmon building with aluminum panels of primary colors (assorted) positioned under each window. Must have been, must have been built thirty years ago. The halls smelled of ammonia, and here were the dining hall, the classrooms, the staff offices, the infirmary (presumably), and six or seven unfortunate bunks. Really pretty urban for a camp, but we were never far from a city, and at night the airplanes buzzed in low, so you couldn’t hear the TV. At other times of the year it served as a high school and a fire station. Alan made us shut our eyes and walk the long twisty corridor from the dining hall to the stairwell, counting the steps to each turn. Seven turn left twelve turn right, you dig?

“Smells like ammonia,” said Dan

“How long do we have to remember these numbers?” I asked. Woozily, and all that.

“About forty minutes,” Alan said.

Your head hurts, of course, and you eyelids—it’s not that they’re heavy, just that it’s their natural state to be closed innit? and frog-marching them into any other state is an imposition on the Natural Order. But what does tiredness do to your memory, and, more pressing question, what did we do then? There was a large group of children assembled; the award ceremony for Carl that was. Somebody was shouting: “Thou fool! Thou fool!” again and again. A little girl in counterpoint chanted: “Fuck everything!” until she was shushed by an older sister. Alan had unlawfully gained the stage, speaking into a mike stand, and there were several eggs in midair. Officials dropping, their trousers torn off, and chaos. The art teacher had just hit me on the head with some kind of trowel (she was flailing away, they were falling before her like snow), so things’re a bit vague, all things except for that trickle of blood, bisected by my left ear, shoulder-bound. “The dark!” I heard Alan shouting, the slogan he’d contrived hours before. He had to repeat himself, it’s what they do on TV. “We’re all the same size in the dark.” If he’d timed it seven seconds better, that’s exactly when ace-in-the-hole Dan would have turned the lights off. We were in a closet, and I had just boosted him up to reach. All that blood in my eyes (from bending over it slid there), and I could still see he was pulling the wrong wires. Until he pulled the right one.

Alan was somehow at our side, and we ran down the corridor. “Alan,” I was saying over and over again. Everybody had been repeating lately, everybody, why not me? “Alan you forgot the emergency generators light up the hallways with emergency generators Alan.” My hand on my head, I was out of breath already. It was a long corridor and chock full of shadowy recesses in the fluorescent twilight. Dan, perhaps oblivious to the light/dark dichotomy, was loudly calling out the paces we’d memorized, getting every number wrong, careening off corners. All that noise, and you could still hear them behind us, probably gaining. We’re all the same size in the dark, but in the dim lambency of emergency power, adults have long legs. All that noise, and still you couldn’t miss the preternatural keening…

We were in the grade school wing (seventeen more paces till the next turn). It was the five- through seven-year-olds banging on the doors, screaming God save us God save us. The voices they use, like castrati on 78, but hey, they’re six, got that sixth sense rats departing got. And little kids fear the dark and it’s gotta be dark in those classrooms. Alan stopped and turned every knob, three, four doors in a row, even the neonatal ward. Children spilled out, raced down the corridor, many sucking deep drafts of air into their lungs, perhaps all the better to scream. Whatever else you say about Alan, he turned every doorknob. Let that be noted: entered in by the defense and granted by history. So the children toddled away; one set had their arms around each other’s shoulders, four abreast; makes you want to say aw. Okay then, we’re in g.d. awe, and we were running again. Corridor, nightmarishly long. New noises in the distance, explosions, cracklings like cellophane, the unmistakable whine of a bottle rocket. As Dan ricocheted off another door and into me, several things became clear. Like the fact that they (They!) wanted Alan, above all else, he was the keystone, he was the one they wanted, they wanted. It was only a matter of time before the constabulary mopped up any unseemly ruckus among the natives, but pukka sahib back there wanted Alan, and of all civet cats he must not slip back into the jungle. And they were close, they were close enough to get us, and when they did I was going to go down with Alan, brother. I was thinking clearer. The words, when I tried to speak, were heavy and printed in black letter, but the brain was a motorcade of activity, some synapses sparking four abreast. Thinking things like: What’s that popping noise?

A side corridor, receding into infinity, and down it dash two pink barrettes square as C. bipinnatus petals, attached to the head of Ellen. She was flanked by Brittany and the elusive Emma McUmbrarum, of course, their fists full of ladyfingers and the occasional match, coming towards us. They’d been conspicuously absent from Carl’s award ceremony. Brittany was giddy, desperate to explain her private cleverness. I mean, everyone knew about Alan’s inciting at the ceremony and he’d be bragging about it anyway, but Brittany, if nobody knew, imagine the hell that would be. You could see dancing in her eyes a half dozen dimly assimilated stories of cows led up bell towers, VWs reassembled one night in the Proctor’s second-story office, ha ha. We popped open an inflatable raft in Mr. Kearn’s office, she said, too rapid and breathless for quotes. And at the time we all had to pause and marvel. It now sounds vain and silly, like the fireworks they’d been setting off too, but in context it had an uncanny symmetry (appositeness is a wholly inadequate word) that you would not understand. An inflatable raft; such a coup! And speak of it, there it was, rafting down the corridor (I am obliged to mention the adverb eerily) to skid to a halt at our feet. Big and orange, and it sat there inert at our feet, secure in a job well done. Still confused Dan started to clamber in, but Alan pulled him away.

Looming into sight just then on the side-corridor horizon were Mr. Kearn and a whole host of Harries, their silver locks streaming behind them like a comet’s plasma tail. They were armed. And probably they were coming that way all along, weren’t they? The side corridor was a shortcut.

A few swift nods from Alan and his cognate Brittany and we had hoisted the raft over our shoulders and were running again, twelve legs laughing. One of those moments when you are led by nothing but the harmony of the spheres, for what else would drift Brittany’s raft (which I had christened Ellen’s raft) into our path, would bring us together as mutual cavalry now that the hordes were upon us? Weaving among ourselves, passing the raft from one to another, so no one gets too tired, no one falls behind, its fat bulk scraping the walls on each side. We were dimly aware of the Harries pitching eggs, bottles, bricks, Christ was that a trowel again? after us. They had had a vision (you could hear them extemporizing on it) of how things should have been, of the six of us downed and mildly maimed beneath their righteous fury, tripped up or conked out by this motley hail of soda cans and aquaria. Another, perhaps the platonic, timestream, and that was so; but no. Our serendipitous raft shielded us, and we knew no fear from the items booming off its bottom like a bass drum. One pink cosmic barrette popped off Ellen, went pinging along behind us. By the time they shouted “aim for the legs” they were almost out of ammo. And we hit the stairwell door and there is no more glorious feeling. A stray egg or two nicked my shoe, but that was nothing. A steady sigh came from a gash in our shield, but that was nothing (damn trowel). There! We dropped the raft and punched the fire-safety bars as one, and our soles echoed down the stairs rapid-fire. It felt like we had done something beyond mere: tossed a few eggs, blew up a few rafts (with a pop, that was the mystery pop (three ¶¶ previous), the pop of inflation), pulled a few plugs. At that moment it felt like we were literally reforging the cosmos and casting it into a more pleasing form. I may appear to have uttered a solecism, but that’s what it felt like. Mt. Emma’s middle finger flashed behind us; Alan even permitted himself to shout the extravagant pun: “C’mere putsch.” We were laughing and laughing.

The door marked exit was right in front of me when I heard someone, could it have been Ellen? cry, “No, Jay, the basement.” I turned to see my five comrades disappearing down more stairs, deeper into the bowels of the—

“Is there even a way out from down there?” I called after them. My head hurt. I followed. I made it to the basement door before it had even clicked in place—there was a small sign on it reading further fire exits through me—but I looked up and down the basement corridor and saw no one. Still a chance, I thought, to turn around and make for the out of doors. But I chose a direction and ran, and that direction was one of the basement options. Maybe I’d catch up to them. Maybe they were right around the corner. Music of the spheres, where are you?

An old sign on the wall, somewhat chipped, patiently explained the way to a fallout shelter. These tunnels, I recalled a guidebook saying, could go on for miles. This far north people tended to root underground in winter, their faces vein-blistered by the cold into star-nosed moles’. I passed the rumblings of a boiler room and the wet thumps of a washing machine, but really the only sound was my footstep, one sound repeated a thousand times through the hollowness, then repeated back to me in an echo that resembled rumbles and thumps. I called softly a name, her name, once or twice, but it wouldn’t do to be heard, not by my pursuers. Bit of dirt about, got it on me when I had to crawl. The pipes over my head had been patched with athletic tape and papier-mache, the corners with dusty webs. Wherein lurked the dreaded ettercap, her four-bladed chelicerae slavering. I couldn’t hear her summoning me, couldn’t see the malice in her many eyes, but I put some distance between me and her irregardful. By the time she had spun her tripwires across the floor I’d be long gone, would I, and those after me might make her acquaintance. I paused to give her a wink, to let her know that it was no hard feelings; these feelings are merely the feelings you feel in the tunnels. If only I didn’t also feel so goddamn crappy. Aloneness, and all that. I wanted to sit down, but Madame Ettercap had her eyes everywhere. The very air seemed sinister, almost…musty. I just wanted to.

I found a small (maybe 3” by 3” by 7”) cardboard box full of batteries in a fire-extinguisher niche, blue five-cent stamps curling up off its side. I held it as I walked, taking batteries out, sniffing them, sometimes discarding the leakers. As I progressed (and this is why I say I progressed), the walls started getting less tear-stained, the floor less gritty. I was heading up, not more than gradually, but enough that if I dropped a AAA it would roll. Roll away, towards whence I’d come. I rooted through for a nine volt with a lightning cat on the side, which I held upside down, placing both its little silver dimples against my tongue. Nothing. Alan had told me if you ever did that you’d die, but Alan was a fucking liar. Just keep walking, and I started hearing people. Makes you want to duck behind a garbage can, but I decided to act nonchalant. Businessmen were scurrying past now, all businessmen, occasional woman in a pants suit. Ties were yellow and spotted, or else candystriped red and blue. A yellow sign that was beginning to get towards dusted read: this way to airport, that way to subway but with arrows and no demonstratives. “Better avoid the airport,” I thought, and turned smartly on my heel.

But easier said in this underground maze. The sounds of the airplanes above and the metro below faded together into one long unwavering static, a kind of a rumble that came from everywhere and was echoed in the clockwork gears of the gray flannel suits lurching their flaccid passengers along. Policemen loitered in doorways, but how would they know who I am? A description, ha! I could hardly describe myself. He’s got, wot? eyes, right? and two of those. Feet, yeah feet. My hair, bright shining like the sun, might be a distinguishing feature, but it had grimed down in the underneath into a generic blah color. If I hadn’t been absolutely covered in filth I could have blended in anywhere.

The airport, for all my effort, was bearing closer. Every turn, or turn around, I made only set my feet more precisely on the brightly lit airport track. Might as well have been a moving sidewalk, the way I was going. Succumbing to fate, I tried to conjure up an alibi, or rather an excuse for my airport presence, but the best I could come up with was that I was flying to Chicago. There had to be a flight to Chicago, I reasoned, surely at least one. It’s a big airport, O’Hare is, to fly to. Hadda be.

A man dressed in a red uniform with darker-red stripes along his pants legs informed me that the flights tonight would be at 7:45 and 9:30, bowed, and opened the glass door. Through I went and thank you, doorman. The terminal was long and narrow, with gates all up one wall and benches down the other. In the center was a big town-square-type clock (it’s 7:30 already); at the far end double doors. Another red-dressed man was hustling people on the 7:45, 7:45, this way for the 7:45, are you sir, on the 7:45? I told him I was going to Chicago, and he lifted an eyebrow at me and turned away, keeping up his patter. There was a constant stream of people emerging from other gates, circling around, passing through and mingling with those headed for the 7:45. “Will you be taking the 7:45?” a Woman in Red asked me, and only me.

“I’m waiting for someone,” I said, because really, God knows where that 7:45 is going to, and I didn’t like that eyebrow bit. So I made a big deal about craning my neck and looking up and down the terminal. And that’s when I saw a pink barrette, a folded ear, a neck craned like mine was craned. I ran up to Ellen and hugged her like a drunkard, holding on for life, maybe even dear. As she stiffly patted me on the back I saw, at the edge of my field of vision and only for a moment, a girl who looked just like her, neck, ears, barrettes, and all, walk swiftly by. But I was too busy trying to conceal from her my erection to care. This is why you don’t hug girls like that at my age. And aw, but she was even worried about me. The year was 1991.

I didn’t even ask what she was doing there. Paranoid fantasies were a thing of the future, and at this point events didn’t connect, they seemed to shuffle together, but always running parallel and distinct. Even when they crossed there was no contact, just snaking around like the woven straps of a basket. Back then, for real, events didn’t connect, and who that doppelganger was I’ll never know. El and I spoke madly of an airplane plan to stow away for foreign climes, where the Chairman was already our father and mother, and revolution was already a thing of the past, decades past not dangerous minutes, a fact and not a hastily corrected fallacy; but soon abandoned it for talk of returning. Ellen was far too cynical to fall for that mother-and-father jive, anyway. The essential argument for returning was: They can’t punish everyone. The ringleaders were going down, true: Alan, and Brittany, and—but you couldn’t call Dan a ringleader, could you? Well they were going down. But the three hundred or so regular joes who just happened to be around, or who perhaps ran away at the first sign of trouble, could hardly be blamed. At Nuremberg they tried Goering, not Jerry and Uncle Fritz. Jerry went back to work at the choc’lit shop, Uncle Fritz barcalounged with a Katzenjammer Kids funny page. They’d wave to Ivan and John and Joe, and Ivan and John and Joe would wave back: They were too busy dissecting Hitler’s scrotum to care about kicking on the little guy. Officer, we ran away at the first sign of trouble; raft, what raft? (we practiced saying). Harry wouldn’t testify any different as we all looked the same to them.

So we were heading for some trouble, true. Could be a few cops there, maybe even the army depending on how bad it’d got, but probably just Kearn and Harry, back in control. What’s the worst they could do, send us home? If a camp shuts down it is no dishonor to be sent home. Outside through the double doors, and we gazed across the frozen lake towards the lights of Camp Calicut. Young lovers in long scarves promenaded across the ice, hands held secret in muffs. “Looks strong enough to walk on,” said Ellen; and she’d been across once before, one AWOL night with Emma to pull the clear plastic Lucky Strikes knob on the airport vending machine. We wrapped a mock muff of toilet tissue around our clasped hands and stepped on the ice. Cracks slipped out from beneath my feet like gradual lightning bolts, a meandering path multiplying in bullseye concentric circles. “I weigh more than you do,” I said, scrambling rapidly onto hands and knees spidered far from my body, diffusing the weight. I kept the tissue to swaddle numb palms, and slid along beside her with the heavy shuffling steps of a bear. On the interstate in the distance I could see two counselors I’d suffered under tearing away in Mr. Kearn’s car. With telescopic vision (temporarily granted me) I read their lips, learned for the first time that their names were Patrick and John. Patrick spat into his right hand, John into his left, and they prepared to proclaim themselves Spit Brothers, joined forever against the forces of chaos and anomie, against both the bourgeois establishment and the fascist underground. John reached over to join hands, but arms crossed in confusion and he took Patrick’s wrong, Patrick’s dry left hand, smearing it with saliva. Patrick wiped his own spit off his right palm, steering with his knees, and they held an oozing grip into the distance, perhaps a sunset in another twenty hours or so.

“But did your parents pay for this [Camp Calicut] on their credit card?” Ellen asked, sudden thought. “Because then our going back might screw up their credit rating, with the refund and all. I’m not sure how it works.” Her question snapped my head back around, away from the dwindling taillights, already as small as stars. Actually, I had just gotten my first credit card (gifted me by mother to buy button candy at the camp canteen) and they’d put the camp price total on it so I could build a credit rating. I told her not to worry, not about decadent credit ratings.

My shins were cold. “Not your hands?” Ellen asked, oh Christ touchingly concerned, but my hands were okay. My knees hurt and my shins were cold, and I could hear the ice crumpling like paper under my mass and scattering into bobbing pieces behind me, as scattered peoples in the Mongols’ wake. She wanted me to have some cover story prepared, in case one hand or knee slipped through the ice and I returned to camp with a sopping chill limb. “I’ll think of one when it happens,” was my answer; but I knew well, really, the kind of panic I’d be in once wet; I wouldn’t be thinking of any stories then. I knew it so well, but I couldn’t make myself prepare: too grim a thought, I guess. I had hardly even let myself speculate about the camp body count, a careless troweling here or there, bottle rocket up a nose and straight through to the brain pan. Dozens dead, headlines read (in my mind. Really it was much worse).

Ellen stopped and indicated of the lake, with sweeping gestures and whispers, “This part’s deep,” a caution for both of us really. “At least twenty feet, and there is an octopus king down there.” But the ice was so thick by this point it was practically black, and I stood up and trudged the last ten paces with dignity. Couldn’t even see what she was worried about, this close to the edge. Around the lip of the lake was a drift of snow to climb over, and then the camp lay before us like a ghost town. The unmistakable negative cylinder of bootprints everywhere, but no makers, no trackers, just their signs. The secret ideograms they formed were a blinding spirograph of complexity precluding any reading. “Who had gone whither and when?” (one might ask). The thousands of prints were noise in the snow.

Which snow plowed around our knees as we cut across to the paths, partially shoveled at least. Then a walk through the center of camp, past the Main Building, among the cabins. The absolute silence of a million birds flown away months ago, our footsteps reduced to a styrofoam squeaking. “Any moment now,” we whispered to each other, they’ll spot us and take us away. We knew we were in trouble like nothing ever, but hand in hand it could be borne. A store that used to sell souvenir postcards had the lights still on. Through the anti-theft gratings they put on the windows last Tuesday we could see Mr. Kearn and Harry in plush chairs, leaning over a card table by candlelight. We could have turned ourselves in right there, but we were in a snooze-alarm state. Just five more minutes. Let those two plot our punishments a little longer. Someone was bound to spy us soon. No reason to get up just yet…

Near the embers of the campfire pit rose a totem pole, faithful in spirit, at least, to the traditions of two thousand miles and two hundred years away. A small squatting child, nearly naked, with his hands tightly gripping the wings of a raven above him, appeared to have been intricately carved into the base of the pole. It was a slightly reddish color, compared to the images above it. We watched as the pole began to sway, and the child stagger in circles. “My God, it’s real,” Ellen gasped. The child, his face tortured into a coyote leer, staggered almost squat under the burden of a twenty-foot pole balanced on his head. His frantic scrabbling produced a phantom cone, with the pole for a generatrix and his footprints a directrix, which he attempted to resolve into a perpendicular. Yet the footpath circled more and more wildly, the pole angled more and more sharply, finally slipping off and crashing flaccid—literally flaccid, like a rubber chicken—on the ground. The child scrambled into the snowy brush, towards the cave that camp spelunkers used to go to to find used condoms and urine stains. “How did he escape the adults?” I asked, staring at the grotesques hewn in the pole. But there it was right in front of me: some factory-contrived wind spirit had been crudely chipped away at, and there was no mistaking that ferrety nose, or those amphibian eyes, it had been recrafted to resemble. It was Alan in wood.

“Well, I didn’t see that coming,” Ellen said. I hadn’t either. Events reoriented themselves in my mind: the police had not come; Mr. Kearn and Harry were behind bars; Alan and his troops had won. And then they were upon us. Springing out from the bushes, dropping coconut-like from trees, in some cases even tunneling under the snow to pop up at our feet: three hundred children aged five to fourteen, leering in the starlight. The youngest ones had their tongues hanging out and were panting like dogs. Alan, bedecked in a faux zebra-skin afghan and markered-up chef’s hat, entered through an orifice, puckering and then resealing, in the crowd. Dan, a leash connecting his belt and Alan’s, crouched at his master’s side, his fists wrapped in boxer’s tape. “Welcome to my kingdom,” Alan said, without a trace of irony.

Hello, Alan seemed to lack sufficient gravity, and so we were silent.

“You deserted the revolution,” said Alan, his minions silent, many armed with pruning shears or pointed sticks. “And who, in turn, abandoned you to your fate?”

Again, the truthful you did, buddy didn’t seem the way to go. Why did he even ask who abandoned us? The question made no sense. I said, without thinking, my knees dry but my palms wet, “A third girl.”

Everyone started laughing, some falling backwards into the snow, again and again because it feels so good. I realized that my statement would necessarily imply I was a girl, too, to round out, with Ellen, the trio. “I mean a third person,” I said. “A girl.” And then I realized there was only one answer to this question, and she was nowhere to be seen in this crowd. “Brittany,” I said. “She led us astray and then abandoned us,” Ellen said. “Brothers,” Alan said, and we shook hands.

They took us to the cave and prodded us with broom handles and tickled us under the arms for initiation. We sat in a circle then, a magazine-fed fire blazing in the middle, its smoke sucked out through fissures in the roof. The children in the back were invisible, where the five-year-olds with night vision nipped at each other’s necks and bayed. The second graders served snow-chilled soda cans to whoever cuffed and bullied them. I remember thinking: for this you turned the doorknobs, Alan? So they could become slaves and wild dogs?

But we were all much younger by that point, and I couldn’t have been more than eight myself. A girl in overalls, her face painted a garish purple, stood up, her back to the fire, and danced a little dance and sang a little song. This is the song she sang:

These are the jolly things I do:
I play and eat and take a poo.
And then I fish them from the bowl
And stuff them up my peepee hole.

Cheers, applause, author! The crowd were ecstatic, and shouting so, and only quieted to receive the much-anticipated second verse.

I suck my toes and blow my nose
And watch as Kleenex fungus grows.
I eat it up because it’s green…
Much like an apple I’d once seen.

Oh, they were wild for it, no college student at a summer job in an oversized Disney mask ever produced such rapture in them. The girl sat down and Alan rose up, like seesaw ends. His hands were far above his head, acknowledging the fans.

“Oh yeah, well, listen to this,” he said, “listen to this.” He had to repeat himself. Every eye turned to him. His army couldn’t even agree on whose steamboat it was, Miss Suzie’s or Miss Lucy’s, but they were of one accord there in the cave as, their faces half-illuminated and flickering, they waited with one ear, or with two ears each. What a hit we’d had in “These are the jolly,” and here Alan was promising something better! He smiled and worked the crowd with nothing more than winks and nods. “The little number I’m a-gonna do is popularly known,” he said, “as the Russian national anthem.” And Alan started to sing a song to the tune of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” about the miserable economic conditions in Soviet Russia. The narrator lamented the lack of vodka, toilet paper, lovely ladies, and representative government in crudely rhymed quatrains. He might well have written the piece himself. Nobody really got it, and those who could get it would have wanted something better; you could tell. A shame, really, but for all its jingoism, this song just wasn’t a winner. Alan bowed at the end to strained applause. As he straightened up, the light cast on his face revealed two evil eyes and a scowl. “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded to the crowd. “How dare you laugh at a juvenile poop song and boo real satire, you illiterate savages?” He frothed as he spoke, his head snapping back and forth so flecks of spittle separated from their mother-mass and plunged, spherical in free fall, to the ground. And it’s not like they were booing him, just that whatever Roman triumph he was expecting, this wasn’t it. “You only like the easy songs; what kind of army are you?” He stalked away, out of the cave, where the snow had begun to fall again. I held Ellen’s hand and my breath. He was already losing control of them. He stood framed in the cave mouth, silhouetted against the lights of the airport and the city beyond. His plan was to march tomorrow and take it, and burn its skyscrapers to the ground. And he would, sure: You know well, thanks to the memory of Clio, muse of history, that he would do all he planned, and more. But how much longer (we did not yet, then, know) could he keep these children under his hand, before factions (Suzie/Lucy) splintered his army to nothing, and ochlocracy swept westward like the Huns? And there Alan would lie forgotten with a misericord passed through his throat behind them.

We could feel it all falling down around us, and so could Alan. It must have been worse for him. We watched him standing there alone, and I held Ellen close to me and whispered into her ear that it was already over.

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My name is Muknik, which means Little Mouse, and I am being paid forty bucks to kill the last twelve surviving Lutherans on earth. Muknik is not my real name; William the Bastard gave it to me. Muknik means Little Mouse in Lutheran.

I don’t know who put up the money. I do not know who would pay forty dollars for twelve dead Lutherans.

“It doesn’t work that way, Muknik,” William the Bastard will tell me. “Ten bucks a head, times twelve, divided by the five of us. That’s forty for you.” He’s right. He sounds like he is wrong, but he’s right. But I still do not know who put up the hundred and twenty dollars.

“You don’t have to know, Mousey,” William the Bastard will tell me. He’s right. He closes the suitcase with the hundred and twenty five dollars in it. I do not know what the extra five are for. There are five of us. There have been as many as eight. People come and go. I would like to go, but who would let me? This is not a job I want. This is a job I got roped into, long ago. And one time I almost escaped, so now they keep checking up on me, whatever I do.

That was in a karaoke bar. That was also long ago. And also long ago was when I got shanghaied, through clever machinations.

“Keep your mind on your work, Little Mouse,” William the Bastard will tell me. “You’re dreaming bitter thoughts again.” He’s right. And I am important today. That is why I will get a double share. That is why the math is right, although it looked wrong. I, Little Mouse, will get a double share. I knock on the door of the movie theater. They are holed up in a movie theater, old and abandoned. They know there is danger. They are the last twelve. They are Lutherans.

“I am Little Mouse,” I say. “You absolutely must let me in.” I act serious.

“Go away, Little Mouse.” They say, “There will be no movies showing today.”

They are in the place where you go to watch the actual movie, the place with the sloping floor and all those chairs bolted to the floor. They have unbolted the chairs. I know this because chairs have been strewn about the lobby, lying near the ticket taker’s ticket taking stand, bobbing in the congealed oil of the popcorn machine. Their seats flap in the breeze, on hinges. The breeze comes through the gaps in the walls.

I have an answering machine. I have a telephone, with a long long cord. There is something in the answering machine.

“I am Muknik. You absolutely must let me in.”

The telephone rings. It is William the Bastard. “But I’m trying,” I tell him, and hang up. He is on the other end of the cord. He is not in the movie theater; that would be suspicious. I am not suspicious. I am Muknik.

“Did you say you were Muknik?” Their voices are muffled through the door, but you can hear their Lutheran accents.

“Yes, yes. I am Muknik. Why will you not let me in?”

“Just where did you get the name Muknik?” This is what they want to know. I do not tell them that William the Bastard gave it to me. That would be suspicious.

“My parents gave it to me.” This is a lie. My parents were not so stupid as to give me a Lutheran name. That is why they lived so long. My mother even changed her name, disguised her accent, and never appeared in bright light, thereby obscuring her Lutheran features, she was so clever. My features hardly need obscuring, unless you look so hard. So there is nothing to let you know I am half Lutheran unless I tell you.

I am half Lutheran.

That is why William the Bastard thought I ought to have a Lutheran name. I watch the door. Tiny curlicues of plastic are spiraling off it. There is a drill boring through it. This is not me drilling in. This is them drilling out. It is a little hand-driven drill.

“Stand back. We are drilling,” they say, with their Lutheran accents. I stand back. I am not so stupid.

When they are done drilling they put their beady eyes up to the hole in the door. Some call out in fear because the light is so bright. The sun is streaming into the lobby through the gaps that time and wild beasts have made in the old movie-theater-lobby walls. Really, these walls are quite dilapidated. I am surprised that the movie room, the place the Lutherans are in, does not have holes in its walls. That is why they have locked themselves in there; there are no holes to get through. But I am a Little Mouse, and I will gnaw my way into their hearts.

“Are you paying attention? We are trying to ask you questions.”

I was dreaming thoughts again. “Ask me then,” I say.

“Why are you here?”

An easy lie. “I seek asylum. We are the last thirteen.”

“He doesn’t sound like a Lutheran to me,” says one voice.

“He doesn’t look like a Lutheran to me,” says another.

“Check here, around the nose,” I say. “And the ear flaps.” They mutter and I make sure to add, “I’m only half.”

They deliberate. “Can we let him in if he is only half Lutheran?” That is what they wonder.

The phone rings in my hand. “Almost,” I tell William the Bastard, and hang up. “You can come in,” they say. The door opens.

It is dark inside the theater. There are still some seats, here and there, bolted to the floor. They close the door on the phone cord. I tug, but the cord will not slide. It is slammed in the door. I stand near the doors.

“Hello,” I say.

The Lutherans are dressed in plaid overcoats and babushka head wraps. Some have feathers in their hair, and shoes. Their children are huddled in tents near the screen.

“Hello,” they say. The phone rings, and I ask them, “Where do you go to the bathroom?”

They point towards a corner near the door. It is curtained off. The phone is still ringing. “Excuse me,” I say. This is what I do. I pull the phone towards the corner. The cord has a little slack I can play out, but still it does not reach. Then I pick up the receiver and stretch the curly cord that connects it to the phone. If I pull it so tight that the curls disappear and the phone hovers off the ground, I can stand inside the curtain of the bathroom.

The floor slopes downward here. There is a big pot, the kind you make stew in.

“Are you dreaming again?” William the Bastard asks me over the phone. “I am almost ready to believe that they have caught you, that they know it all.”

“No. I am here,” I tell him.

“I almost set it off right now, I was just about to. I thought they had you. I almost set it off, inside or outside, just in the hopes I’d get one or two.”

“I am on target. I will report more later,” I tell him.

“I just want to know if you’re in yet.”

“More later soon bye.”

“Soon, or I’m setting it off, hell or high water,” but I hardly hear him. I am too busy hanging up. I exit the bathroom.

“Hello, fellow Lutherans,” I say. They suspect nothing. Maybe I suspect something.

“It’s true, he’s one of us,” an old woman says. “Look around the nose, and at the ear flaps.” She tries to touch me with a withered, dusty claw.

“There is something I must do,” I say. I bend down to the answering machine. I do not tell them there is a bomb inside it. There is a bomb inside it. I did not build it, but I know it is there. “I must sing the Let Me In Song,” I tell them. “It is a custom of my people.”

“It is not a custom of the Lutherans,” a man with a beard that has grown in in tufts says.

“You forget that I am only half Lutheran.” I say. “I am also half Iroquois.” And they let me sing. I sing into the answering machine. I have pressed record. Just because there is a bomb in it does not mean it does not work. I sing:

“Let me in, let me in
Or I’ll kick you in the shin.
Oh, why can’t you believe that I
Am one half Lu-ther-an?”

I sing it eight times. Then I say, into the tape, “My! I am in!” and press stop.

“Why do the Iroquois sing a song that goes I’m a Half a Lutheran?” asks a little girl with scurvy.

“That is a good question,” I commend her. The man with beard tufts beams with pride.

He says, “That is my girl.”

“It is stuffy in here. I will go out for some air,” I say. I am pleased that I could win their trust, with my Lutheranesque face, and my charm, and my Lutheran name.

They protest, and the little scurvy girl says, “Stay here and play with me, mister. Play with my dolly.” The doll has been contrived out of tin cans and strings, rigged up in the shape of a doll. I am pleased that I am the only one, out of all of the five of us, who could have done this job, but I know that William the Bastard will never give me a double share.

“You must stay with us,” they say, but I say:

“I will be gone for only a minute. Do not answer the phone.” It is already ringing as I shut the door. They suspect nothing.

I run through the lobby; I run past the candy counter. There is so much dust in the carpet that it flies up in billows behind me; it must look like I am running so fast I am smoking. I leap through a gap in the wall.

I cannot hear what happens but I know what it will be. This is what must happen:

The phone will ring until the answering machine goes on. William the Bastard will hear me singing. He will hear Let Me In. He will hear it eight times. By that time I will have run far away. Then he will think I am inside the movie place. He will set off the bomb. He will get his one hundred and twenty dollars, ten dollars a head for twelve Lutherans. He will have to give back his five dollars for the head of the half a Lutheran.

Who will be far away.

(I decided to share some short stories I wrote in my youth. Or, like, at least this one.)

A man impales a cork on a metal skewer, holds it in the fire. Flames lick the metal, sooting it, blackening the cork. When the cork has cooled, he rubs it on his face, his hands, the shiny parts of his rifle, the medals on his uniform. He seems particularly disgruntled about having to soil his medals that way, and his rifle, which shone before as brightly as a newly minted penny that has never changed hands.

I had things somewhat easier. My rifle was an old, scavenged model, made from wood and pig iron, that only shone when wet. Medals I lacked, although I had received two patches, one for being conscripted and one for not deserting, which were waiting in my breast pocket to be sewn on. My hands and face were already a uniform gray, what with the caked-on mud—in fact, my whole body was gray, save for a pink ring chafed clean by the waistband of my jockeys. There was no moon. “Come on,” the blackened man said, dropping the cork into a puddle in the bottom of the trench.

We slipped out onto the field, rifles slung over our shoulders and clipped to our belts, so they wouldn’t come sliding over our heads as we crawled. This clip made it impossible to ready your rifle quickly, but that hardly mattered, as we were under strictest orders not to fire them at any cost. I had a box of grenades, which I pushed ahead of me with my hands while I snaked forward on knees and elbows. I could hear an occasional shot from the Corolonian line, followed by panicked chastisements. “Show some hustle, soldier,” the corked-up officer snapped. I followed him. He appeared to have sat in some chalk dust, or dry clay, before going over the top, for the seat of his trousers was dusted white. I tried to think of where in the trenches the clay could possibly be dry. I followed his bright buttocks winking in the dim starlight as we crawled. We were a good thousand yards from the Corolonian trenches. I saw the white buttocks in front of me disappear suddenly; there was a splash, and some cursing. “Mind the crater,” the officer called, but I had already crept closer to investigate, and the box I was pushing had tipped in over the lip. I could hear clattering as the grenades tumbled out, and the soggy thumps.

“Mind the bombs,” I called, and the officer was out of the crater in a flash, racing back to our lines. “Abort mission! Abort!” he screamed although there was no reason to believe those grenades could be set off by anything other than random chance.

“Partial success,” he told everyone when we returned. “The bombs are much closer to the enemy lines than before.”

“You were hardly gone five minutes,” PFC Effingham said. The officer, what was his name? got into his truck and was driven back inland, away from the front, ignoring Effingham.

That Effingham, he was my only real friend in the trenches. He had given me his helmet—helmets were in short supply—when I first arrived at the front; Effingham hated helmets. Every time he got issued one he’d give it to some other sap who had no helmet, and go report it lost or missing. Then they’d send a new one, he’d give it away, report, and another issue. I don’t know why he didn’t just keep his mouth shut about losing the helmet, but mine is not to reason why, and anyway, Effingham way outranked me.

“Boy,” he said to me that day. “What happened to those bombs?” Boy was not an insulting term. My name is Anthony Boy.

“They’re in a crater, Mr. Effingham,” I said. “They’re wet.”

“Good, good. Good enough. Well, you should come and meet the cracksman.”

The cracksman? “Like Raffles?” I asked.

“Come and see. He just arrived while you were gone, and I haven’t spoken with him yet myself.”

The cracksman turned out to be a tall, slender Frenchman with a violin case. He was wearing black silk civvies, very dapper. He was shaking everyone’s hand. You could tell by the way he looked around, and by the way he didn’t have scurvy, that he wasn’t used to a life of mud and lice and filth; but he hardly acted squeamish about it, either.

Effingham went up and shook his hand. “Zugazagoitia,” the cracksman introduced himself.

And: “Here, man,” he said to Effingham, “what’s become of your helmet?

“I lost it,” Effingham preened.

“Well you can have mine; they issued one with the uniform, but I really have no use for either.”

Effingham accepted it with unconcealed pain. There were hardly any helmetless men left in our battalion. He said, “And this here is Anthony Boy.”

We shook. “Are you really a cracksman?” I asked.

“A crack shot, Boy; a crack shot.” Zugazagoitia then “bummed a fag,” and “split for mess.”

“But they can’t let him shoot,” I whispered to Effingham afterwards. “That’s against orders.”

“I’m sure there are special provisions for cracksmen,” said Effingham.

*

Zugazagoitia had been all over the front, and oh! how he told us stories. Like how at other places you didn’t crawl around no man’s land, you walked upright. That was because machine guns were set up to shoot just an inch above the ground, in the hopes of catching someone peeking their head out of the trench. So you walked, because then machine guns would hit your feet, instead of your head. After your got hit in the feet you might then tumble down, to where the bullets hit your head; but it was important to do things in the correct order.

Of course, we had no machine guns around here; this was a pretty crappy area no one cared about. All our rifles were fifty years old, too (except the officers’, which were shiny brand new, but just mock-ups, toys) and exploded in your face about one time in six if you tried to fire them. Of course, at a thousand yards you couldn’t hit any Corolonians, either, anyway.

Maybe order my full-length books?

And that was why, Effingham explained to Zugazagoitia next morning, we weren’t supposed to shoot at all. At first, when the whole thing began, everybody’d been blasting away at each other, and the only casualties came from exploding rifles, never from enemy bullets. So some egghead reasoned out that if the Corolonians were just as bad off as we were equipment-wise (and they were), all we had to do was stop firing, and in a few days the Corolonians would have blown themselves to pieces trying to shoot us. Unfortunately, they caught on, and stopped firing too (unless their eggheads had them stop firing first, and we caught on). Now the only people who fired were simpletons and greenhorns, and evolution was weeding them out.

“We’re in the process of moving our bombs over near the Corolonian line,” Effingham added. “Most of these bombs wouldn’t go off if you used them for fuel, of course, but them what do blow up tend to blow at random, so it’s better we get them away from us.”

“Do you play violin, Mr. Zugazagoitia?” I asked.

“No, my chipper Boy,” Mr. Zugazagoitia said, adjusting his rakish cravat. “That is simply the tool of my trade.”

“Your lockpicks?”

“Come, gather round,” Zugazagoitia said. “I’ll show you.” He opened the violin case with a snap, and removed from its velvet cushioning three silver rods. He screwed these together like a “billiards champ,” which is army slang for a plumber. He kept removing pieces from his case and attaching them to his contraption: a stock, a trigger, telescopic sights, etc.

“What is it?” I asked.

Zugazagoitia held it up and everyone sighed. It was a beaut of a rifle, extra long, shiny, and new.

“You’re not planning on firing that, then?” Effingham asked.

But Zugazagoitia already had the rifled up to his shoulder. “You see that man doing callisthenics there?” he said.

“No,” said everyone except Blair, who had a spyglass.

“Yes,” said Blair.

“And that other man, some rods to his left?”

“No.”

“Yes,” said Blair.

Zugazagoitia fired. We all dove for cover. “He’s mad,” we said.

Zugazagoitia fired again.

*

This is what our moles and spies told us was being said at the Corolonian lines:

Corolonians (all): Ha ha! Stupid Palamans! Firing again!
A Corolonian: Oh my! Scotty appears to have passed out from excess callisthenics.
Another: Touch of sun, may be. He must have hit his head on a rock—there looks to be quite a spot of blood.
Yet another: Say! Rudy’s tuckered out, too.
Again: And also hit a rock I dare say.
Corolonians (all): Ha ha! Stupid Palamans! Still firing.
And another: Ah! Sergeant’s come down all heat stroked, it seems.
Still another: And Meyer.
Etc.

*

Well, there was quite a commotion, I bet, when the Corolonians found out we were killing them with gunfire. Like ignorant natives, I bet, when they first discovered, with superstitious dread, the power of the “thunder-sticks” so-called. At least that’s what Effingham says it was like. And there was quite a commotion in the trench once we realized that Zugazagoitia’s rifle wasn’t going to blow up. And Blair, he managed to convince us that the Corolonians were actually getting shot, and that made us as happy as shooting at ignorant natives, it did. We jumped up and down. We yelled, “We’re number one!” and “In your face!” We drank quite a bit. And the whole time Zugazagoitia was just crouching there, picking them off one by one until all the Corolonians (he told us) were huddled in their trenches, not daring to show a hair on their miserable heads.

“Here’s to Zugazagoitia,” we said, “the finest cracksman of them all.”

“I’m a crack shot, actually,” he said but accepted our toast.

That afternoon we all grabbed a crate of grenades and marched, calm as can be, out of the trench, across no man’s land, and right up to a few yards from the enemy line, where we deposited the whole shebang. Any Corolonian git who stuck his head up to shoot at us, or, since they were under orders not to shoot, lob a rock, got popped by Zugazagoitia, who was sitting half a mile back scanning the Corolonian line. We laughed as we marched back, and suffered only one casualty, when Swanstrom stepped on a nail. Actually, it was pretty bad, and we had to hustle him off to hospital, and he sent us a postcard later saying how the leg had to come off, in the end, so that was sad. But at the time it was a great victory. And the next day was a great victory, too, with Zugazagoitia standing watch and shooting bad guys while we egged him on and on.

“Corolonians suck!” we screamed. “Hey you! Yeah you, Corolonian, can you hear me? You suck!”

And Zugazagoitia fired and fired. Of course, he didn’t get as many as he did the first day, because now no one did calisthenics right out in the open. They hid and they skulked and they crouched in their trenches, but every once in a while one would get careless and stick his head up and BANG was the end of him. It almost got boring.

“Mr. Zugazagoitia,” Effingham said to him one day. “The boys were all wondering if maybe you could do some stunt shooting. For morale purposes.”

“Stunt shooting?”

“Yes sir, you know, like shooting standing on your head, or blindfolded, or while treading water in a big barrel.”

“At what would I be ‘stunt-shooting’?” asked Zugazagoitia.

“Oh, Corolonians, of course. We thought it would be real demoralizing for them if they died and you were doing all sorts of capers at the same time.”

“You know, I can smoke two cigarettes at once while firing…” said Zugazagoitia.

“We have the barrel all ready,” said Effingham.

That was how Zugazagoitia ended up killing three Corolonians standing on his head, two more while eating an apple (he could have done more, he pointed out, but he’d finished the apple already), six one-handed (including one Corolonian who was one-handed himself, quite the coup for Zugazagoitia), and one while he treaded in an enormous barrel full of rain water. He never managed to hit anyone while blindfolded, and the Corolonians razzed us some for that, but overall we got the better of them at every turn, what with so many of their people dying and all.

“These thoughts keep me warm at night,” PFC Effingham said to me one lazy afternoon as we sat dangling out legs in our trench. It was a pleasant day, sunny; there was a “softball” match going, and the shouts from players and crack of the bat mingled with the crack crack crack of Zugazagoitia’s rifle. “The thoughts,” Effingham continued, “of the absolute hell the Corolonians must be going through. Huddled in those dank muddy trenches like animals, stooped over Neanderthal-style when they walk—and you know how muddy those damned things get. And always afraid, Boy, that’s how the Corolonians are most like animals, they’re always afraid, afraid they could be killed at any minute by a tiny piece of metal moving too fast to see, too fast to hear. Hee hee, and we got them, Boy, we got them bastards good.”

“Yeah,” I said, “we’re number one.” I was half listening to the “softball” players, arguing about what the bases were again.

Crack, went Zugazagoitia’s rifle, crack crack.

Oh, Zugazagoitia was quite the darling of our “squadron” (or whatever). We brought him his meals, we gave him our blankets and cigarettes and chocolates and the snapshots our girls sent us from home. Effingham tried to give him his helmet, but the cracksman politely demurred.

“For he’s a jolly good fellow,” we sang.

“I’m touched,” said Zugazagoitia.

When it rained we held umbrellas over him, and Blair and a few others started building him a little shack with an open front, for Zugazagoitia’s use and his use alone; unless we were invited in, of course.

The rest of us, when we weren’t pampering our cracksman, would go fishing in the rain-filled craters, or work on our tans, or monitor the wireless for jazzy tunes. That’s what Effingham was doing, playing with the wireless, I mean, when he heard an official-sounding voice repeating, “723486, 723486.”

“What does 723486 mean, do you suppose?” asked Effingham later that day, while we were taking turns lighting Zugazagoitia’s cigarettes. Zugazagoitia was engaged in the particularly demoralizing stunt of facing backwards holding a mirror and firing over his shoulder, which is why he had no hands left over to light cigarettes with.

“723486?” he said.

“Yes, sir. I heard it on the wireless,” said Effingham.

Zugazagoitia turned around, knelt, started to disassemble his rifle. I noticed how shiny it was still, and new looking. We would all have liked to polish it; but no one touched the rifle except the cracksman, Zugazagoitia insisted. He removed the sights, the stock, the trigger, and unscrewed the long barrel, fitting each piece into its slot in the violin case. “I’m sorry, boys, but that’s the code that means I must go. I’m being recalled.”

“Are you sure you have to go?” we asked.

“Perhaps I misremembered the numbers,” Effingham suggested.

“No, my friends, I’ll be needed elsewhere, I suppose.”

“Is that what 723486 means, Mr. Zugazagoitia? That you’re needed elsewhere?” I asked.

“Not quite, my dear boy, but effectively so. It literally means that a…a ‘cracksman’ (to use your vernacular) has been dispatched by the Corolonians to this theater. Wouldn’t do to have two around, now, would it? We’d just end up shooting each other. Bally silly, that would be.”

A truck swung by a few minutes later. Zugazagoitia stood next to it, distributing to their rightful owners some of the sweetheart snapshots we’d given him. Then he pulled himself up in the passenger seat and waved. Effingham tossed his helmet into the back of the truck as it roared away. “There goes a damn fine shot,” said Effingham, who the next day passed out from sunstroke and hit his head on a rock, while the Corolonians cheered.

I, like Gogol, have written

books you may enjoy

I read some good books last year, but the one that haunts me the most is an 1835 novella by Nikolai Gogol about badass cossack warriors: Taras Bulba. I can’t talk about the power the book has over me without spoilers, so proceed slowly, and I’ll, you know, warn you before they come.

Taras Bulba takes place in an alien landscape, even by the standards of nineteenth-century Russian fiction. We are in the seventeenth century (probably?) here, among a semi-barbaric people. I say semi-barbaric because the Bulba family lives what appears to be a bourgeois life in a nicely appointed house with servants. Taras Bulba’s two sons have just returned from seminary—essentially in this context boarding school—and are ready to take up the family business, which is, as it turns out, violence.

Over the strenuous objections of their (killjoy) mother, the Bulba boys are soon riding with their father over the steppes, heading to a Cossack camp, a kind of impromptu and temporary city in the middle of nowhere. The population is all Cossacks (with merchants hawking wares on the outskirts), and these Cossacks are (as they say) living lives to the fullest. The whole camp is a permanent party, just manly men drinking and signing and dancing with each other.

None of it sounds like the least bit fun to me, but then I am not semi-barbaric. Honestly, it cones across as almost adolescent, with its extreme sexlessness. It’s a stag party. Women are excluded from the cossack word so thoroughly that even their absent mother is denied. “See this saber?” Tasas Bulba tells his sons. “That’s your mother. All the rest is garbage.”

Well, you can’t party forever, and before long, and not without Tasas’s influence, the Cossacks go to war. It was always going to be war; why would Cossacks assemble if not for war? So now our heroes are besieging a Polish city. Wikipedia calls Taras Bulba a “romanticized historical novella” and here’s where the romance (in both meanings of the word) comes. One of Taras Bulba’s two sons has fallen in love with a Polish woman. He has discovered a secret tunnel that can take him into the city to rendezvous with his love. Soon he decides to leave the Cossacks and lead, instead, the Poles in battle.

The novella I read came as part of (as the last entry in) a Signet paperback collection of Gogol stories. It is nothing like the stories preceding it in the collection. Gogol is best known for his often surreal, perhaps proto-Modernist tales: In “The Nose,” for example, a man awakens to find his nose missing, and then learns his nose has been traveling around town having adventures. Kafka or Calvino could comfortably have written a story like this, although of course it must have stood out in 1836.

Gogol’s Taras Bulba is not surreal in the least; on the other hand, it was written far too early to be part of the so-called realistic tradition. It springs from its own traditions: It is a family drama; it is a coming of age tale (or two; two brothers each must come of age); most of all, it is all-out action! You can practically smell the pulp coming off this one, and if it’s not Robert E. Howard it’s Harold Lamb territory. The close hewing to multiple genres is, as always, a comfort.

Here’s the thing (and dude! here come all the spoilers). No sooner does the faithless son ride out for the Poles and against his family than his father unhorses him and quite deliberately executes him in cold blood as a traitor. The other son is meanwhile taken captive (by Poles) and Taras rushes to free him, completely fails, and watches his son get tortured to death. Then he goes on with his warlike life as before, but perhaps more bitterly and savagely, until he is captured and killed.

This is all presented in the most aromantic manner possible. It’s grim and horrible. Taras is a character not really driven to introspection but his pride in his sons and his eagerness to expose them to his own bloodthirsty world is palpable and therefore, in retrospect, heartbreaking. Maybe before I was a parent myself, when I had far fewer emotions, I could have read this unmoved, but no longer. It really is a devastating read.

As much as “The Nose” is a subversion of the kind of classic short story you expect from even somewhat “unrealistic” canonical writers (Poe, Hawthorne), Taras Bulba is a subversion of all the genres it gestures towards: the star-crossed lovers, the prison break, the pulpy barbarian war fun. The love story is brutally truncated and impossibly short. The pulpy action ends in despair. But—

Look, short stories existed in 1836. Gogol knew, when he was writing “The Nose,” that he was thumbing, you know, something at a regular short story. But Taras Bulba was hardly designed to subvert our expectations of pulp fiction, because there were no pulps. It’s not Realism (with a capital R) but it’s certainly realistic to imagine that a semi-barbarian would want to break his son from prison but would understand the systems involved so poorly that he cannot even get a chance to see him. Perhaps Gogol’s 1836 readers would not be surprised by the way events unfold; but to a twenty-first century reader, it seems absurd—not that a love story would end in tragedy but that it would end immediately, without having a chance to play out properly. Bulba’s other son could be put to death, but the prison break should almost succeed and then fail at the last minute. It is simply a betrayal of narrative to structure a plot this way. And because Gogol clearly knew something about betraying narrative structures, Taras Bulba feels like Gogol’s messing with me. Taras Bulba feels unfair.

And yet: When young Ostap Bulba is being (quite publicly) tortured to death, his father, desperate to see his son again before he dies, lingers among the spectators. Ostap bears up manfully under the torture, but towards the end, his bones broken and death near, Ostap calls out: “Father! Father! Where are you? do you hear?”

From the crowd Taras shouts back, “I hear, my son!” and then slips away (to spend a final chapter in further ruthless killing).

That’s what Gogol grants his hero. I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything as sad as that page, and yet I am also grateful for that moment of consolation. There is, at least, a moment when the rules of narrative, however briefly, cohere into something recognizable, something almost sentimental. It was an immense relief to hear Bulba shout those words.

(And I, o.c., wasn’t even being tortured to death.)

(If you find anything I say entertaining or enlightening, please check out the books I write, such as this collection of twenty alternate history scenarios, this new crime thriller novel, or this postmodern Pynchonean filth about NYC in 2003—a historical novel! Plus many more! Or if you are, like me, too poor for impulse buys, please “like” and share this, or another, post.)

So many great holiday gifts!

At the time I considered the ne plus ultra of annoying—and perhaps it has been surpassed, but self-preservation forced me “out of the game” and I no longer study these things—to be the ArtCarved college ring catalog.

Those are three different catalogs, above—the mid-’90s editions, which are the ones I kept in my “collection.” They’re what I’ll be quoting from.

Part of the glory of the ArtCarved catalog is the word-salad sub-Chat-GPT nonsense with which it is filled. Watch it make a bunch of assumptions about you:

You have invented your own life. You are at ease. Show them who you are. Where you have been says volumes about your path. Demonstrate the trajectory of your lifetime. Up. Straight up. Let your brilliance shine. Softly, as the light in your happy eyes.

“Happy eyes” sells it for me. But of course this abomination against taste is not alone:

Send signals. Signs of who you are. Your belief in excellence, your understated nature. The confidence of no glitz. Quiet power. Confidence is magnetic to itself. As is excellence. Wear the magnet. Be the magnet. Give the sign.

These sentence fragments are appalling! “As is excellence”! It demands to be read in a beat-poetry cadence, and yet it would be incredibly annoying even if written in big-kid sentences. Why would I want to send a signal to everyone about my understated nature (let alone my belief in excellence—who’s agnostic on excellence?)?

This is all bad enough, but what’s really wonderful (by which I mean terrible) about the catalogs are their character pieces. Like a modern-day Theophrastus, ArtCarved offers us quick glimpses into the personalities of different types of people—the people who buy ArtCarved rings! Here is my favorite (by which I mean my least favorite):

In what possible world is Voltaire the antithesis of army boots, such that Overalls there can base her identity on the quirkiness of their juxtaposition? The fourth most famous Goth cartoonist is named Voltaire: Do you think he never wears army boots? Why Voltaire?

This pull quote is like a haiku of annoying, where every word (even that damned ellipsis) does so much work! “Thank you” she says. No one in human history has ever been this much of a poser.

This one’s good (by which I mean bad), too! These two preppie dweebs also made the back cover

where they continue to be so bland that they literally blot out the sky, but the key thing about the O. Henry story, told breathlessly (by which I mean by someone who is out of breath and can only pant out more sentence fragments) by the female lead, is that it is transparently false. At least Voltaire Overalls had a sales argument: “If you’re a rebellious (?) intellectual (?), an ArtCarved ring will match your esthetic.” What are the Two Henries here telling us? “If you buy an ArtCarved ring, there is a trivial but nonzero chance you will get a cute story out of it?”

Also, “Gift of the Magi” is not about picking out matching gifts. That’s the opposite of what “Gift of the Magi” is about.

Perhaps I should have more sympathy for whoever has to write this garbage. I mean, despite what the covers of all three catalogs claim, class rings are not really a tradition any more at most schools, if they ever were, but ArtCarved can only pay the bills if it dupes people into thinking they are. And yet here once again, but for completely different reasons, we are in the realm of the false. When was the last time you were in the doctor’s office, reading a diploma on the wall, and began to fret: But where is the class ring? In no one’s mind are the two yoked.

And of course, the lie is only part of it. The main part is the restrained wackiness of feeding your boyfriend a chip. It’s so restrained that he has to guide the chip home by grabbing her wrist. I’m gritting my teeth so hard I can feel it behind my eyes. Is anyone else having this visceral reaction? I’ll only show one more. Let’s see how sweaty and desperate ArtCarved can get.

Pretty sweaty and desperate.

Perhaps the whole world has become an ArtCarved catalog now, which explains why I mostly stay in my basement reading old comic strips. In the old days it seemed so innocent, the idea of digging into the lower depths of bad culture, watching infomercial after infomercial and laughing like Beavis and/or Butthead. But conspiracy theories used to seem fun and innocent, too, and suddenly Q-Anon has stormed the Capitol. I didn’t see that coming. If we are not all murdered from above by autocrats we will inevitably die a less glorious death from below, the slow death of despair as all human discourse begins to sound like:

The future. It is ahead of us. We are ahead of it. We will take all of our college years with us, into it. It will be perfect, it will be ours. Our standards, our principles embodied in a ring of tradition. It whispers success. It says we’ve made it. Our own.

As long as this paragraph exists, no one in the world can be strong or happy.1

Oh! And look! Voltaire Overalls is back, and polishing the future!

I also wrote a book for perverts

Back in the ’80s, Piers Anthony was a juggernaut of the SF section. His impressive back catalog and daunting new-release schedule guaranteed him a full shelf or two at your local B. Dalton. A couple decades later (long before the present moment) he had become an embarrassing relic, his books out of print, his name a punchline.

Unlike SF darlings of slightly later eras, such as Neil Gaiman (accused rapist) and Orson Scott Card (the gay marriage thing), Anthony has had no one moment in which he fell from grace. People just started getting squicked out by his books.

It may be that the books are, and always have been, rapey; the public’s growing perception of their rapiness turned its eye away from him. It may be that his books are, and have always been, full of sexualized young girls; the further in time society moved from the liner notes to Nancy Sinatra’s Boots album (see image below), the less acceptable sexualizing young girls became, and society shut it down.

These analyses are not, I think, incorrect, but they do not quite hit the mark. Neither is what the standardized tests would call the best answer. The back half of the twentieth century is fulled with gross texts that are gross because they’re rapey or gross because they’re “pedo-ey,” but not all of them have disappeared down the drain Anthony’s books have. I can still listen to Nancy Sinatra without feeling weird; I just ignore the liner notes; who can read Piers Anthony now?

This essay will be an attempt to tease out the best answer. It will also, incidentally, explain why Anthony’s fan base skewed towards young teenagers. You may have noticed already, but perhaps have not been able to pin down specifically, the fact that Piers Anthony books feature a weird sexual peccadillo—I say weird not judgmentally, as I don’t want to kink shame, but just to indicate it is something not often made explicit in mainstream American literature—I mean, the kind of books you could buy at B. Dalton in the ’80s.

Remember, I’m not calling Piers Anthony a pervert. I don’t know anything about P.A. (outside of what he has revealed in his 2.5 volumes of autobiography). He has stated or implied more than once (Anthonology p. 245; Bio of an Ogre p. 208) that the sexy element in his work is due to “the market.” So forget about P.A.: It’s his books, that are perverted! Their author’s shifting fortunes are merely a metric of how badly his readers wanted to indulge in their particular perversion.

Let me say right here at the outset that, despite a cruel and acerbic tone I have trouble shutting off, I bear Anthony no ill will. I have loved his books and hated his books (depending on my age), but I am trying to be dispassionate here; I’ll save my vituperation for other authors and other books. Personally, I think he does have some quality work that stands up well: Mute, On a Pale Horse, maybe Orn or Night Mare; and even his weaker books (and I’ll admit he has some real stinkers) often have interesting ideas. His first novel, Chthon, was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula, Macroscope for the Hugo. In an alternate reality, Anthony would be remembered as a minor post-new-wave writer with a few hidden gems. Maybe time, that thief, will drag him around to that verdict eventually. But at the moment…well, here we are.

I must warn that the following paragraphs contain really quite a lot of discussion of sexual assault, rape, and sexualized violence, and although I’m not going to linger lovingly on the details, maybe I’ll be quoting someone who does.

Start here, in the very first Xanth book:

•A Spell for Chameleon (1977)

This is the key text to understanding Piers Anthony’s work, and therefore his rise and his fall. I know people often skip block-text quotes, so I’ll summarize what follows right below it, but honestly this one is important—maybe try to wade through the whole block. For context: Bink is riding on the back of Cherie the centaur, and she says…:

“Now hang on. There’s a trench ahead I have to hurdle.”

Bink had been relaxing, but now he leaned forward again and clasped his hands tightly around her waist. She had a sleek, comfortable back, but it was too easy to slide off. However, if she weren’t a centaur, he would never have had the nerve to assume such a position!

Cherie picked up speed, galloping down the hill, and the motion made him bounce alarmingly. Peering ahead under her arm, he saw the trench. Trench? It was a gorge, some ten feet across, rushing up at them. Now he was more than alarmed; he was frightened. His hands became sweaty, and he began to slide off the side. Then she leaped with a single mighty spasm of her haunches and sailed up and across.

Bink slipped further. He had a glimpse of the stony bottom of the trench; then they landed. The jolt caused him to slide around even more. His arms scrambled desperately for a more secure hold—and wandered into distinctly awkward territory. Yet if he let go—

Cherie caught him around the waist and set him on the ground. “Easy,” she said. “We made it.”

Bink blushed. “I—I’m sorry. I started to fall, and just grabbed—”

“I know. I felt your weight shift as I leaped. If you had done it on purpose, I’d have dropped you into the trench.” And in that instant she looked uncomfortably like Chester [another, meaner centaur]. He believed her: she could drop a man into a trench if she had reason to. Centaurs were tough creatures!

“Maybe I’d better walk now.”

“No—there’s another trench. They’ve been opening up recently.”

(pp. 30–31)

As promised, here’s a summary of the text above: While jumping over a gorge, Bink accidentally grabs Cherie’s breasts. It wasn’t his fault.

That’s the key to the scene. It wasn’t his fault. Unlike a fratbro at Woodstock 99 groping a crowd-surfer, Bink is innocent. And in fact, he only survives because he is innocent! The guilty get dumped into a gorge (!) that has just opened up (!!). Make of that what you will, Freudians!1

One thing that’s interesting here is that it’s unclear if Bink actually enjoyed his second-base experience. He’s terrified, after all! If I may indulge in some foreshadowing: It’s like a gratuitous shower scene in an anime: The cat-maid isn’t getting her jollies off taking the shower, as she’s just taking a shower; and there’s no one else there. The only one getting stimulated is the camera. The performance is only for the audience.

Now, there’s nothing particularly weird about this scene, and it could appear in any number of novels and pass without comment. But the more Piers Anthony books one reads, the weirder the scene appears. Because a scene much like it appears again and again. The books craft complicated or baroque justifications for why a character—the hero, and male—must go through some kind of sexual encounter and come out the other end saying it wasn’t his fault. Sometimes (as here) it is an accident. Sometimes the character has no choice. Sometimes both!

Bink’s experience is unusual if not unique because it gives a peek into what happens to people whose fault it is. Usually this part is left unstated. All that is left is the innocence. But surely the anxiety is always there? There’s always the danger of the Gap Chasm.

What follows in the paragraphs below is a whirlwind tour of Piers Anthony’s oeuvre in chronological order, or at least a tour of eight scenes that match our summary above. We will restrict ourselves to moments when a character—the protagonist—is compelled to sexual activity through forces beyond his control. This is not just the common motif of a passive male hit on by a manic pixie or sexually aggressive woman: This is about having no choice. Not necessarily because the male character is raped, but perhaps because the greater good requires the character to go through with something he would otherwise have been too much of a gentleman to do.

These examples can be deadening after a while, so feel free to skip ahead to the conclusion.

•Macroscope (1969)

Here’s the scenario: Four characters, including young Ivo and his crush, the beautiful Afra, are, for plot reasons, about to use a teleportation method that breaks down and reassembles the body. Afra is afraid that she will be reassembled as a different person and so demands that someone grope—“handle” is her term—her so that they will know if the self that is reassembled after the teleportation is indeed her. Will Ivo fondle the woman he’s crushing on?

“I couldn’t tell one girl from another, by touch,” Ivo objected, feeling his own face heating.

“Do it,” Groton [another of the four characters present] muttered.

“Me?”

Groton nodded.

(p. 162)

What follows is page after page of Ivo hesitating to touch Afra and Afra forcing him, quite physically, to. “She caught his hand and jammed it against her midriff”—that’s how it starts. Soon: “She grabbed at his hand again and lifted it in both of hers forcing his fingers to uncurl. ‘Here?’ She plastered his right palm against her left breast.” This is followed by: “‘Here?’ she demanded again, and rubbed his fingers against the firm lower crease of her left buttock…Ivo snatched his hand away.” [Ellipses in the original.]

I cannot stress enough how long this scene goes on for. Ivo is pressured from all sides, so he eventually squeezes and prods every inch of Afra’s lovely flesh. Don’t worry, though: “He touched her pubic hair and passed over it lightly, finding no more reason to probe within it than he had to feel the insides of her ears, nose or mouth.” This goes on from page 161 to 166. Also notice that he’s doing a real service for Afra here. “Confirmation by tactile sensation—very important,” approves Groton (p. 161).

Ah, you may be objecting, but this is scene just a weirder and more juvenile version of a strong come-on. You’ll have to produce something far weirder to persuade me.

Well, the next one has a far more importune sexually aggressive woman. It involves an even more important real service. And, yes, it is weirder.

•“The Bridge” (1970)

In this short story, a 9” tall miniature dream girl shows up begging, quite literally, for sex. The first word of the story is “please,” and Minnie never stops saying please for the entire story. She wants to have sex with a normal-sized human, impossible as that sounds, because her vagina is a conduit to another solar system, the people of which need the protagonist’s sperm to survive. Hey, our hero is preventing extinction here! He has no choice! What a mensch! This particular benevolence is described in lushly pornographic detail that I will forbear to quote.

There’s an oddly objective nature to this good deed, though. The protagonist does not know he’s saving a species: He thinks he’s just satisfying (as one does) a mysterious 9” tall girl that shows up on his pillow one morning for no reason. He scoffs at the idea that “a great deal more had been at stake than an act of physical love between two people” (Anthonology p. 260).

But we, dear reader, know the truth.

•Var the Stick (1972)

It gets weirder.

Var’s girlfriend Soli has been captured, and is chained naked to a rock. Or as P.A. puts it: “Soli’s slender wrists were pinned within them [manacles] at shoulder height. She was naked, her lustrous black hair falling down around her shoulders, her small breasts standing erect, her rather well-fleshed thighs flexing nervously as she fidgeted about” (p. 308 of the Battle Circle omnibus, from which all Var quotes here on in are taken). Soli is a virgin sacrifice to the half-bull “god” Minos, a creature made “by mutation and operation” to suffer from a certain predilection. He must deflower virgins, and such is the size of his member that the virgin inevitably perishes in the operation. Note that Minos is overall a swell guy, and it’s not his fault that he is a rapist killer. “That is the way I have been designed,” he explains (p. 313).

I spent all my money on P.A. paperbacks

but you can BuyMeACoffee

So Soli is chained and Minos is coming for her, and Var knows that Minos is so butch that any attempt to fight him is vain. Trouble for Soli! What happens next is…awkward.

Var threw himself on Soli as though to shield her from the onslaught of the god, knowing this to be futile but determined not to desert her. He held her close and tight though she fought him, tearing his clothing with her feet and teeth. Finally he got her body pinned firmly against the wall so that her legs split and kicked behind him ineffectively while she hung by the manacles. “I will not leave you,” he panted in her tangled hair.

Then her resistance collapsed, “Oh, Var, I’m sorry!” she sobbed. “I love you, you idiot.”

There was no time to be amazed. He kissed her savagely, hearing the tramp of Minos’ hoofs, the blast of Minos’ breath.

Desperately they embraced, experiencing what had been building for three years; compressing it all into these last moments. Sharing their love absolutely, exquisitely, painfully.

(pp. 316-17)

In case it was unclear what happened there, Var and Soli just had sex. Now that Soli is not a virgin, Minos is not interested in killing her with his penis, and he just ambles away.

You will note that Var didn’t really mean to do the deed—and anyway, he saved the girl’s life. It wasn’t his fault! It was for the greater good! And I repeat he didn’t mean to!

It’s all in there.

•Juxtaposition (1982)

Var’s experience was big. I want to bring out a small one now.

So a femme fatale named Merle has spent most of this book pursuing our hero, a man named Stile. She keeps putting him in situations where he appears to have no choice but to sleep with her (or suffer dire consequences)…and still he refuses! Subverting our expectations, that Stile. Okay, finally he does agree, but that’s not what we’re here for.

We’re here for an earlier scene in which, to deceive a crowd (and save Stile’s life), Merle is pretending she wants to kill Stile with a knife. Then they wrestle. It goes like this (the he and she in this quote are Stile and Merle):

He diverted the blade and fell with her to the floor. Her clothing ripped; she was half out of it. She scrambled over him; now he felt every part of her! Her teeth brushed his ear. “My bare bottom is driving Hoghead [a guy in the crowd] crazy!” she whispered with satisfaction as the seeming struggle continued.… “Voyeur’s delight,” Stile agreed, trying to catch a glimpse himself, but unable.…Actually, it was in its way enjoyable; Merle was a splendid figure of a woman, and she had a fine flair for drama. At the moment she was wrapping her bare legs about his torso, theoretically securing him for another stab with the knife.

(pp. 290–91)

This is just a fight, remember. It is a fake fight, put on to deceive Hoghead and a bunch of other people, but it is also deadly earnest (because, for complicated reasons, Stile’s life depends on making it look realistic). But somehow the whole fight is actually an erotic dance! Stile has spent so many pages refusing to have a sexual relationship with Merle, and three seconds into a knife fight he’s having a sexual relationship with Merle.

None of this is Stile’s fault, of course. He’s just trying to save his life. It’s not his fault that his opponent’s clothes fly off. This is what happens to a man who keeps saying no.

(Incidentally, although Stile does ultimately agree to sleep with Merle, he never actually does. Weird. The ultimate perversion.)

•Bio of a Space Tyrant: Mercenary (1984)

In case not having sex isn’t sexy enough for you, the Bio of a Space Tyrant books are all about having sex.

The Jupiter Navy of the future, for example, possesses not only a head (for physical relief) but also a tail (for a different kind of physical relief). That’s a pretty good pun! And just as you have to use the head, you have to use the tail, and on a weekly basis.

Why would anyone make such a rule? Well, a helpful c.o. explains:

It is…the opinion of the Jupiter Navy that the best soldier [sailor?] is a satisfied one. We do not care to have stifled sexual urges generating mischief in the ranks, so we see that sex is not stifled. Sexual expression is normal and healthy, and the Navy wants normal and healthy personnel. But this cannot be verified by a computerized test, and psychiatric charting is cumbersome and, in my opinion, unreliable…It is necessary to see sexual expression in practice.

(p. 35)

Also it weeds out the gays.2

Hope Hubris—eventual space tyrant, but just a Navy guy in this book—of course must visit the tail for his required dose of rational heterosexuality. But the first time he goes, after rejecting the usual hookers, he is placed with a sensitive soul, another fresh-faced naval recruit, just sixteen (like Hope) and female. They are required to have sex! The Navy commands them! But Hope, narrating his experience, realizes in weird free-verse (?) paragraphs that: “To her it was much the same as rape. ¶And I was to be the rapist.¶I turned to go, unable to continue with this” (p. 40).

But did I mention that he has no choice? Hope has no choice! The Navy is making him have sex with this cute girl!

So they do it and it is nice.

Throughout the book, for the rest of the book, Hope has no choice but to go to the tail periodically and have sex (lovingly described). Naval rules!

I wrote several books you can buy

By the way, if this rule sounds strange to you—well, future Jupiter seems prescriptive in a lot of unexpected ways. This description of a woman (as an aside, descriptions of women in P.A. always sound something like this) comes from the next book in the series: “Her face was elfin, but her body was as finely formed as any could be without requiring an entry to a starlet career” (BoaST: Politician p. 199)…

…Requiring???!?!?

•Bearing an Hourglass (1984)

This book has a banger of an opening, at least for our purposes. On page two Norton meets a ghost, and before the chapter is over the ghost is begging Norton to sleep with his wife. It seems he needs an heir, and, as a ghost can’t father one. You see the favor Norton will be doing everyone?

Of course Norton nobly refuses to cuckold even a ghost, although the ghost, and to a lesser extent the widow Orlene, are begging him to. Instead Norton just hangs around the castle (!) feeling weird, so that night he has a nightmare, and…

He woke—and Orlene was there, her arm about his shoulders as she sat on the bed. Her warm breast pressed against his upper arm, soft through the material of her apparel and his. “Wake, wake, Norton, it’s all right” she soothed.

If she had a baby and it screamed in the night, even so would she comfort it—and what baby could be better off?

(p. 25)

Just a maternal bosom, nothing to see here. Or is there???!? the narrator leers at us. Is there???!?

You might think it’s a letdown, a chapter later, when they actually get down to business, and we learn “they made love often at first, then settled down to a pleasant routine” (p. 44), like healthy adults, until you remember that Norton’s here to father a child for a ghost, and not for his own jollies, so that’s all fine.

•Bio of a Space Tyrant: Executive (1985)

Eventually, quondam-Mercenary Hope Hubris gets out of the navy and into politics and becomes a space tyrant. Who’s going to force him to have sex now?

How about a mysterious agent named Q, who will only help him out if he agrees to her sex conditions?

They are not your usual sex conditions. In a pitch black room Q hits Hope with a pacification ray so he can barely move, strips him, and:

Now she got on me [i.e. on Hope], her naked body straddling mine, facing toward my spread knees. Her thighs dropped down outside mine, her feet remaining on the floor, so that she was able to stand in her fashion. She took my member and guided it, slowly settling down on it, until all her weight was on me and the connection was complete. Still I did not move, obeying her unstated directive. She required my body to play with in her fashion; she had it.

Those hands reached down, caressed that portion of my anatomy that remained exposed, then moved on. One finger slid to the aperture below and nudged and pushed, and, lubricated by something, entered. I felt very much as if I were a woman, being entered by a man, especially considering the intimate contact above that site. That member of hers drove to its full depth etc.

(pp. 134–35)

According to Hope, “I had been accepting what was happening as if I were indifferent, also in the manner of a woman” (p. 135). It’s all very weird. There is a conveyor belt involved.

But you’ll notice that Hope Hubris never asked to have a finger up his butt! He never asked to be shown how it feels to be a woman! Q demanded it! His career was at stake! And the pacification ray! He had no choice!

Hope Hubris says in a later book: “As the Tyrant of Jupiter I had of course had dealings with the nations of Uranus” (BoaST: Statesman p. 112). Har har har.

•Wielding a Red Sword (Del Rey, 1986)

We are now fully in the decadent period of Piers Anthony books. I don’t mean they’re almost over—P.A. has another hundred+ novels left in him, and he will be cranking them out for the next forty years. I mean that by now the convolutions required to justify this strange perversion and preserve the hero’s innocence have reached new levels of implausibility, and I for one can not bring this little bark any further upstream than 1986. To wit:

Prince Mym has been betrothed to Princess Rapture, but he loves another, so his father the Rajah imprisons him in the Honeymoon Castle so-called. The Rajah sends Mym a concubine, but Mym refuses her, whereupon the Rajah chops her head off and mounts it on a tall spike. A second would-be concubine suffers the same fate, so Mym relents with the third. “I can not be the murderer of these lovely women,” he says, in italics. “Then he took the hand of the concubine, and brought her to his bed, and dispatched her maidenhead that hour” (p. 28).

Eventually (after many concubines) Princess Rapture herself gets sent to the castle, and she and Mym hit it off, but he still refuses to sleep with her.

They spent the night together as before [i.e. chastely]. This time Mym dreamed that he held her in his arms, as he was doing in reality, but the dream continued farther. He kissed her, and then he began to undress her, and her flesh was warm and silken-smooth, and he sought to possess her—

And wrenched himself awake. Reality had been mirroring his dream, and her body was open to his touch.

Why did you not stop me? he demanded.

“I tried—but couldn’t,” she whispered.

I never forced a woman in my life!

“Couldn’t—make myself protest,” she confessed.

(pp. 42–3)

What does it take to get laid in this town? Imprisonment, multiple decapitations, and somnambulism. That’s what I mean by a decadent phase.

•Conclusion

Now this list of relevant passages is very far from exhaustive, and you can easily find additional examples if you care to look. In the story “The Whole Truth” (1970), our hero is compelled to have sex with a woman to prove she is not a shape-shifting alien (Anthonology p. 243). It’s not his fault! Or: Hope Hubris is compelled to sleep with a spy to...well it’s complicated, but I guess it made sense at the time; as Hope tastefully puts it: “We did complete the act. I felt guilty, even as my fluid pumped into her body, because of my memory of Megan [his wife, whom he’s cheating on], but I knew it was necessary” (BoaST: Politician p. 159). Did you hear that? It was necessary. Such marvelous possibilities are always hanging in the air: “Maybe you’ll have to make love to me after all to make me tell [you what you want to know],” a beautiful woman teases Detective Subble (Omnivore p. 78); it doesn’t happen this time, but hey, it could!

And then there’s like the whole of Firefly, a book I could never bring myself to read, but it’s about an alien horror creature that uses pheromones to compel people to have sex. Dude, it’s not our fault; it was the alien! (I’ll put pp. passim for that one.)

You can see, I hope, why this kind of perversion (and remember, I am saying perversion non-judgmentally) would appeal to adolescents. The typical P.A. protagonist is perpetually turned on but unable to make a pass, which is a good description of a lot of teenagers. And yet the protagonist gets some anyway. Even when they’re not actually scoring, P.A. protagonists are just Macroscopically always accidentally pushed against or rubbing up against something sexy. Imagine if you’re trapped in a cave in another dimension with your crush, and she has to squirm past you in a tight space. Your crush “was unaware of the electrifying effect of a perfect breast as it touched a man, even sheathed as hers was by layers of clothing” (Orn p. 35)—but you know!

Note that the subterranean breast contact there was (Bink-style) an accident. And whenever such a thing is not an accident it is necessary. Whatever guilt or shame teenage readers might have about sex is obviated by these qualifiers. Sometimes they don’t even enjoy it; only we, the lucky readers, get to enjoy it.

(At this point, let us recall that the default euphemism for sex in Xanth is “the Adult Conspiracy” (Crewel Lye pp. 281 & obvs. etc.).)

Sex without choice is generally rape, of course. In Orson Scott Card’s foray into “don’t blame me, I had no choice” sex in Hart’s Hope it is explicitly rape, and I doubt anyone has ever called it otherwise. But P.A.’s characters are all in a pretzel, somehow simultaneously 1. having sex, 2. not meaning to, and 3. not raping anyone. I mean, sometimes they rape people. There’s a lot of rape in P.A., and I just left most of it out.3 But sometimes they walk a fine line that threads itself directly into an adolescent’s libido.

That’s why the books were popular, of course. So why are they no longer popular? Why do adolescents no longer need Piers Anthony? I mean, maybe they just grow up with fewer hang-ups these days, what do I know? Or maybe they are illiterate. But for the maladjusted bookwormy SF fan—of whom there must still be many…

I think the answer is clear: that nerds who want an oops-I-touched-a-boob vicarious experience can get it from manga or anime. The same esthetic, the same perversion, appears again and again in a more varied and easily digestible form in Love Hina or I”s or [fill in your faves].

Imagine that I have made a graph with two lines: one of P.A.’s popularity (in popularity units over time), the other in availability of manga (in availability units over time). You’ll see one steadily going down (until it bottoms out), the other steadily rising (until I guess it tops out; we’re at max, right?). Manga hit the mainstream sometime around 2004, after P.A.’s star had already begun to sink, but P.A. was never for the mainstream; these are nerd books for nerds; and as a nerd-American I can assure you that manga was crawling all over nerddom by 1990. In 1990 P.A. publicly choked by titling the most recent Xanth novel with a pun already used by Naura “Angry Red Planet” Hayden.

No one can survive a humiliation like that. It was all downhill from there, and meanwhile Viz is reprinting Urusei Yatsura comics; Shinobu is taking a bath; hope no one walks in on her by accident!

Uh oh! Someone walked in on her. But he didn’t mean it.

•The editions used, provided for page-number reference purposes

Anthonology (Tor, 1986)
Battle Circle (Avon, 1978)
Bearing an Hourglass (Del Rey, 1985)
Bio of an Ogre (Ace, 1989)
Bio of a Space Tyrant: Executive (Avon, 1985)
Bio of a Space Tyrant: Mercenary (Avon, 1984)
Bio of a Space Tyrant: Politician (Gregg Press, 1985)
Bio of a Space Tyrant: Statesman (Avon, 1986)
Chthon (Berkley, 1985)
Crewel Lye: A Caustic Yarn (Del Rey, 1985)
Juxtaposition (Del Rey, 1984)
Macroscope (Avon, 1969)
Omnivore (Avon, 1978)
Orn (Avon, 1971)
A Spell for Chameleon (Del Rey, 1984)
Wielding a Red Sword (Del Rey, 1986)

My children are currently not permitted, by school rules, to walk on their own to kindergarten, or even to third grade, but I attended school long ago, in a more dangerous city, at a time when crime was much higher, so I walked to kindergarten alone. It was a different time, of course. Most days I was not truly alone, as I walked with my friend from across the street, who was one year older. A kindergartener and a first grader, walking through the city together. And of course should my friend be sick or absent for some reason, I just went on my own. It wasn’t far.

I’m not bringing up the fact that I walked to school as part of some sort of “uphill both ways” Yorkshiremen complaint. I bring it up because I’m telling a story, and the fact is vital to the story. The story doesn’t take place in kindergarten, though; the story takes place in first grade, when I still walked to school, now in the company of a second grader.

One day in (I think) late September, as the two of us came to school, we saw an unusual sight. Many (but, significantly, not all) of the district teachers were in front of the school. They were carrying signs and (in my memory) marching to and fro. I had no frame of reference for such things, and so I didn’t understand; but the teachers were on strike. Not all the teachers in the school, but around half. I don’t know how it happened—not now, and certainly not at the time. I probably understood words like union and scab, but not in the context.

My current teacher was not marching, but my last-year’s kindergarten teacher was. It had only been a few months since I’d been in her class, so she remembered me. She called me over that day, over to the picket line.

“There’s no school today, Hal,” she said. “Go home.”

Now, I liked my kindergarten teacher. She was young—if I remember correctly, mine was her first class ever—and pretty and, in the tradition of kindergarten teachers, exuberant. I have not heard this song since I was five, but I nevertheless have been forever earwormed by her rendition of:

Here sits the monkey in the chair, chair, chair.
He lost all his true loves he had last year
So rise upon your feet and greet the first you meet—
The happiest one I know!

I liked my current, first-grade teacher fine, too, but the year was young, and perhaps she was statelier and less exuberant. She certainly was not marching in front of the school with a sign! I looked around for my friend, but she had disappeared—no teacher had called her over, after all. Where she went I didn’t know (obviously she just went into the school). But not me: “There’s no school today, Hal.” So, like the good little soldier I was training to be, I went home. I walked home every day, after all. I knew the way.

My mother was in the car, with my baby sister, just pulling out of the driveway for a day of errands, when I arrived home. My arrival was quite a surprise. She stopped the car, of course, and came out for a brief colloquy.

“What are you doing home?” or words to that effect, she asked.

I told her there was no school today.

Most assuredly, she insisted, there was school.

But here I played my trump card. “Nuh uh,” I told her. “Teacher said.” Presumably I specified the source of my information, the kindergarten teacher we both knew well.

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Immediately I found myself bundled into the car, next to my sister, and we were driving the few blocks to my school to get to the bottom of this mystery. When my mother saw the strikers, my nonsensical story must have snapped into coherence. She parked and, sister in tow, the three of us crossed the picket line and entered the school.

We could not have known this, but inside the school, half the classes were operating normally. My friend from across the street was sitting in class and going through the second-grade daily routine. If I had ignored my kindergarten teacher and entered the building, I would have been in Mrs. S——‘s class, completely oblivious to any outside drama. Of course, that was only half the school. The other half was classrooms with no teachers, and I can only imagine what hustling and shuffling was going on behind the scenes in a desperate attempt to drag P.E. coaches and school nurses and hastily telephoned subs into rooms with no greater goal than to prevent the children from, as they say, sharpening a stick at both ends. Perhaps as my mother barged into the principal’s office, the principal was not at her best. Perhaps she was having a stressful day.

Still, one does not become a principal by showing, through word or deed, that one is ruffled. Unruffled, the principal received our little retinue in her office.

My mother was hopping mad. The facts of the case were plain. My kindergarten teacher had sent me away from the school back to a home that, had it not been for great good fortune (imagine the series of improbable delays: the last-minute diaper or the unexpected phone call), would have been empty. I possessed no way of entering the locked house: “Latchkey kids,” as we called them, were not unusual at the time, but I was not one, and I lacked a key. I would have been trapped outside, without water or sanitation facilities (food I did have, of course, carefully packed in my Flash Gordon lunch box) for hour after hour. “He could have died!” I’m sure she said, as mothers will.

It is unlikely that I would have died, although I have chosen to retain the hyperbole for my title. I could have gone to the backyard and played in the sand there (for some reason, our backyard was almost 100% sand). I could have gone to a neighbor’s house: There were at least two retirees I knew who would have been home. I could have wandered back to school. I was not completely without resources, although, as I was six at the time, the resources were limited, and I’m sure it would have been a long, confusing, and scary day.

But my mother was still going on about it. She very much wanted to the principal to make sure the striking teachers did not continue to send children out into the city to wander the streets.

Still unruffled, the principal explained patiently that although it may appear that a school employee had some responsibility for the unfortunate situation, such was not actually the case. In fact, she explained, it was Hal (that is to say: me) who was at fault. Because Hal should never have listened to a teacher who was not on duty.

This neat solution to the problem—the problem of who was to blame for my wandering the streets—did not go over well. There was some shouting. And on later days, my kindergarten teacher did not attempt to intercept me as I entered the school. She continued to march, but we did not interact.

For the first few days (or weeks? I remember it being a long time, but time moves more slowly when you’re six), the school policy was that any student whose teacher was on strike was not to attend school; any student whose teacher (and mine fell into this category) was not striking still had to go. I was very jealous of the absentee kids! Eventually, though, the school just gave up and closed down for the duration. It was like a second, magical and unexpected, summer vacation—briefly, before the mothers of my classmates banded together and started their own version of school, a homeschool at a different house every day. We sat in rumpus rooms and practiced handwriting and sums while someone’s mother gave a modicum of instruction. I didn’t like it, but I guess they were doing the best they could. And then, without consulting me or telling me why, the strike was settled. The school reopened. My kindergarten teacher went back to work. I finished first grade, and then we moved across the country.

But if there was ever a chance that I would ever trust any teacher or any school administrator, in any context—fairly or not, it evaporated that day as two adults who were on opposite sides of a bitter dispute somehow managed, without even speaking to each other, to conspire against me. They just did it automatically.

I doubt my kindergarten teacher remembers me, or the time she sent me to my alleged doom. I doubt my principal remembers one moment of pusillanimity in a lifetime (I’m guessing) of pusillanimousness. I ran into one of my first-grade classmates at a comic convention last year (we were, Æ 6, equally skilled as comic artists and now, alas, he is 5000X more skilled) and he didn’t even remember the teacher’s strike or school being canceled!

Ah, but I remember everything. Not where I left my keys or when the various pediatricians’ appointments happen, but everything about being six. An awful lot of it concerns Star Wars. We used to shotgun orange soda and jump up and down to hear our bellies slosh. But there is also the day in (I think) late September when I learned eternal distrust.

About Daniel Pinkwater (henceforth DMP) I know nothing and everything. I say nothing because I’ve never met the man. I’ve never spoken to his friends or relatives. My few attempts to flirt with him online have been failures (as such flirtations tend to be). Whatever deeds he has done in his life await the pen of a hypothetical future Boswell or more likely, as is the fate of most deeds, the oblivion of time.

But every man husbands inside his breast a secret soul, which some eschaton or another is always threatening to reveal but which can be perceived on this side of the veil solely through the intermediary of art. I know a lot about DMP’s art—the literary art of his published books, specifically. That’s what we’re here to talk about.

DMP wrote or co-wrote (depending on how you count) about 105 books in his career, and what follows is a ranking and discussion of 104 of them.

The remainder of my methodology I have relegated to a footnote1 so as not to tax the patience of the reader.

Without (as they say) further ado, the entire DMP canon, best to worst—scroll down to your favorites and get mad at me!:

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•1 Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars (1979 middle-grade novel)

[Two junior-high students gain psychic powers to 1. baffle their classmates and idiot teachers and 2. travel to other dimensions.]

Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars (permit me to here at the beginning to proffer a smidge more of plot outline than usual) is the story of young Leonard Neeble, suffering through a terrible junior high experience until he meets a weird classmate known as Alan Mendelsohn; Alan claims to be from Mars (or alternatively the Bronx). Together Leonard and Alan frequent used bookstores, and lo in an occult shop they discover the secret to psychic powers and eventually interdimensional travel. They have an adventure. Leonard finds peace.

I’ve argued elsewhere that many or most of DMP’s books follow a similar structure: An alienated young man meets a weird character, gets drawn by him into an ever-weirdening world of weirdness, and finally achieves some kind of transcendent experience . You will notice that this monomyth, this DMP-standard plot structure, also fits Alan Mendelsohn; so why, then, is the book special? What makes Alan Mendelsohn better than its superficially similar rivals? Why (specifically) is it number one on this list?

One thing may be that Leonard, the narrator of Alan Mendelsohn, starts from a lower point than any other DMP protagonist. He’s genuinely suffering! Maybe the Dada Ducks from Young Adults (#2) are also suffering, but they are clearly suffering intentionally, gratia artis. Leonard is unwillingly uprooted and deposited in the hell that is West Kangaroo Park. Uprooting is a classic opening to a novel, and DMP’s canon is filled with uprooted protagonists (Robert Nifkin from The Education of Robert Nifkin (#4), Nick Itch from Looking for Bobowicz (#100), Neddie Wentworthstein from The Neddiad (#15), Jules McSchwartz from Jules, Penny, and the Rooster (#35))—but they all end up better off than they were before relatively quickly. Chicago, Hoboken, L.A., and the ’burbs (respectively) are good to them. Leonard (on the other hand) leaves friends, family, and a neighborhood he loves to find himself friendless, miserable, and failing out of school. The personal stakes are higher here than in any other book (even Nifkin, which comes second)!

The driving theme in almost all of DMP’s work is (as alluded to above) the quest for transcendence—“the blessings of enlightenment” one character calls it in Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (#26). The quest is often driven by a dialectic or conflict between two proposed routes to transcendence, which could be simplified as meditation and art, or the way of the guru and the way of the artist. Perhaps in Alan Mendelsohn the scalepan is tipping towards guru: Leonard uses (thinly disguised) Zen meditation to find adventure and yoga to find happiness, while the Waka-Wakans discover that pure aesthetics lead not only to cowardice but also, which is worse, to bad art. Perhaps a rival reading will insist that meditation brings Leonard nothing but boredom and lukewarm fleegix, and the Waka-Wakans’ mistake was in consuming art without producing it. I’m not here to adjudicate your readings. I don’t want to get bogged down in this stuff (yet).

Generally (by my math) a DMP book is two-thirds setting, one-third theme, one-third jokes, and maybe some plot. Alan Mendelsohn is less joke-filled than later books while still being very funny; it also has one of DMP’s most satisfying plots (insofar as there are coherent conflicts and difficulties, and they are all resolved at the end). We’ve already addressed the theme, so let me propose that the best thing about the book is the setting: I don’t just mean the city of Hogboro, a funhouse-mirror version of Chicago (more on this later), or the nightmarish Bat Masterson Junior High. I mean a world in which two friends can learn secrets, cause havoc, and have adventures. I mean that the best place to find adventure is a street full of used and weird bookstores, and the best place to leave this earth is an abandoned, forgotten, and overgrown exotic-garden tourist trap—and they’re all here!

Unlike later DMP books, in which adult advisors (Chicken Nancy in Cat-Whiskered Girl, the Yorkshire witch in Dwergish Girl (#31), almost every grownup in The Neddiad) are benign, everyone in Alan Mendelsohn is on the make. Samuel Klugarsh is three-fifths sheer fudge, and only accidentally does he fail to defraud our heroes. Clarence Yojimbo is not about to give away the secret to Hyperstellar Archaeology for free. Dr. Prince is a sap if not a fraud. You get the feeling that everyone sees Leonard and Alan as a “mark” except William Lloyd Floyd, whom Alan sees as a “mark.” This is merely another way of saying that Leonard and Alan are treated as adults, the most exciting moment in the life of a junior-high student. And the coda, where Leonard comes into his own; and is then given the promise of future adventure…this is the world I would wish to live in.

DMP has a great many wonderful books, and I won’t kick if you (dear reader) have a different favorite, but Alan Mendelsohn is the book for me.

•2 Young Adults (1985 YA novel, or novellas, or weird collage of stuff)

[Six friends devote their lives to art despite the carpings of a philistinistic world.]

I’ve written about Young Adults at some length before, and I’ll try not to repeat myself—but of course I have to justify placing a book at the #2 spot, especially when that book is hardly even a book, but rather a miscellany. The bulk of Young Adults is comprised of three parts: two linked novellas (one previously published as a separate volume) and a long chapter purporting to be the first of an actual novel. Just as things are getting started…the book ends. These three parts are in some sense conventional narratives, if we stretch the meaning of the word conventional and ignore the fact that extra chapters of an endless Dada young adult novel find their way to be scattered in here and there.

Mixed in around and between these three conventional parts are a collection of crude Dada comics and illustration galleries, plus a lengthy surreal attack on DMP’s art and character apparently written by a friend of his. The book was reprinted without all of these extra parts, and I didn’t notice for years.

The conventional narrative—or three conventional narratives—tell three stories in the degraded lives of six teenage friends who alternate between elevating artist and guru in their desperate attempt to wring some meaning from the suburban hellscape they live in. It goes poorly.

And none of this should work—I mean, as a book. The characters are not even characters, as their only defining features are how tall and how thin they are. The plots—and remember, there are three separate plots for three separate narratives—are all slim and implausible.

But none of that matters. “This is a Dada story.” Modernism 101 is that you cannot grapple with the chaos of modern life with classical forms. The Dada Ducks—our heroes—can express neither their art nor their pain constrained by an Aristotelean story arc. As I said before, these are the only characters that suffer as much as Leonard Neeble, and if the suffering is almost 100% their fault, surely this just makes it nobler.

It’s also one of the funniest books ever written. I understand that Modernists have subverted narrative in the past, but if Kotik Letaev or In Parenthesis had made me laugh this much, I’d be writing about them instead of this book.

Probably you should eventually go read the really very long piece I wrote about Young Adults, but do it later, because Lizard Music is next on the list.

•3 Lizard Music (1976 middle-grade novel)

[Young Victor is left alone by vacationing parents and an irresponsible sister, and soon finds himself tracking down clues, absorbed through late-night television, about a civilization of intelligent anthropomorphic lizards.]

Lizard Music is DMP’s first novel (I consider Blue Moose (#59) and Wingman (#10) to be novellas), and he hit the ground running. It features what is in some ways DMP’s most polished or conventional plot. The “call to adventure” is carefully set up, with Victor first isolated from his regular life and then slowly realizing that something weird is going on in the world—other DMP books move at such a fast clip that you might not notice that the action in many of them is precipitated by the narrator just meeting some guy at random. Although many of DMP’s novels build to an absurd or surreal conclusion, never again would the conclusion be as satisfying as the chicken-obsessed lizards of Diamond Hard.

For that matter, no DMP protagonist would have a transcendent experience as beautiful as Victor finding his squirrel in the House of Memory. If he had not brought the squirrel home I would have thrown the book in the trash, but he brought the squirrel home and so I love the book.

Most DMP protagonists are more or less interchangeable, and I think even a close reader would be hard pressed to distinguish between Leonard Neeble (#1) and Walter Galt (#7 & 30) and Robert Nifkin (#4) and Neddie Wentworthstein (#15) and Harold Knishke (#8) (etc.) outside of the specific lineaments of the situations they find themselves in. This is not to say that DMP does not create memorable characters; in fact, he excels in creating memorable characters. One of his most memorable is the narrator, who appears in a dozen books under a dozen names! But Victor is different. Victor is, I think, the most practical and proactive character to narrate a DMP book. DMP’s narrators are always up for adventure, but Victor seeks it out. He needs no Alan Mendelsohn or Winston Bongo (from Snarkout Boys (#7 & 30)) as accomplice; for that matter he needs no Osgood Sigerson (also Snarkout) or Melvin the Shaman (Neddiad (#15))—Victor follows clues on his own.

Needless to say, one of DMP’s other most memorable characters is the Chicken Man, a real figure from Chicago folklore who appears in three DMP novels and one book of essays, but here in Lizard Music for the first time. Less sinister than his appearance in Snarkout Boys, less purely mad than he is in Bushman Lives! (#8), the Chicken Man in Lizard Music is a strange but wonderful combination of Gandalf, Don Quixote, and Lord Buckley.

Lizard Music lays out the basic DMP landscape quite starkly: There is a preterite and an elect. The preterite are possessed by aliens. The elect learn to appreciate musical lizards and dancing chickens. The scene in which Victor realizes, while watching a talk show, that American pop culture is indistinguishable from the aftermath of an alien invasion is at once hilarious and harrowing. If DMP’s texts are an attempt to articulate a mystical experience, they are also an attempt to delineate a roadmap out of the hell that is life among pod people. This theme he returns to again and again in his later novels, but it’s all right here in the first.

The character Victor also features in another, later book, and when he reappears he is the director of a secret art collective. For this to happen he has to cross time, space, and (I do not say this lightly; it’s all there in the text) the other. But he also has to believe in art. DMP’s texts, more and more as time goes on, will be simultaneously art themselves and a finger pointing at art. But it starts here in Lizard Music.

I dedicated my first book to

“babsey [my wife], light of my life, and

pinkwater, fire of my loins”;

it’s only $2.99 on kindle

•4 The Education of Robert Nifkin (1998 YA novel)

[In 1950s Chicago, a young man fails out of public high school but finds his place in a much sketchier private school.]

Many of DMP’s earliest books tend to take place in what one might call the real world: Hoboken (Hoboken Chicken Emergency (#46)), Rochester (Last Guru (#29)), or Washington Heights (Wingman (#10)); then, after a spate of novels set in some kind of fantasy America where Chicago is called Hogboro or Baconburg,2 DMP returns to reality. There are exceptions to this schema—Yobgorgle (#37) is in Rochester, Lizard Music (#3) in Hogboro—but it helps me, at least, pin down DMP’s books in place and time. It helps me sort.

When The Education of Robert Nifkin came out in 1998, it was DMP’s first novel for young readers in eight years, following Borgel (#11) (which takes place nowhere and everywhere). It is set in, and is about, Chicago. Almost all DMP novels are bildungsromans, but Robert Nifkin is the most bildungsromany. It is perhaps not DMP’s most savage but certainly his most sustained attack on public schooling. Yes, it takes place in the real world, but it’s a version of the real world in which Kevin Shapiro (boy orphan from Young Adults (#2)) can be “Professor of Art History at Miskatonic University.”

Good old Miskatonic U. is, of course, a reference to a different creator’s work; but Nifkin’s real-life Chicago abounds also with cameos from DMP’s own. Artifact smuggler Samuel Klugarsh from Alan Mendelsohn (#1) and master criminal Wallace Nussbaum from the Snarkout Boys books (#7 & 30) both appear, and their chronologies line up fine with their established lives (unlike Kevin Shapiro’s above). William Lloyd Floyd and (unnamed) the Mad Guru are there, presumably because these are real denizens of the Chicago of DMP’s youth (and Floyd reappears, himself unnamed, in Bushman Lives! (#8)).

But we’re not here to talk about Chicago. We’re here to talk about education! Robert Nifkin (nifkin, where I come from, is slang for perineum; just saying) has to get educated.

One can view the title with some degree of irony; the entire book is a college application (“use additional sheets of paper as needed”—one of the driest of witty intros to a novel), so perhaps the education comes later, after the application essay/book is handed in and accepted; in other words after the book is over. But Nifkin is also straight-up about Robert’s education. Like a Saul Bellow character, Robert can learn how to be a slightly crooked hustler (“that’s the Chicago way,” as they say in the Untouchables) before his book-learning kicks in. But he also manages to book-learn, all while attending a broken-down parody of a fancy private school. The Wheaton School defies casual description, with its Southern-gothic decay and pornographer teachers; it’s not a place that demands that students learn, but significantly it is not a place that forbids it, either. (It encourages comparison with the unorthodox education offered to the Dada Ducks by Henrich Bleucher at the end of Young Adults (#2).)

I mentioned before that a DMP novel is a roadmap out of the hell. This is Robert’s true education. He knows what hell is—Riverview High School (Harold Knishke from Bushman Lives! also attends, slightly later) or, perhaps, the tacky bourgeois world of his parents—and various people offer him ways out. Sergeant Gunter offers communism. Clifton Fadiman (“no relation”) offers life as a hoodlum. Jack Evergreen doesn’t so much offer as disappear down a chess hole, but surely that’s (“the Luzhin defense”) an option. Robert Nifkin reads books (he tells you which books) and looks at art (he tells you which art) and watches movies (he tells you which movies) and listens to music (Odetta; he tells you) and presumably will escape to a thinly veiled analog for Bard College (here called St. Leon’s; a Bard alum explained the joke to me). But his secret, of course, is that just wandering around Chicago he had already escaped. Chicago was all he needed. Riverview was terrible, but Chicago (as I’ve said) was good to him.

Unlike just about every other DMP protagonist (I’m aware there are a couple other exceptions), Robert Nifkin never experiences a moment of transcendence. This is a naturalist novel, true, but even James Joyce gave his characters epiphanies. I should be disappointed by this fact, but I’m not. Robert Nifkin is trapped in the real world, and the real world is all he gets, but the real world is also his way out of it.

And this burden—of abandoning his usual novelistic structure, of being unable to fall back on some mystical experience—forces DMP to give Robert Nifkin some real bildung in this roman. Nifkin achieves an almost impossible feat: Robert matures and grows and learns and, you know, comes of age; but—and this is the wonderful part—only a little. Robert Nifkin is ready for the next step, and no more. He is now (in the words of his faculty advisor) only “slightly repellant.”

Knut Hamsun’s Hunger is the story of a callow youth who eventually works himself up just enough to go to something else…and that’s the closest book I can think of to Robert Nifkin. Except Nifkin is funnier, more hopeful, and has a lot more Chicago in it than Hunger does. (Also DMP appears to be less repellant than Knut Hamsun.)

BOOKS

FOR

KIDS!

•5 The Big Orange Splot (1977 picture book)

[When Mr. Plumbean’s perfectly neat house gets slightly marred, he decides to shoot the moon and paint it in an absurdly colorful manner.]

Far and away my favorite of DMP’s picture books is this early charmer. It features an overt moral, which is usually death to any text, a children’s book especially, and the moral here is do your own thing, which is somehow even worse. But the insane delight the characters take in doing their own thing is both infectious and bonkers. None of this should work. All of it works (“no one knows why”).

On a dull street of identical houses, the kind Pete Segar would make fun of in “Little Boxes,” an accidental glitch in the uniformity inspires pure freedom and chaos. Mr. Plumbeam’s (eventual) house is the most splendid of eyesores. The rest of the block is even crazier, to the extent that probably some of the houses are completely unlivable, even if theoretically they could stand. So it goes.

Having people celebrate individuality by chanting a cultlike mantra is a strange choice, but it just comes across as fun. This whole book is fun Probably do not let your neighbor actually keep a pet alligator. Or do, I guess. I’m not your boss.

Note the constant stress upon the reader occasioned by saying the word Plumbean, with its three bilabial consonants followed by an alveolar /n/. The word perpetually strives to resolve itself into *Plumbeam, which would keep the bilabial pattern going. I imagine this stress is how the pre-splot Plumbean felt, desperately trying to keep his street neat despite the rainbow-explosion nature of his dreams.

My young son’s favorite DMP book, as he will tell anyone who asks. Certainly one of the all-time best picture books.

•6 Fish Whistle: Commentaries, Uncommentaries, and Vulgar Excesses (1989 essay collection)

[A collection of humorous essays, most of them having originated as radio pieces broadcast on NPR.]

First off, the titular essay (“Fischvistle”) is the funniest essay ever written, so even if the rest of the book was trash, or lorem ipsum nonsense, this book would still rank high. “Fischvistle” is the funniest essay in the book, and it’s the funniest essay in any book, and I find this strange because I cannot put my finger on why it’s so funny. When I first read it (as an adolescent) I thought “Compass, compass” was the choicest part, but now I think “Son, I want you to invent a fish whistle” is the choicest part. I guess it’s a specimen of dialect humor, but less pronounced than, say, Milt Gross. Hyman Kaplan is funny, and Milt Gross is much funnier, but “Fischvistle” is the queen of them all. Just dynamite stuff.

The rest of the book is also great! It’s funny, but it’s not as funny as “Fischvistle” (nothing is), and I don’t generally read DMP just for funny. A lot of people are funny. Erma Bombeck is funny, but when was the last time I made a list and put Erma Bombeck at #6? The essays (most of them radio pieces, reformatted for print) that are straight-up humor essays, like Andy Rooney bits, are the weakest parts!

But many of the essays are autobiographical, and DMP’s life has been like nothing anyone but DMP could imagine. It’s pretty clear that a lot of DMP’s fiction is autobiographical, and by my estimate every DMP narrator in every novel written between Alan Mendelsohn (#1) and Neddiad (#15) (and at least one outside this parameter) are just incarnations, variously obscured, of young DMP—but you’ll be surprised to learn just how very autobiographical that fiction has been, how unobscure those incarnations are! Harold Knishke’s experience with de Kooning’s Excavation (#8), the Snarkout Boys’ experience at the Laurel and Hardy film festival (#7), Leonard Neeble’s Uncle Boris and his adventures with a film camera (#1)—they are all, mutatis mutandis, true.

When characters are revealed to be based on real people, DMP gives them “real” names that are scarcely more plausible, or less DMPish, than their fictional counterparts: Clark Gomez (from Bushman Lives! (#8)) appears (in Fish Whistle) as Lance Gonzales; Davis Davisdavis (from Artsy-Smartsy Club (#60)) appears as Herman Hermann—in other places, such as the introduction to Four Hoboken Stories, DMP suggests that his real name may be David Davis, which appears to be the emmis; Madame Zelatnowa (from Alan Mendelsohn (#1)) appears as Sonia, and…well, Sonia is perfectly plausible. Actually her name might just be Sonia Zelatnowa. What do I know?

DMP has always excelled in creating (or evoking) an exciting world, a world one might want to live in, and what if that world were our world already? The Chicken Man and the E.J. Sperry Thought Factory and Bughouse Square and especially the Snark (actually the Clark) Theater are all (in some sense and of course filtered through a collection of scarcely fact-checked essays) “real.” “Sometimes I feel that my whole purpose in life is to tell people who might not have seen it that such a place as the Clark existed,” DMP writes, and that’s something we’ll return to later. If your life seems stupid and pointless (as it probably does), isn’t it pleasant to think that somewhere out there people are making art and/or listening to Mozart and/or scrawling FREE JOMO KENYATTA on a building? That dogs have some kind of pseudo-psychic bond with people? That one can get better at art through crypto-Zen practices? That small experiences—visiting a Japanese temple or the Art Institute of Chicago or building a model airplane—can change you for the rest of your life? Some of that is plausible, isn’t it?

Every story ever told presupposes a world, and the world DMP supposes in his anecdotes is simply better than ours. UNLESS IT ISN’T! UNLESS OUR WORLD IS THIS ONE! For that reason alone, even if it had no other virtues (which it does: “Fischvistle”), this would be an exciting book.

The two great disappointments of my life are that 1. I never thwarted smugglers (as boy heroes used to do in the old books) and 2. I never lived the DMP life. I put in a solid effort at the latter: I moved to Hoboken; I hung out with artists; I listened to classical music. I’ve had some weird times—at the homemade-flamethrower show, or the time I helped attach, with a hole-punch and string, an octopus to a robed man’s face so he…well, it’s a long story. I had a good time. But I mostly had a good time locked in an apartment, sipping tea and discussing books with friends. I went to Beanbender’s, but it was full of posers. I went to Maxie’s, but they told me to buy something or get out. I went to the College of Complexes and they wouldn’t even let me through the door. Maybe I was lacking, or maybe it was the times: DMP went back to the Clark, and it was a porno house. Maybe the whole world is a porno house now.

But for a while, after I read Fish Whistle and before I grew up and saw what the world was like, I believed.

•7 The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (1982 middle-grade novel)

[Two high school chums who sneak out at night to watch old movies find themselves plunged into a kidnapping plot involving a master criminal and an intelligent avocado.]

The first (of two; the apocryphal third volume never appeared) Snarkout Boys books is The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, DMP’s love letter to old movies. Walter Galt and Winston Bongo (the titular boys) consume a steady diet of weird B or classic films, and if the adventure they get wrapped up in involves plenty of Dr. Mabuse-type motifs and pulp cliches…well, a lot of DMP books do, too, so it’s hard to tell if this one leans more heavily into it or not. The butler did it. The plot is, perhaps for the first but certainly not for the last time, openly nihilistic (as is fitting with the literary reference in the title: “The snark was a boojum, you see”).

As is so often true, the setting is the true hero of the book. Baconburg is, as already noted, another stand-in for Chicago, with the Clark theater reimagined as the Snark, the Newberry Library as the Blueberry Library, and Chicago’s Washington Square Park even more overtly as Bughouse Square. Here narrator Walter finds that his true calling is sneaking out of the house to watch movies, dine at all-night eateries, and solve crimes. The implicit metaphor of North Aufzoo Street is one of my favorites: Upper North Aufzoo Street is a boring and lifeless thoroughfare, but under it runs Lower North Aufzoo Street, “the city beneath the city” where on the one hand Romani, screevers, and buskers ply their various romantic trades and on the other hand the delivery men and maintenance workers ensure the the actual (upper) city continues to operate.

For many people, this book will be remembered for the reappearance of fan favorite the Chicken Man. This reappearance is not the first doubling in DMP—that would probably be news reports of the president having a cold (from Lizard Music (#3) and Fat Men from Space (#51)), the city of Hogboro (from Lizard Music and Alan Mendelsohn (#1)) or the concept of Blong Buddhism (from Last Guru (#29) and Alan Mendelsohn) depending on what you count—but it’s certainly the first major character doubling, of the sort that non-obsessives might notice, and it certainly hints that many or all DMP books might be taking place in a shared universe. DMP’s fondness for reusing, apparently at random, uncommon names such as Papescu, Nussbaum, and Bogenswerfer3 can make it difficult to tell if someone is reappearing or just coincidentally sharing a name—security guards at the Hogboro Zoo (Lizard Music) and the Baconburg Museum (Avocado of Death) are both named Anolis, and I assume they’re the same person but really who knows? But surely the Chicken Man is sui generis.

Much like Robert Nifkin, Walter Galt never experiences a lone, singular transcendent moment, instead gradually easing into the secret Lower North Aufzoo world that was all around him all along. His mystical practice is Snarking. This operates more (again) on a level of metaphor than is usual in DMP, but surely Snarking is presented as a Mystery Cult with its own costume, sacred space, and nighttime sacrament. A movie theater is always an invocation of Plato’s cave. If Walter and Winston never quite manage to “rend the veil”—well, remember that Big Audrey, in a movie theater, does something quite like that, starting behind the screen and moving sideways out the exit door (#26). Maybe they’ll get there.

In my youth, Avocado of Death was my favorite DMP book, but one thing has slipped it down on the list. The text heavily implies that Walter’s parents, Theobald and Mildred, are in fact the same as detective Osgood Sigerson and his assistant Ormond Sacker. Sigerson and Sacker are themselves homages to Sherlock Holmes and Watson (Sigerson being a pseudonym Holmes canonically employs in “The Adventure of the Empty House” and Ormond Sacker ACD’s rough-draft name for John Watson) and it is clear that they have gone around having lots of fun adventures before the events of Avocado of Death.

But this means that Walter Galt, in escaping his deadly-boring existence, is only lamely following after his parents? How bunk is that! I didn’t realize the connection when I read the book as a child, and only later did the horrible truth come crashing down on me. I realize that the adventure was always in good fun and not exactly dangerous (except to realtors), but the presence of a family unit gleefully sharing the adventure together makes it sound more like a play-acting, a game without stakes (except to realtors). The book never really recovered in my estimation

I mean, it’s still one of the greatest books of all time, just not as high as it used to be.

I'm serializing a free "thriller" novel

•8 Bushman Lives! (2012 YA novel illustrated by Calef Brown)

[A gorilla-enthusiast (?) teenager in 1950s Chicago decides to study art and discovers a mysterious gorillacentric naval conspiracy.]

Bushman Lives is the capstone of DMP’s career. There would be other novels, and they have been fun, but none have striven so hard to be literature with a capital L. This is the story of Harold Knishke, an archetypal DMP protagonist and his conversion to art.

By this point in DMP’s oeuvre (this book came out in 2012), some things are, I think clear. Hogboro and Baconburg are just alternate universe representations of Chicago—Chicago is on the shores of Lake Michigan, while Hogboro is on the shores of Lake Michagoo; in Chicago, the Nor-Well Drug Company is on the corner of North and Wells in Old Town, while in Baconburg, the Nor-Bu Drug Company is on the corner of Nork and Budhi in Old Town; examples abound. That characters can travel through time, space, and the other, that they can be or meet multiple versions of themselves is well established in several previous texts, which explains how William Lloyd Floyd or the Chicken Man can exist, in different books, in both the real city of Chicago and the fantasy city of Hogboro.

Sometimes I think DMP established this framework simply so (in this book) Victor from Lizard Music could reappear in 1950s Chicago and seek simultaneously the island of the lizards and Bushman the Chicago gorilla (who may or may not be dead when the book starts but is nevertheless a major character).

I’m not sure if it’s possible to understand this book without having read a great many other DMP books (but especially Lizard Music (#1) and Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (#26), both of which it shares characters with). Perhaps it is impossible to understand this book fully regardless. How many secret gorillas are there here? You may expect a definitive answer, but you will not get one. Geets, at one point, disappears to join the navy, and you may think at first this is some sort of blunder on the part of the narration, a chapter establishing his departure having been accidentally omitted—but then he leaves the navy and it turns out he didn’t even tell anyone he was going; he just went. The narration is true to the plot. And…Geets is a secret gorilla too? They’re everywhere! An entire school of exegesis should spring up around this book to plumb all its secrets.

As I’ll say again and again, the primary question in any DMP novel is how to express in words the mystical experience that DMP is always writing around or towards. Bushman Lives!, uniquely for DMP, answers that question like Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, by bringing Harold to the brink of revelation and then abruptly

ending. Perhaps I should be frustrated by this, but I think it is perfect. Every book DMP ever wrote is leading up to this moment, and here we are, trembling on the lip of the very thing they all, in different way, try to say.

As a special bonus, Bushman Lives! contains not only the most compelling and cogent analysis of schooling of any DMP book, but also the most compelling and cogent justification for art of any book anywhere: “Art does the least harm.”

•9 The Worms of Kukumlima (1981 middle-grade novel)

[Young Ronald Donald Almondotter, his grandfather, and a famous explorer travel to Africa to seek extraterrestrial (?) worms and their potential treasure.]

More than any other DMP book, Worms of Kukumlima is a straight-up adventure story in the H. Rider Haggard / Jules Verne / ripping yarn tradition. Following clues from the writings of a dead (?) man (as in She or Journey to the Center of the Earth) to find treasure in the heart of Africa (as in King Solomon’s Mines or Five Weeks in a Balloon) is as ripping as a yarn can get.

Of course this is a DMP book, so there are also giant worms and crunchy granola and a Nasser-faced pinball machine. The journey into the heart of Africa is never just a journey into the heart of Africa (thank you, Conrad), but in DMP’s hands it is a journey towards the mystical experience, an experience you only have when not looking for it. I’m not sure the experience ever actually arrives except in an allegorical representation: The Buddha-field is traditionally strewn with gems, much like Kukumlima, while setting the Buddha-field in a volcano is a powerful image I cannot quite unpack.

But it’s mostly adventure. No other DMP book is this exciting on a visceral (as opposed to intellectual) level. If I say this is a popcorn book, that is not a criticism. Nick Itch (Looking for Bobowicz (#100)) spends his childhood reading great adventure books in Classic Comics form and Neddie Wentworthstein (Neddiad (#15)) spends his childhood playing games based on the great adventure books the bigger kids have read—surely DMP cannot be grudged producing a great adventure book to rival these?

I once read a critical essay that claimed the guiding incident in adventure fiction set in Africa is a descent into a cave or other subterranean realm. Indeed, this happens in Haggard’s three most famous novels (KSM, She, AQ) as well as in Buchan’s Prester John and (of all books) Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. Well, Kukumlima nicely turns the motif on its head as its heroes are stuck above ground, the villains, as worms, below.

But of course an adventure is always a journey far from the fields we know, and the adventure is only as good as the contrast with those fields. Narrator Ronald Donald Almondotter, like Victor in Lizard Music (#3), has little interest in hanging out through the boring summer, preferring to work at his grandfather’s salami-sealing company (the sausage industry is one of the primary employers in any DMP book), and the brief delineation of office life with the gin rummy and the classical music station and the National Geographics in the bathroom is both banal enough to want to leave and pleasant enough to want to return to.

Ronald Donald Almondotter also has the best name of any DMP narrator, and in Kukumlima the names just keep getting better: Seamus Finneganstein, Sir Charles Pelicanstein, and Milton X. Mohammedstein all show up in the first two chapters. (A question: Did Sir Charles Pelicanstein make the movie Eugene Winkelman watches about the quest for sea monsters in Lake Ontario, the one starring Ambrose McFwain (#37)? Evidence for yes: How could two such movies exist? Evidence for no: Would Sir Charles Pelicanstein permit anyone else, let alone Ambrose McFwain, to star in a movie he made?)

I’m not sure if the lengthy history of the London Earthworm Society is the first of DMP’s shaggy-dog segues that go nowhere, but it’s certainly an excellent one (Borgel’s tale of his boyhood in the Old Country is probably the best, unless one counts the entirety of Young Adult Novel (#2)).

If I’ve failed to make Kukumlima sound as profound as some of DMP’s other books, it is nevertheless twice as fun. And surely there is some mystical secret to be drawn from the mystical quest for Kukumlima, the peace that passes understanding, the flight to freedom, the bombinating worms…

•10 Wingman (1975 middle-grade novella)

[While avoiding his cruddy racist school, Donald Chen encounters a flying superhero.]

Wingman is an outlier in DMP’s canon. It is his most serious book. It is his least Jewish book. It may be his first book of any real length (Blue Moose (#59) came out the same year, but it’s shorter anyway and I don’t know which one was first). And yet in some ways it fits right in: It is the story of an alienated young man who hates school and likes comic books (he has, in fact, the greatest comic book collection of any DMP character, and that includes such luminaries as Alan Mendelsohn (#1), Steve Nickelson (#58), and Nick Itch’s father (#100)). Most importantly, its protagonist is the first, but far from the last, in the DMP canon to have a mystical experience through the agency of art. Long before Harold Knishke enters de Kooning’s Excavation (#8), long before DMP (in Fish Whistle (#6)) tells the autobiographical story of himself entering into de Kooning’s Excavation, Donald Chen enters the Chinese artwork at the Met. The mystic visions Donald experiences (on more than one occasion) are among the most overtly mystical of any experience of any DMP character (I put them at fifth, after those in Java Jack (#19), Borgel (#11), The Neddiad (#15), and Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (#26) maybe?).

Perhaps because it is racially motivated, perhaps because it is not flecked with hyperbolic humorous touches, and perhaps because it takes place in a very real contemporary New York City and neither a mythic city like Hogboro nor a real city in the romanticized past, Donald’s alienation is hard to bear. Perhaps the only joke in the book is the suggestion that Superman (in one of Donald’s comics) might have to seal the Hoboken Dam before it sunders, sweeping Hoboken away—and even that is only funny if you’ve lived in or near Hoboken. When I read the book as a kid I dismissed it as self-serious, a minor work.

But I came to love it later in life. DMP knows what he’s doing, and the serious world of Donald Chen’s Washington Heights exists in contrast to the strange and unsettling appearances of the titular Wingman. The burgeoning wackiness of DMP’s usual settings can run the risk, like García Márquez’s Macondo, of drowning in quirkiness. Of all DMP works longer than a picture book, only Wingman truly partakes of what Tzvetan Todorov would call “the fantastic.”

It is, DMP claims, “mostly a true story.”

•11 Borgel (1990 middle-grade novel)

[Melvin Spellbound and his distant uncle are tourists, traveling through a surreal version of outer space (as well as time and the other).]

Borgel is a time bomb of a book. I doubt if anyone, in 1990 when the book came out, expected it to present a kind of roadmap for the overarching DMP universe. Thematically, and quite explicitly in the text, the map it resembles is a map of New Jersey. I guess technically the idea of different existential planes arises in Alan Mendelsohn (#1), but Borgel set the tone. Tone is the most important part of any book. The tone of Borgel is anything goes!

The basicest plot should be familiar. I mean, it is [pastes]: An alienated young man meets a weird character, gets drawn by him into an ever-weirdening world of weirdness, and finally achieves some kind of transcendent experience. The weird character is a distantly related Uncle Borgel, who displays at least a surface resemblance to the Uncle Boris who appears in every DMP memoir (and also Alan Mendelsohn). But Borgel’s weirdness surpasses Boris’s, or almost anyone’s, and soon he is taking our narrator, young Melvin Spellbound, on a journey through time, space, and the other. I think there’s a tendency, in discussing Borgel, to focus on the time travel aspect—Borgel’s fantasies about being immortalized in a TV special all involve time travel in the title, and the book was published in the UK under the title The Time Tourist—but since he never visits ancient Rome or anywhen identifiable, the feel of the book is more like he’s traveling through space. But probably we were wrong to focus on time and space in the first place. Probably we should be focusing on the other.

All of DMP’s books are about the other—not the way all Lovecraft books are, not that kind of other. “The other” is the third thing, the tertium quid, that gets defined no other way. It’s not A or ~A. It’s not sleeping or waking. It’s not Bing or Frank. You don’t know what it is, but you know what it isn’t. The heart of every DMP novel, remember, is the inexpressible transcendent thing. It’s the thing I mean. The noumenal; the Lacanian Real; “where your eyes don’t go.” Whatever it is, it’s the thing we’re talking about, the thing no one can talk about.

And, yeah, that’s what this book is about. There’s a lot of fun stuff, and Borgel’s fables4 are among DMP’s best work, but the real meat of the book is the story of the quest for the Great Popsicle. The Great Popsicle is not actually the other (in the time, space, and the other trichotomy), but it is the other (in the sense of the thing we’re talking about). The Great Popsicle is some kind of manifestation of the divine. Its appearance as a benevolent romping popsicle is one of my favorite passages in DMP (and therefore all of literature). And then (I’m assuming you’ve read the book) it gets eaten. All goodness and joy in the universe, devoured by a Grivnizoid. Whereupon the Grivnizoid becomes all goodness and joy in the universe. This is the moment. All of DMP’s work turns on this axis.

Not for a while, though. DMP’s next book, The Afterlife Diet (#18), only resembles Borgel in the crazy interpolated summary-within-a-novel “The Diskountikon” (which resembles Borgel an awful lot). His follow up, Robert Nifkin (#4), has a hero who absolutely does not travel through time or the other, and very little in space and not at all in that kind of space (California → Chicago → Annandale-on-Hudson is all, and that off-page). It’s only in 2007’s Neddiad (#15) that the basic worldview of Borgel—universal benignity, that is—returns, and only in Neddiad’s sequels that the shape of the DMP universe becomes clear.

Just as all Milo Levi-Nathan’s craziest book proposals in The Afterlife Diet prove to be, in some sense, true, the craziest DMP books that you assumed were deuterocanonical prove to be perfectly plausible. Guys from Space (#17) and Ned Feldman (Space Pirate) (#25) and Mush (a Dog from Space) (#72) are all, it turns out, not only perfectly plausible but not even far-fetched. I mean Borgel could as easily play jazz with Mush as he could raid Spiegelians with Bugbeard as he could drink root beer with the space guys as he could do anything. After Borgel, anything goes. That’s the true legacy of Borgel. Eventually (after The Neddiad, as we shall see) anything went!

This book is so good that I keep thinking I ranked it too low, but then I look above and all the books that beat it are so good, so what is one to do? It’s all part of the cutthroat zero-sum-game of substack.

Fund my debilitating DMP addiction

•12 Norb (1992 comic strip collection illustrated by Tony Auth)

[An eccentric inventor and a neighboring teenage girl have various strange adventures, one installment a day in your local newspaper.]

For one brief, glorious year, DMP had a syndicated comic strip (illustrated by political cartoonist Tony Auth). That “year”—it ran for 362 days between 1989 and 1990—was a good time for comic strips: Bloom County was wrapping up and FoxTrot was starting; Calvin and Hobbes had hit its stride, Far Side was still going strong, Robotman was getting better and better, Dilbert was not yet crazed, and Peanuts was entering a kind of late-in-life elder-statesman renaissance. There was a lot going on.

But the DMP/Auth strip took its cue from none of these. Norb looks back to the humorous adventure/continuity strips of yore: Thimble Theatre, Li’l Abner, and especially Alley Oop (a caveman named Oopy Al accompanies our heroes on one of their time-traveling junkets, a detail perhaps too on point). Over the yearlong run, Norb (an “eccentric genius,” his name short for Norbu, which is both a Himalayan peak and (Nor-Bu, remember?) a drugstore in Baconburg) and his neighbor Rat (Bentley Saunders Harrison Matthews, the tritagonist from the Snarkout Boys (#7 & 30), somewhat defanged) have a wide variety of variegated adventures, sometimes solving crimes, sometimes just dealing with an annoying houseguest. The whiplash effect of these storylines is like…well, there used to be a weekly comic strip called Sappo.5 For six Sundays in 1937, Sappo’s wife has been trying to catch him sneaking out to play poker. Then come five Sundays in which Sappo switches brains with a dog. There follow three Sundays of slapstick gags at home. Then for six months Sappo travels through space (with his wife and friends). After they get back, there’s a month about competitive duck hunting. Well, Norb is like that.

What you get is, on the one hand, exactly what you might expect a DMP adventure strip to be like (weird and funny). On the other hand, it is unlike any other DMP text. The characters are aware they are in a comic strip, frequently remarking on the conventions of the form in a Sam’s Strip kind of way. One mystery requires a trip to a soiree populated entirely by old comic characters: “Wow! Look at all those old fogeys!” Rat exclaims as he looks across a room that includes, inter alia, Wimpy from Thimble Theatre, Mammy Yokum from Li’l Abner, and Alley Oop himself. For the next two weeks, the fogeys trade Attila the Pun-style one-liners as Rat groans.

(Note that the presence of Rat seems to indicate that in some sense, at least, the strip takes place “in continuity,” which can cause some complications. Rat’s ever-absent parents attend (at one point) a “sensitivity seminar” in Peru; Peru is of course where their nemesis/erstwhile butler Wallace Nussbaum hails from! Is something going on behind the scenes?)

The project was doomed from the start. America’s expectations from comic strips by 1990 had become: things you cut out of newspapers and magnet to a fridge. For all the exciting appearances of innovation alluded to in the first paragraph above, the comics page was still safe and cozy, rarely “challenging” (you know what I mean), and primarily composed of titles that started decades earlier (as is still the case). In 1990, The Katzenjammer Kids was still in syndication!

But worse than audience prejudice was the pure physical restriction of the medium. Adventure strips need art! This is true of “straight” adventure strips (Caniff, Raymond) and also of the humorous ones Norb takes as its model, but by 1990 comics had shrunk too greatly to allow much art in them. A daily installment of Alley Oop or Li’l Abner regularly unspooled across four big panels (Thimble Theatre averaged six!), but Norb is almost always restricted to three cramped panels. When Auth tries something ambitious, like the distorted forms of our characters as they rocket through time, you can really perceive how limited he is, trying to cram the information into a tiny box. Bill Watterson was the last great strip artist (even if not necessarily the last great strip cartoonist) because he kept his virtuoso art moments for the Sunday pages, where he had space, and if you have a rival in mind (John Cullen Murphy, maybe?) it’s probably on a Sunday strip. Of course, Watterson spent his whole career railing against what shrinking comics strips were doing to the art.

So Norb lasted only a year, was largely hated or ignored, and suffered the ignominy of a neglected afterlife. The Sunday have never been reprinted. The dailies have been collected in their entirety only once, in an impossible-to-find 19926 volume from Mu Press with what may literally be the worst binding of any book ever made.

The name Mu evokes, lost continents, Zen nothingness, and the coefficient of friction; as you search for a copy Norb (as you should), you will see how all three apply. Those who believe in comic strips as an art form (like me!) should make the effort.

Alternate histories! Makes a great gift!

•13 Ducks! (1984 picture book)

[Scott purchases a duck who bullies him into wishing for a chariot that carries him to heaven, or maybe duck heaven. Ducks lie.]

Some of DMP’s picture books are more tone-poems than anything else, but Ducks! tells a story, and it is an insane story. It’s more or less the old tale of the fisherman who saves a talking fish, only in this case the fish is a vaguely hostile duck who is also (everyone agrees) a serial liar. Scott, our young narrator, is taken up to heaven in a chariot—this appears to be an Elijah reference, and presumably the chariot is only not fiery because DMP testifies (in Young Adults (#2)) that he can never spell the word fiery correctly—and then returned home after being jerked around a bit.

All of this makes some sense when viewed in the light of other DMP books. Scott has a mystical experience, in fact the mystical experience as he ascends Elijah-like to heaven, but the experience is kind of lame and boring (you know, like Waka Waka (#1)). The unnamed duck is similar to other bossy DMP guides or interlopers. Scott joins Donald Chen (#10), Seymour Semolina (#20), and Ned Feldman (#25) as characters who get a feathery ride. Ducks are the “major enthusiasm” of Colonel Ken Krenwinkle’s life (in Yobgorgle (#37)).

But what if you’re reading Ducks! in isolation (as presumably many young readers would be)? What should anyone make of this story? It’s merely an account of how Scott loses seven cents!

Of course, that’s why I love this book. It’s an unstory. The parents keep coming in and summarizing everything that happened in painful but hilarious expository dialog. “Mothers and fathers usually lie,” the duck says, but ducks usually lie.

Ducks! may not be the weirdest children’s book ever made—because ECK used to put out children’s books—and it may not even be the weirdest great children’s book (because Maurice Sendak’s Outside Over There), but it’s too weird even to be a tone poem. I don’t know what it is. It is, of course, (as another kind of Duck would say) a Dada story.

Perhaps it’s worth noting that Reverend Nathan DuNord, in his insane screed Modern Art, An Invention of the Devil, suggests that pictures of ducks are the only valid form of art. This screed, of course, comes from Bushman Lives! (#8), the only other DMP book to end in a !7

•14 Wizard Crystal (1973 picture book)

[In search of happiness, a wizard steals a magic crystal from a frog pond.]

It’s hard to compare a novel with a very short text that contains only a few hundred words or so, but, hey, this is the task we decided upon. I am aware that I favor the longer works (certainly they’re easier to write about), and perhaps I’ve tried to be fair and fight my prejudices by giving the picture books bonus points. You’ll never know.

But Wizard Crystal is the real deal. I found this book terrifying to read as a youth—and I mean as a teenager; I didn’t read it till I was a teenager. It’s a theme DMP would return to in later books, but here presented in a way that is strange and unsettling. It’s more or less Borgel from the point of view of the Grivnizoid, if that makes any sense. It’s an unpleasant experience. It’s a great book. Even the font is horrible.

The calif seeks the subterranean palace of wonders and learns too late it is hell—this is the plot of Beckford’s eighteenth-century gothic novel Vathek, but it is also the plot of Wizard Crystal…with the curious coda that maybe everything is in fact all right. Maybe it’s nice here in the subterranean palace of wonders.

This book also contains my favorite DMP art—not my favorite art in a DMP book necessarily, but my favorite art by DMP—especially the wizard’s hat.

•15 The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization (2007 middle-grade novel illustrated by Calef Brown)

[Neddie takes the train, goes to Hollywood, and saves civilization (from the return of antediluvian chaos).]

I don’t know what marketing exec decided to make the push, but Neddiad was a big deal when it came out. The whole thing was serialized online. There were contests (I won one, and the Calef Brown art from chapter seven still hangs upon my wall). It seemed like everyone was talking about the book. The last few DMP books had slipped out quietly, but this one made a splash. It was at the time, and remains, the longest DMP book (excluding omnibuses, of course). It’s a big one. There’s a lot going on!

The Neddiad is an inflection point in the canon of DMP novels. After this one, and perhaps starting with this one, everything would feel different (except Bushman Lives!). There are a lot more prophesies, and a lot more witches. There are a lot more female narrators. Where previous novels had skewed urban, after Neddiad the novels would skew rural, with even the ostensibly urban environments (Poughkeepsie, Kingston) frequently abandoned for the wilds of the Catskills. Essentially, Leonard Neeble and Alan Mendelsohn (#1) may live in the suburbs, but they pine for the Old Neighborhood / the Bronx and only find salvation by taking a bus into Hogboro; their idea of wilderness is an overgrown tourist trap next to a junkyard. Post-Neddiad characters (contrarily) head for the forest primeval at the drop of a hat, either on this plane or another. (Bushman Lives! (#8) is more or less an exception, but you’ll notice Geets Hildebrand and a host of ape-men have one eye on the woods…someone has to put the wald in Waldteufel…etc.)

But a lot of that is post-Neddie. Neddiad is both the last of the old-style novels (not literally the last—there’s Bushman Lives!) and the harbinger of the new style. For all its evocation of The Illiad (perhaps more obvious after The Yggyssey was released), The Neddiad is structured more like The Aeneid: First Neddie Wentworthstein makes his long and perilous journey from Chicago for California, and only then does he have to fight for it.

The stakes are bigger than in previous DMP books—actually the stakes in both Lizard Music (#3) and Avocado of Death (#7) are huge, involving as they do aliens taking over part of the earth, but of course in those books the aliens win—and Neddie has to save, as the title says, civilization. In the course of said saving, he undergoes a mystical experience that is one of the most overt mystical experiences in the entire DMP canon. The revelation of the Great Popsicle is echoed quite precisely in the revelation of the Great Turtle. Even if you think I’m usually talking out of my hat about the mysticism, you really cannot deny this one!

All of this is all good stuff. But I want to talk about another thing the book does, something that doesn’t quite start with The Neddiad but which gets properly launched with The Neddiad.

I quoted before DMP’s statement on his purpose in life: “to tell people who might not have seen it that such a place as the Clark existed” (#6). More than ever before, The Neddiad is about the past, and DMP’s memories of the past, and the preservation in memory of a time and place that has long faded away. This is the Los Angeles of ca. 1950, with its stucco and its kitschy buildings in various shapes. The Hollywood Ranch Market was a real place and the brown Derby was a real place and Clifton’s Cafeteria (they go there in The Yggyssey (#81)) was a real place, and DMP through the magic of art is going to recreate them all as they were in their heyday. The Monte Vista Hotel is still a real place (in Flagstaff, Arizona). Pollepel Island in Cat Whiskered Girl (#26) and the Kingston Stockade District in Dwergish Girl (#31)…there’s a real sense that DMP is sharing something almost forgotten with you, the reader. I never rode it, but such a train as the Superchief used to roar across the West.

DMP has always excelled in creating a rich and vibrant (I should fix that cliché) setting, and the gurus and health food joints and new age bookstores of 1970s DMP preserve (as any author preserves; only he’s better at it) the moment the books were written in. But starting with Robert Nifkin (#4), set in the Chicago of the past, the impetus to keep safe a moment long gone, like Uncle Boris filming a forgotten Oriental Garden (#1), starts to emerge.

There have been infodumps in DMP books before, and one remembers Theobald Galt’s lecture on werewolf etymologies in Baconburg Horror (#30). But nothing, not even Robert Nifkin’s reports on Chicago architecture, could prepare one for the information in The Neddiad. It is far-ranging, with prehistoric epochs and Native Americans and did you know the alligator snapping turtle is the largest freshwater turtle in North America? But mostly it’s about Hollywood. Pace Sir Charles Pelicanstein (from Kukumlima (#9)), but Los Angeles exists after all.

These infodumps are presented with a twinkle of irony, and I’m not complaining about them. They are at least in part a parody of worse books with more irritating infodumps, or even of infodumpy Moby Dick (and see Magic Goose (#20) below for the ad absurdum end of the parody). But there’s no avoiding their presence. If DMP books are a map for the young reader to escape a rotten life, they are sometimes a very specific map for a very specific time, when a hip youngster could avoid the mundanity of conventional media by indulging in Lord Buckley and listening to “Serutan Yob” and perusing a pseudo-poem at the E.J. Sperry Thought Factory. The fringe or underground aspects of these specific media shade through the “cult” texts of B-movies or old comics books or Mississippi John Hurt’s “Chicken” (which is not like his other songs) and Screaming Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You” (which is indeed like his other songs) and into the conventionally immortal art of Mozart or even Louis Armstrong (these are not my but DMP’s examples). The hi/lo of the Cl/Sn/ark Theater, which you can imagine might show Glen or Glenda? on a double bill with Grand Illusion (part of their alphabetical series; this one is my example) is the ultimate avatar of the DMP esthetic.

This is the civilization Neddie has been fighting for, and if it is forgotten, Neddie will have failed.

•16 Author’s Day (1993 picture book)

[An almost-recognizable author comes to a local grammar school for author’s day.]

Fish Whistle (#6) contains an essay about a young man possessed of “a large collection of light reading—authors like Kingsley Amis, S.J. Perelman, and Jerome K. Jerome.” Well, Author’s Day is the Jerome K. Jerome of DMP books. It’s light, but it’s funny enough to be a classic.

Bramwell Wink-Porter, a writer who bears a passing resemblance to DMP, visits Melvinville Elementary School, and farcical disasters spiral out of this slim premise. The children are straight out of “Ransom of Red Chief.” The adults are crazy. It’s a good time.

I should note that one speaker from the Blueberry Park / Bughouse Square section of Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (#7), the one who wants animals to wear clothing, is revealed to be Melvinville teacher Mrs. Heatseat—but such knowledge is hardly necessary to enjoy the book.

In 1993, when Author’s Day came out, the idea that DMP would write a book (as Bramwell Wink-Porter did) called The Bunny Brothers must have seemed as absurd as a petition for animals to wear clothing. Things would change…

•17 Guys from Space (1989 picture book)

[Space guys take a young boy on a journey into space in search of adventure and root beer.]

Almost all of Guys from Space is written in very short sentences, each sentence being an entire paragraph. I realize that is is less a stylistic idiosyncrasy than a nod to the fact that this book is aimed at very young children, but actually very few DMP books are written in this way. I am aware that other writers have tried the one-short-sentence-per-paragraph style out and come across looking like illiterate savages, but here it gives the book the cadence of a poem.

It did not make a noise.
It landed like a dream.
“This is good!” I said.
I was not scared.

This is, I think, the first of DMP’s dialog-heavy picture books (although some might point to The Muffin Fiend (#23) for priority). As in an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel, most of the action comes through dialog, and this, too, gives the book a slow, dreamlike rhythm. It takes a full page for the space guys to convince our unnamed narrator to get permission to go on their spaceship!

The actual voyage of adventure and exploration is utterly charming in a childlike way. The trip takes them to an interplanetary root beer stand reminiscent of the one run by Alfred the anthropoid bloboform in Borgel (#11) (or the one run by Sid the amorphoid fleshopod in Afterlife Diet (#18)). They get a genuine discovery (ice cream in root beer—a pleasantly DMP discovery in that it is retro and also involves junkfood) and arrive home in time for dinner.

Guys from Space is in many ways a sister book to Ned Feldman, Space Pirate (#25): Both take a small boy through space to a distant planet, both involve the plan of testing alien atmosphere by stepping out into it (and running back to the ship, slamming the door, should it prove unbreathable), and both involve a big yellow smiley face (it’s being woven on a loom in Guys from Space). But while Ned Feldman is a cynical comedy (and an excellent one), Guys from Space is the most innocent of the great DMP books. “We are space guys. We know what we are doing.”

•18 The Afterlife Diet (1995 novel)

[The afterlife turns out to be segregated by weight; author and editor engage in a savage duel to the death, as nature says they must; meanwhile shadowy forces from the old world, many of them fat, strike out into in the new.]

DMP must have been aware that he would have only one chance to produce a novel for grown-ups, so he crammed everything in here: fat people, aliens, vampires, werecreatures, cults, fat people, Moby Dick, sausages, Eastern-European Jews, parakeets, and more fat people. Like many DMP novels (post-Slaves of Spiegel (#48)), it is a palimpsest constructed from several stories in several timelines………plus a madman’s notebook (which the novel resembles), more than one book proposal (some of which, in the context of the novel, prove to be nonfiction), and ever so many digressions. Part of it takes place in the afterlife, which resembles a lame Catskills resort. There’s plenty of sex, most of it not so much graphic as…sausagey. Almost every character is fat.

It’s tempting to skim the interpolated texts here, but one lengthy part, “The Diskountikon,” may be the single best thing in The Afterlife Diet. “The Diskountikon” is itself a kind of travesty of the Melvinge of the Megaverse trilogy—books DMP oversaw in some nebulous way but did not write. Instead of Melvinge, the main character is Irvinge. Instead of an enormous unobtainable mall, the characters seek an enormous unobtainable discount pharmacy. The idea of a store so large that its parking lot swells to impossible sizes—it takes three or four generations to make a trip to the mall, “the first of which is spent looking for a parking space”; subsidiary shops pop up in the parking lot, and you’re never sure if you have reached the actual enormous store or just one of these ersatz distractions—is one of the best in all literature, and it’s nice that DMP salvaged it from the Melvinge books to establish it in one of his own.

My most Afterlife-Diety–novel

The book is perhaps overly didactic—its theme is that fat people should just mellow out and be fat without worrying, and you will not miss that theme—but it’s funny enough that the sting of didacticism gets absorbed. The one fat character comfortable with his weight is a skydiving carpe-diem maniac who lives quite literally in a perpetual orgy—there’s a moral here, but it’s mostly just silliness.

Perhaps not all of it works, but the book is so audacious and ambitious that with every rereading it gains in my estimation. It also contains the first appearance of Robert Nifkin’s Wheaton School (#4), about two-thirds of Vampires of Blinsh (#28), a very different Gypsy Bill from the one that appears in Borgel (#11), and a cameo by fan-favorite Rolzup.

•19 Java Jack (1980 middle-grade novel by Luqman Keele and DMP)

[The putative child of anthropologists travels to Indonesia after reports surface that his parents are dead; there he becomes a pirate, prophet, and rock musician before things get weird.]

Worms of Kukumlima (#9) is DMP’s semiparody of a boy’s adventure story, but Java Jack is straight up adventure, no parody. It’s a little bit Lord Jim, with a touch of She, but the book it most resembles is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped: the first-person account of a boy out of his element becoming entangled in local politics; Bunga is Alan Breck.

Actually, the book it most resembles is Worms of Kukumlima, down to the gem-strewn Buddha field in a volcano. But, as I said, it’s played much straighter. Instead of Milton X. Mohammedstein, there are real Muslims.

Java Jack the book is attributed to Luqman Keele and DMP, in that order, and I have no idea how the collaboration went down, but the prose reads like DMP, the plot is (almost) classic DMP, even some of the smallest touches (Raymond!) are pure DMP. The local color of Indonesia is Luqman Keele, of course—he seems to have lived there much of his life—and I don’t mean to downplay his contribution. Ever modest, DMP has asserted that he was more of an editor, that the book was really Keele’s. What do I know? I’d say DMP’s fingerprints are all over this thing. And the end of the book—here is where Luqman Keele and DMP may share sensibilities.

Luqman Keele (also known, confusingly and later in life, as Luqman McKingley) seems to have been active in something called Subud. I know a Wikipedia amount about Subud, but basically it’s an Indonesian-based spiritual movement. Keele wrote a biography of (and edited a series of transcripts from talks by) Subud’s founder. Based on the fact that the biography is entitled Journey Beyond the Stars, I’m assuming there’s a lot of Subud in Java Jack. The Subud symbol is seven concentric circles, and the entrance to the Fiery Star is “on a island [1] inside a palace [2] that was an island in a pond [3] on an island [4] that was in a lake [5] inside a volcano [6]—which was on an island [7].” Subud syncretically adopts influences from several faiths, and the Sultan of Maggasang’s opening of the treasure house requires the cooperation of five holy men, “one representing each of the major religious communities of Maggasang.” How much Java Jack’s journey “outside the material universe” represents authentic Subud cosmology or teaching—probably someone should read some of Keele’s other books and report back. That someone might eventually be me, but I haven’t done it yet.

The Subud ritual of latihan is referenced by a DMP character some thirty years after Java Jack, in 2010’s Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (#26), but never in Java Jack itself. Regardless, let us note the presence of a mystical experience at the climax of a DMP book. And what a mystical experience it is! All the haters and doubters who are sniffing that the Snarkout Boys never really achieve transcendence have nothing to object to here! This is not my favorite mystical experience that a DMP narrator undergoes, probably because it is far from the clearest, and that may be because more Subud knowledge is required to get all the details—but it’s got to be the most mystical!

Luqman Keele died (under the name McKingley) in 2012. You can find a brief obituary here.

This is probably the most violent DMP book (Afterlife Diet (#18) excepted), but it is also the one that most embraces repentance and forgiveness. Fligh is the single most evil character in any DMP book, Nussbaums included, and he is well on his way, at book’s end, to joining Doctors without Borders. The pirate becomes a benign capitalist. Java Jack is off on more adventures!

I hope my habitual carping does not obscure the fact that this is a real rip-snorter of an action book, apparently but unjustly neglected by DMP fans. Also, the fictional island of Maggasang, where the climax of Java Jack takes place, is, we learn in Avocado of Death (#7), where “the best orangutans for wrestling purposes come from.”

(There exists an unrelated (?) 1927 novel called Java-Jack, which I have never read but probably should unless you beat me to it.)

•20 The Magic Goose (1997 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[A giant talking goose flies a kid around at night so he can visit an author (and also, you know, just fly).]

The Magic Goose is, more than most DMP books, pure parody. A kid (Seymour Semolina) has absorbed from children’s literature an idea about what a visit from a magical creature should be like. One day a magic goose visits him, and the goose is just terrible at his job. The entire book is the goose failing to take Seymour on an adventure while Seymour badgers the poor fowl. Maybe I would have found this frustrating if I were still Seymour’s age, but I’m not so I find it hilarious.

DMP characters frequently speak in ridiculously thorough infodumps, providing lengthy discourses on the history of werewolves, coracles, drive-ins, or especially art. These infodumps are, I think, also parody, the kind of thing a character in a bad thriller would do, but made ridiculous with the amount of (for example) etymological detail provided. Well Magic Goose is hardly the most infodumpy DMP book (that would be one of the Neddiad trilogy (#15, 81, or 26)), but it manages the nice work of self-parody, providing periodic vocabulary definitions that are straight up extracted from the dictionary.

Apparently this was originally released under the title Goose Night, which is better, but I read the (more common) Magic Goose edition and am congenitally inflexible.

•21 Tooth-Gnasher Superflash (1981 picture book)

[A family goes shopping for a new car.]

In some ways Tooth-Gnasher Superflash is just a joke, with a punchline and everything. It’s a good joke, but a joke is hardly going to rate a book this high on the list. What I love about Superflash (and as always I may be reading too much into things) is the deadpan absurdity of the characters’ speech, which suggests nothing so much as a Ionesco play. If you like the Bald Soprano or The Lesson (which also has a punchline) you’ll love Tooth-Gnasher Superflash. That’s all I have to say about that.

•22 Wempires (1991 picture book)

[A vampire-obsessed kid gets visited by real vampires.]

This book starts out as just another picture book about children interacting with classic Universal Monsters (you know, like I Was a Second-Grade Werewolf (#55)). But then the Wempires show up—and these guys are great! Their Borscht-belt accents and boorish behavior as they plunder Jonathan’s house for snacks—this is true comedy.

“Drinking blood—yich! Now for drinking, ginger ale is the best” is the single DMP line that gets quoted the most in my house.

•23 The Muffin Fiend (1986 children’s book)

[Mozart helps solve the crime of the missing muffins. It was aliens all along.]

Young Adults (the complete version, not the bowdlerized massmarket reissue; #2) contains absurd low-res illustrated tales of the superheroics of Wolfgang Amadeaus Mozart. Muffin Fiend could be a stylistically identical and tonally similar outtake of the Young Adults Mozart stories.

In Muffin Fiend, Mozart is now a master detective, prone, much like master detective Osgood Sigerson in the Snarkout Boys books (#7 & 30) to say things like, “I used to know but I forgot.” He is visited by Inspector Charles le Chat (which of course means Charles the Cat—Young Adults readers take note!) and contracted to find who’s been stealing the muffins of Europe. In a plot twist that will be repeated in Borgel, the fatal clue comes from the fact that someone elects to eat inedible food.

Mozart claims to hold the record for the greatest number of muffins consumed in twenty-four hours, which happens to match the number of conquests Don Giovanni (in the Mozart opera of the same name) claims in Spain: 1003.8 When Mozart has a showdown with the muffin fiend, however, it is the fiend who has taken the Don Giovanni role, and Mozart is the statue: In their duet, the fiend sings “No!” again and again and Mozart offers a fatal handshake.9

As one might expect from a book that is practically a spin-off of DMP’s most Dada book, the ending is “a Dada story.”It’s also remarkably similar to the endings of Fat Men from Space (#51) and Avocado of Death (#7), which is quite a feat because those endings are not similar to each other.

Despite its surface occult apparatus (that stray illuminati pyramid) and operatic intertextuality, this scherzo has little depth I can tease out beyond its inherent absurdity. But that absurdity is sufficient to make this one of DMP’s most fun divertimenti.

I’m not sure if anyone noticed, but I worked some music terms into that last paragraph.

•24 Devil in the Drain (1983 picture book)

[A boy discovers the devil lives in his kitchen sink and is also a jerk.]

DMP’s picture books often (Wempires (#22), Magic Goose (#20), Ned Feldman (#25), etc.) involve a kind of home invasion, and the invader is generally a bossy, selfish jerk. The Wempires are charming, but they’re also here to make a mess and clean out Jonathan’s kitchen. The Magic Goose may have good intentions, but he in such denial of his own incompetence. Captain Bugbeard’s only redeeming feature is that he knows how to fly a space ship, and that only most of the time. I’d put the hostile duck from Ducks! (#13) in this category, too; but at least he gives you a chariot with a nice paint job. Even he has an upside.

But then there’s Devil in the Drain, which is about an invasion by the actual Devil. Like Captain Bugbeard, he comes through the sink. Like many DMP characters, he’s here to demand food (and like Lance Von Sweeney (Magic Pretzel (#53)) or Glamorella Katz (Kat Hats (#42)), he is obsessed with pretzels). And he’s just rotten. He’s awful. He’s literally the devil!

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this book (ever since I first read it, reformatted as a short story, in Marvin Kaye’s SF anthology Devils and Demons). Does the unnamed narrator damn himself by breaking his word to the Devil (and was this, in fact, the Devil’s plan?)? Or (and this seems more in keeping with DMP’s usual worldview) is the whole point of the story that the Devil is there to make you worry about things you should’t worry about (such as accidentally draining a goldfish), and the only thing to do is flush him away out of your thoughts?

Of course, the fact that the Devil resemble the dead goldfish—is he the ghost of the goldfish out for revenge? Or is this encounter taking place inside the narrator’s conscience, where he has conjured up a dead goldfish to hound him, Furies-style?

If this book were a moral fable, I’d say it was a failure, being too unclear, but the book is art, and art should make you think.

“How come you haven’t mentioned how frightening I am, and at the same time sort of fascinating?” the Devil asks, and maybe thinking too much about the Devil is a mistake—which is great! The whole book is a trap! It’s The King in Yellow of picture books!

•25 Ned Feldman, Space Pirate (1994 children’s book)

[An alien space pirate takes Ned Feldman on a space adventure, exploring planets and encountering dangers.[

This one’s a real favorite in my household. It serves almost like a primer, a junior version of one of DMP’s longer novels. It’s all abbreviated, of course: The whole book must take place over the course of two hours or so. In that time Ned Feldman meets a conniving little crayon-munching space pirate, learns from him some of the theoretical physics (“space science”) the DMP universe runs on, travels through space, explores a planet, and returns home. It’s short and sweet.

Captain Bugbeard is one of DMP’s greatest comic creations, an egomaniacal coward who spouts strange fruit-related similes. His flag sports a motto that would get a Dada Duck (from Young Adults (#2)) fined five bucks for saying—he’s been meaning to get a better one.

This book contains one interesting little game with the inexpressibility that is at the heart of most DMP novels. Ned Feldman meets a yeti, a creature about which he says:

The yeti was the scariest thing I had ever seen. Not only was it the scariest thing I had ever seen in real life, it was also the scariest thing I had ever seen on TV or in a movie, or in an ad for a movie I was not allowed to see because it was to scary.It was also the scariest thing I had ever heard of or imagined. ¶I am not going to tell you what the yeti looked like. It was too scary.

This is good. Alan Mendelsohn (#1) had featured an “unspeakable awfulness,” an “ineffable ickiness,” but surely this indescribable yeti is more unspeakable, more ineffable that that!

Then, later, Ned concedes that they yeti “might just want to be friends.”

Note the big orange splot (#5) on Ned’s homework alongside the space battles. Like one of Mr. Plumbean’s antagonists, Ned’s teacher “believes in neatness”; this revelation should, perhaps, force us to view Ned’s piratical adventures in a new light—as a radical assertion of individuality or an external manifestation of Ned’s inner self.

•26 Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (2010 middle-grade novel illustrated by Calef Brown)

[An employee at an occult bookstore, herself a semi-feline transplant from another dimension, solves a mystery about space cats by traveling through even more dimensions.]

Remember that the primary question of a DMP book is how to express the inexpressible mystical experience that its characters (almost inevitably) must undergo. Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (no definite article, just like Huck Finn) is a good book because it’s funny and engaging, but it is a great book because it finds an answer to this question. The answer may not be as clear as the answer in Borgel (#11), Neddiad (#15), or Wingman (#10), but it is perhaps the second-best answer, after only the nonanswer of Bushman Lives! (#8).

But before all that—this is a novel about Big Audrey, a minor character from The Yggyssey (#81) who inexplicably comes to earth (from some other dimension) and then moves across country (again pretty inexplicably, but with Marlon Brando) and sets up shop in Poughkeepsie. There’s a lengthy introduction explaining the concept of alternate worlds as laid out in The Yggyssey, a kind of the-story-so-far, but (as we’ll see when we get to it) The Yggyssey couldn’t even complete its own story let alone set up another one. Big Audrey in a matter of pages abandons every setting and character that might make this recognizable as a sequel. She hangs out in Poughkeepsie selling books about UFOs. She meets some zany characters. She has some adventures. She leaves this world behind, which might have been a more jarring experience had she not already done that once. And then it gets weird.

In the approximate plane of Apokeepsing (a genuine old name for Poughkeepsie because in a post-Neddiad book genuine local history is important) Audrey and her friend Molly are arrested, jailed, and brought for trial not to court, but to the Temple of the Mystic Brotherhood, a building surmounted by what appears to be the statue that later resides in the Terwilliger-Matthews residence (Avocado of Death (#7)). There they undergo some kind of initiation that comes straight out of the Rosicrucian handbook, or possibly the Fleischer Brothers. Everybody lies to and betrays them. The bad guys are revealed to be good and then act bad. I frankly have to read this section about seven more times and take better notes. Our heroes end up back in the real world behind a movie screen. It’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, playing first run because this book, you will remember, takes place in the past.10 “Klaatu barada nikto.”

But none of that is what’s important. It’s great, and it may be important, but it’s not the important thing. After all that, after Audrey uses clues she gained as an initiate to resolve the plot proper, “someone” shouts, “Everyone take your places for the grand dance.” And then we get the important thing. Audrey learns what she wants to know. The inexpressible is expressed. It’s a dance.

Everyone quotes Steve Martin as saying that talking about art is like dancing about architecture. DMP’s characters—it happens in a muted way in Dwergish Girl (#31) and Crazy in Poughkeepsie (#36)—are perhaps dancing about art. Or DMP is writing about dancing about art. They’re dancing about something. The answer to everything is there, and you could experience this too, if only you could see the dance. Which you can’t, because it’s a book. And there, right after the dance, the book ends, with the ironic promise that the answer to the final question will come in a book that has never been written (*Escape to Dwerg Mountain). I say ironic because the book (we are told) will be sold “at the Gleybners’ bookstore”—a fictional place that only exists in the pages of Cat-Whiskered Girl.

I don’t understand all of the last fifty-plus pages of Cat-Whiskered Girl. But one thing is clear: If Audrey can meet herself, and herself is Elizabeth Van Vreemdeling—all bets are off. If you’ve spent years wondering why Professor Mazzocchi has the first name Fritz in Hoboken Chicken Emergency (#46) and Sterling in Looking for Bobowicz (#100)…I had assumed “Fritz” was a nickname, but maybe we’re dealing with two slightly different but mostly the same people. Remember that Chicago or the Chicken Man keep showing up in DMP books slightly different but mostly the same.

The entire plot of Alan Mendelsohn (#1) hangs upon the fact that zitkisberries can only grow in one location in Waka Waka…except there’s also a zitkisberry bush in the offices of the World Famous Salami Snap Company in Worms of Kukumlima (#9), and they’re drinking fleegix in Crazy in Poughkeepsie. You can stop worrying about that one.

The fast food restaurant MacTavish’s in Last Guru (#29) serves health food, while the fast food restaurant McTavish’s in Yobgorgle (#37) serves junk food. It’s all so clear now!

What started in Borgel and bloomed in Yggyssey, a cosmography that treats the Earth or our Earth as just one place among many, finally fruits here. If it doesn’t fully make sense that’s either because you did not undergo trials in the basement of the Mystic Brotherhood Temple or because you could not see that wonderful dance.

•27 Pickle Creature (1979 picture book)

[Sent by his grandmother to buy a pickle, Conrad accidentally acquires a pickle creature, which is different.]

I’ve said that some of DMP’s picture books are tone-poems, and that’s Pickle Creature. There’s a decent gag in which Conrad overtly lures the titular creature to his grandmother’s and then claims it followed him home, and the pickle creature is probably the cutest thing DMP ever drew, but the whole book really just leads to the moment the pickle creature curls up on a rug and goes to sleep while Conrad watches a scary movie on TV.

DMP says in Fish Whistle (#6) that a dog and a man may share a thought, and the thought is: “Ahh!” The end of Pickle Creature is a shared (between Conrad, creature, and audience) Ahh!

•28 Vampires of Blinsh ( 2020 picture book illustrated by Aaron Renier)

[A description of the events and attractions in the very vampiric town of Blinsh.]

Some DMP books are narrated from a thousand miles away. I almost said this about The Muffin Fiend (#23), but actually that’s 250 miles, 300 tops. But Vampires of Blinsh—that’s the ten-thousand-miles book.

A thousand-mile book is told, like “The Diskountikon” summary from The Afterlife Diet (#18) or an Aesop’s fable, plainly and economically but without recourse to emotion. There’s no interiority. Calvino excelled in such stories; Borges is their acknowledged master.

But Vampires of Blinsh is something else. It’s not even close to a story, It’s a travelogue! It’s great!

From a God’s-eye view Henry Fielding could only dream of, we view the village of Blinsh in the country of Pinksylvania. Blinsh is apparently an alternate transliteration of Blint, the accursed village that features so heavily in Baconburg Horror (#30) and Afterlife Diet. I’m not just guessing that Blinsh is the same as Blint. Blint and Blinsh are both near the towns of Nornish and Blorsh and the big city of Farshningle. Both have an Onion King market with a Midnight Madness sale. Both have a citizen identified as “Grimma Farforshnik, mother of six.” Both are chock full of vampires. Some books call it Blint; this book calls it Blinsh.

If it’s not a translation variance, it’s one of the Cat-Whiskered (#26) doublings. The book is full of doublings: The “I’d rather be writing” bumper sticker from Author’s Day (#16) reappears on Jonas Papooshnik’s car. Mildred Van Helsing from Wempires (#22) reappears on Otto’s refrigerator. Good Intentions Boulevard runs right through Blinsh to (in Borgel (#11)) Hell. Some of these are hardly even mysterious—surely more than one person can buy a bumper sticker!

But those last two paragraphs are a distraction. Blinsh. Blinsh is full of vampires. With the flat, deadpan prose of an old-time newsreel, DMP runs down the amenities and civic character of vampire-laden Blinsh, and incidentally the surrounding vampire-laden areas. “Blorsh is easy to reach by train, bus, automobile, or horse cart.” This is precisely the tone of a chamber of commerce pamphlet (with the slight decentering implicit in “horse cart”). “There are not enough pages in this book to do justice to the capital of Pinksylvania, the magnificent city of Farshningle.” Blinsh is a place where vampire and human live in harmony. “It is true a certain amount of biting happens, but a nip on the neck may just be a vampire’s way of saying ‘Hello, let’s be friends.’”11

Background characters appear and appear again, but most are nameless and certainly none are involved in a narrative. This is just the story of Blinsh! And yet…

In the opening pages, a vampire bites Jonas Papooshnik on the neck. The narrator insists nothing untoward will result, that Jonas’s evident distress is caused by bad donuts. Jonas sleeps all day, emerges at night, and the narrator insists he’s just goofing with his nigh vision goggles. He bites another citizen, Cowboy Bob…and still the narrator wants to claim that no one involved is a vampire. Papooshnik and Cowboy Bob start to fly, vampire-style, and the narrator suggests they may have learned it from their neighbors. Certainly they have not become vampires!

Bear in mind the narrator speaks with perfectly objective authority, as one conveying only the blandest and most incontrovertible facts. And yet the narrator is clearly wrong. The narrator is clearly lying to you. Papooshnik got bitten and rose as a vampire. Cowboy Bob (again, we are told he is not a vampire, quite explicitly) got bitten and now he’s a vampire too! And this is all happening in the background, as asides, just one of many things to see in the dynamic town of Blinsh.

Clearly the Blinsh chamber of commerce, or whoever is putting out this guidebook, is nervous that visitors will want to avoid a place that admits to being 51% vampire by population; so they are covering up the horrible truth. “A nip on the neck” isn’t a harmless bit of play, like a dog taking your hand in its teeth. Vampire bites make more vampires. It’s there in the footage! But the narrator asks us not to believe our eyes. The narrator assures us everything is all right.

Everything will not be all right. DMP wrote three books about Blint/sh, that accursed blight upon the earth. Only one of those books paints Blint/sh in a positive light. THAT BOOK IS A LIE!

It even gets the name wrong.

•29 The Last Guru (1978 middle-grade novella)

[Boy tycoon Harold Blatz, occluded with Tibetan monks, returns to spread a message of universal truth.]

Of all the sounds and furies that have been furiously sounded, the furious sounds of Last Guru sound most furiously. The question, of course, it whether it signifies something or not.

Harold Blatz, the eponymous last guru, says what he has to say in the most gloriously ostentatious fashion anyone has ever said anything. The final cantos of the Paradiso are a model of understatement compared to what Harold is up to. And the world that he says it to is perhaps the most alien thing in all of DMP. Because while Harold is occluded and becoming enlightened (this is the plot of the book, people), America ca. 1978 has rapidly become a strange parody of America ca. 1978. Somewhere north of 99.5% of Americans have embraced the guru package—meditating, bell ringing, gong crashing, and incense burning, as the book puts it. It’s a little like Afterlife Diet (#18), in which everyone across America is obsessed with dieting—but more ’70s. That’s the difference between 1978 and 1995.

DMP books are all about enlightenment, remember. They are about the way of the artist and the way of the guru, and the tension between these two paths with one goal. Note how similar the main tenet of Blong Buddhism (“if you spend twenty-four hours a day meditating, you aren’t apt to get in very much trouble”) is to Bushman Lives!’s (#8) valorization of art (“art does the least harm”).

Harold Blatz himself has apparently no interest in art beyond comic books, no interest in the arts more broadly beyond building model ships. He makes his first fortune betting on a horse named after the Buddha’s own and eventually learns he is the reincarnation of a pre-Buddhist Tibetan sage named Dimdap Kram’ba. Is this the final triumph of guruism?

Well, of course not, because it’s satire. America’s turn to spirituality (in the book) is ushered in by a thinly veiled Ronald McDonald. Everyone meditates so much that no one is picking up the garbage, and so society breaks down. All that incense has created an asthma epidemic. “And yet, nobody was any happier than before the great spiritual movement.”

In a world without art, where spirituality is mostly fraud, what do we have left? We have Harold Blatz, and that thing he wants to say.

As for what he wants to say and whether it is important or not, I placed that down in the Crazy in Poughkeepsie (#36) entry.

•30 The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror (1984 middle-grade novel)

[The Snarkout Boys return, this time to battle a mysterious werewolf-like creature.]

A funny thing happened on the way to Baconburg. It actually happened two years earlier, on the way to Spiegel (#48), but the vagaries of my ranking system means we’ll cover it here first. What happened is that DMP decided he was sick of writing novels, as he hitherto had, with one narrator telling a straightforward tale. Moby Dick famously has a (“call me Ishmael”) narrator who disappears partway through the book only to reappear at the very end; Moby Dick, everyone knows, is DMP’s favorite book (and no fewer than three DMP characters express interest in rewriting the book from the POV of the whale12). Maybe Moby Dick was the inspiration.

Because Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror (the sequel to Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (#7)) has no fewer than three narrators, two different first-persons and the good old omniscient third. It also includes excerpts from several newspapers (at least one of which, a 1983 piece from the New York Times, is a direct lift from a real story (!); I don’t have access to any Nairobi newspapers to check the next piece), transcripts of relevant news programs (complete with commercials), and government interdepartmental letters. These texts and excerpts are non-diegetic, in the sense that no character reads them—they’re just deep background, provided for the reader. There are also diegetic excerpts from texts the characters read (Coping with Werewolves) or recite (Quicksilver’s poetry). There’s even a chapter narrated by, or composed of a mad rant by, Wallace Nussbaum, which I guess means there are three first-person narrators, but I didn’t count it because it was just the once. The book, in other words, is a palimpsest.

Other DMP books, such as Borgel (#11), Bushman Lives! (#8), and more or less Lunchroom of Doom (#43), would switch between first- and third-person chapters. Other DMP books, such as Looking for Bobowicz (#100), Hound of the Basketballs (#61), and even Bad Bear Detectives (#45), would pause the narrative to trot out newspaper clippings. And Afterlife Diet (#18)…who even knows what’s going on in Afterlife Diet? The whole thing is a magnificent slurry of various texts.

There are times in Baconburg Horror when this palimpsesting seems artful and there are times when it seems lazy. There are times when it just seems like DMP wanted to throw something weird in (like the NYT article, included perhaps illegally, on the history of drive-in movies). There are long third-person digressions on the history of Blint (cf. Vampires of Blinsh (#28)) or the amenities of one decadent drive-in movie palace. Much of the fun of Baconburg Horror is just how weird it is. The heroes keep jamming more and more often unnecessary characters (the whole cast of Avocado of Death, Chicken Man excepted, and plenty of newbies) into one diner booth or into multiple cars. Once again, the Snarkout Boys save Uncle Flipping but fail to prevent a larger catastrophe.

It’s all in good fun. It is the second installment of a B-movie serial that never got its third. As such it is (I may sound silly saying this) fundamentally unserious. The book ends with Wallace Nussbaum on the loose and our heroes excited because they have such a good time thwarting him. This unseriousness exists in an inchoate form in Avocado of Death, but the virtues of that book, the novelty of the Snark, and the greater stakes (aliens!) overcame it. Baconburg Horror is fun, and I may have ranked it higher if it didn’t seem like a bit of a letdown after its superior predecessor.

SMP trilogies usually bounce back after a disappointing (Attila the Pun (#103), Looking for Bobowicz, Yggysey (#81)) second book, so it’s a shame the Snarkout Boys never got their capstone. Induction tells me it would have been great!

Pssst! Buy me a coffee!

•31 Adventures of a Dwergish Girl (2020 middle-grade novel illustrated by Aaron Renier)

[A gnomish creature comes to the human world to prevent alien meat-puppets and dead gangsters from setting Kingston, New York, on fire.]

Few fans of How the Grinch Stole Christmas stop to think about the fact that the Grinch is, canonically, a microscopic creature no larger than a paramecium. I say this because the Grinch is only a head taller than a Who, and the Whos, we learn in the earlier Dr. Seuss book Horton Hears a Who, have built an entire society on a speck of dust.

Approximately zero percent of Grinch readers—or fans of the holiday special or movie or related merchandise—stop to fret on the Grinch’s minuscule nature. I’m not sure even Dr . Seuss considered this reading to be accurate. There are perils in taking a scale from one book and applying it to another.

I say that because The Neddiad (#15) takes place around 1950, and Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (#26) is a sequel to a sequel of that book, and Adventures of a Dwergish Girl is a prequel to Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl, and it is…(doing some math here)…not 1950 in this book. The prices are too modern. The main character’s parents (we learn) watch the 1961 film classic Gidget Goes Hawaiian “when they were young.” Nothing hangs together.

We’ve already seen that the multiplicity of worlds that DMP’s books take place in is a multiplicity that keeps contradicting itself. In Slaves of Spiegel (#48) The Ugly Bug band is a rock band; in Borgel (#11) it is a country band; by The Artsy Smartsy Club (#60) it plays “blues and klezmer.” None of this is necessarily contradictory and a band can switch genres, but it unravels some of the cohesion that the frequent reappearance of the Ugly Bug Band would suggest. The Last Guru has monks of the Silly Hat Order; Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg (#30) Horror has monks of the Serious Hat Order. Hergeschleimer’s Oriental Gardens are in Hogboro while the not-quite-identically named Hergeschleimers’ Oriental Gardens are in Los Angeles. And Molly the Dwerg, who sometimes goes by Molly deDwerg and sometimes by Molly Van Dwerg and sometimes by Molly VanDwerg (no space), both is and is not a child of the 1950s.

None of that really affects a reading of Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, and most casual DMP fans will probably not even notice. The only real tie-in to Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (the book to which this is, recall, a prequel) is the presence of a Dwerg named Molly and the suggestion that said Dwerg will soon go to Poughkeepsie and go mad (as she is when Cat-Whiskered Girl opens). A witch tells Molly she must go to Poughkeepsie because “it is written,” a nice meta gag for an event that DMP quite literally wrote. But outside that one bit, the book stands on its own, and stands well.

As we’ve seen, DMP books tend to lead their protagonists to a magical world and a mystical experience, an experience that is, as often as not, as disappointing as watery fleegix (if you receive my meaning); Dwergish Girl is unusual in that it starts in a magical world where the inhabitants regularly have a mystical experience—and Molly’s already bored by it.

(Incidentally, the mystical experience, communal humming, is called laithan by the Yorkshire witch; as we saw above, latihan is a practice of the ecumenical spiritual movement known as Subud, of which DMP’s Java Jack (#19) coauthor Luqman Keele was a follower.13)

Perhaps Dwergish Girl suggests that the hero’s-journey–progress of most DMP protagonists is cyclical? After all Molly starts more or less where Leonard Neeble or Victor ends, and then upon returning to reality, has to begin again, making a friend, meeting a witch, plunging into the woods to have a dance experience only slightly less overtly mystical than the one in Cat-Whiskered Girl. I don’t know; I never get these things right. (But notice how in later books (#8 & 36) Molly is wiser than the usual DMP character.)

What Dwergish Girl certainly offers are the usual compliment of eccentric characters, loving descriptions of junk food, and a plot that is simultaneously insane—in that it requires thwarting undead gangsters and extradimensional flesh robots—and coherent. The jokes are spot on: my favorite is a crook known as Legs Rhinestone “with the most beautiful limbs in the underworld” who loses one leg and is ever after referred to as Leg Rhinestone. Leg Rhinestone is a joke that gets funnier every time it appears.

•32 The Moosepire (1985 middle-grade novella)

[The author seeks to uncover the truth behind the blue moose’s seeking to uncover the truth behind a vampire moose in Alaska.]

DMP’s books are filled with doppelgangers of the author,14 which is how we get Bramwell Wink-Porter (#16) and Eland I. Tankwiper (#26) and Abigail Finkdotter (#16 again) and Nathaniel Inkblotter (#20) and Winkus Winwater (#100) and Rozkolora Akvo (#35) (that’s Esperanto for pink water), and the fat bald guy down the street from Jules, Penny, and the Rooster (#35 again). But in Moosepire DMP appears as himself, or as a parody of himself, hanging out at London gentlemen’s clubs like Phileas Fogg. He narrates the entire book, which I guess in a way is true for every blue moose book, but here it’s more overt. He is also abused constantly, which is hilarious. Several characters make weird vegetable similes like Captain Bugbeard from Ned Feldman (#25). And then comes the interpolated text, an account by the moose of his own experiences in the frozen north. If you thought the interpolated text in Return of the Moose (#50; q.v.) was lengthy—this text is over half the book! It’s suitably ridiculous, but (unlike, say, the RotM text) its events can be considered true in the context of the world. I mean, it’s certainly less ridiculous than the plots of any number of other DMP books. Ducks usually lie (#13), the magic goose is completely unreliable (#20), Captain Bugbeard himself is often writing checks he cannot cash, and I’ve got a suspicious eye on Mush (the dog from space; (#72 & 52))—but this time (and not some others) I assume the blue moose is playing it straight.

He is, incidentally, the Blue Moose for the first time in this book; never before did he get capitalized. (Inconsistent capitalization across books also haunts the Head Zookeeper (from the bad bears books) and an Amorphoid Fleshopod (as mentioned in Borgel (#11) and Afterlife Diet (#18)).)

The story the Blue Moose tells in his lengthy manuscript is a somewhat Lovecraftian tale of his researching, seeking, and unraveling the riddle of a vampire moose. The solution to the riddle manages the almost impossible feat of being a satisfying answer and a nihilistic non-answer. This is probably DMP’s most cunningly constructed book.

The moose himself (in the course of his researches) checks out 962 books and reads all but nineteen of them. Two of the books he checks out are Blue Moose (#59) and The Moosepire; statistically speaking he almost certainly read at least one of them. Molly Van Dwerg reads Borgel (#11) (in Crazy in Poughkeepsie (#36)) and Seamus Finn reads Alan Mendelsohn (#1) (in Neddiad (#15)) and Eugene Winkleman tried to read Lizard Music (#3) but gets bored (in Yobgorgle (#37)) but only the moose gets to read about himself. I think he’d like that.

•33 Chicago Days / Hoboken Nights (1991 essay collection)

[More humorous essays.]

Two years after Fish Whistle (#6), DMP returned with another collection of radio pieces from All Things Considered. It’s more of the same, and the thing that it’s the same as was so great! By the transitive property, this should be great, too! And some of the stuff, like the art/Zen overlap with Navin Diebold, is so up my alley that this book should be even better than Fish Whistle.

And Chicago Days / Hoboken Nights is a really good book, and perhaps even a great one. But Fish Whistle is sitting comfortably at #6 on this list, and Chicago Days / Hoboken Nights is quite noticeably not. I guess to explain why I have placed it down here I must resort to the unpleasant task of complaining. Usually complaining is my metier, but I almost never want to complain about a DMP book. You perceive the agonies I suffer!

In the preface to this volume, DMP admits that it “turns out to be a fragmentary autobiography.…I guess I got so comfortable with my audience that I didn’t mind revealing a whole lot about my own life, something I never do when I write fiction.”

Everyone can recognize immediately that the latter part of that statement is false, as DMP’s fiction is highly autobiographical. The essential problem with Chicago Days / Hoboken Nights is that by the end everyone will believe the former part is false as well. Too often the stories in Chicago Days / Hoboken Nights are perhaps poetically true but nevertheless literally not. Memoirists take liberties all the time, of course, and probably David Sedaris is making stuff up and absolutely Robert “Good-bye to All That” Graves made stuff up, but Good-bye to All That is still one of the all-time great memoirs because what it says about WWI may be factually inaccurate but is emotionally profound. But only it works because you can’t see the strings. If Graves’s fabrications of WWI were just plain implausible, the book wouldn’t work.

And many of DMP’s memories in CD/HN are too obviously structured as stories. DMP is too good at making stories; he’s got the rhythms down. Time and again I closed the book saying to myself, “That was a splendid tale. I don’t believe a word of it.”

I feel weird even saying this matters to me. Clearly I in no way deserve to know anything personal about DMP. That’s all his business. And really, it doesn’t bother me that his narrative on how he decided to become an artist and then a writer, as told in CD/HN, contradicts his account in the preface to Four Different Stories (a 2018 omnibus volume; I refer to the James P. Kupetzenmacher story, for those keeping score).15 But I need a memoirist to try harder to deceive me. I feel the same way about books about flat earths or ancient astronauts, the kind of books Samuel Klugarsh or Howling Frog or the Gleybners would sell and that I read voraciously as a teenager. I didn’t need the books to be true (because they were never true; the shape of the earth is sadly fixed), but I did need them to trick me, and obvious blunders (Arabs did not conquer most of Europe in the thirteenth century, pace Bradley’s The Columbus Conspiracy; the Latin word annuit is a verb and not a noun, pace Dubay’s The Atlantean Conspiracy; platinum is an element and not an alloy, pace Childress’s Technology of the Gods; about two-thirds of Sepehr’s Species with Amnesia; etc.) ruin my suspension of disbelief.

DMP doesn’t make any blunders, of course, or at least I lack the knowledge to catch him. But he makes his anecdotes too anecdotey.

Maybe I was dazzled while reading Fish Whistle and the dazzle just wore off, but I think that in Fish Whistle he tried harder to fool me, and it turns out I value that extra effort an awful lot.

Still a fun book, though.

•34 The Wuggie Norple Story (1980 picture book illustrated by Tomie de Paola)

[A family with a fast-growing cat seeks to establish the cat’s size by acquiring various animals for comparison.]

Ducks! (#13) starts out looking like a conventional folktale, and then goes crazy. The Wuggie Norple Story, contrarily, eases into a conventional folktale structure and holds it till the end. This is the additive structure of “The House that Jack Built,” of the Gingerbread Man taunting “I ran away from a little old woman, a little old man, a barn full of threshers [etc.].” Every day more and more creatures wait for Lunchbox Louie. That’s the story.

It makes sense that DMP’s most conventionally structured children’s book should have his most conventional illustrator. I don’t mean “conventional” pejoratively, though—Tomie de Paola is a great artist, and the book is beautiful. The characters are all clearly hippies, and by 1980 this must have been some kind of nostalgic throwback; at the very least it’s a choice. I’ve said elsewhere that DMP’s books always have one foot in the counterculture, a broad term that ranges (for DMP) from 1940s jazz hipsters to 1970s health food nuts but never quite makes the leap into the 1980s. By the 1980s, his characters will be looking backwards, to old movies at the Snark or old Classic Comics (which are, of course, already adaptations of older books).

What I haven’t made the book sound, I am aware, is fun, and that’s too bad because this book is a lot of fun. Wuggie Norple is a pretty amusing name, but most importantly, it is the least amusing name in the whole book! Roger Ebert once griped that no one but the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields should be allowed to give characters wacky names, but Roger Ebert evidently never read Wuggie Norple. Exploding Poptart is my favorite, but they’re all good, and the structure of the book forces the reader to read the names again and again.

Furthermore, the book (unlike many or most children’s books, including some of DMPs) has a setting solidly established even before the folktale structure takes over. Lunchbox Louie and his family have pleasant but weird lives, and we get the rhythm of their days—whistle fixing; onion cooking; King Waffle hits a big rock with a little hammer. Like many DMP settings, this one is beguiling. Makes me want to fix some whistles.

This setting, incidentally, in just outside Thundebolt City, which means the whole book takes place on Diamond Hard, the invisible island from Lizard Music (#3). Make of that what you will, Victor!

•35 Jules, Penny & the Rooster (2025 middle-grade novel)

[A young girl, her magic dog, and a rooster seek to save a magic forest from malign forces.]

Let me repeat that I have no insider knowledge about DMP’s life. I’ve never gone through his garbage, or interviewed his friends. I’ve never met the man! Everything I know about DMP I learned from a book he’s written.

So if I say (as I have) that DMP has spent decades mythologizing his childhood, it’s because he has asserted, in print and on the record, that certain things are true. He lucked into being a hall monitor bigwig in high school—just as Harold Knishke lucked into being a hall monitor bigwig in Bushman Lives! (#8). He cut school and Robert Nifkin (#4) cut school. He went to the Clark and the Snarkout Boys (#7 & 30) went to the Snark. He rode the Superchief to an LA military school and Neddie (#15) rode the Superchief to an LA military school. There are whole hosts of examples, and the parakeets and the crazy uncles and if I keep dredging up some of the same data points its more because I’m naturally lazy then because alternative data points don’t exist. If you fed DMP’s novels into a some AI bot and asked it to portraitize the artist as a young man, it would say a tubby Jewish kid who likes comic books and building models. [Checks Fish Whistle (#6)] yup!

So I know even less about Jill Pinkwater’s life! She married DMP, I got that. She likes animals. “All creatures like her, even ones that are unlike her” (asserts the dedication to Bear and Bunny (#89)). Oh, and DMP mentions in Uncle Boris in the Yukon (#82) that when she was young Jill won a collie named Penny in an essay contest. Do you see where I’m going with this?

In this, the first DMP book since Jill Pinkwater passed away in 2002, DMP has quite obviously turned to mythologizing his wife’s childhood. I don’t know how far this goes (and it can only go so far, the book being what it is) but in some way at least redheaded Jules is just a mispronunciation of redheaded Jill. Jules wins a collie in an essay contest. Then she’s off to the woods for the most rural of rural adventures. Witches and prophesies. It’s the DMP monomyth again, and there are many commonalities that run through this book all the way back to his ’70s novels: a quirky bookstore and a move to the suburbs, although, presumably because the narrator’s gender is reversed (from the all-boy ’70s), this book features an eccentric aunt rather than an eccentric uncle, and a rooster instead of a chicken.

Perhaps significantly, this is the first DMP book in a quarter century (since Robert Nifkin) to lack illustrations.

The most ostentatious change is in the moment of transcendence. Jules experiences a taste of it early in the book, when a faun puts her to sleep. And then…does it return? Does Jules ever attain “the blessings of enlightenment”? The rooster crows, and Jules sees colors and has some sort of experience, but the one that awakens is the turtle.

I’ve said before that DMP’s later books are more benign than his earlier ones. Adults are more competent; relatives are more helpful; there are fewer outright frauds. Borgel (#11) marks the last time a character must literally, as Robert Nifkin the last time a character must figuratively, collect dead skunks to survive. (Bushman! is again an outlier, but only partially). If the forbidden forest represents the desideratum—Waka Waka (#1) or Kukumlima (#9) or Diamond Hard (#3) or Gunungan Heaven (#19)—well, Jules is the only character who gets to stay there. And at the very end she gets her second glimpse of the soporific faun.

I’ve never written a book about a woman I loved who died. I don’t know how difficult it is or is not to assign a transcendent moment to someone else. But I can read a metaphor. Enjoy the forest, Jules.

I have an ongoing art project—

here

are

some

good

ones

•36 Crazy in Poughkeepsie (2022 middle-grade novel illustrated by Aaron Renier)

[A guru and his pupil wander around Poughkeepsie, first in search of anything interesting (which proves to be a whale ghost) and then in search of whale heaven (whale ghost in tow).]

Crazy in Poughkeepsie is a fun romp with more references to Tod Browning’s Freaks than any other children’s book ever published. I can also see how some readers might find it inexplicable or arbitrary.

Umberto Eco remarks somewhere (I’ve lost the reference) that plenty of older texts lend themselves to being read on multiple levels, and the only difference with Modernist or Postmodernist texts is that for the first time the naive or surface reading is in some sense wrong. To medievals, the book of Jonah offered a moral about God’s mercy (level 2) and an adumbration of Christ’s resurrection (level 3), but it was also the story of a man-eating fish (level 1), and just reading it like that was in no way incorrect (while reading Ulysses, on the other hand, as a stroll through Dublin hardly even makes sense).

I’m saying this because DMP’s novels have always lent themselves to multiple levels of interpretation (Baconburg Horror (#30) can be read on fifteen different levels, according to its dust jacket), but perhaps the surface reading (as the years and books go on) gets harder for a casual reader to extract. (Hey, I got lost in The Yggyssey (#81)!)

Molly the Dwerg, in her fourth appearance (and still in the modern world despite this book apparently taking place between Dwergish Girl (#31) and Cat-Whiskered Girl (#26)), is not even the main character here, but her powers, wisdom, and money are all over the book—how would a reader unfamiliar with Molly process the surprise that she is not merely a crazy tree-dweller (as she also is)? Oom Knorrig and his waggle dance reappear, but with hardly any introduction or explanation. Molly reads and alludes several time to the earlier (and “strangely similar,” she says) DMP novel Borgel (#11), without ever mentioning its title—you just have to have read one particular book from thirty years ago or you’re out of luck. Even a familiarity with DMP’s oeuvre can be misleading: I had thought a stray reference to a twentieth-century swami in Poughkeepsie was a veiled reference to Harold Blatz from Last Guru (#29) (because I assumed in my provincial way that Poughkeepsie and Harold’s home of Rochester, both being “upstate,” were near enough to each other to count (they are not)); turns out to be a reference to Andrew Jackson Davis, a real Poughkeepsie person. This is never explained in the book. And I cannot stress how very much Tod Bronwing’s Freaks is all over this book. There are parts that won’t really make sense unless the child reading the book is intimately familiar with a forbidden body-horror movie from 1932.

But of course you can just go along for the ride. Fun jokes, fun times. Going along for the ride is thematic, as this is a book about a quest that (much like the search for The Worms of Kukumlima (#9)) involves just wandering around aimlessly. But the book isn’t really about the ostensible quest, any more than it is about the parallels with Borgel—

(with Lumpo Smythe-Finkel (himself a character from Baconburg Horror) in the Borgel role and the dog Lhasa in the role of the dog Fafner (named after a dog from Alan Mendelsohn (#1), and reappearing, under the off-by-one name Fafnir, in The Afterlife Diet (#18)—you see how deep this rabbit hole can go))

—because (I hate to beat a dead horse, but) the book is about “the blessings of enlightenment.” If Pickle Creature’s (#27) few pages are all a lead-up to the moment the titular creature sleeps curled on a rug (as I have argued, or at least asserted), then Crazy in Poughkeepsie’s more generous page count leads to the bombinating dance of the whales. Mick and his friends experience something that cannot be described. This is what DMP books all point to, the thing that cannot be described. But how cleverly it is hinted at! The thing that cannot be described is big—we know it’s big because it’s heaven but scaled up for whales! It’s wonderful, and we know it’s wonderful because the amenities are laid out like a resort (the fun version of The Afterlife Diet; even better than the Garden of Earthly Bliss Drive-in and Pizzeria from Baconburg Horror)—and then we’re told that no one uses the amenities because they’re less wonderful than the real thing (that cannot be described)!

It’s kind of a meadow, but that’s not the exciting part about it.

As in Cat-Whiskered Girl (and, mutatis mutandis, Bushman Lives!), the narrative doesn’t bother to return the characters to the “real world” after the climax, but we are assured (Lumpo Smythe-Finkel is always, and especially for a guru, too on point with his explanations) that they will return, and they will be (again, he straight-up says this) forever changed.

So is Crazy in Poughkeepsie like one of those medieval grail texts that looks like a courtly romance but is actually a series of instructions in alchemy?16 To what extend are we, the readers, supposed to take this book, or any one of DMP’s others, and decode it to get a framework to reach enlightenment? Because that’s what these books keep pushing towards us, right? A map not only away from our nightmarish existence but a formula for something greater? This is Buddha twirling the flowers! This is Bodhidharma coming to the East! Somebody better figure out what these texts mean! You’ll notice that Mick experiences three bombinations of escalating sublimity, the second one sufficient to get Smythe-Finkel rambling (“everything is God”) and the last one literally in heaven and completely beyond words. You’ll notice that Molly is assured that madness is just the kind of “crisis” one must suffer through to achieve a “certain kind of destiny.” These sound like codes. And surely the doublings and repeated redoublings—Romany Bill is a double of the three mutually exclusive characters named Gypsy Bill who operate various eateries, spas and camps in Borgel and The Afterlife Diet—point to something solid and actionable.

I would not rule anything out, but one wonders: If DMP has been encoding the secrets of enlightenment into his books for a half century now…wouldn’t that mean he is enlightened? Are we supposed to believe that having become enlightened he hangs around, bodhisattva-style, to help those who can decode dozens of children’s books? Does that sound so plausible?

One caveat: It is at least possible that in DMP books, transcendent experiences are transformative, but they don’t actually turn characters into wise and holy men like Lumpo Smythe-Finkel. Wise and holy men may exist, and Smythe-Finkel is no fraud (nor is Molly17 or Lhasa or, to take just one example from an earlier text, Melvin from The Neddiad (#15)), but whatever makes them wise and holy is more than just beholding the Great Popsicle (#11) or flying with Wingman (#10) or getting a silver needle pushed through their head somewhere between (?) Indonesia and Fiery Star (Java Jack (#19)). As disappointing as it may be to learn, these kind of transcendences serve a similar function to regular (humdrum) transformative experiences, such as falling in love, traveling abroad, learning to play piano, or anything—it can be the tritest, cheesiest thing you can think of, and the DMP transcendence may differ in quantity, quality, and kind, but the result is the same: You come out the other end different but still in the real world. Sometimes a bildungsroman is just a bildungsroman.

The closest analogue is the discovery and contemplation of art. Listening to Mozart or looking at a de Kooning original (these are very DMP examples) may be transformative, but even the most die-hard esthetician knows that one returns from the sublimest ecstasies of Romantic contemplation to a world that is still the world. It pains me to say this, but perhaps this is all the satori that any character gets. Perhaps the apparent conflict between the way of the guru and the way of the artist is not in conflict, and one is just a metaphor for the other, and vice versa. Victor (#3) is transformed on Diamond Hard and devotes his life to art (#8). It’s a good life! This is why Robert “no transcendence” Nifkin (#4) still fits in with the other DMP narrators or the Snarkout Boys just can enjoy movies (#7 & 30). This is why David Nyvall can be a soi-disant Zen master just from sculpting (#33)!

“Just knowing I had almost understood them once would make me feel happy as long as I lived,” Mick predicts as he stands in (again, quite literally) heaven, and minutes later he is griping because he has to return to Poughkeepsie. Already he needs a pep talk. That lasted like three pages, Mick!

But Mick also says: “Anyone, anyone at all, would consider it good luck to be able to study and live with a single blade of grass in that meadow.” That’s about art, isn’t it?

I could be wrong, of course! DMP could still be hiding answers in there! Smythe-Finkel became a wise and hold man somehow! Perhaps one should meditate (Maurice says it’s boring). Perhaps one should engage in “bell ringing, and gong crashing, and incense burning” (#29) What do I know?

Look, I make no pretense at determining DMP’s, the actual human’s, beliefs. But I can tease out what his books assert, and if I say that this is what DMP believes, I am merely engaging in shorthand. His books assert

don’t worry about it.

Don’t worry about it seems like a weird ultimate theme, but this is one that DMP’s books harp upon again and again. Melvin and Borgel and the Chicken Man (#3) all come out and say it in so many words. The Last Guru (#29) is a book in which a character says, in the loudest and most ostentatious way any fictional character has ever said anything in the whole history of literature, not to worry, as we are already enlightened.

Harold Blatz (#29) said it loudest in a very early book, but becomes clearer as DMP books enter the twenty-first century that Neddie was always going to thwart Kkhkktonos (#15), Molly was always going to prevent the burning of Kingston (#31), and Mick was always going to find Whalhalla. These characters sometimes seem to view more than drive their own narratives (like William Pedwee in Fat Men from Space (#51)) because this is the truth Harold Blatz brought us at great expense. They don’t need to worry so much. The plan will come off. As the old proverb goes, “do nothing, and your enemy’s corpse will float down the river.”

This is, as I said, more a theme that comes to the front in the post-Neddiad era, and one wonders what a mellow cat like Neddie would do if placed in a book like Avocado of Death (#7), where plans go awry, or a genuine ripping yarn boy’s adventure like Worms of Kukumlima. Maybe he’d been enslaved by worms. Or maybe the universe really is reeking of benevolence like a Great Popsicle, and just going along is always the right move.

Is there no revelation there? Is this fact disappointing? Have I wasted my life, like Ferdinand de Saussure, seeking patterns in books that have none?

This quote/anecdote seems apposite:

Obaku addressed the monks, “You guzzlers of wine! If I had gone on as many pilgrimages as you in search of Zen, wherever should I be today? Don’t you know that in all the land there is no Zen teacher?” A monk came forward and said, “But surely there are those who reform the disciples and govern them. What about them?” Obaku said, “I didn’t say there was no Zen, merely that there is no teacher of Zen.”
•Gyomay Kubose, Zen Koans (Contemporary, 1973).

•37 Yobgorgle, Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario (1979 middle-grade novel)

[On a brief trip to Rochester, Eugene Winkleman encounters a monster hunter and helps him go sea-monster hunting.]

I used to undervalue Yobgorgle. I liked it fine, but it always seemed a lesser work compared to the other MG novels that surrounded it. I was, I guess, right in the sense that’s it’s not up in the top ten with some of its sister books, but I was more importantly wrong in the sense that Yobgorgle is great! It’s a delightful travesty of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with a porcine Nautilus. The hidden room in the Rochester library has haunted me forever, even in days when I’d forgotten what book I read it in. And the novel contains one of my favorite DMP gags—that Uncle Mel is afraid to fly because he cut himself with a serrated plastic knife on an airplane.

Why, then, did I undervalue the book? Honestly, I bet it just had too many grown-ups for me. Also, perhaps it leaned too heavily on eccentric millionaire Ken Krenwinkle to suit the bomb-throwing anarchism of my adolescent heart. DMP plots are often facilitated by the very rich, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the top three books on my list are three of the rare ones that exclude all millionaires. Furthermore (rounding out the top picks) in Robert Nifkin (#4) and Bushman Lives! (#8) the wealthy characters are mostly tangential. And if the Matthewses or Seamus Finneganstein fund the adventures in Avocado of Death (#7) or Worms of Kukumlima (#9), they are never as ostentatiously wealthy as Krenwinkle.

But I’ll throw another possibility out there. Perhaps I undervalued Yobgorgle because I thought it lacked a moment of transcendence, that moment that all DMP characters yearn for and seek. I was wrong, again, and the moment is there; I was just too stupid to see it.

Remember that flight is one of the oldest and most broadly applied metaphors of the mystical experience. The shaman takes flight when he enters the other world, as does Donald Chen in Wingman (#10). Things are obscured and occluded here, as in a mystical text they should be—but you will notice that the Flying Piggie, in order to break through the invisible barrier that fences it in, must literally travel so fast it flies. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

I was reading this out loud to my son and I kept cracking myself up as I read about the sheer gluttony of Uncle Mel and Professor McFwain, another of DMP’s jokes that just keeps getting funnier with repetition.

•38 Rainy Morning (1998 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[On a rainy morning, Mr. and Mrs. Submarine welcome an ever-waxing number of sheltering guests.]

I don’t know why this one isn’t more famous. Sure, there are other DMP books I like better, but I’m weird and perhaps those books are an acquired taste. This one seems like something normal people could enjoy. It also features Jill Pinkwater’s finest art (in my estimation). Perhaps the quiet, muted cover—one of the things I love about the book—betrays it, and no one picks it up to flip through to the beauties within.

This is the story of Mr. and Mrs Submarine, and if they somewhat resemble the Pinkwaters, well, note that the about the author features pictures of the submarines in lieu of the actual author and illustrator.

We are again, as in Wuggie Norple (#34), in additive-folktale mode. Mrs. Submarine keeps making corn muffins, for creatures who want out of the rain: first, “rational” guests (cat, dog), then eccentric guests (crows, coyote), then bonkers guests (Beethoven, a traveling circus). “It is a small European circus” is the kind of dry line that I find (in context) hilarious but which is still serviceable and inoffensive to whoever it is who reads children’s books.

(Note that the coyote slips under the sink like Captain Bugbeard from Ned Feldman (#25).)

The repetition of certain words and phrases, especially “corn muffins” and “submarine,” is comforting in a Goodnight Moon kind of way, or like coming in out of the rain to be greeted by tea and muffins. Yeah, this book should be dragged out of obscurity.

•39 The Frankenbagel Monster (1986 picture book)

[A mad bagel scientist creates a bagel so powerful it may endanger humanity.]

I mentioned before that DMP has some books narrated from a thousand miles away, and Frankenbagel Monster is a prime example. It is, on one hand, another DMP riff off the Universal monster canon; as in Wempires or I Was a Second-Grade Werewolf (#55), the plot is driven by the singular obsession of the protagonist. But Jonathan (Wempires (#22)) and Lawrence (Werewolf) have their obsessions presented from inside, in the manner of contemporary fiction. Harold Frankenbagel’s obsession is more an anecdote from Boccaccio. I don’t want to use the “showing and telling” dichotomy, like a finger-wagging MFA workbook, but it is similar.

Because I don’t at all mean this as a criticism. Frankenbagel has a story to tell, and it’s a funny story with a genuine punchline. The moments of parodically sinister atmosphere are there, like the small details in a Borges story, to center readers in genre and manage their expectations. “This is the story, not of my emotions, but of Uqbar and Tlön and Orbis Tertius,” Borges famously wrote (in the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”), and every time Harold Frankenbagel feels scared, I half expect a similar admonition. Too much modern literature features a story hobbled by unnecessary personal detail (which is why Grimms’ fairy tales are better reads than Andrew Lang’s—they skip that jive). Frankenbagel has more in common with one of the summarized movies Victor watches in Lizard Music (#3) than with Wempires.

The art is thematically apposite. While Wempires and Werewolf are drawn in loose, loopy ink, Frankebagel is one of DMP’s experiments in computer art. Not only are the heavily pixelated illustrations dehumanizing almost by definition, they are used again and again in the vein of clip art. Harold Frankenbagel is not an individual: He is a rubber stamp that sometimes gets reversed so he’s looking the other way. Arnold Von Sweeney is a rubber stamp who sometimes looks the other way by the technological miracle of moving his pupils.

Note that the Bagelunculus is animated by blue garlic, presumably from Spiegel (#48). A perhaps more inexplicable thing to notice: The police chief mentioned in the newspaper that Von Sweeney reads is Fred Moonie, which would scarcely be remarkable if a policeman appearing in both Hoboken Chicken Emergency (#46) and Slaves of Spiegel (#48) had not gone by the eerily similar name Officer Mooney. Other Hoboken police (from Looking for Bobowicz (#100)) include Officer Spoonie and Officer Flooney. I don’t know what to do with this knowledge, so I merely share it with you.

•40 Three Big Hogs (1975 picture book)

[Three hogs, abandoned on a farm, seek their fortune in first civilization and then the wild.]

Even the cursoriest of perusals of the DMP canon make it clear that DMP has a special obsession with fatness. No major writer has written as many fat characters as DMP. There are more fat characters in The Afterlife Diet (#18) than in all of Faulkner. From Ali Tabu to Sigmund Yee, DMP books offer an almost complete alphabet of fat people.18 I’m more likely to discuss DMP’s obsessions with art or transcendence, because I find that more interesting, but the fat thing is just as prevalent, and perhaps more obvious. It’s not hard to see where this comes from. “Now, folks, I’m fat,” DMP introduces himself in the first essay in Fish Whistle (#6). “I’m a fat guy. That’s just how it is. Fat.”

We’ve already seen one attempt to wrestle with the fat issue, in The Afterlife Diet, a book that succeeded despite rather than because of its fat content. We’ll get to later, less successful efforts wayyyy down this list. But for the moment there’s this curious outlier, the very early picture book Three Big Hogs. It’s an outlier because the fat theme, when it appears in DMP books, rarely appears as subtly.

Shane Fergussen (#3) is “about as wide as he was tall” and Arnold Babatunji (#31) is “a little fat man” and Lawrence Talbot (as an adult) is “on the fat side” (#53) and Bobby Gibbs the elephant trainer (a real person, by the way) is a “big fat guy, sort of like an elephant himself” (#15) Captain Colossal likes fat ladies and subscribes to the Opera News (#2). Walter Galt says he likes Laurel and Hardy because “Hardy’s fat and I’m fat and Winston Bongo isn’t exactly a beanpole either” (#7). This isn’t subtext, but text.

But here we are. The hogs are big.

With another writer I may not have even noticed this, but look at those hogs. They are sorted and described in terms of their poundage. The big one is 300 pounds. That’s a big hog! The hogs, subtly for once, are typed as fat.

Like Elliot (we’ll get there—#104), though, the hogs are not just fat—they’re weak and helpless. And like Elliot, the hogs learn that they do not have to be what they do not want to be. They become strong and they become wild and they become (therefore) free.

What they do not become is svelte. The closest we get is the observation that the tough guy forest hog “wasn’t smooth and fat,” which isn’t much. Unlike Elliot, and like some of DMP’s other didactically fat characters, the hogs learn that being fat is no big deal. They get hairier and toothier, but they never get thinner. And of course the book doesn’t have to mention this fact. As I said, for once, subtly.

There’s another way a reader can approach this book, I think, and that is to note that the pigs are cast in what I’ve called the “invader” role. The Wempires (#22) are a classic example—they come into a house and the just mess things up. As do the hogs! This book is Wempires from the POV of the Wempires. Where does the Devil go after he goes down the drain (#24)? Well, probably not literally into the forest, but you get what I’m aiming at.

DMP also has a decades-long ongoing theme of dancing animals (most recently the ballet de reptile from Bushman Lives! (#8) and the conspicuous failure of Drooly the bear to dance in his Mrs. Noodlekugel volume (#94))—and Three Big Hogs has ’em too. A lot going on in this book!

•41 Magic Camera (1974 picture book)

[A convalescent lad discovers his antique camera has strange properties.]

Tapping into the same nightmare of universal destruction as DMP’s first book, The Terrible Roar (#57), comes DMP’s fourth book, Magic Camera. A kid, Charles, lying sick in bed, discovers that an old family camera has the ability to disappear things. It also has the ability to make things reappear, so the nightmare is not absolute. Ordinarily I’d object to that, but this is a children’s book, so maybe it’s good.

Anyway, the story is short and strange, the way I like it Especially strong is the description of Charles’s inability to process the surreal things he is seeing.

Wizard Crystal (#14) has my favorite DMP illustrations, but this one is a close second. The camera looks great! Everything is kind of psychedelic, and it’s a shame the illustrations aren’t printed in color.

Like many early DMP books, but unlike most later DMP books, this one is third person. It’s the first of five DMP books to be called Magic Something (counting Big Bob and the Magic Valentine’s Day Potato (#98) but not subtitles like …A Magic Moscow Story (#48 & 103)).

•42 Kat Hats ( 2020 picture book illustrated by Aaron Renier)

I’ll say, some sixteen entries below, what I think is not the zaniest DMP book (#58)—but this will raise the question: Just what, then, is the zaniest DMP book, smart guy? In order to alleviate any anxiety occasioned by the looming of that question in the reader’s mind, I will pre-answer it here. Kat Hats is the zaniest DMP book.

Other books (Slaves of Spiegel (#48), Borgel (#11), Yggyssey (#81), Cat-Whiskered Girl (#26)) go, at some point in their page count, further off the rails, but they all start someplace recognizably normal and move into weirdness. Kat Hats simply takes place in an insane world. Other “unrealistic” books such as Wuggie Norple (#34) or Roger’s Umbrella (#54) are set in a world that is conventional for a children’s book; Cone Kong (#90) is half parody and half Looney Tunes cartoon; Norb (#12) is a comic strip, for Pete’s sake, and what do you want from that?; the point is, all of these books take place in a context if not a literal world that is familiar. Even Vampires of Blint (#28), superficially as strange as Kat Hats (and significantly also illustrated by Aaron Renier) is formatted as an introduction, leading an outsider (the reader) into a the zany Blintian world. The fact that the shift from this world to a strange world starts on page one and not (as in Borgel) on page 32 is immaterial.

And then there’s Kat Hats. Kat Hats is zany. In a world where strange people have strange professions and strange names and strange bodily forms, Matt Katz (whose name, at least, stands out by being completely “normal”) trains real-live cats to warm the heads of polar explorers, mountain climbers, etc.—by sitting (the cats, that is) hat-like upon them. The book’s story follows a dream-logic where people eat pretzel casserole, moose make hat racks of their antlers, and popsicle-induced brain freeze is the equivalent of frostbite. The backgrounds are filled with giraffes, UFOs, and three people in tracksuits pretending taped-together cardboard boxes are a truck. “Old Thirdbeard was so called because in his youth, he grew two other beards, which he now kept in his dresser drawer and wore on holidays”—note how much weight is being carried by that because.

The style of narration here is so larded in irony that the effect is quite distancing, something like Frankenbagel Monster (#39). As in some of Kafka’s short fiction, the insane world is simply mentioned and assumed. One must imagine how it feels to live within it. Only by looking to something from Young Adults (#2)—“Chickens from Uranus” or “The Buttoniad”—can a reader find a DMP text this gleefully absurd.

One more thing about the name Katz. Although his last name is never overtly provided, Mick, narrator of Crazy in Poughkeepsie (#36) is presumably (based on the family concern: Katz’s Kosher Kibble Kompany) Mick Katz. If so, then the Kat Hats / Crazy in Poughkeepsie combo would be the only time the main characters of two unrelated DMP books share a surname.

Unless the main character of Kat Hats is Thermal Herman 6 7/8ths, in which case never mind.

•43 The Werewolf Club: The Lunchroom of Doom (2000 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Members of the Werewolf Club realize that aliens are replacing locals as part of a bid to conquer the earth.]

Everyone knows that the thing to do, if you write children’s books, is to come up with a recurring character. Actually this is what you should do even if you write grown-up books, as Sherlock Holmes and Conan the Barbarian agree, but children’s books especially are crawling with Curious George and the Pout-Pout Fish and the Little Blue Truck and Pete the Cat and on and on. I don’t even hate all of these! It’s just what you do.

DMP tried a few times, with varying success—I mean esthetic success; I hardly know how books sell. Werewolf Club remains my favorite of his efforts, or at least if you take the median19 of the ranking scores of all the Werewolf Club books, it squeaks ahead of the bad bears books and trounces all DMP’s other series. And Lunchroom of Doom is my favorite of the Werewolf Club books.

The plot is essentially the inverse of Avocado of Death (#7); ravenously consuming things proves here to be not a boon to alien invasion but a way of stopping it. You can view this as the same trajectory that led from Fat Eliot and the Gorilla (#104) to Fat Camp Commandos (#102) (q.q.v, of course; we have no time to get into that here), a philosophical shift that moved from eating is bad to eating is good; but I think 1982’s Avocado of Death is already too late to be opposed (or “opposed”) to eating. I think it was just a Dada story. Lunchroom of Doom, on the other hand, is the story of saving the world, which I’m not necessarily in favor of, but it makes a good yarn. On a pure plot level this is far and away the most satisfying of the Werewolf Club books. In fact if by plot I mean a conventional plot, not DMP’s usual double-secret backhanded subversion of a plot, then this book is the most satisfying of any DMP book except The Moosepire (#32).

Groucho Marx cameos somewhat mysteriously as Captain Sterling (a cameo so oblique one might not even notice it were it not for the chapter title “Hooray for Captain Sterling”).

The book has a more exciting cameo in store, though: Young Adults (#2) fans will be delighted to read the return of masturbation-obsessive Cookie Medoza, and even more delighted to read of her death.

•44 I Am the Dog (2010 picture book illustrated by Jack E. Davis)

[Jacob and his dog switch places for a day.]

Far and away the best of DMP’s three collaborations with artist Jack E. Davis is this delightful trading-places tale. Jacob spends a day as the dog, eating kibble and chasing squirrels; Max (the dog) spends a day as the boy, somehow doing homework and easting pasta with a fork. That’s all there is to it, but it’s great fun and there’re no missteps. And, to make Nathaniel Inkblotter (from Magic Goose (#20)) happy, there is a moral. The moral is, succinctly, “being a dog is better.”

•45 Bad Bear Detectives (2001 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Two bad bears seek to clear their names by determining who really stole those muffins.]

For the better part of a decade, DMP (with the help of Jill Pinkwater) produced books about polar bears. Two polar bears, Irving and Muktuk, appear in more DMP books than any other character (nine books each). Two other polar bears, Larry and Roy, have the second most appearances (eight books each). Martin Frobisher, guardian to a polar bear, is third (seven books each) with his wife and daughter tied for fourth (six books each) with Lawrence Talbot (of werewolf fame). The characters you think you see all the time, like Rolzup (five books) and Steve Nickelson (four books) cannot compete.

Irving and Muktuk are bad bears, but their books are better than Larry’s. These two bears are, being bad, more fun, of course. “They are not to be trusted.” They are casually bad, cheating at cards, teasing smaller animals, and especially stealing blueberry muffins.

Bad Bear Detectives is my favorite of the Irving and Muktuk books, because of its flippant “oh well” Avocado of Death-esque ending (#7), and also because Irving and Muktuk’s casual badness, which is, after all, their charm, hits such heights of casualness. They cannot even keep track of the horrible things they do.

One wonders if Wolfgang “Muffin Fiend” Mozart (#23) could have solved this muffin crime.

•46 The Hoboken Chicken Emergency (1977 middle-grade novella)

[A giant chicken is loose in Hoboken!]

Hoboken Chicken Emergency is not really the DMP novel in embryo—the DMP novel had already been born fully formed, like Pallas from the head of Zeus, one year earlier, as Lizard Music (#3)—but it feels, nevertheless, like it has the training wheels on. Even the length is novella-y. Like many of DMP’s early works, it is third-person (in fact, every DMP book with the exception of Lizard Music written before 1979 is third person). Much like Fat Men from Space (#51) (released the same year), news bulletin play a prominent part, although, as in Fat Men (and not in many later books), these news bulletins are diegetically being listened to by characters.

You may have forgotten, you who have not returned to the Chicken Emergency in a while, that Arthur Bobowicz disappears for almost twenty pages in the middle of it. This, too, feels like a foretaste of the structure of later DMP books (and like Moby Dick).

The picture of Anthony DePalma’s cigarette smoking, bug-eyed judas-chicken Frankie is the funniest thing DMP ever drew. “What you have not noticed is that Frankie is not a real chicken.” Note that someone named de Palma (a subtle difference! like the change from Molly VanDwerg to Molly Van Dwerg) is Chicken Emergency’s co-dedicatee (alongside someone named Lugo, which is of course an alias of Captain Bugbeard from Ned Feldman (#25)); the two are designated as “great men and friends to all chickens.”

Contrast, while we’re at it, the dedication for Frankenbagel Monster (#39), which is to the bagel, “friend of humankind through the ages.” Contrast that with the pretzel, called (in Magic Pretzel (#53)) “mankind’s friend through the ages.”

Chicken Emergency (to return to our true subject) is one of the books most associated (I have found) in people’s minds with DMP, it is, indeed, fun and funny, so I can see why it would be a crowd pleaser. It does feel inchoate to me, at least, but only compared to the glories that are to come.

•47 The Blue Thing (1977 picture book)

[A blue seed gradually becomes a blue sky.]

Of all the tone poems (as I’ve said) that are DMP picture books, The Blue Thing is the tone poemiest. it’s structured a bit like The Wuggie Norple Story (#34), what with the growing and the animal sizes, but Wuggie Norple was (as the title asserts) a story. This is some kind of Orphic myth.

The art here is very much in the Wizard Crystal (#13) vein, with the abstracted shapes and the loose hatching. Black and white with one added color, that color being the blue thing. Unlike most DMP picture books, this one makes no sense divorced from the picture. Or I should say less sense. These books are not about sense, but about evoking a feeling.

The feeling is an anti-Terrible Roar (#57), an assertion of universal creation from a tiny seed. This is nothing less mythic than the creation of the sky. William Blake wanted “to see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower,” and The Blue Thing is DMP’s attempt to do just that.

Perhaps it doesn’t work completely. Perhaps DMP’s reach exceeded his grasp. But who, outside of Blake, could successfully evoke something so vast with only a couple hundred words?

•48 Slaves of Spiegel: A Magic Moscow Story (1982 middle-grade novella)

[Aliens kidnap a Hoboken “slob chef,” compelling him to participate in a grand cook-off in space.]

Where do you go with a trilogy that starts out about Hoboken dog fanciers (#58) and moves to the occult summoning of a Dark Age restless spirit (#103)? Extrapolate the curve through A and B and I guess you end up on Spiegel. It’s difficult otherwise to figure out how Slaves of Spiegel (my favorite of the Magic Moscow books) came to be.

In Fat Men from Space (#51) we learn little about the Spiegelians—their gluttony, their sartorial philistinism, their leader Sargon. Slaves of Spiegel is here to fill in the gaps. The prevalence of asides covering Spieglian history and culture are very much an adumbration of things to come, as is (this we covered under Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror (#30)) the fragmentary narrative, which is cobbled together (like Dracula) from diverse sources: Norman Bleistift’s journal, Steve Nickelson’s written report (and a written report from a UFO club commenting on that report), a radio broadcast, a building inspection report, transcripts of dialog and thought (!), and the words of (as DMP puts it) “an unnamed third person who knows everything that happens in this story.” The assembled narrative is a real freak parade of strange alien ideas, remarkable for how many of them later carry over into other books—in later volumes you’ll find the return of such Slaves of Spiegel introductions as the Betelmoose galaxy, giant space chickens, clown men from Noffo, the planet Terraxstein, and Witzbilb (although only in Borgel (#11) do we learn that Witzbilb is that galaxy that contains Terraxstein). Are the worms of Kukumlima (#9) actually, despite the caviling of Seamus Finneganstein, aliens from Bleeeegh? According to Spiegel: Apparently.

Slaves of Spiegel is so full of invention and humor that by all rights it should rank higher on this list. But there’s something unfulfilling about the book, despite its virtues. A fragmented narrative keeps one hand in its pocket, so to speak. A book like this always runs the risk of just enumerating a series of things that happen—and I’m not sure Slaves of Spiegel dodges that trap. Borgel does a better job of keeping the gonzo alien jargon, marrying it to a cosmography that feels organic and plausible, and producing a story with both moral and esthetic heft.

This is almost the last hurrah for the Magic Moscow, although Steve Nickelson will reappear years later in Looking for Bobowicz (#100). But in Borgel, one last time, in a litany of instructions on how one goes “beyond” Hell (significant!), we are told: “Turn left again at the statue of a blue-and-orange-striped cow’s head.”

•49 Jolly Roger: A Dog of Hoboken (1983 children’s book)

[A tough dog rules the packs down at the Hoboken dock, and such is his dignity that only one guy, known as the kid, is permitted play with him.]

Jolly Roger is DMP’s love letter to Hoboken. You may consider Magic Moscow (#58) or Hoboken Chicken Emergency (#46) love letters to Hoboken, but it turns out these are quasi-platonic puppy-love mashnotes. Jolly Roger is the kind of filth James Joyce used to write Nora Barnacle.

“The most famous personality in Hoboken,” Jolly Roger is, like the Chicken Man, a real character of local underground lore—ostensibly; I have found no corroboration. Of course, unlike the Chicken Man, Jolly Roger is a dog. He appears in Artsy-Smartsy Club (#60) and Chicago Days/Hoboken Nights (#33),20 but his star turn is here. The book has a couple characters with zany names (Norway Ned or Jutland Jed) and a conventionally “satisfying” ending, as though this were a regular children’s book, but overall it reads much more like a passing down of oral tradition. If The Neddiad (#15) and similar volumes seek to preserve the spirit and tone of a world the facts of which are readily available, Jolly Roger is a preservation of naked fact, but fact that is otherwise obscure: something like a very local festival tradition recorded, and only therefore perduring through the centuries, by a late-eighteenth-century Romantic. DMP wants the world to remember forever there was once a particular dockside dog who captured everyone’s, or at least his, imaginations.

And that is the only immortality you and he will share, Jolly Roger.

•50 Return of the Moose (1979 middle-grade novella)

[The blue moose writes an implausible autobiography only to find his message perverted by bad publishers.]

The moose stars in the only DMP trilogy to get better with every installment, and this is why we are moving backwards in time like this. More precisely, Blue Moose (#59) is a gentle rhapsody about friendship and food while Return of the Moose is a madcap tale of Munchhausenism and revenge, with a satire of the publishing industry thrown in for good measure. The reader’s temperament will determine which book is the better. I’ve made my choice.

Almost one third of this book is taken up by an interpolated text, a ratio even Afterlife Diet (#18) would find challenging to match. The text is, fittingly, insane, a deadpan tall tale involving the moose’s triumph over hostile space moose, the Axis Powers, and Mount Everest (not necessarily in that order). “In those days, I was known by the name of Harry S. Truman.” Among the moose’s most far-fetched boasts is his claim to have invented the cheeseburger, which, as we learn in Spaceburger (#70), was actually invented in 1911 by Nikolai Raspelnootzpiki (perhaps a friend of Borgel’s (#11)? Unconfirmed, but how many Raspelnootzpikis can there be?).

Much as in Lunchroom of Doom (#43), the plot (I mean the plot of the frame narrative, not the plot of the insane first-person moose-text) is resolved by just eating an awful lot.

Incidentally, the moose, when roused, is said to produce a “terrible roar” (#57).

•51 Fat Men from Space (1977 middle-grade novella)

[Fat aliens with bad taste in dress come to Earth to plunder it of its junk food.]

Fat Men from Space is one of DMP’s two or three most famous, beloved, and recognizable books, which I find strange—not because it’s not a good book (it is, although obviously I think there are at fifty books better), but because it thumbs its nose at the most basic rules of narrative.

Usually when a DMP book is thumbing its nose, it’s for Dadaist or nihilistic reasons. I would say it’s punk rock, if I thought DMP listened to punk. But Fat Men from Space feels more like a statement on human futility. The wheel turns, and we are merely bound to it.

William Pedwee (his last name the same as Dr. Nathan Pedwee’s, the famous fruit soda magnate from multiple later DMP books (#100, 81, etc.)) learns about an alien invasion, witnesses the aliens’ devastating assault, and then…well, then that’s it. Then he goes home. The aliens are thwarted by…the vagaries of fate? as William Pedwee stands helplessly by. The rest of Earth stands helplessly by, as well, and they lack not only agency but also knowledge. At least William knows why the aliens leave.

This lack-of-plot is especially mysterious when you consider that in Lizard Music (#3), published a year earlier, Victor watches a movie called Invasion of the Fat Men, which is same story as Fat Men from Space—except in Invasion of the Fat Men the Earthlings actually do something. They defeat the aliens by means of a trick. (The same trick, incidentally, as is used in the film Invasion of the Bageloids, a fictional movie summarized in Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (#7).) They do something! That’s two movies where earthlings do something! But no earthling in Fat Men from Space does anything at all.

Another curiosity: DMP would, increasingly in later books, pepper his narratives with news reports, book excerpts, journal extracts, TV transcripts, etc. Here, not quite for the only time, the blasts of radio news exist in the story organically. I mean diegetically. I mean, William is forever eavesdropping on them (via his marvelous radio-receiving tooth).

The tackily-dressed alien fat men (who appeared for the first time, remember, not here but in Lizard Music) would return again and again, both as villains (Slaves of Spiegel (#48)) and as interplanetary cops (Fat Camp Commandos Go West (#95); The Neddiad (#15)). As Mavis Goldfarb says, “We are not alone! And the others are all fat!”

•52 Mush’s Jazz Adventure (2002 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[A space-dog tells her young human how she came to earth, joined a jazz-combo, and fought crime.]

The cover of Mush’s Jazz Adventure proclaims “this cooking, saxophone-playing dog never runs out of stories!” The book ends with Mush promising narrator Kelly Mangiaro that he will “another time” tell her “more stories.” Alas, all these claims are false, and the legend of Mush end here, in the second and final Mush volume. The two Mush books are unusual in that they switch illustrators—DMP does the first one (#72), Jill Pinkwater the second.

Jazz Adventure is, I think by far the better of the two, and not just in terms of the art. It’s a riff off the “Musicians of Bremen” motif, only with a lot more music. Mush’s band plays jazz, but also music I’d call roots or blues. Other than that, they behave Bremenly.

One interesting side note on Mush’s band: Mush herself performs with a donkey, a cat, and a chicken. The Cat and Chicken are addressed, as if by name and with capital letters and everything, as “Cat” and “Chicken” (making this the second chicken named Chicken in the DMP canon, after Ned Feldman’s giant space steed (#25)). But the donkey never gets a proper name! Are we supposed to infer his name is Donkey? But Mush is not named Space Dog! I have spent far too long thinking about this.

Chicken sings, of course, like Dharmawati from Avocado of Death (#7). As Baconburg (where Dharmawati performs) in some sense “is” Chicago (where Chicken performs), Dharmawati in some sense may “be” Chicken.

Mush’s Jazz Adventure is one of those dialog-heavy DMP books—not as consistently as Guys from Space (#17), say, but pronounced nevertheless. The effect is not quite naturalistic, and almost parodic. Sample text:

“And you crashed on Earth?” I asked
“Ran out of gas,” Mush said.
“Spaceships run on gas?”
“Yes.”
“You ran out of gas?”
“Then I crashed.”
“Ruined the spaceship.”
“Totally.”
“Then what happened?” I asked.

For that matter the bulk of the book is, in fact, a dialog, a tale Mush tells Kelly with occasional peanut-gallery interjections.

The atmosphere (as befits a jazz / blues club) is seedier than one usually finds in a regular children’s book, or perhaps even in many a DMP book, which is of course (the club owner was sent to jail for beating up a gorilla) what I like about it.

•53 The Werewolf Club: The Magic Pretzel (2000 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[A school club of young werewolves seeks to remove the curse set upon their faculty advisor by his evil brother.]

The Werewolf Club books, of which this is the first, are the various stories of three young werewolves and one lad who is not a werewolf but who was raised as a dog. Dogs are similar to wolves. If Max and Jacob had not switched back at the end of I Am the Dog (#44), Jacob would doubtless be joining Werewolf Club.

Dog-boy Norman Gnormal is our narrator, and this is a nice structural joke. Book-writing 101 requires that a group of eccentrics be made palatable by the narration of a normal identification character. Norman Gnormal is on the one hand (as his name says) normal: He’s not a werewolf! But on the other hand his upbringing has been more bizarre than any of his werewolf clubmates. At least they, in human form, got to sit at the dinner table.

All the other members of the club are drawn quickly but succinctly. Lucy Fang is the DMP-standard tough sophisticated girl, like Iggy (from The Neddiad (#15); she weirdly dulls her edge by its sequel (#81)), like Rat (from the Snarkout Books (#7 & 30) and Norb (#12); she also softens somewhat by the last-named), or perhaps even like Loretta Fischetti (from Looking for Bobowicz (#100); she stays the same in its sequel (#60), I think). Ralph Alpha is an delightful expression of pure contempt for the Ronald Rubins21 of the world: “a natural leader…stupid and handsome.” And Billy Furball is a classic humorous “type” that you’ll recognize and enjoy—but as the series goes on he gets to add to the antiauthoritarian theme implicit in the Alpha dog’s stupidity: Billy Furball, we eventually learn, is a dedicated antimonarchist. No more kings!

There is indeed a magic pretzel as promised. There is also a pretzel museum, a prophetic chicken, sibling rivalry, and a villain who knows the importance of villainous elan: “Lance Von Sweeney may be evil, but he does so many cool things,” our heroes are compelled to exclaim.

The book features little inset fact cards on each member of the Werewolf Club—the kind of paratext I cannot resist. These fact cards do raise some thorny questions, though: We learn that Billy Furball’s favorite movie is The Wolf Man, his favorite actress Maria Ouspenskaya; you’d think Billy should notice that his faculty sponsor, Lawrence Talbot, is named for the Wolf Man himself, and that his sponsor’s mother resembles Ouspenskaya. Of course, Billy Furball notices very little…but Lucy Fang’s favorite actor is Lon Chaney Jr.! He plays Lawrence Talbot in The Wolf Man! Lucy Fang, take note!

Predictably, Billy’s favorite book is The Fuzzy Bunny (vide #55).

•54 Roger’s Umbrella (1982 picture book illustrated by James Marshall)

[An anthropomorphic cat is carried away by an unruly umbrella before he learns the way to control it.]

“An umbrella is an umbrella—they’re all the same” more than one adult tells Roger, and the phrase twists around to a new meaning: It is not that Roger’s rambunctious umbrella should be as calm as most umbrellas, it is rather that all umbrellas are fractious until trained. An interesting idea, pleasantly set out.

James Marshall is (I know both from my misspent youth and from reading Miss Nelson etc. to my children) a great illustrator, but for whatever reason his art doesn’t quite work in this book. Maybe it’s the incongruity of seeing anthropological animals overrunning a DMP book;22 maybe it’s that twee sailor suit. The little old (stoat?) ladies’ house had some nice surreal touches, but Aaron Renier would have made it more crowded.

I’m not sure I have correctly ascertained what the various directions to the umbrellas mean. Bloogie seems to be a way to get the attention of a recalcitrant umbrellas. Naffle, of course, makes the umbrella furl. Clearly Bloogie! Hoop! Dwing! takes you home, but is hoop for flying, dwing for home? Vice versa? Need more data

•55 I Was a Second Grade Werewolf (1983 picture book)

[A young werewolf enthusiast turns into a werewolf, although no one else seems to be aware of this transformation.]

To a certain kind of unhealthy mind (like mine), the most important question about I Was a Second Grade Werewolf is: Is the narrator the same guy as the faculty advisor from the Werewolf Club books (#53, 43, &c.)? They’re both named Lawrence Talbot. They both have unnamed mothers who wear headscarves. They both have a propensity for going to school in werewolf form and yet no one notices.

The implications are, as they say, huge if true. Mr. Talbot the faculty advisor reminisces (in Werewolf Club Meets the Hound of the Basketballs (#61)) about his youth in Poughkeepsie—does that mean I Was a Second Grade Werewolf (being the story of Talbot’s youth) is DMP’s first book set in Poughkeepsie? Mr. Talbot the faculty advisor (in Werewolf Club and the Magic Pretzel (#53)) has a half-brother named Lance Von Sweeney—did Talbot’s mother have a second marriage to Professor Sir Arnold Von Sweeney (from Frankenbagel Monster (#39))? Is the little brother depicted in I Was a Second Grade Werewolf Lance? Did he turn evil because young Lawrence ate his cup?

Perhaps few have sought answers to these questions. Lawrence Talbot is (as noted above)) the name of the protagonist from the Universal monster movie Wolf Man, and DMP may have just borrowed it (as he borrowed a protagonist from Dracula for Wempires (#22)) twice. The unnamed mother is patterned after Maria Ouspenskaya’s character from the same movie (as is Maria from Crazy in Poughkeepsie (#36)—or is she, Poughkeepsie resident that she is, the same character???), so what appears to be a similarity between books may just be a similarity the books share with a movie.

Leaving all that aside, Second Grade Werewolf is still fun, one of several DMP books that introduce kids to classic monsters; perhaps it suffers from comparison with Wempires, its closest parallel. Lawrence asserts he is a werewolf—other people assume he’s either playing make believe or acting out. Lawrence’s frustration at their misunderstanding is truer to the grade-school psyche than any number of contemporary picture books.

Of which speaking, note the book Mrs. Packman reads to her class—totally the first appearance of the fuzzy bunny motif that will reappear as The Fuzzy Blue Bunny (Robert Nifkin (#4)), The Fuzzy Bunny (Author’s Day (#16)), and Fuzzy Bunny Babies (“Give the People Cartoons They Can Whistle” from Fish Whistle (#6)). In case your mind is unhealthy.

•56 Irving and Muktuk: Two Bad Bears (2001 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Two bad bears consistently attempt to steal muffins.]

The strange thing about Irving and Muktuk is how different it is from every other Irving and Muktuk book. The other four bad bear books are dialog-heavy (as we discuss in Bad Bears in the Big City (#62, below), but this volume, the first volume, is one of those thousand-mile books. The first few pages are practically in Vampires of Blinsh (#28) territory, presenting as they do an ethnography of the town of Yellowtooth and its annual blueberry muffin festivities.

(Let me pause a moment here to note that Yellowtooth is the place Eric the Dead haunted in Moosepire (#32), and that Yellowtooth’s Brass Monkey Hotel is if not the the bluest joke in DMP’s books23 certainly the bluest joke in DMP’s picture books.24)

Here the usually garrulous Irving and Muktuk never speak. Until the very end of the book there’s no dialog at all, although occasionally Officer Bunny shouts something (to which no one responds). The book is structured as a series of blackout gags, with our two bad bears contriving some Beagle-Boyish grift, only—smash cut to a helicopter carting them off! Blackout; and start a new grift. If this makes it sound like a Road Runner cartoon…well, perhaps I’m thinking in that vein because there’s so little dialog. The omniscient narrator keeps breaking kayfabe to toss smug valedictions at the departing bears. It’s insanely strange but fun. Second-best polar bear book.

•57 The Terrible Roar (1970 picture book)

[A young lion’s roars immanentize the eschaton.]

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim Paracelsus wrote (back in the sixteenth century): “The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them.” I mention this because I read The Terrible Roar years ago while squatting secretly in the library of a university I did not attend. To such lengths did I go to consume the harder-to-find works in the DMP canon.

But that was years ago. The Terrible Roar, DMP’s first book, is expensive, and I am poor, and so I have not read it in a long long time. I have to go off hazy memories.

What I remember is terrifying. In DMP’s second book (Bear’s Picture (#65)) a bear murders two people for making fun of him.25 In this first book a young lion destroys the world, pretty much accidentally. Some would say that’s worse!

The disappearing nature of the roar is clearly linked to The Magic Camera (#41), although the roars go further. I remember the book being a real mindbender. Someone should send me an illegal pdf of a scan of the thing so I can see if my memory was right!

In 1938 a great (the greatest?) calypso singer described the snowballing aspect of universal destruction: “You burn down the London theater, you burn down the big empire.” That singer’s name: Roaring Lion.

•58 The Magic Moscow (1980 middle-grade novella)

(A short-order cook adopts a scruffy malamute who wins a dog show and gets dognapped.)

The Magic Moscow is an anomaly in DMP’s canon, in that it contains no monsters, aliens, mad scientists, or talking animals. Presumably these things exist in the world of the book, as its sequel (Attila the Pun (#103)) is about a ghost and its threequel (Slaves of Spiegel (#48)) takes place on another planet, but such extravagances do not feature in this volume.

This anomaly can only be so anomalous, though, as this is still the story of a comic-collecting junk-food addict and his love of a dog (named Platinum Blazing Yukon Flash, or Edward for short). Nevertheless, this is DMP’s first work of “realistic” fiction, and how many of those does he have?26 Of course, “realistic” does not mean Stephen Crane or the like. This is a humorous, ridiculous novella. My copy (Aladdin Books, 1993) proclaims on the cover “Daniel Pinkwater at his zaniest!” all caps, which is far from true, but it’s still much zanier than Stephen Crane.

A good half of the book is taken up with acquiring Platinum Blazing Yukon Flash aka Edward. John Crisco, keeper of the Gold Rush Kennels, gives DMP an opportunity to hone his contempt for dog breeders (which will flower later in Fish Whistle (#6) in the body of Larry Porketta). There’s a chapter in which Edward competes in a Hoboken dog show, and it feels very much like like something Beverly Cleary or Robert Newton Peck would have written in the 1970s with its low-stakes slapstick wackiness. This is not a criticism, by the way, as Cleary and Peck are both great, but it does feel like DMP is trying to write something a “normal” middle-grade writer would have come up with at the time.

But unlike Cleary and Peck, DMP can only be normal for so long. The end of the book is a meditation on fame, on the roles one assumes and how they make one view the world, and of course on the very DMP plot structure of the danger being no danger. Steve Nickelson, proprietor of the titular Magic Moscow restaurant, only acquired his dog, a malamute, because of his love of a fictional mountie and his fictional malamute—that would be Sergeant Schwartz of the Yukon and His Great Dog Hercules, a TV show, comic book, and movie franchise clearly inspired by Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and similar properties (Dave King / Douglas Renfrew)—and one day the actor who played Sergeant Schwartz comes to the Magic Moscow. In a vein that would later be mined by failed sitcom Lookwell, the actor cannot quite fathom that he is not himself a mountie. He is, he says, “more like all the mounties than any one mountie could be in real life.” He fabricates a crime out of innocent clues. The novella ends with a non-event, as DMP books should.

(Incidentally, the name Sergeant Schwartz is clearly a gag in the manner of Howard Goldberg, Frontiersman (from Alan Mendelsohn (#1) and Yobgorgle (#37)), but Schwartz is also almost the default DMP surname. In addition to a planet mentioned in Slaves of Spiegel, Schwartzes in the DMP canon include hippie Gloria Schwartz (Lizard Music (#3)), prankster Melvyn Schwartz (Fat Men from Space (#51)), baseball player Mac Schwartz (Avocado of Death (#7)), pizzerista Kevin Schwartz (Attila the Pun), and cowboy Black Schwartz (a pleonasm; Fat Camp Commandos Go West (#95)), not to mention all the characters named McSchwartz in Crazy in Poughkeepsie (#36) and Jules, Penny, & the Rooster (#35).)

The idea of renaming a Magic Moocow as Magic Moscow is choice, by the way, and a good reminder of what makes DMP different. God love them, but Beverly Cleary or Robert Newton Peck never would have thought of the Magic Moscow.

•59 Blue Moose (1975 middle-grade novella)

[A blue moose shows up to help run a restaurant in the frozen north.]

Some DMP books do not so much tell a story as assert a situation. This is more common in the picture books. At times this assertion I have called a tone poem, but when it doesn’t lead to a climactic moment of pure esthetic sensation (as in Pickle Creature (#27)) it is more just an establishment of how things are (as in Aunt Lulu (#68)).

Blue Moose is longer than a picture book, but its structure is similar in its propensity for assertion. There is incident, and that incident is, I suppose, a plot, but I hope readers will agree that the plot is subservient to the situation. The plot is simply a couple of threats to the status quo of the situation (a Game Warden with the familiar name of Bobowicz seeks to eject the moose / the moose may be going away on his own) that are resolved in favor of said status quo. In this way Blue Moose is similar to a Silver Age Superman comic, where the threat was often not to the invulnerable Superman but rather to the franchise as established. “Oh-oh! Lois Lane has finally learned my secret identity!”

But there is also one strangely tone-poemy moment. The moose hums. Like a Dwerg or a whale (see Crazy in Poughkeepsie (#36 above), and perhaps in reference to the practice of latihan (see Java Jack (#19 above)), this humming has something akin to a mystical power.27 The text merely alludes to “an unseasonable thaw” but the illustration suggests that Mr. Breton and the moose experience some kind of vision (of the Buddha-field?).

One of my favorite things about Blue Moose is the pair of folk rhymes at the beginning, with the word moose substituted in—a nice, surreal way to ease into the book. This is the first DMP book to get a sequel, a sequel that (as anyone who reads these in order already knows) is even crazier and better. It’s also the first to feature an ending that bathotically (and therefore humorously) subverts both expectation and cliché (the departure motif). Also subversive is the fact that the illustrations are black and white, so the allegedly blue moose appears to be of soberer hue.

•60 The Artsy-Smartsy Club (2005 middle-grade novel illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[The three friends from Looking for Bobowicz learn about art to enter a sidewalk-chalk contest.]

Twenty-seven years after the much beloved Hoboken Chicken Emergency (#46), DMP returned to the scene of the crime, so to speak, with a sequel, Looking for Bobowicz; I found it dissatisfying, and you can locate it down near the bottom of this list (#100). But The Artsy-Smartsy Club is something else. It has both the lowest stakes and the highest stakes of any DMP novel. It’s about three kids learning to love art, by which I mean (because they learned to love literature in the previous volume) the visual arts. Only in Bushman Lives! (#8) is the conversion to art this overt, and in Bushman Lives! the story is about a lot of other things, too. Not Artsy-Smartsy Club! It’s just art and all about art.

That’s what I mean by low stakes. Who will win a sidewalk chalking contest is low stakes. But art, especially in the DMPverse, is the highest stakes there is. A-SC has no moment of transcendence, no assertion of why art might be valuable, different, special, sacred, or what have you. The kids in the club are converted…by art. Just by art: Van Gogh and El Greco and St. Francis in the desert.

There are three members of the club (and several older esthetes of various degrees of trustworthiness); although the three produce artwork of differing kinds and emphases, it is an unusual feature of the book that their reactions to art are unanimous. I personally have never visited an art museum with three people who could agree on anything. Perhaps this is thematic; perhaps DMP believes (or wants us to believe?) that before Immortal Art all fellows of sense bow down alike.

But as much as the book is about experiencing art, the book is even more about making it (the two activities are often linked for DMP). There are several adults here who out and out give instruction. “People talk about sudden inspiration, and talent, and genius—but art is mostly about hard mental work,” says one, and everyone agrees with him, at times quite explicitly—and he’s the bad guy! All the good advice about working on perception to improve art (a very DMP sentiment) is given by a cry-baby sneak! I’m not sure if this is DMP magnanimously indicating that even rotten people can understand how to make art, or if it’s just another aspect of the book’s curious unanimity.

Artsy-Smarty Club, like Looking for Bobowicz, exists in a somewhat strange liminal space, the long decade between two major works (Robert Nifkin (#4) and The Neddiad (#15)). The books are pitched for a younger audience than these bookending works (or perhaps than any other DMP book of their length). If part of the fun of DMP books is finding curious connections between them, these two volumes offered a welcome oasis in this decade of drought. A small example: Davis Davisdavis, one of two (as mentioned before) DMP doppelgangers for the real-life art dealer David Davis, is revealed to be scientific eater who survives on eggplants and Dr. Pedwee’s Grape Soda—which is interesting because in The Yggyssey (#81) we learn that Dr. Pedwee28 himself is a fruitopath who proclaims the magic of the avocado. Eggplant to avocado is truly the DMP spectrum of vegetables (which is why, as we shall see, the Big Bob books don’t work better (#97), even if William Lloyd Floyd (#1) and Vincent Arrigato (#35) do own stone and brass potatoes from the moon and Mars respectively).

Henfanger, Florida, hometown (you will recall) of Anthony DePalma, is also where Arthur Bobowicz’s mother has fled to. She lives there under an assumed name.

Somewhat more challenging to rationalize: In Slaves of Spiegel (#48), Tesev Noskecnil is the name of a humanoid slothoform from the planet Horthy who competes against and resembles Steve Nickelson. In Artsy-Smarty Club, Tesev Noskecnil is “a famous walrus hunter from the earliest days of Hoboken” who has a park in Hoboken, Tesev Noskecnil Park, named after him. But Steve Nickelson is a lifelong resident of Hoboken! He appears in Looking for Bobowicz! When he met Tesev Noskecnil on Spiegel, how did he not exclaim, “Fantastic coincidence! Your name graces a park half a mile [or so; it has to be less than a mile; Hoboken is famously a mile square] from where I live!”?

It is perhaps significant, although I have not yet figured out how, in light of Hoboken’s newly revealed walrus-hunting past, that Artsy-Smartsy narrator Nick Itch hails from a town whose school mascot in the Fighting Walruses. Unlike, say, chickens or lizards, walruses are not so associated with DMP; although they are not completely absent from his older books it is only in the twenty-first century that they really start popping up: with Tesev Noskecnil and Nick Itch, as the two protagonists of Cone Kong (#90), and, huge and prehistoric, in Vincent Arrigato’s cabinet of wonders.

•61 The Werewolf Club Meets the Hound of the Basketballs (2001 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[The Werewolf Club visits the Basketball family in upstate New York and faces the curse of the hound.]

At some point in his life upstate, DMP must have eaten a jitterbug and it made a big impression. Jitterbugs first appear in the DMP canon back in Baconburg Horror, but they start appearing more in the twenty-first century: in two Werewolf Club books, in Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl, in Crazy in Poughkeepsie. Hound of the Basketballs features one of those celebrations of the jitterbug, lovingly detailing how to make one.

But most of the book is, of course, a play off The Hound of the Baskervilles (although Sherlock Holmes himself does not show up until the next volume). Glucinda Basketball is reminiscent of a more strictly gothic heroine—Madeline Usher, perhaps. Information about the hound comes from a collection of old songs, poems, and manuscript histories that readers and characters must sort out for themselves. The answer is bathos, of course, but a pleasantly humorous bathos. The Werewolf Club books, with one exception perhaps, have an improvisational style, underlined by the fact that the plot of this one is ushered in by Mr. Talbot innocently proposing, hey, let’s go visit some relatives.

Compare Local W. Yokel’s comment on Basketball Hall (“Arrr. Some say the Hall be an evil place”) with the Mad Guru’s statement about the West Kangaroo Park bus in Alan Mendelsohn (“Arrr…some speak of her as an evil bus”) (#1). The ultimate source for the text is chapter 19 of Moby Dick, because with DMP it always comes back to Moby Dick.29

•62 Bad Bears in the Big City (2003 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Two bad bears adapt to their lives in a New Jersey zoo.]

I think the remaining three bad bears books are pretty similar in quality, so I just lumped them all together. Bad Bears in the Big City is the second book in the series, and it is here, and not in the idiosyncratic first book, that the usual bad bears formula appears.

Roy says, “I heard you were kicked out of Yellowtooth for stealing muffins.”
“We were kicked out of Yellowtooth for stealing lots of muffins,” Muktuk says.

Irving and Muktuk talk a lot. This is the dialog book in the style pioneered in Guys from Space (#17) (but with longer paragraphs). Pages of some of the bad bears books can read almost like a play. This worked best in Guys from Space, where the constant deadpan discussion of marvelous events added to the oneiric atmosphere, but it is still used to good comic effect in these bad bears books.

And our heroes are themselves great comic characters, quick to self-pity, quick to self-destruct. (In this book) disguised as school children, Irving and Muktuk tour a blueberry muffin factory. At the end of the tour, the children are encouraged to eat all the muffins they can. “It is at this point that Irving and Muktuk are discovered to be bears.” As fine an example of understatement as you’re likely to find.

And while I’m talking about DMP’s prose—I haven’t really harped on this till now, but I hope it’s at least implicit that DMP has a good prose style. This is most obvious in the service of a joke, but Big City offers an example I’ll isolate here:

Roy goes to his locker. He puts on his hat. He puts on his coat, swipes his timecard through the slot under the big clock, and goes to wait for the bus.

I think the natural instinct of a writer would be to break up that sequence of events differently, probably Roy goes to his locker and puts on his hat and coat. He swipes his timecard through the slot under the big clock, and goes to wait for the bus. This ruins the rhythm of the sentence, which in its original form starts slow and speeds up as Roy gets closer to leaving work (as is sensible). There are several ways of splitting this information up, but just try it. Every other sequence is worse. DMP got it right.

This is a small and ultimately unimportant paragraph we’re talking about, but I hope it shows how DMP unostentatiously chooses the right way to organize his sentences.

•63 Bad Bears and a Bunny (2005 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[A bunny terrorizes the bears who had sought to bully it.]

Not for the last time in the DMP canon (cf. #91), a bear mistakes a bunny for a very small bear. An odd motif to return to.

Note that Roy is watching Big Bear on TV, one of four (!)30 appearances of that beatnik star.

•64 Bad Bears Go Visiting (2007 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Seeking to be sociable, the bad bears nightmarishly invade and destroy a home.]

When the bad bears get taken into custody, they ride in a zoo bus that evokes, if only vaguely, the “special zoo bus” Victor takes, with the lizard painted on the side.31 This is, of course, the same bus the zoo sent to pick them up from the airport. The bad bear series ends, fittingly, the same way its first book ended: with our heroes quite literally in shackles.

•65 Bear’s Picture (1972 picture book, sometimes illustrated by D.B. Johnson)

[Two art critics tell a bear not to paint; he paints anyway.]

Bear’s Picture is one of DMP’s earliest books. It was reissued in 2008 with new illustrations by D.B. Johnson (and slightly modified text)…

…and the new version can get a little dark—it’s the story of canting critics who are murdered by a bear. I suppose there’s another way to interpret things, but this, my five-year old, assures me, is the emmis: The critics have drowned and are now dead. It’s a neat inversion or extension of the story of the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 2:24): Mock Elisha and you get a bear; mock a bear and see what you get!

In the essay “Whose Little Jackson Pollack Are You?” in Fish Whistle (#6), DMP reports “an actual dialogue [he] overheard between two of the kids” he was teaching art to. The dialog starts:

“What’s that you’re painting?”
No reply.
“Is it a clown? It looks like a clown.”
“No, it’s not a clown.”
“Is it a butterfly? It could be a butterfly.”
“It’s not a butterfly.”
[Establish that it doesn’t look like what it is purported to be.]
“It doesn’t have to. It’s my picture.”

You will note that this dialog is not word for word but almost word for word the text of Bear’s Picture.

And at that point the critics drown.

At least in the Johnson version. In the original, the critics (literally inhuman) simply wander away.

•66 The Werewolf Club Meets Dorkula (2001 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[The Werewolf Club must thwart a vegetarian vampire with the help of a new member: Henry, Count Dorkula.]

Nobody saw this coming, but Noshferatu, the bagel vampire from Moospire (#32), is back, retconned as a fruitpire. Something like the muffin shortage from Muffin Fiend (#23) is now a fruit shortage. And the Werewolf Club has a new member, a fruitpire again. Remember that the Wempires (#22) avoid drinking blood and announce, through song, how much they like bananas…but fruitpires are something different. The titular Dorkula is heavily suggested at the beginning of the book to be one of DMP’s big-talking fakes, with his assertion that he could turn into a bat right now and just chooses not to; but this proves to be a red herring, and he’s a bat by book’s end.

This, the third Werewolf Club book, is the first to lack chapter titles, which, as those titles were in the first two books gauchely formatted as the same font and point size as the main text, just all caps…I guess from a design standpoint, they won’t be missed.

Minor character Hugo Van Helsing is one of several Van Helsings to appear in the DMP canon (Wempires and Vampires of Blinsh (#28) contain others); this makes sense because Van Helsing combines two separate DMP obsessions: Dutch names and Dracula references.

The loose, loopy way DMP was writing books in 2001 in indicated by the fact that at one point the first-person narrative pauses and a chapter is presented, like a play, in dialog with speaker tags. The plotting is loose, too, with the Werewolf Club running around for the climax, but everything happening “off-camera” and between new characters.

In Uncle Boris in the Yukon, (#82) DMP quotes Jill Pinkwater as saying that this book is “not exactly Noël Coward.” It’s also not exactly Lunchroom of Doom (#42), but it’s fine.

•67 Dancing Larry (2006 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[A civilized polar bear, denied the opportunity to practice ballet, creates his own dance troupe.]

The penultimate Larry book (of six), Dancing Larry came out seven years after its predecessor—a much larger gap than any previous. It starts out (presumably therefore) with a summary of the situation as established in earlier books—that Larry is a wild polar bear who works as a lifeguard at a hotel in Bayonne, New Jersey, and has friends and relatives in a nearby zoo. This is the first, and only, book narrated by Larry himself. It is my favorite of the Larry books.

You may recall that DMP’s second book, Bear’s Picture (#65), featured art critics insisting bears cannot paint, and Dancing Larry is in some ways a more complicated return to the theme. I mean “more complicated” because in Bear’s Picture it’s unclear how the bear acquired paint or the requisite skill at painting; where he had laid out his canvas; why art critics happened to be wandering by. If you demand answers to all these inclarities in your picture books, you’ll be satisfied with Dancing Larry. Madame Swodoba expresses her injunction against dancing bears because Larry starts to dance in her dancing studio. Anyone who remembers what happens when Irving and Muktuk try playing volleyball in the Beachballs’ living room (Bad Bears Go Visiting (#64)) will sympathize with Madame Swodoba. Everything falls into place

I don’t think I have this particular mental problem, and I did not complain about illogical aspects of Bear’s Picture; but I am satisfied with Dancing Larry anyway. Like Bear’s Picture it ends with a bear, in defiance of the critics, creating art. In this case, the art is dance, an art form I know even less about than painting. Like a whirling dervish, DMP would use dance as a go-to metaphor for transcendence in the years following Dancing Larry, but it happens here first, and maybe it’s not even a metaphor for anything; it’s just (as Flaubert would say) a dancing bear.

But what’s wonderful about it is that the book ends, wordlessly, in the middle of the dance. It’s just Larry and his friends dancing; there’s clearly a narrative (to the ballet) going on, although I don’t know if I understand it. On the copyright page, which comes in the back, there is a brief coda, a smaller wordless picture of the dancers taking a bow.

If you watch a movie about a dancer (or any kind of art) you can be sure to hear a voiceover explaining why what you are watching is beautiful. Not for one moment will you be allowed to look at art for yourself.

But here the dance just exists. I don’t know if it’s good art—dance is hard to judge from static images and I’m not qualified to judge it anyway; perhaps any time several polar bears dance in unison it should be considered impressive. But the art is permitted to exist right here with me, naked and unmediated, or as unmediated as a marker drawing can be. This is wonderful.

•68 Aunt Lulu (1988 picture book)

[An Alaskan librarian brings her many dogs to New Jersey.]

This is my go-to example of a DMP picture book that asserts a situation rather than tells a story. Aunt Lulu lives in Parsippany, New Jersey, not too close to an unnamed narrator. She used to live in Alaska, near a bunch of miners (three of whom were former dog rustlers from The Magic Moscow (#58)). These are two situations, and the progress from one situation to the next, which some might call a plot, is just Lulu writing a letter.

This is not even a criticism, because DMP excels at creating situations! That’s why the settings of his books are so good. I want to see a librarian drive a dogsled pulled by fourteen huskies down a New Jersey highway, past Ferret World and Onion Giant, and by gum that’s what I’m going to get. That’s the whole book.

•69 The Picture of Morty and Ray (2003 picture book illustrated by Jack E. Davis)

[Inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray, Morty and Ray attempt to make their own pictures ugly through nonstop vice.]

DMP is often nihilistic when it comes to plotting or narrative, but Morty and Ray is perhaps unique in the sense that it operates in a moral vacuum. It is faithful to Oscar Wilde’s dictum that books are neither moral or immoral. Oscar Wilde is the ultimate source for this story, of course (in addition to providing a flattering pull quote, a bit of fraud that is thematically apposite for an amoral book), although, as with most of DMP’s horror-themed picture books, the real source is not the book but a movie adaptation.

Morty and Ray, like Dorian Gray himself, become bad for purely esthetic reasons. While Gray reads J.-K. Huysmans, Morty and Roy watch a movie adaptation of Dorian Gray; but the result is the same.

Having created the most convention work of art possible— a portrait—M&R turn to their true art, which is modifying the portrait without touching it by performing acts of evil. The evil is mostly fairly mild, like sticking their (clothed) butts out a bus window, but the boys are cruel as well. The cruelty is bad, and they are legitimately cruel. DeQuincy considered murder “as one of the fine arts,” but not even he ever considered that murder might be wielded like a paint brush.

Genuinely puzzled by the idea they might be hurting anyone—for they are not malicious; they are artists—Morty and Ray only repent when they find their art descending too far into the grotesque. Fortunately de gustibus non est disputandum and they locate a critic with a more grotesque-friendly esthetic. There is no moral. There can be no moral.

•70 Spaceburger: A Kevin Spoon and Mason Mintz Story (1993 picture book)

[Two boys walk a long way to attend the grand opening of a futuristic burger joint.]

Spaceburger is a sequel to Doodle Flute (#75), although it’s hard to understand why, as the two books are thematically, tonally, and stylistically dissimilar. One book is first person, the other third person. Spaceburger must have about eight times as many words (I’m estimating) as Doodle Flute, in the same number of pages. Nevertheless, there you have it: Mason Mintz returns, and he wants burgers.

I’m sure this theme starts in Last Guru (#29) somewhere, but I associate it more with the description of the Garden of Earthly Bliss Drive-in and Pizzeria in Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror (#30)—a lengthy and over-the-top description of a marvelous place. Whale Heaven in Crazy in Poughkeepsie (#36) is another example, and also, of course, Spaceburger.

Despite the assertion right there in the subtitle, Spaceburger is hardly even a story. It’s not really the tone poem some of DMP’s picture books are. It’s almost like Vampires of Blinsh (#28), except viewed close up (as opposed to from ten thousand miles away). It’s just a description of the world’s greatest burger place, if they world’s greatest burger place served mediocre burgers. When it gestures vaguely towards a story, Spaceburger most closely resembles a quest narrative, like Worms of Kukumlima (#9) (or, again, Crazy in P.). The walk to Exitville is interminable, but also so pleasant that (Kevin Spoon reports): “I forgot to think about the Spaceburger while we walked.” Only then does Spaceburger heave into view.

Most of all, though, Spaceburger is just joyous. Two kids walk a long way to eat a burger, singing, as kids will, a dumb fun song, and the place they eat in is amazing. “We both checked excellent, and underlined it.”

•71 Uncle Melvin (1989 picture book)

[Charles’s Uncle Melvin splits his time between living in the Looney Bin (his term) and puttering around Charles’s house.]

I get the feeling that DMP has a reputation for writing about crazy people, and perhaps that reputation is merited. G. Whillikers (#9) and Flipping Hades Terwilliger (#7 & 30) and Professor Tag (#26) are all quite explicitly mad, and it’s not hard to think of characters who may not know they’re crazy but quite obviously are. Well, for whatever reason, DMP decided to write a book about a person who is crazy, but in a real-world way. Mad scientists aren’t really crazy, you know. Uncle Melvin, though—he’s crazy.

This is the quietest book DMP ever wrote, as well as the most realistic (and I’m including his autobiographical essays is that assessment). Unlike other “real-world” books like Magic Moscow (#58) or Jolly Roger (#49), there is no wackiness in the world. The world is not zany, though Uncle Melvin is. DMP (usually a bomb-throwing anarchist) seems to be approaching his subject with respect, perhaps for the first time since Bear’s Picture (#65). It might be unbearably afterschool-specially if it weren’t so well done.

I claimed (above) that The Blue Thing (#47) is the tone poemiest of DMP’s tone poems, but Uncle Melvin is second place. As in Pickle Creature (#27), the entire book is a setup for the final page (which is also, in this case, depicted on the book’s cover): that quiet, realistic, but almost miraculous moment.

Note: Every proper name appearing in this book also appears in Aunt Lulu (#68).

•72 Mush, a Dog from Space (1995 children’s book)

[A young girl in need of a caretaker finds a marvelous dog, ostensibly from space, who’ll take the role.]

Mush is the first DMP book to have a female narrator; it’s probably the only DMP book of the twentieth century to pass the Bechdel test. It reads like a rough draft of Jules, Penny and the Rooster (#35), or at least for a small part of that book. After her babysitter quits by letter (just like Aunt Lulu (#68)), Kelly Mangiaro gets to spend her days learning three of the most important skills for a DMP character: how to make food, how to bond with a dog, and how to perceive things. The initial thing she perceives is the variety of smells in the woods, making Kelly the first DMP character looking to make the rural turn (so common, as we’ve seen, after The Neddiad (#15)).32

Mush keeps promising to tell how a dog from space ended up on Earth, but naturally never does. Mush is much less of a fraud than, say, the magic goose, but one wonders, despite her telepathic powers and cutlery skills, whether Mush isn’t having us on.

Of course, in the sequel (#52), Mush lays the whole story out, so that should allay my suspicions. But, as a raccoon says to her at the time: “I believe every word you say…NOT!”

•73 The Werewolf Club Meets Oliver Twit (2002 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[The Werewolf Club accidentally gets stuck in 1890 London, where they help fight crime and seek to return home.]

Borgel (#11) claims to be traveling through time as well as space, and several characters (Molly, Victor, etc.) implicitly change eras, but the only tradition time travel in the DMP canon outside the case of Deadly Eric comes in this celebration of Victorian literature. The time machine of H.G. Wells (travestied as H.G. Talbot) lets the Werewolf Club team up with Oliver Twist (travestied as Oliver Twit) and Sherlock Holmes (travestied, for once, not at all) to catch Jack the Ripper (travestied as Jack the Schlepper, a jewel thief). In a modification of the terminology from Borgel, time and space are still time and space, but (physicists, correct me if I’m wrong about this) the other is called the in-between.

—Wait! wait! actually Norb (#12) is filled with ever so much time travel, I just almost forgot to mention it because Norb is a comic strip and comic strip time travel feels different. Also, Norb featured a Sherlock Holmes appearance a full decade before Oliver Twit—

This is the book that reveals that Prince Albert was a werewolf, which is somewhat strange because Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror (#30) claims his wife, Queen Victoria, was the werewolf of the family. Both statements could be true, of course. In fact, perhaps it would be unusual if they were not.

With five members (and this book introduces a sixth) plus Mr. Talbot, the Werewolf Club and their tales can get crowded; indeed, Meets Oliver Twit is a crowded book. Perhaps too much goes on, but it’s fun regardless.

After five Werewolf Club books, the only thing I have left to say is that some editions of each book read on the cover “by Daniel and Jill Pinkwater” and some read “Daniel Pinkwater / illustrated by Jill Pinkwater” and I don’t know how to tell them apart or why.

•74 Around Fred’s Bed (1976 picture book illustrated by Robert Mertens)

[Fred can’t sleep for fear of the monsters that cluster around his bed; twist ending.]

This early picture book is perhaps the only DMP book that doesn’t get better with rereading. It’s got to be his shortest book, at under one hundred words (I counted 92, but I’m not the best at counting). It’s simple and fun, and the cover is great. I’m surprised it didn’t get more lasting mainstream love.

“But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: ‘It’s clever, but is it Art?’” We’re only interested in art here. This book is fine, but it ranks where it ranks because I am an angry old man judging books for children.

Fred resembles Pogo, doesn’t he? I don’t think Robert Mertens ever illustrated another book, but it’s hard to tell because apparently the world’s most famous German herpetologist (!) is named Robert Mertens, and the noise of his innumerable books keeps disrupting the signal.

The great Shel Silverstein wrote a poem—“Frightened,” included in the posthumous collection Every Thing On It—that is suspiciously apposite. The first two lines are:

“There are kids underneath my bed,”
Cried little baby monster Fred.

•75 Doodle Flute (1991 picture book)

[Kevin Spoon seeks to own and learns to share a unique kazoo-like instrument.]

I go back and forth on Doodle Flute. It does not feel like a 1991 book; it feels like a 1971 book. It’s probably too on-point.

Like Guys from Space (#17), this book has prose organized into such short paragraphs that it is almost verse. The opening page, to wit:

Kevin Spoon had a nice life.
He had nice parents.
He had a nice house.
He had his own room.
He had his own bathroom.
He had his own TV.
He had his own VCR.
He had his own stereo.
He had his own computer.
[Etc.]

Obviously that’s not 1971. But Mason Mintz (possessor of the titular doodle flute) is a man out of time. The fashion pendulum may, in 1991, have been swinging back towards his beatnik slovenliness, but surely his parents’ pumpkin patch, his garishly retro plaid hat, and his propensity for sharing are not a product of the ’90s. I imagine him talking like Fleetwood from The Brady Kids (1972–’73). He’s a bit like a watered-down version of Alan Mendelsohn (#1), only Alan, organically living in the ’70s, didn’t have to try so hard to indicate he was trapped there.

Unusually, although not uniquely, this book is in third person while its sequel is in first.

•76 Second-Grade Ape (1998 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Flash Fleetwood encounters and adopts a wild gorilla that he then brings to school.]

Why does Second-Grade Ape get a hyphen and Second Grade Werewolf (#55) doesn’t? Don’t ask me, man. I didn’t do it.

Anyway, my problem with Second-Grade Ape is that the best parts are the parts without the ape. The single funniest gag involves Mr. Fleetwood punishing chickens. The most charming bit involves the old-timey–gangster nicknames Flash Fleetwood and Bullets Birkenstock come up with for each other. I guess the ape is fine, when he shows up.

The names Fleetwood and Birkenstock indicate that the characters’ families were, in 1998, among the last surviving hippies in America. I’d compared Mason Mintz to a different Fleetwood, above (#75), before I knew that the randomizing influence of the ranking system would put these two entries next to each other. Presumably the Mintzes would get along with these guys.

Mrs. Fleetwood’s statement, “He is twenty times bigger than a cat,” is not the kind of thing you should say to Lunchbox Louie (from Wuggie Norple (#34)). Am I right? Am I right?

•77 Beautiful Yetta the Yiddish Chicken (2010 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[The titular Yiddish chicken escapes her poultry destiny and begins a new life on the streets of Brooklyn.]

Beautiful Yetta is a slight book, its few words made fewer by the fact that they alternate between three different languages (four if you count Brooklynese), and so there is the extra space for translation. We have, as in Aunt Lulu (#68), an unusual situation being asserted, with the novelty that the book offers an origin story. It feels weird to say that little happens in the book, when actually everything happens in the book, at least from Yetta’s POV—she frees herself (from the jaws of certain death), adventures a bit, and finds her place. This is a classic story! But all the weight of the book falls, imbalancingly, on the final four pages. Here is the crux of the matter—a chicken comes to lead a flock of parrots. The book tells how it happens, sure, and at greater length than Lulu, but the how hardly matters. Yetta’s wanderings through Brooklyn hardly matter. Unlike with most books that superficially resemble this structure (you know, The Odyssey et seq.), few readers of Yetta will remember the pages and adventures before the final assertion, while every reader will remember that assertion well. What is Yetta about? The ready answer is that it’s about a chicken who leads parrots. No one’s ever going to say that it’s about how a chicken came to lead parrots (although by page count it appears that’s what the book is about).

This structure (which I hope I’ve made clear) makes the book a curious read. But ultimately how much you like the book will probably depend on how badly you want to see a chicken ruling parrots (or perhaps how diverting you find the sight of birds chatting in Yiddish and Spanish).

The front flap of my edition comes with an injunction “to treat newcomers with respect and compassion” backed by the authority of the Torah. I know I’ve laid a groundwork for hating on didacticism, but the truth is if any book is a thousand years old or more I will absolutely listen to it telling me what to do. The “Havamal” or the Tirukkural or the Torah are all welcome to didact away! The back flap keeps going, though, and now its modern day people explicating Yetta’s values. Dial it back, guys! You’re too young!

•78 Beautiful Yetta’s Hanukkah Kitten (2014 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Yetta rescues a kitten on Hanuhhah.]

I put both Yetta books together because, honestly, I don’t know what to do with them.. Jill Pinkwater’s art does more of the heavy lifting than is the norm in one of the Pinkwater/Pinkwater collaborations. The first quarter of this sequel (by page count) is spent summarizing the events and situation from Beautiful Yetta the Yiddish Chicken (#77), a book that, a couple of paragraphs ago, I went and said nothing happened in. The rest of this book is one small incident, an incident so small one might barely notice it had not it been given weight and emphasis by being made the subject of a book. Which book is in some ways more like a painting than anything else, one of those paintings of a quotidian moment in the life of a seventeenth-century burgher that is frozen, immortalized, and engrandized by oil paint. Except Yetta’s trilingual four-species entente is far from quotidian—it just feels that way because the event is so quiet, and treated so gently.

This book takes place (as the title implies) on Hanukkah, “when the humans are in a good mood.” Compare with animals’ opinion of Christmas in Wolf Christmas (#80), a time when humans are “quite peaceful.” Can Potato Claus’s ersatz holiday compete (#88)? We should ask an animal.

•79 The Phantom of the Lunch Wagon (1992 picture book)

[Chris Kevin-Keith seeks to reopen a popular but haunted lunch wagon.]

Here we have the story of a haunted restaurant refurbished and rehaunted—by a phantom! Annnnd…

Look, maybe I’m thinking about this too hard, but the plot falls apart for me on a basic level of sense. If the titular phantom of the lunch wagon (serious spoiler here) is a kitten…how does that explain the phantom of the previous lunch wagon, years before? Kittens don’t stay kittens that long!

Or is this some sort of double-secret reverse-trick ending in which an immortal, unaging supernatural kitten is the real phantom? Like the phantom is indeed a phantom? Is that the point?

But as old Mr. Wiggers would say, “No one listens to old Mr. Wiggers.” A good book if you can get your mind over the plot hump. My daughter’s favorite DMP book when she was very young.

•80 Wolf Christmas (1998 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Wolves spy on humans on Christmas.]

First off, Jill Pinkwater is the best at drawing wolves. Someone probably should have taken that into account before getting her to spend a decade drawing polar bears. Her polar bears are great, but her wolves are the pure quill.

Wolf Christmas, which features more wolves than any other book Jill Pinkwater illustrates [citation needed], is a classic DMP tone poem picture book, the kind I keep harping on. The entire book is wolves running through the night, listening to humans sing Christmas carols, and (this is the punctum, the moment the poem is working towards) themselves singing. Look how DMP sets up this, the climactic moment, in the final sentence of the book: “Then we threw back our heads and sitting on the hillside above the place where the humans live, we wolves sang, too.” The wolves’ two actions are separated by several adverbial phrases and clauses, delaying the moment when the wolves will also sing, so when it hits it hits all the harder.

Uncle Louis is another in the litany of eccentric uncles (and aunts): Boris (#1), Mel (#37), Borgel (#11), Lulu (#68), Melvin (#71), Gertrude (#35)…only he’s a wolf, which is, naturally different. When DMP reads this piece on NPR he pronounces Louis’s name the French way, like Lunchbox Louie (#34). I guess that makes sense, but it hadn’t occurred to me until I heard it.

•81 The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There (2009 middle-grade novel illustrated by Calef Brown)

[Iggy follows a bunch of ghosts across dimensions to a ghostly party.]

Partway through The Yggysey our heroes end up in a real pickle. Melvin the shaman could save them but is reluctant to, because if he does they will have no heroes’ journey, no personal growth, no everything a book is ostensibly about. Should he save them? “Do it! Do it!” they demand, and reluctantly he does it, and indeed they undergo no personal growth, they achieve no “deep knowledge” of themselves.

This is a funny gag, and it reminds us that in a Dada world stories mean nothing. On the other hand, The Yggyssey means nothing. This is an entire book about the meaningless silly things you might encounter on the way to a party. It’s fun and the party’s fun, but is it a book? If it is a book, it’s a book so meaningless that it goes back in time and erases the meaning of The Neddiad (#15)! And then the climactic appearance of Shmenda is a huge middle finger to the concept of narrative, which is punk rock and all, but still…I bought the book, you know?

Iggy’s main growth is losing the personality (generic DMP tough girl) she had in The Neddiad and becoming indistinguishable from the usual DMP narrator. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the transformation of Neddie, who changes from his previous (DMP-narrator) personality to something melancholic or tranquil.

After Melvin saves the kids from the need to participate in a real spiritual quest, he says, “Maybe it was for the best,” because the next trial would have involved being attacked by volcanos. This, too, is a funny gag, and Yggyssey is full of funny gags, which is why it doesn’t rank lower.

I may be criticizing this book for the same things I praised in Ducks! (#13), but I guess that’s the difference between reading thirty pages of unstory and 250 pages of unstory.

•82 Uncle Boris in the Yukon and Other Shaggy Dog Stories (2001 memoir illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[More essays, all dog related.]

I love dogs, but DMP loves dogs more than I do. Dogs are all over his books, often as major (Fafnir (#11), Lhasa (#36), Penny (#35)) or main (Jolly Roger (#49), Mush (#72 & 52), Max (#44)) characters. By my count he has dedicated no fewer than six books to dogs.33 Uncle Boris in the Yukon is a memoir of DMP’s life as seen through the lens of the dogs (and occasionally other pets) he has known. Maybe if I liked dogs even more than I do I would like this book more than I do.

The book starts with a story about DMP’s Uncle Boris, a familiar character from Fish Whistle (#6) and even Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars (#1). This story is unique in the sense that it is overtly, even gleefully, false. It didn’t happen. The rest of the book is perhaps sometimes hyperbolic (for comedy), and of course could be a hoaxing fiction for all I know, but is at least ostensibly true. There is reason to believe (we’ll get to why) much of it is at least broadly true. And yet there is that first chapter, calling everything into question. Imagine picking up a David Sedaris book and finding that the first chapter is about Hugh’s experiences as an astronaut. How do you read the rest of that book?

But that’s a small objection—just a curiosity, really, not a problem at all. The real problem I have with the book is that parts of it are cut and pasted from two earlier books. It’s not just that the book contains some of the same autobiographical anecdotes as Fish Whistle and Chicago Days/Hoboken Nights (#33), it’s that entire paragraphs are copied word for word.

I still remember my bubbling wrath when I first read the book and discovered its dirty little secret. If Uncle Boris were a book of essays, and some of the essays were reprinted from a previous volume, that would be a mere annoyance, the way you feel when you buy a graphic novel and realize you already own several of the issues it contains. But instead, reader, I felt betrayed, the way I feel when I buy a comic book and realize the artist drew one panel and photocopied it six times to fill up a page. In retrospect, that reaction was too strong. I was young and poor and I bought the book in hardcover (twenty bones!). But I felt it, and it is hard for me to forget.

The two best lines in the whole book—

Only selling a dog already dead, or made of acrylic, would have been more of a coup.

He was better than average. He could read and write, and had never eaten a child of his own.

—are both from Fish Whistle.

The book brings up an additional challenge that is simultaneously confusing and emblematic of the DMP method. I’ll try to explain. These are, remember ostensibly true stories. They are stories that have been told elsewhere, also as true stories—which is evidence that they are actually true! There’s consistency!

But in Uncle Boris, DMP is doing something new. He’s naming names! For the first time his alma mater is not called St. Leon’s, but rather Bard College. Herman Hermann is now David Davis. These are real, verifiable, people and places. He gives the address on Hudson Street, Hoboken, where he and Jill Pinkwater used to live.

Unscrupulous dog breeder Larry Porketta from Fish Whistle (“he could read and write”) reappears (word for word, remember) as Franz Gussik. Wee Folks Residential Treatment Center from Fish Whistle reappears as Glade and Glen Boy’s Farm Residential School. I have no way of knowing if any of these names are real…but it is is strange to have someone tell two true stories with only the proper names changed. They cannot both be true! What is one to make of this? Especially if the details about Porketta are copied word-for-word with only the name changed in Gussik!

Of course, in a post-Cat-Whiskered world (#26), Porketta might stand revealed as Gussik from another dimension. Both stories can be true. Only my inability to enter state 26 keeps me from determining which story is true when and where and for whom.

Anyway, this book is probably better if you 1. haven’t read the Chicago Fish and Hoboken Whistle duology, 2. are not a petulant man who holds a grudge, or 3. like dogs even more than I do (and I like dogs a lot).

•83 Young Larry (1997 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[A polar bear ends up in New Jersey and becomes a lifeguard.]

I mentioned before that children’s book writers entropically tend towards creating (Little Monster; Fancy Nancy) a recurring character. He had had a couple of sequels and even a trilogy or two, but nevertheless in the main DMP heroically resisted this urge for a quarter century—and then along came Larry. Larry the polar bear. Larry is neither my favorite or least favorite DMP series. The art is always nice, because the big white shape of a polar bear creates a negative image of blankness in the middle of Jill Pinkwater’s background colors. With the exception of Dancing Larry (#67), which I quite like, most of the books blend together for me. I allowed them therefore to cluster here, and in chronological order.

The Larry series is somewhat unusual. Every even-numbered volume (At the Hotel Larry (#84), Ice Cream Larry (#86), and Sleepover Larry (#87)) is narrated in the first person by Mildred Frobisher34, while every odd-numbered volume has a different narrator: The first book (Young Larry) is third-person omniscient, Mildred’s father narrates the third book (Bongo Larry (#85)), and as we’ve already seen Larry himself finally gets to narrate the fifth. The fragmentation of narrative that we’ve noted take root in Slaves of Spiegel (#48) and grow though Baconburg Horror (#30) and later books now spreads its canopy across an entire series.

I’m not sure how clear it was to readers in 1997 that Young Larry was launching a series, but I will say that the book makes less sense if you view it as a stand alone volume. It has a very weird arc. The opening pages are pretty standard nature-documentary fare, until Larry Rip-van-Winkles himself to Bayonne, New Jersey, where he becomes a lifeguard. Soon he saves a rich (ugh!) man who offers to buy a hotel at which Larry can lifeguard further. This being established, the book ends.

The structure is similar to something like Aunt Lulu (#68), where a situation (hotel polar bear lifeguard!) requires establishment. It’s weird enough that maybe the book would be better on its own, because the reader has stuff to ponder. Instead a sequel came out the same year…

•84 At the Hotel Larry (1997 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[A polar bear works as a lifeguard at a hotel.]

In Hotel Larry we learn that the rich man (ugh), Martin Frobisher, has a family. Martin and his wife Semolina look like DMP and his wife Jill—that’s Jill doing the art, remember—and Semolina Frobisher will only grow more and more Jill-like as the series progresses. Perhaps the Larry books are the Pinkwaters’ alternate reality life, one in which they have a red-headed daughter and a hotel and a tame polar bear.

This book marks the first appearances of Irving and Muktuk, unnamed but distinguished by their shifty eyes. Consistently they will be referred to as Bears Number One and Three (Roy is Bear Number Two). This is, in fact, the way to distinguish a book in the Larry series from a book in the bad bears series—only in bad bears books do Irving and Muktuk have names.

(The trim size is also different.)35

On the copyright page, the coda of this book is an homage to Matisse’s The Dance, only with bears. For all I know these books are filled with clever swipes and homages to the fine arts and I’m just too pictorially illiterate to notice.

•85 Bongo Larry (1998 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Larry the polar bear experiments with the counterculture.]

This is the one where Larry becomes a beatnik. He calls cops “square,” which is fairly mild, and plays the bongos like Marlon Brando (#81). At one point he paints something that’s a dead ringer for the painting in Bear’s Picture (#65) (the original I mean), which itself looks a bit like it was visited by the seagull from The Big Orange Splot (#5).

Bongo Larry is narrated by Martin Frobisher, a character named (as befits a friend to polar bears) for an arctic explorer. (In Uncle Boris in the Yukon (#82), fictional Frobisher Junior College is mentioned as one of the few places to have done scientific study of Inuit dogs; just one of the places the nonfiction facade of that book cracks.) Martin emphasizes that he does not own Larry—they are merely friends—which is the kind of thing Mr. Breton would say in the Blue Moose books (#59, 50, & 32).

If you’re really worried about continuity, you might start wondering how it is that polar bears wandering the streets must be disguised as visiting human uncles to avoid worrying people, while bears can meanwhile have a whole underground bar scene of their own. Good thing I’m sane, and nothing like this worries me!

Larry’s beat poetry resembles Jonathan Quicksilver’s (from Baconburg Horror (#30)) but is not as good. Nevertheless, it is better than ~80% of beat poetry.

•86 Ice Cream Larry (1999 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Larry becomes an ice cream spokesbear.]

The second book narrated by Mildred Frobisher, and the first one she narrates after being given a name. Mildred, incidentally, is one of the most commonly appearing names in the DMP canon: I count no fewer than nine characters named Mildred.36 I would try to rank DMP-character names in order of commonness, but this is somewhat difficult—there are seven different Melvins in DMP, but there’re also three Melvyns, Melvinge (of the Megaverse), and the town of Melvinville.37 How do you sum that? The winner would probably be William/Bill/Billy, which is boring. There are sixteen characters named Reynold, but fourteen of them are lizards, which probably shouldn’t count.

In any event, the thing I want to mention about Ice Cream Larry, a book where every character starts rich and gets richer, is that Larry is shown reading a volume by Herman Melville; a few pages later he quotes Herman Melville: “I would prefer not to,” he says, quoting Bartelby the Scrivener. But Bartelby the Scrivener is not the book he’s been reading!

Mildred also mentions that (like Martin) she does not own Larry. They’re pals. And indeed, Larry seems like a nice guy, but the truth is I find him a little boring.

•87 Sleepover Larry (2007 picture book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Larry invites his friends to a traditional sleepover ala humans.]

And here we come to the end of the Larry books. This is Larry’s final appearance, as well as the final appearance of Irving and Muktuk, as their final book (Bad Bears Go Visiting (#64)) came out a few months earlier in 2007.

The painting Larry does in Bongo Larry (#85) now hangs on the wall of the…I guess it’s the lobby of the Hotel Larry, although the reader may be forgiven for assuming it’s the Frobishers’ rumpus room. Larry asserts (in the book’s opening sentence) that he lives at a hotel, but there’s not much hotel to be seen in this book. Larry’s friends come to a sleepover, and their options, in a building presumably full of beds, are sleeping in the back yard or on the floor of Mildred Frobisher’s room.

(The first song the bears dance to is about a prostitute with syphilis. I am here to ruin your childhoods.)

Sleepover Larry, like many or most of the Larry books, is strange in the sense that it is hardly strange at all. It is the conventional tale of a conventional sleepover, except that there are polar bears involved. It is, like many or most of the Larry books, pleasant enough, if you’re into pleasant.

What I really want to talk about, though is: Jill Pinkwater gives Larry a distinctive way of lounging on couches—you can see Martin Frobisher start imitating his slouch in this book. Well, in the third illustration in Looking for Bobowicz (#100), Bruno Ugg is slouching just like Larry.

And there is another commonality between the two books. Sleepover Larry is co-dedicated (alongside the dog Lulu) to Starr LaTronica, “a great librarian.” Looking for Bobowicz featured a crazed (but possibly great?) librarian named Starr Lakawanna.

Lakawanna: named for the Hoboken ferry terminal; but the near-rhyme is obvious.

•88 Big Bob and the Winter Holiday Potato (1999 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Big Bob and Big Gloria stage a play about a new winter-themed holiday franchise.]

I don’t really like the Big Bob books. I’ll complain about them later. For the moment, I’ll say I don’t really like the beginning of Big Bob and the Winter Holiday Potato, but then we get the play Bob and Gloria write, “A Visit from Potato Claus.” This play is just weird enough to be good. The astronauts and the terrible gifts literally ordered from a catalog for delivery—this is the play the Dada Ducks (#2) would have written if they were seven years old and still untouched by cynicism.

•89 Bear and Bunny (2015 picture book illustrated by Will Hillenbrand)

[A bear and a bunny look for a pet they can joint adopt.]

In “The Confessions of Pinkwater,” a surreal appendix to the Young Adults volume (#2), a repentant DMP, aggrieved over his corrupting influence on the minds of youth, vows in the future to write “acceptable books about cute furry animals” or, alternatively, “high schools in California with really good athletic programs and uniformly attractive students.” Well, it took him thirty years or so, but…

I don’t think the California military school in Neddiad (#15) quite counts in fulfillment of this vow, but here we are at Bear and Bunny. Indeed, DMP finally managed to produce some acceptable books about cute furry animals. There’s nothing wrong with them, and the art by Will Hillenbrand is, indeed, cute. But I don’t really understand them.

This is the sequel to the tonally similar Bear in Love (#91), and I rate this one a little higher because…I don’t know, I like frogs?

Incidentally, the fact that DMP has written two completely unrelated books, one titled Bear and Bunny and one titled Bad Bears and a Bunny (#63)…I can’t wrap my head around that.

•90 Cone Kong: The Scary Ice Cream Giant (2001 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Captain Charles Handsome, a walrus, captures a gigantic ice cream cone to show off back in civilization.]

I’ve complained before (#54), perhaps unfairly, about anthropomorphic animals cluttering up DMP books. Well, they’re back, and this time they’re walruses. It just doesn’t seem to work for me, these walruses, but in Cone Kong walking, talking walruses are practically the whole gag.

Not quite the whole gag, though, because there’s also a walking, roaring ice cream cone. In the monster-movie spinoff tradition of Frankenbagel Monster (#39), Wempires (#22), and I Was a Second Grade Werewolf (#55), here we have King Kong reimagined as a tasty frozen treat. The only problem is I’m not sure we gain by the reimagining, by the ice cream or the walruses.

On a side note, the Big City, whence Cone Kong is transported, could well be (which might explain the walruses) the Big City from Borgel (#11), a strange place somewhere out in time, space, and the other. Of course, it could also be the Big City from Bad Bears in the Big City (#62), which would be Bayonne, New Jersey. Big City as a term is a little vague, I guess. A polar bear and a goose are among the reporters there.

•91 Bear in Love (2012 picture book illustrated by Will Hillenbrand)

[A bear receives mysterious secret-admirer–style gifts.]

DMP has this in common with Thomas Pynchon: They’re both fond of filling their books with songs that I cannot quite make scan.

Perhaps DMP has a lot in common with Pynchon. Someone once told me that they thought a thread ran from DMP through Vonnegut, and Shea & Wilson’s Illuminatus!, to Pynchon (and I immediately designed my first novel, Immortal Lycanthropes, to fill a perceived gap between DMP and Vonnegut). But Bear in Love, songs aside, has nothing to do with Pynchon. It hardly even has anything to do with DMP!

It’s not a bad book. The drawings are cute. Its sequel is Bear and Bunny (#89), and that’s a spoiler. Bear in Love. It’s fine.

•92 Mrs. Noodlekugel (2012 children’s book illustrated by Adam Stower)

[A brother and sister meet an eccentric and magical old lady.]

There are (for our purposes) three tiers of DMP books with no bright-line transitions. There are the huge mass of great ones, tapering down, I guess, into the good ones. There are the ones I dog, canting critic that I am. And then there are those I simply do not understand. Perhaps they are written for an audience that is not me (you know, like children or something). Perhaps they are simply outside my spheres of interest. There’s nothing wrong with them, necessarily, but I get little if anything out of them.

It’s probably more insulting to an author to say “your book meant nothing to me” than “I hated your book.” But I don’t mean to be insulting. Only the ancient curse that compels me to read DMP books, all DMP books, and rank DMP books, all DMP books, could get me to write these little pieces on the books. But cursed (like Captain Seymour Van Straaten (#37)) I am. So here we are.

I don’t understand Mrs. Noodlekugel.

All the ingredients of a DMP book are there: the hidden garden left over from before the apartment buildings went up. The mysterious old lady. The talking cat. But it all seems like it’s run through the filter of a different author’s vision. Nothing feels like DMP. Mrs. Noodlekugel is a collection of magical granny motifs but never transcends them. There’s nothing Old World about her, nothing threatening or truly strange. Angela Lansbury plays her in a Disney direct-to-video movie. Compare her to Uncle Borgel (#11), or Melvin the shaman (#15), or even Mush (#72 & 52), to see how dull she is even though she is constantly trying harder.

This is from the about the author from Mrs. Noodlekugel: “Daniel Pinkwater lives on a cute little farm in New York State and writes, and writes, and writes because it is so much fun.” Clearly, if someone can write anything that twee in a DMP book, something has gone wrong.

•93 Mrs. Noodlekugel and Four Blind Mice (2013 children’s book illustrated by Adam Stower)

[Mrs. Noodelkugel’s mice get glasses and her cat gets a father.]

I can’t jimmy the Noodlekugel books apart, so I just put them in a row, in the order they came. That is perhaps unjust. Perhaps this book is better than its predecessor. The first Mrs. Noodlekugel book suffered from having almost nothing happening. Like Young Larry (#83), the book simply set up a situation, perhaps in the hope that that situation could later on be exploited.

This, then, is the exploitation. It is, at least, weird: There’s one story going, in which mice visit an optometrist, and then the oldest and hoariest plot twist, something out of Tobias Smollett if not Boccaccio, pops up more or less from nowhere. I guess that’s cool.

Still, though, the tone is all wrong. It feels like someone described a DMP book to an amanuensis who didn’t quite understand what was being said and then ate five bags of Twizzlers. I hope this simile makes sense.

Nevertheless, as though to prove me wrong, Mrs. Noodlekugel at one point says, “It’s a mighty hard road from Lynchburg to Danville, and you have to make a three-mile grade,” which is a direct quote from the old folk ballad “Wreck of the Old 97,” exactly the kind of song Vic Trola would play on WRJR (in Looking for Bobowicz (#100)).

•94 Mrs. Noodlekugel and Drooly the Bear (2015 children’s book illustrated by Adam Stower)

[Mrs. Noodlekugel’s husband shows up and fails to train a bear.]

Adam Stower is a good artist with a pleasant cartoony style, but he keeps drawing people smiling. They smile while they’re eating and they smile while they’re talking and they smile while they play Monopoly and they smile while they listen to music. No one could possibly smile this much. Nick and Maxine look at all times like they are auditioning for a commercial. They look like they’re trying to avoid being wished into a cornfield. This is emblematic of my problem with the books.

I should mention that the size, design, and trade dress of all three Noodlekugel books is charming. Gotta give some credit there. Also, my kids like these books, and they are the ones who are supposed to like these books. My daughter says they remind her of Betty MacDonald’s Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books. I disagree, but fine. Mrs. Noodlekugel is fine. I’d probably like her more if DMP’s name were not on her covers, regimenting my expectations.

In 2015, DMP published two books: this one and Bear and Bunny (#89). Then, for almost five years, there was complete silence. It seemed that DMP’s canon had stopped sounding, with a whimper and with two bear books, which makes a nice sort of bookend with Bear’s Picture (DMP’s opus #2) (#65) but is still a disappointing way to leave the stage: tweely.

Fortunately for everyone, after that hiatus, DMP was back, with (forgive the cliché) a return to form. Five books in five years in the 2020s (so far) and all of them good to great.

The structure of this list, which inevitably must end with the 104th-best, which is to say worst, DMP book guarantees a whimper not a bang of an ending; but this structure is not the true story. After Drooly the Bear there’s more to come, and all of it has been better than Drooly the Bear. Do not despair, I say, although it looks like despair is coming. In five years we’ll get Vampires of Blinsh (#28).

Ars vincit omnia!

•95 Fat Camp Commandos Go West (2002 children’s book illustrated by Andy Rash)

[Three plucky fat kids seek to heal the wounds in a Western town while simultaneously welcoming alien visitors.]

Everything I want to say about this book is perhaps implicit in my review of Fat Camp Commandos (#102), the one where they do not go west, below, so I’ll just say I rated this one higher because it has more aliens, especially fan favorite Rolzup.

Pity poor Andy Rash, who got the opportunity to illustrate two DMP books, and these were the two he got.

•96 Wallpaper from Space (1996 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[A boy’s new space-themed wallpaper beckons him in a dream, and he travels through dream-space with and as mice.]

Wallpaper from Space is the third in an obvious if only implicit trilogy‚ the boy-in-space books—and perhaps that is its problem. Guys from Space (#17) is more charming; Ned Feldman, Space Pirate (#25) is funnier; it leaves Wallpaper from Space nowhere to maneuver, and perhaps little reason to exist.

The book starts out strong, with a grumpy Steve—moodier than most DMP characters, and therefore automatically interesting—lobbying for wallpaper that contains lions eating people or alligators eating people or people eating people but settles for space. That’s good! But the space adventures that follow are simply more arbitrary and less interesting than the two other space books. The mice are no match for the space guys, let alone Captain Bugbeard. And the final reveal, that this has all been a dream, is not the kind of reveal we should be getting.

My five-year old (who likes this book more than I do, which I suppose is just) claims that the picture of a murine Steve at the end indicates that our hero is still a mouse after waking, and his parents simply do not realize it (which might indicate the respect my five-year old has for parents’ intellects). I guess that’s one take, but it doesn’t make me like the book more.

The song the mice sing (“chunk chunk”) is similar to the song the frogs sing (“gunk gagunk”) in Wizard Crystal (#14). If there is a competition, though, between their two books—mice vs frogs—the result has been decided millennia ago in the pseudohomeric Batrachomyomachia.

Frogs win.

•97 Big Bob and the Thanksgiving Potatoes (1998 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Big Bob and Big Gloria pretend to be vegans to get out of participating in a Thanksgiving-themed activity.]

So I was saying before that I don’t like the Big Bob books. I don’t like their impossibly benign second-grade classrooms. I don’t like Bob and Gloria’s smug faces. I don’t like their teacher’s grandiose claims (cowboy, race car driver etc.). I don’t like everyone’s on-point dialogue. I don’t like the weird Structuralist (?) opposition between big and small students, and I don’t like the facile way it is resolved. But most of all, I do not think potatoes are inherently funny the way avocados or eggplants are.

For a moment, at least, as this one opens, it looked like the books were going to be okay. Big Bob cries (over being big) and his mother tells him not to cry, because he’s a big boy. That’s good.

But then comes Mr. Salami, whose name isn’t even as funny as Mrs. Heatseat (Author’s Day (#16)) or Mrs. Hotdogbun (Second Grade Ape (#76)), and I don’t like anything that follows.

•98 Big Bob and the Magic Valentine’s Day Potato (1999 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Bob and Gloria plan a holiday surprise but then get outsurprised in turn. It’s Valentine’s Day, Big Bob!]

Holiday pranksters Bob and Gloria make up a Valentine’s Day tradition and then, like characters from Foucault’s Pendulum, find that the thing they invented has come true. I guess it’s cute, the way young readers can spot the sartorial clues that reveal the identity of the potato. Everyone sure goes to a lot of effort. Just reading this book makes me tired.

Jill Pinkwater’s cover illustration, with Bob and Gloria dancing with a potato, is the best thing about this book.

•99 Big Bob and the Halloween Potatoes (2000 children’s book illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Bob and Gloria subvert (?) Halloween by wearing potato-themed costumes?]

I guess I should say there’s nothing particularly odious about the Big Bob books, including this one. Most children’s books, and I’ve been compelled to read, out loud, a great many children’s books, so I speak with authority, are worse. But the inherent conflict in Big Bob and the Halloween Potatoes, the thesis that the problem with most holidays is that they are not potatoey enough, the antithesis that authority must impose some structure of tradition upon culture or there will be nothing but nihilism and anarchy, and the synthesis represented by dressing up as a french fry…this just leaves me cold. DMP books almost never leave me cold! and although there may exist DMP books to which I harbor more strident objections, at least objections get you hot!

•100 Looking for Bobowicz (2004 middle-grade novel illustrated by Jill Pinkwater)

[Nick Itch moves to Hoboken, makes friends, and loses his father’s comic book collection, which naturally he must then track down.]

DMP characters, even the young ones, tend to look towards old media for their entertainment. Rat famously has a crush on James Dean (#7), a man who died before she was born, and of course the whole conceit of the books she appears in is that teenagers can’t get enough of second-run movies. According to my calculations, based on all movies named as playing at the Snark, the mean release year of a Snark film is 1940.38 The first Snarkout Boys book came out in 1982.

And that’s just movies! DMP characters’ comic book taste leans (regardless of when they live) towards the Golden Age. And the music! Norman Bleistift’s favorite song is Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” (#103). Sleepover Larry is about bears dancing to ’30s jazz records (#87)—the kind of thing Lumpo Smythe-Finkel would listen to (#36). And then there’s Looking for Bobowicz.

Three kids improbably obsessed with a pirate radio station that plays “old blues, cowboy songs, hillbilly music, stuff like that” (even more improbably followed by “it’s cool, isn’t it?”)—this sounds great! Add to that the fact that this is the story of how three kids come to read and love classic literature through the mediation of Classic Comic Books—I should be unable to resist this book. And yet I do resist it. Despite some nice touches, it is by far my least favorite DMP novel (everything that ranks below it is less than novel length).

I guess this is a spoiler, but it’s hardly a spoiler because it’s screamingly obvious pretty fast and probably alluded to in a subtitle, but Looking for Bobowicz is a sequel to The Hoboken Chicken Emergency (#46), a better book that came out over a quarter century before. The main character of Chicken Emergency, you will recall, is Arthur Bobowicz. Really a lot of pages in this sequel are spent on newspaper articles that summarize the earlier book. It’s cool that Steve Nickelson is quoted in the newspapers, and it’s even cooler that Steve gets called a “popular man-about-town and patron of the arts,” but it still goes on too long. And then there’s the fact that the book is a mystery. The mystery is bogus. I know it’s a kid’s book, but it’s bogus even for a kid’s book. The clues are weak. The solutions are obvious. Honestly, no sequel released twenty-seven years after an original has ever been very good.

Perhaps the title is supposed to be a backhanded reference to the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer? This book is, by my count, one of five books in the DMP canon to use the slang term “emmis,” a favorite of mine.39 I think I’m flailing around trying to avoid admitting that I didn’t really like a book I kind of should have. Jolly Roger radio is a great name for a pirate radio station, though. And as the attentive reader will have learned (because of the tyranny of numerical order) the sequel to this sequel is better.

The flap copy claims that this book (much like Wingman (#10)) is “practically true.”

•101 Yo-Yo Man (2007 picture book illustrated by Jack E. Davis)

[A young boy practices yoing so he can win a yo-yo contest.]

Look, I’ve rocked a baby or two in my life. I’ve walked the dog. I’m an old hand at yo-yos so perhaps I was expecting too much from this, DMP’s foray into the underexplored genre of yo-yo fiction. But even by the slight standards of picture books, this story is slight. An unnamed narrator wants to be good at spelling and yo-yos. He practices until he is good at spelling and yo-yos. Happy ending! Thus is the bully foiled.

“Everyone admires me” is probably the worst sentence even to appear in a DMP book. Let me assure everyone that if yo-yo and spelling excellence were the route to admiration I would have led a very different life.

Yo-Yo Man is based on as essay from Chicago Days / Hoboken Nights (#33), with the interesting part of the essay, the ending, made worse. Still, Jack E. Davis’s art is always fun.

O brave soul who has read this far,

consider checking a book of mine out

•102 Fat Camp Commandos (2001 children’s book illustrated by Andy Rash)

[Three kids break out of fat camp and get revenge on the world of the thin.]

Fat Camp Commandos is the story of three fat kids who go around being unpleasant to skinny people. On the one hand, that’s terrible. But it’s primarily terrible in the world of didacticism, in which we are not. We are in the world of art. The question is never whether this action is morally wrong; the question is whether it is bad art.

The Commandos may be evil, but they are evil in a tradition of evil; they are anarchists committing propaganda by the deed; as they lob a bomb into Café Terminus or Haymarket Square, they shout “There are no innocent bourgeois!” They are DMP’s horrible id, and the id is always dangerous.

And make no mistake, readers view these kids as dangerous. Browse some online reviews and watch the Grundies clutching at their pearls because, heavens!, this book encourages children to be fat! But literature should be dangerous. We’ve lost sight, in our cautious age, of the daring virtue of someone like R. Crumb just groping for a new taboo to put in his underground comics. On some level DMP must want revenge, and he wants revenge on the world so he chose to write a children’s book about it. That’s so bonkers it might be good.

But then there’s Mavis Goldfarb. Mavis Goldfarb is the worst character in DMP’s or perhaps anyone’s canon. She possesses every possible annoying person trait: She’s an energetic, self-righteous, confident go-getter. She’s even rich! Her goddamn chauffeur enables all her bad behavior! The only non-annoying things about her are the fact that she’s an “A-plus student and Celtic witch,” and of course those are the first two things she says about herself, which spoils it. It’s okay to be an A-plus student and Celtic witch, but of you go around introducing yourself as an A-plus student and Celtic witch, it is too late for you.

All of this would be all right if the book didn’t lean so hard into making Mavis cool. She’s like orgymonger Alan Plotkin (from Afterlife Diet (#18)) without the irony (and honestly even with the irony, Plotkin is pushing it; at least he’s a quack!). “I can do a hundred push-ups and then beat you at tennis” is the kind of thing Mavis (quite literally) says to her friends and they put up with it, maybe because she’s rich.

I can’t believe she’s also rich! Unendurable! Who’s dying at Café Terminus now?

•103 Attila the Pun (1981 middle-grade novella)

[A bad magician accidentally summons the ghost of Atilla the Hun’s brother, a terrible comedian, to Hoboken.]

For much of my life Attila the Pun was my least favorite DMP book, but every time I’d go to reread it I’d start out doubting my harsh judgment. It begins well enough. There’s a lot of new information about the life of Norman Bleistift, the narrator of both this book and The Magic Moscow (#58) (to which this is a sequel), his living quarters and family. It’s nicely detailed, and then it disappears, never to be brought up again. Perhaps you’re wondering about Norman’s siblings, DMP hints, and by gum, I guess I was. Even if it doesn’t directly affect the story, it provides background on Norman’s character, right? But then Norman mostly disappears from the book as a character. The book is soon more or less hijacked by a couple of stronger characters, which wouldn’t be so bad except it leaves me wondering why I bothered to learn about the Bleistift family, and the nieces and nephews, and the moose head on the wall…

But the first of those characters is great! Lamont Penumbra, a spoof of The Shadow (aka Lamont Cranston)—he’s a would-be wizard who lucks into Steve Nickelson’s collection of superfluous magic books. (“I, myself, am only interested in comic books and science fiction,” Steve explains.) But then there’s Attila.

Attila is one of DMP’s favorite historical figures, name-checked, by my count, in no fewer than six books (including this one).40 That’s fewer than Mozart,41 but still respectable! This Attila is not the famous Attila, though, but his brother Bleda (a real historical personage; everyone just calls him Attila). And he’s insufferable, by which I mean he tells bad jokes.

The thing is—usually I love bad jokes. I love Charlie Weaver and Ernie Bushmiller and Can You Top This. Sometimes a DMP character can successfully tell a bad joke (such as Lumpo Smythe-Finkel’s 9W joke in Crazy in Poughkeepsie (#36) or the Theseus Club in Norb (#12)), but Attila’s jokes are just too bad. They are not bad enough to be parodically bad, whereupon they might come around and be good again. They are in the uncanny valley of humor.

Unlike Mavis Goldfarb (#102), Attila is supposed to be annoying, which is some consolation. But the book’s resolution to the problem (what do you do with an annoying Hun ghost?) is even more annoying, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be. It’s an unserious solution. This might be intentional and thematic—the book ends as lamely and childishly as one of Attila’s jokes, but mere intentionality will not save it. We’re near the end of the line here, folks.

•104 Fat Elliot and the Gorilla (1974 children’s book)

[With the help of an imaginary gorilla, Fat Elliot becomes Elliot.]

Here we go. No surprises here.

The dedication to Second-Grade Ape (#76) reads “To Bushman—With apologies for last time.” Last time was Fat Elliot and the Gorilla, the least DMPish book ever written (its dedication: “To Bushman, thanks pal”). It was early on in his career, when the cover still says “by Manus Pinkwater.” Who knew how things would go?

The theme of Fat Elliot is, quite explicitly, “You Don’t Have to Be What You Don’t Want to Be,” and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’d good advice. If this were a book about sexual identity, or saying non serviam, or just going off and making art (or whatever), I’d be dancing a jig in favor of it.

But I don’t have to be in favor of the theme for the book to be good. We are (like Morty and Ray (#69)) judging artworks on esthetic, not moral, merit. This book is about how Elliot is fat and therefore bad, and how he gets thin and therefore good, and in the context of the remainder of the DMP canon this is an unusual (to say the least) choice. But a fatphobic book isn’t necessarily a bad book. Every book you’ve ever read and loved that was written before Fat Elliot is probably at least implicitly fatphobic. Fat Elliot has its problems (or it wouldn’t be #104 on this list) but Elliot’s decision not to be fat cannot be one of them.

In fact, the problem with Fat Elliot is that there’s nothing in it aside from Elliot’s decision not to be fat. The book is relentless! It’s boring! It’s self-righteous! It’s simplistic! Elliot didn’t have to be what he didn’t want to be, but it turned out his desires were conventional and dull. The plot is just Elliot getting thin. That’s the plot. The gorilla and the scale and the world conspire to be so annoying that Elliot becomes thin just to get away from them. The result is an annoying book.

It would be interesting to learn if Elliot’s gorilla-technique could help people in other difficult situations. I’ll never know. The only good thing about this book is that it sticks in the craw of that annoying twerp (#102) Mavis Goldfarb.

Conclusion?

I’m not sure I made some things clear enough. I think DMP is a major writer, one of the great American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century—my suggestions for his only possible rivals at the moment would probably make me look weirder than I want to look, so I’ll forbear. Perhaps DMP’s focus on “unserious” genres may obscure his qualities to the higher of brows, but surely now that we are poptimists, now that the high/low divide has been collapsed into a nihilistic rubble that Camus’s Caligula could only dream of, now we can see what DMP has achieved.

Also, I really like how often DMP books end with the main character anticipating further adventures. All books should be like that.

I think I probably ranked Yobgorgle and V. o. Blinsh too low, Ducks! and Artsy-Smartsy too high. Certainly I could noodle with the rankings obsessively for the rest of my life; too late, though, and now I’m stuck!

Dear reader, I hope you go and read some (all? in order?) DMP books. I wish I believed the world were as benign, or even as fun, as DMP makes it look. Me—still awaiting the state-26 revelation that will let me see the jewel-encrusted Buddha-field here, in this worldwide volcano. In the meantime, I’ll make art, which does the least harm

(My ongoing art project, collages of quotations, updates weekly. Some of my favorite examples are below)

The complete list

1. 1979 Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars

2. 1985 Young Adults

3. 1976 Lizard Music

4. 1998 The Education of Robert Nifkin

5. 1977 The Big Orange Splot

6. 1989 Fish Whistle: Commentaries, Uncommentaries, and Vulgar Excesses

7. 1982 The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death

8. 2012 Bushman Lives!

9. 1981 The Worms of Kukumlima

10. 1975 Wingman

11. 1990 Borgel

12. 1992 Norb

13. 1984 Ducks!

14. 1973 Wizard Crystal

15. 2007 The Neddiad

16. 1993 Author’s Day

17. 1989 Guys from Space

18. 1995 The Afterlife Diet

19. 1980 Java Jack

20. 1997 The Magic Goose

21. 1981 Tooth-Gnasher Superflash

22. 1991 Wempires

23. 1986 The Muffin Fiend

24. 1984 Devil in the Drain

25. 1994 Ned Feldman, Space Pirate

26. 2010 Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl

27. 1979 Pickle Creature

28. 2020 Vampires of Blinsh

29. 1978 The Last Guru

30. 1984 The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror

31. 2020 Adventures of a Dwergish Girl

32. 1985 The Moosepire

33. 1991 Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights

34. 1980 The Wuggie Norple Story

35. 2025 Jules, Penny & the Rooster

36. 2022 Crazy in Poughkeepsie

37. 1979 Yobgorgle, Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario

38. 1998 Rainy Morning

39. 1986 The Frankenbagel Monster

40. 1975 Three Big Hogs

41. 1974 Magic Camera

42. 2022 Kat Hats

43. 2000 The Lunchroom of Doom

44. 2010 I Am the Dog

45. 2006 Bad Bear Detectives

46. 1977 The Hoboken Chicken Emergency

47. 1977 The Blue Thing

48. 1982 Slaves of Spiegel: A Magic Moscow Story

49. 1985 Jolly Roger: A Dog of Hoboken

50. 1979 Return of the Moose

51. 1977 Fat Men from Space

52. 2002 Mush’s Jazz Adventure

53. 2000 The Magic Pretzel

54. 1982 Roger’s Umbrella

55. 1983 I Was a Second Grade Werewolf

56. 2001 Irving and Muktuk: Two Bad Bears

57. 1970 The Terrible Roar

58. 1980 The Magic Moscow

59. 1975 Blue Moose

60. 2005 The Artsy Smartsy Club

61. 2001 Meets the Hound of the Basketballs

62. 2003 Bad Bears in the Big City

63. 2005 Bad Bears and a Bunny

64. 2007 Bad Bears Go Visiting

65. 1972 Bear’s Picture

66. 2001 Meets Dorkula

67. 2006 Dancing Larry

68. 1988 Aunt Lulu

69. 2003 The Picture of Morty and Ray

70. 1993 Spaceburger: A Kevin Spoon and Mason Mintz Story

71. 1989 Uncle Melvin

72. 1995 Mush, a Dog from Space

73. 2002 Meets Oliver Twit

74. 1976 Around Fred’s Bed

75. 1991 Doodle Flute

76. 1998 Second-Grade Ape

77. 2010 Beautiful Yetta the Yiddish Chicken

78. 2014 Beautiful Yetta’s Hanukkah Kitten

79. 1992 The Phantom of the Lunch Wagon

80. 1998 Wolf Christmas

81. 2009 The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There

82. 2001 Uncle Boris in the Yukon and Other Shaggy Dog Stories

83. 1997 Young Larry

84. 1997 At the Hotel Larry

85. 1998 Bongo Larry

86. 1999 Ice Cream Larry

87. 2007 Sleepover Larry

88. 1999 Big Bob and the Winter Holiday Potato

89. 2015 Bear and Bunny

90. 2001 Cone Kong: The Scary Ice Cream Giant

91. 2012 Bear in Love

92. 2012 Mrs. Noodlekugel

93. 2013 Mrs. Noodlekugel and Four Blind Mice

94. 2015 Mrs. Noodlekugel and Drooly the Bear

95. 2002 Fat Camp Commandos Go West

96. 1996 Wallpaper from Space

97. 1998 Big Bob and the Thanksgiving Potatoes

98. 1999 Big Bob and the Magic Valentine’s Day Potato

99. 2000 Big Bob and the Halloween Potatoes

100. 2004 Looking for Bobowicz

101. 2007 Yo-Yo Man

102. 2001 Fat Camp Commandos

103. 1981 Attila the Pun: A Magic Moscow Story

104. 1974 Fat Elliot and the Gorilla

As you may have heard, I write books for a living, and when you write books, getting negative reviews is just part of the game. Here are two mediocre reviews for Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods I pulled off Amazon:

Of course, some people just genuinely don’t like my books

and that’s fine. It’s fine. That’s part of the game. And, honestly, in my case, when I get a stinging review, I remind myself I deserve it, because I personally am horribly cruel when I write reviews.

I tend to have emotional reactions to things like bad cinematography, bad graphic design, and especially bad books, by which I mean books I don’t like; and much like a petulant child I lash out at whatever that has hurt me. I also write positive reviews of books I like, mind you, but these fawning, love-drenched reviews are never as popular as my pure spleen.

Probably the mature thing would be to calm myself down and (subsequently) suppress my record of cruelty, but I have never once in my life calmed down. And so I have elected to put my cruelty on display for all to see. Please read below my savagings of others’ works, works they slaved over and loved as their own children, and share in either my or their pain.

Before we begin I should mention that this week, Christmas special, two of my books

a paranoid thriller about an asexual mathematician
and
a paranoid thriller about shapeshifting teens

are on a special 99¢ Kindle deal! Also, all my books (without exception) make great gifts, and if you write a review of one I will send you a free sketch on an index card to paste in your book (or frame). Some restrictions inevitably apply.

I mean, I hope the review you write isn’t like one of these below, but fair is fair.

•1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

1491 (the book) is admittedly full of interesting tidbits, but whenever its author steps back to try to connect them into a larger picture, he inevitably trips over his own confusion. This flaw is so poisonous to the quality of the book, that I feel compelled to demonstrate said flaw by pulling a few examples from the first couple chapters and then assuring you, the prospective reader, that the entire book is like this. The entire book is this dumb, just a jumble of misguided passages between the facts, again and again, all sweaty attempts to blow minds without even bothering to set the charges.

Here, as an example and presented in its entirety, is a paragraph from 1491’s introduction:

“Advertisements still celebrate nomadic, ecologically pure Indians on horseback chasing bison in the Great Plains of North America, but at the time of Columbus the great majority of Native Americans could be found south of the Río Grande. They were not nomadic, but built up and lived in some of the world’s biggest and most opulent cities. Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms. Others subsisted on fish and shellfish. As for the horses, they were from Europe; except for llamas in the Andes, the Western hemisphere had no beasts of burden. In other words, the Americas were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously imagined” (p. 17).

What are to make of this? There are a bunch of true facts that absolutely no one has disputed for centuries (the Indian population was much denser in the south; horses came from Europe; the opulent cities as testified by Cortes and Pizarro, etc.) followed by an “in other words” and a complete non sequitur. Although plains Indians hunted on horseback, other Indians at various times and various places did not; therefore “researchers” had “previously” been wrong.

“New revelations” the title promises us, and provides old ones; but then you get the feeling Mann will sacrifice anything to make a sale. “According to William I. Woods…the region could have supported as many as 400,000 inhabitants, at least in theory, making it one of the bigger population centers in the world” (p. 29). “Could have.” “As many as.” “In theory.” If my vague weaseling happens to be true, then the result just might be a startling fact! They don’t even let you get away with this kind of talk on Wikipedia.

Here’s another puzzler: “Every European and Asian culture since [Sumer], no matter how disparate in appearance, stands in Sumer’s shadow. Native Americans, who left Asia long before agriculture, missed out on the bounty. ‘They had to do everything on their own,’ Crosby said to me. Remarkably, they succeeded” (p. 19). Look, don’t tell Erich von Daniken, but Asia also had to do it on their own, because Asia had to spawn Sumer. Sumer had to do it on its own! Remarkably, Sumer succeeded. This is just silly!

This is from chapter two, on legends of the Inkas’ origin:

“In one of the oral tales recorded by the Spanish Jesuit Bernabé Cobo, the Inka originated with a family of four brothers and four sisters who left Lake Titicaca for reasons unknown and wandered until they came upon what would become the future Inka capital, Qosqo (Cusco, in Spanish). Cobo, who sighed over the ‘extreme ignorance and barbarity’ of the Indians, dismissed such stories as ‘ludicrous.’ Nonetheless, archaeological investigation has generally borne them out: the Inka seem indeed to have migrated to Qosqo from somewhere else, perhaps Lake Titicaca, around 1200 A.D” (p. 75).

Here’s the thing: The Inka origin myth does, in fact, have “ludicrous” components (e.g. the autochthonous birth of the eight siblings from a cave); it’s just that Mann left them out. Then he performs this remarkably clunky sleight-of-hand: Only an idiot (he jeers) would scoff at a myth that contains this germ of truth, that peoples often arrive where they are from somewhere else. “Perhaps Lake Titicaca,” Mann adds, keeping his fingers crossed; maybe more of the myth is true. Maybe the sun fashioned them in a cave; who knows?

Some people have griped that this book is politically one-sided, but I think they’re misreading it. The goal of Mann’s text is not to rehabilitate or celebrate the Indians for social justice purposes; he just wants to pretend he’s running around overturning conventional wisdom like so many buffet tables. “Cobo got it wrong,” he sings, just so he can pretend to have the marvelous riposte: turns out the myth is actually true, guys! But the myth is clearly not actually true. Parts of it may be true; certainly myths can contain vestiges of historical tradition; but there’s not enough evidence for that, even, so Mann throws in a “perhaps” and runs away, shouting, “Prove me wrong!”

As soon as I start to get excited, while reading 1491, by interesting facts about the Wari or the Amazon or something, Mann hops in, foot planted firmly in mouth, to make a bunch of sweeping, feebleminded guesses he immediately forgets are guesses. So much of this book is just silliness! Someone needs to edit Mann out of his own text so we can, at long last, read something not-stupid.

Free preview of Immortal Lycanthropes

(remember, the whole book is only 99¢)

•The Nazi Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill by Brad Meltzer & Josh Mensch

This is opening paragraph of The Nazi Conspiracy’s prologue: “The president is hiding.” Not just the opening sentence, mind you (although it’s also that), but also the opening paragraph.

The opening paragraph of chapter one is: “The ships have been traveling—secretly—for ten days.” Of chapter three: “America tried so hard to stay out of the war.” Chapter six starts with a paragraph of two whole sentences (“War! Oahu bombed by Japanese planes.”) but one of those sentences is one word long, so make of that what you will.

Here’re a deadening list of some other Nazi Conspiracy opening paragraphs (paragraphs, mind you), chapter by chapter:

Chapter 7: News travels fast.
” 8: Someone has to tell the Führer.
” 9: He knows how to blend in.
” 10: The press conference was a complete surprise.
” 11: “Storm and Ruin.”
” 12: Nazi spy Franz Mayr has a new mission.
” 15: There was an actual game plan.
” 16: It’s no ordinary train.
” 17: They picked Wannsee, a locality on the outskirts of Berlin.
” 18: The champagne is flowing in Wannsee.
” 19: The weapons hit the ground with a thud.
” 21: He needs a lucky break.
” 22: He looks like an ordinary teenager on a bike.
” 24: It’s just a letter.
” 25: The cross-Channel attack.
” 26: No one can say that Franz Mayr isn’t ambitious.
” 27: He’s about to be face-to-face with “The Man of Steel.”
” 28: For a while, things had been looking up for Franz Mayr.
” 29: Roosevelt and Churchill had it wrong.
” 30: The President needs to mediate.
” 31: For the intelligence chief, spy craft is a passion.
” 32: Roosevelt needs Stalin back.
” 33: Otto Skorzeny, Captain of the Waffen-SS, is bored.
” 35: For months they’ve been hunting Nazis.
” 36: The war is moving fast and there are critical decisions to make.
” 37: For Captain Otto Skorzeny, the rest of the summer is a whirlwind.
” 38: There’s new hope for the summit.
” 39: The mountain face is coming at them fast.
” 45: It starts with music.
” 46: The information sometimes comes so fast, it’s hard to know what to do with it.
” 47: Franklin Roosevelt loves the ocean.
” 48: At first, it seems too good to be true.
” 49: There’s a live torpedo headed toward the ship.
” 51: Mike Reilly is on another plane.
” 53: It’s a one-of-a-kind opportunity.
” 54: Churchill doesn’t like what he sees.
” 56: Mike Reilly isn’t the only American making arrangements for tomorrow’s summit.
” 62: Churchill still has a cold.
” 63: It’s a sword.
” 64: The NKVD have the Nazis in their crosshairs.
” 67: President Roosevelt has been gone for more than a month.
” 70: A pistol and a cyanide pill.
” 72: He was still just a kid.
” 73: No one sees it coming
” 75: The president never gets to see the end.

I only listed one-sentence opening paragraphs, and only when the sentence was short enough that I didn’t get bored typing it. Rest assured that many or most of the paragraphs not listed are something like (chapter 52) “Mike Reilly braces for the worst. He’s not wrong.” Or (chapter 61) “There are six of them out there. They’ve got one wireless radio.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with short sentences. There’s nothing wrong with short paragraphs, either, if you use them judiciously. It’s a strange default tic, though, a strange habit to return to again and again. Notice how ugly most of these sentences are; and yet each one is set alone, at the top of the page, as if to be admired for its jewel-like precision. Could anything be more vulgar?

——It turns out the answer is yes.

So often the opening paragraph invokes something akin to a moment of suspense. “He knows how to blend in.” Who? “It’s no ordinary train.” What isn’t? The entire first chapter is a long, vaguely worded description of the movement of the Japanese fleet towards Pearl Harbor, only reluctantly acknowledging at the end what these vaguenesses were describing. Ships on the move! You were probably wondering where the ships were headed, dear reader!

There’s no actual suspense, though, because nothing is less inherently suspenseful than “ships you know nothing about are moving through the ocean!” Dunh dunh dunh! It’s a sign pointing towards suspense, halfheartedly inserted to ape the conventions of fiction under the assumption that readers will revolt if anyone admits for one moment they are not being merely entertained. And yet such half-hearted insertions make up nearly the whole book! The vulgar coyness of “The weapons hit the ground with a thud” or “He needs a lucky break” is all but unendurable. A workmanlike sentence such as “No one can say that Franz Mayr isn’t ambitious.” looks comparatively elegant.

And yet it gets worse. The leadenness of the prose can only be conveyed by example. Here are the opening three paragraphs of Chapter 29 (I put those ¶s in just to make it clear that these are, in fact, complete paragraphs, and I'm not reformatting prose as free verse poetry):

“Roosevelt and Churchill had it wrong.¶
“They thought Stalin would be disappointed that the cross-Channel attack into northern France would be delayed a full year. But Stalin isn’t disappointed.¶
“He’s furious.¶
“[Etc.…]”

Obviously this passage is extremely bad, but notice that it is also space-wasting. That’s three paragraphs and four sentences to say that R & C had underestimated S’s wrath. This treading-water approach is endemic to the book. As an exercise, see if any chapter in the book cannot be improved by being reduced to one midlength paragraph.

Sometimes The N.C. reminds me of a student desperately trying to reach an essay’s word count by writing in circles, and sometimes The N.C. reminds me of one of those episodes of 20/20 in which they only have ninety seconds of usable footage and so spend all their time hinting at the exciting thing they’re going to show you soon while doling out their sparse wares grudgingly.

Perhaps another example will make clear how much time is wasted in this book. Behold the opening four paragraphs of chapter 53:

“It’s a one-of-a-kind opportunity.¶
“For at least a few days, the three Allied leaders will be in the same city, the same room—sometimes eating at the same table. When they’re photographed together, it might even be in a public location.¶
“For Nazi Special Forces, there’ll never be a better chance to hurt them all at once.¶
“The only question is, how do you get close enough to do it?¶”

You’ll notice that this is a fine, if inelegant and verbose, summary of the book, and I would scarcely be complaining if it had appeared on the jacket flap. But this is page 249! Everything in those paragraphs is implicit in the first 248 pages of the book! We already know the content of these paragraphs just by virtue of reading the book—or a bare summary of it, even. And yet this is neither the first nor the last time that the narrative pauses to repeat itself. Page 249’s repetition is, perhaps, especially egregious, but it is no different in kind from the constant low-level repetition that creeps the narrative its reluctant way forward.

In the end, of course, this is a book about (spoiler) an event that didn’t happen, and that may or may not have even threatened to happen. Meltzer and Mensch admit as much in their closing chapters, and I don’t begrudge them writing a book about nothing—but it should never have been a book! It should have been a five- to seven-page essay, and that essay should have had a real opening paragraph.

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•From AbFab to Zen: Paper’s Guide to Pop Culture by Kim Hastreiter & David Hershkovits

I have to admit I’m not sure (looking at the title) why a thousand-year-old Buddhist sect would be considered “pop culture,” but then I’m not as “street” as Paper Magazine is. Of course, no one's as street as “the premiere journal of all things trendsetting,” judging by their self-congratulatory introduction—except perhaps their readers, who are (I quote) “fearless innovators at ground zero, taking risks” etc. (The “ground zero” line may sound strange, but this book was written in 1999.) They also use the word “hipoisie” unironically.

Now, I am not very hip, so I’d like to take a moment to learn, from Paper, just what hipness means. Let's start with a topic I know only a little about, and would like to know more; let’s flip through these alphabetical listings to H for “Hong Kong Cinema.” Here's the entry, in toto:

“Quentin Tarantino’s legacy of video-clerk film majors with voracious appetites for the international and the obscure led to the discovery of the balletic violence and staccato editing style of director John Woo and the Hong Kong school of cinema. Woo came to America in 1996 to direct Broken Arrow, starring John Travolta and Christian Slater, followed by the gorgeous Face/Off with Travolta and Nicolas Cage. Hong Kong stars Michelle Yeoh, Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-Fat have all translated well at the box-office.”

It’s easy to pick this entry apart for its errors and omissions and it use of the tired cliche “balletic violence,” but these problems are all overshadowed by the fact that an entry marked “Hong Kong Cinema” mentions one American director, one Hong Kong director, three American actors, three Hong Kong actors, two American movies, and no Hong Kong movies. Surely there’s something wrong here. The year, remember is 1999; have you ever met anyone who knew less about Hong Kong cinema than these people in 1999? The fact that the primary concerns are making references your parents would understand and gauging how actors do “at the box office” is, it turns out, emblematic of the rest of the book.

The format of the book itself may be part of the problem. The entries are “sushi-sized pieces of delectable information” (shudder; their phrase), too small to convey any real content. But the content each does contain is essentially on the level of a press release. What are we to make of the assertion that two members of the B-52s “have both put out solo records that have been eagerly scooped up by their adoring fans”? I guess adoring fans are eager, but does anyone actually scoop records (presumably actually CDs back in 1999)? Or the statement that Milla Jovovich “has already conquered the worlds of modeling, music and film.” Yes, she has appeared in films; is that what they mean? These sentences are nonsense, little commercials of the sort you might’ve expected to see in Wizard Magazine or a midrange catalog. The entry on Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa ends with the fawning pronouncement: “We have not heard the last of him.” Who talks that way? Apparently it’s hard to pass through the pages of Paper without getting your ass kissed.

(The one acceptable instance: I will tolerate the otherwise spurious claim that Ian McKellan “received universal praise for his performance as James Whale” under the assumption that the brown-nosey word “universal” is a play off the name of Whale’s signature studio. All other occasions of “universal,” “omnipresent,” “peerless,” etc., are hateful.)

But of course the editors of Paper don’t want you think they are soft, and so every once in a while they take a courageous stance and dare to criticize a sacred cow by uttering some unpopular truths. For example, here’s their daring take on “Family Values”:

“A phrase coined by religious Republicans to justify the censorship of movies, rap music, TV shows, theater and anything else that offended their hypocritical selves. These tireless ideologues strive to turn back the clock to the days before words ‘women’s liberation’ were ever uttered. Leaders include the virtuous and sanctimonious Bill Bennett and the reptilian Jerry Falwell of the Liberty Federation and Liberty University.”

Now that’s telling it like it is! I’m not sure how the claim that philistine Falwell wants to censor theater makes him a hypocrite, and it’s a little weird that “virtuous” is apparently an insult now, but I’ll grant that the adjective “reptilian” is pretty funny. After that brief puncturing of hitherto idolized figures Paper then returns to business as usual, enthusing that Li’l Kim “is one of a new breed of rap superstars that like it dirty and designer all the way.” You’ve gotta be pretty cutting-edge to take on Bill Bennett!

Commerce is never far from Paper’s mind. The climactic sentence of their entry on Out magazine runs: “The crème de la crème of advertisers use Out to target the highly sought-after gay market that likes to read about everything from gay-bashing to out celebrities.” This is a wonderfully Paper sentence in the way it trundles out buying power as the staple of success, in the way it manages to flatter everyone (those elite advertisers! that desirable demographic!), and also in the way it writes itself into a corner. The lazy “everything from...to” construction is clearly supposed to wow us with the broad spectrum of gay interests, but of course it was too hard to actually think of a spectrum, so instead we get two subjects that do not, in fact, bound a very large territory under that intimidating rubric “everything.” I’m sure it’s true that lemur enthusiasts are interested in everything from lemur feeding to lemur grooming, but I'm not going to say it that way, because I would sound like an idiot. But “from...to” appears again and again in Paper, and even when they actually manage to list two diverse subjects they’re no better off. Under the entry “’Zines” Paper lists some “with strong, smart and funny voices whose content ran the gamut from gross-out summer camp stories to opinion pieces on the perfection of mint chocolate-chip ice cream.” Leaving aside that “funny voices” does not mean what Paper thinks it means, I must point out that the gamut of summer camp and ice cream, while perhaps broad, is nevertheless cloyingly stupid. They are trying so hard to think of quirky things to enumerate here that they are probably sweating.

Much of the book is just useless and lame. Try paging through and checking how many entries of this “insider’s tour” contain absolutely zero information that your square parents don’t know. How many decades will it take before someone could plausibly pick up this book and be informed by three sentences roughly outlining who O. J. Simpson is? Did you know that IPO stands for initial public offering, and “fortunes are being made on IPOs”? If you did, you know as much about the subject as the authors of this reference book.

And did anyone just plain copy edit? The IPO sentence is only one of the overuses of the passive voice in this book. “Hundreds of permissions had to be secured from photographers worldwide and each of hundreds of entries had to be written, researched, edited and fact-checked.” Or: “…the bar is raised and minds are opened.” I'm not one of those grammar-checkers who red pen every use of the passive, but come on. Also:

Page 13: “The virus was this generation’s Vietnam…”
Page 20: “Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome has been this generation’s Vietnam…”

Note how cleverly they vary the sentences, so you hardly notice you're reading the same one twice!

I fully understand that it is no longer 1999; that even back then there were innumerable splintered pop-culture communities; that Paper’s demographic is not my demographic. (There are, of course, no mentions of anime or manga in a book written in 1999 by people whose “keen sense of what’s up clues [them] in to trends, people and fashion long before they hit the mainstream,” although the entry on “multi-culti style” [sic] does mention that “Japanese kids brought their sci-fi cartoon vibe to the streets,” which might count for something.) It may well be that greed, shallowness, “star-star”-ing, celebrity obsession, bad prose, and ignorance are the building blocks of hip, and Paper is therefore just as hip as it claims when it wallows in these vices. But it’s not necessarily a fact I’d think you’d want to advertise.

And in case you were wondering:

“After the flash of the ’80s and the downfall of corporate culture, things got real as we entered the ’90s. Grassroots companies thrived, hype was frowned upon, glitzy postmodern architecture and design looked tired, and elitism and flashiness were passé. Small became big and dressing down became more chic than showing off. Aerobics and steroids gave way to yoga and pilates, and overdecoration gave way to minimalist, feng shui-designed spaces. Facing a monumental change that only happened every thousand years, spirituality seemed to be the one thing that could make folks comfortable, and even major celebrities tried to free their bloated egos though Zen Buddhist practice.”

There it is, the last entry in the book (they’re not strictly alphabetical). That lamentable string of cliches comprises, in toto, Paper’s entry on “Zen.”

•The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Stieg Larsson was sweating as he rolled a sheet into the typewriter. “Perhaps,” he thought, “if I pretend to be a feminist, I can have uncommitted sexual relationships with lots of beautiful ladies. Oh well, if it doesn’t work for me, it sure will for my Mary-Sue protagonist.”

•Agency by William Gibson

How many times is William Gibson going to write this same book? An overpadded group of characters, primarily distinguished by the clothes they wear, get shuttled like pawns through a series of minutely described tableaus. They do little and affect nothing, but are passively moved at the whim of someone very rich or powerful so that, in a disappointing climax, they may witness something boring.

In this case, it’s an AI shuttling our ostensible protagonist, the impotent Verity Jane, back and forth aimlessly for 400 pages. She rides on a motorcycle and she rides in a van; she sleeps on a couch and she sleeps in a container. She meets the same people again and again, and they give her 1. stuff or 2. rides. Everything is logistics, logistics, and if you’re dying to know how many times Verity folds her messenger bag, you will not be disappointed. Verity does nothing else, though, and if she had died on page four, nothing in the AI’s plan would have been different.

The stakes are high: The AI is trying to prevent a nuclear war. “I did it, incidentally,” the AI tosses off at one point (I’m paraphrasing from memory). “I took care of that off camera.” Phew! Thanks, AI! After moving Verity Jane back and forth a few more times, the AI spends a lot of bandwidth, money, and ingenuity to make sure the impotent protagonist is present at a coming-out party. If Verity had not been there…well, it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference. But she was there, and was privileged to stand idly by while the AI announced to the world that the AI was an AI. That's right, the climax of the book is a livestreamed press release.

I’m not sure if Gibson simply put no effort into plotting this book—insofar as nothing actually happens—or far too much effort into plotting this book: Maybe he sat down and figured out how much time it would take an AI to harvest money from crooked investments, how long the manufacture of various drones would take, etc., and felt bound to keep Verity in the air like a hot potato long enough to achieve the exact logistical orgasm he desired.

All of the above is, of course, thematic. The characters have no agency, right? Get it? Gibson has gone to this well often enough that this is clearly his worldview. “The mass and majesty of this world, all / That carries weight and always weighs the same / Lay in the hands of others.” But somehow Auden, Lovecraft, and Gloucester from King Lear manage to make the same point without being so boring. Also so pointless: Verity isn’t even a pawn, because pawns get compelled to do stuff. Pawns can be sacrificed. Verity is a MacGuffin that everybody Wants to Get/Prevent from Getting, but her only function is to be a POV character (the same is true for Wilf, the deuteragonist, btw) while other people act—and still their actions prove to be less important than off-camera AI planning no one is privy to. I mean, the AI dies and then comes back from the dead, and literally nothing that any character in the book does has an impact on either “exciting” moment. All they can do is watch as the AI explains: “Yeah, so I rigged it where I am no longer dead. I did it off camera,” and go Wow!

I think this chronic impotence is supposed to be “realistic,” but while it might be realistic to write a book about how nothing we do matters, it makes less sense to write a book about how nothing we do matters but we’re still the important center of the universe for some reason. I know the book is about time-traveling supergangsters from another dimension, so realism is not really at a premium here; I’d just settle for getting an actual story. Instead, Gibson fooled me yet again.

•Saturday Morning Mind Control by Phil Phillips

Alas, this book is not crazy enough to be great, but it’s also too dumb to be good.

For a healthy sixth sevenths of its page count, Saturday Morning Mind Control is just a rehash of secondary sources designed to prove that TV violence is bad for you. This is paint by numbers stuff: There are a couple dozen studies that always get trotted out and they’re all garbage; unreproducible axe-grindings with no double-blinds or responsible experimental cautions to be seen. Some of them demonstrate that violent TV leads to violent play, thereby proving that children cannot distinguish between pretend violence and pretend violence. Some of them involve teachers counting violent acts, which is always going to be an exercise in futility, because no teacher will ever count the violence of the state against the students. This is the problem: No TV-violence researcher ever got a result he or she didn’t want. No TV researcher has ever been surprised. All studies are carefully chosen to make sure the lab rats find the cheese. The fact that author Phil Phillips cites Fredric Wertham unironically is sufficient evidence that the studies he dredges up are a poorly vetted lot. Philips also has the duplicitous habit of slipping in studies that have nothing to do with children’s TV (or children’s media at all) whenever the honest data doesn’t say what he wants it to (for example the studies on alcohol consumption on pp. 105-6; not very child-relevant).

Worst of all, despite “stud[ying] over a thousand hours of” them, Phillips doesn’t seem to know very much about cartoons. This leads to a whole host of easily avoidable solecisms: Phillips thinks Smurfette is the result of sex change (p. 74); isn’t aware that the Chipmunks are brothers (p. 82); falls for the old urban legend that Mighty Mouse sniffs cocaine (p. 105); gets He-Man’s battlecry wrong (“For the power of Greyskyull”—that’s half He-Man, half She-Ra) (p. 121); and thinks Hong Kong Phooey is a “spin-off” of Kung Fu in the same way that The New Adventures of Gilligan is based on Gilligan’s Island (it isn’t). He also gets the title of The New Adventures of Gilligan wrong (p. 18). Also, his brief history of animation is nonsense (p. 22), and should be discarded in favor of any other source.

In a broader sense, Phillips’s ignorance leaves him confused every time context would be helpful. He cites Rocky and Bullwinkle as a series that would be easy to redub to appeal to a Japanese audience, unaware that the plots of Rocky and Bullwinkle primarily revolve around untranslatable puns. Any other series would have been a better example. When he quotes Joseph Barbera griping about being forced to make action cartoons “not out of choice,” he doesn’t have the context to understand that Barbera is probably griping because he cut his teeth on funny animal cartoons and is out of his element (also he’s really cheap, and the animation budget on Jonny Quest must have given him nightmares); Phillips drops the quote in with no context but with plenty of sinister insinuation, as though Hanna-Barbera’s programming choices were being dictated by the Rosicrucians.

At least the Rosicrucians would have been interesting. They would have been crazy. But for most of the book, Phillips is ignorant, but not crazy. He’s not even wrong. I mean, despite the nonsense that pass as studies, it’s pretty clear that TV has had an inimical effect on the American public; that it has made people gullible, dissatisfied but complacent, easily bored, prone to retreats into fantasy. I mean, something happened to America, and before the rise of social media, TV was the most obvious whipping boy (sorry, Fredric Wertham). Phillips has stumbled backwards into an approximate truth, but it’s a tedious and cliched truth. This book so full of nonsense that it almost makes me want to doubt the evidence of the last half-century of history.

Let’s look closer at that nonsense, because Phillips’s gaffes are hardly limited to the realm of animation. He is just consistently puzzled by the pop culture he can’t stop bringing up. He lists the Star Wars movies out of order (p. 161), consistently mistypes the company TSR as TSI (p. 152), and lumps underground and adult comics (such as Young Lust and Justin’s Green’s Binky Brown) together with kids’ comics (“Lulu and Jughead”) indiscriminately. This is like writing a critique of children’s movies after watching Jodorowsky and Buñuel films. It doesn’t matter how good or bad the films are—you’re still not going to learn anything about kids’ movies by watching them. Phillips’s whole concept of what comics are like is opaque to me; he says at one point, “Elektra: Assassin is perhaps the landmark comic of the overtly sexual genre” (p. 156), and I’ve been running this sentence over and over in my head, trying to make sense of it. It’s not a true statement about Elektra: Assassin; it’s not a good description of “overtly sexual” comics; it’s not a good use of the words “genre” or “landmark.” I’m curious what he was trying to say here, because no theory I’ve come up with is at all coherent.

And then, in the final part of the book, he starts to worry that cartoons will teach kids how to levitate, which is, I guess, slightly amusing. Even his occult paranoia he bungles, though. Yoda is not patterned after the Mephistopheles in The Secret Teachings of All Ages (p. 161), as a glance at the picture of Mephistopheles in that book will clearly indicate (Mephistopheles actually looks a bit like Tumi Gummi from the Gummi Bears, but I assume this is coincidence). She-Ra’s name is not taken from the goddess Isis (p. 113), which is clear because Isis is not the same person as Ra; anyway Ra is pretty common syllable (sis boom bah!), you know. In fact, She-rah is a biblical name (1 Chron. 7:24), as is He-man (1 Kings 4:31).

Probably the funniest, and also worst and most useless, part of this book, though, is the list of “acceptable” cartoons in the back pages. This carefully curated set of ten titles includes a couple of “classics” (I don’t mean they’re good necessarily, I just mean they’re canonical; I’m not griping about them), as well as no-shows like Glo Friends and Potato Head Kids, both nakedly mercenary advertisements for toy lines, and Rocky Raccoon, a cartoon I’ve never heard of; I cannot find any evidence of its existence; perhaps he meant The Raccoons.

Bonus!: There’s also a “glossary of occult terms” in case you need help understanding hard words like “horoscope” or “ghost.”

I will tolerate Phil Phillips’s loony levitation talk and even to some extent his frothing hatred of cartoons, comics, and pop culture. I will not tolerate his watching one afternoon of The CBN Family Channel and calling it “study.” I really must insist that before you express opinions on (just one example) Elektra: Assassin, you must have some understanding of what Elektra: Assassin is. Phillips has put himself in the position of a hypothetical caveman critic trying to review Kobayashi’s The Human Condition by scrawling: “It like wall paintings, but how wall paintings move?!?”

a Whit Stillman movie

“No soap, radio!”
•trad.

Of all the movies I’ve ever loved, the one I’ve had the hardest time figuring out is Damsels in Distress (2011). L’Age d’Or (1930) and The American Astronaut (2001) are too oneiric to approach rationally; Lost Highway (1997) and Primer (2004) dutifully click into place after you stop and think about them; 2001 (1968) is…less obscure than people claim it is. But Damsels in Distress does not give up its secrets easily.

I started writing things I called “movie explainers” as a bit of laugh at myself—I’m a book guy, not a movie guy—but I have hitherto tried, in my small way, to explain things. This explainer, so-called, is more hesitant. More than usual I may not know what I’m talking about.

Because Damsels in Distress is not the most famous of movies, despite the presence of several celebrities in the cast, I will offer a brief summary before we begin. If you’ve already seen the movie, this section may be de trop, but perhaps play along, anyway; perhaps there’ll be something new.

A bare plot summary

The movie: Violet is an eccentric junior at a small liberal arts college. If she is not a pathological liar, she at least tells a lot of lies. She lives with and leads a coterie of well-meaning but somewhat interfering students, including

1. Rose, who affects a British accent, appears to be terrified of men (a problem the movie does not make much of), and is paralyzed by the presence of bad odors (a problem the movie does); and
2. Heather, who is perpetually confused.

Although Rose is the one designated as suffering from “nasal shock syndrome,” all three of these friends are very sensitive to smells. They also have great faith in the healing power of scents (or at least Violet does—she expresses most of the opinions for the group). Perhaps good smells can help the depressed and suicidal patrons of the campus Suicide Prevention Center (which the three of them appear to run). If not smells, then certainly dance. The Suicide Prevention Center is putting on some kind of musical show, in which only the suicidal or certifiably depressed are permitted to participate; it also serves donuts and coffee, but, again, these are strictly for the suicidal.

Among their other goals are 1. uplifting the hapless “doufi” at the DU fraternity to some sort of civilized state and 2. getting the malodorous residents of Doar Dorm to wash. “There’s enough material here for a lifetime of social work.”

All that is merely by way of background. The movie has not started yet.

The movie starts

As movies should, Damsels in Distress begins by introducing an outsider, a sophomore transfer student named Lily. (These names are all plants, guys!) Violet and her crew recruit Lily as she in moving in, offering her a room and a role. Lily is relatively normal, and is constantly distressed, repulsed, or annoyed by Violet.

The plot of the movie follows the emotional arc of Violet’s precarious mental state. I’m not sure that fact is obvious, actually. One could just as easily assert that the film follows the romantic fortunes of Heather, Lily, and Violet. (Rose, of course, expresses no emotion towards boys except caution, and finds no romance.)

(From this point on there are spoilers. If you’ve never seen Damsels in Distress, you might want to go do it now, at least in part because nothing I am about to say will make any sense otherwise.)

Heather finds a nice boy who is just as confused as she is. Lily becomes entangled first with a French graduate student whose religious convictions require him to sodomize her and second with a “playboy or operator type” who constructs a fictional backstory for himself. We’ll call him (by perhaps his real name) Fred (a name Whit Stillman has used for a “big personality” character before).

But the movie belongs to Violet. Violet’s boyfriend, the dim and unpleasant Frank, cheats on her with a depressed woman perhaps recently rescued from suicide (probably not), and Violet spirals into depression. She pines endlessly for Frank. She wanders away from campus (creating a stir; no one knows where she went) and finds hope in a hotel’s fancy soap; but despite her claim that the soap’s scent is revelatory, she is still depressed. Instead of sitting behind the desk at the Suicide Prevention Center, Violet is now eligible for treatment. She can, as they say, eat the donuts. Perhaps more importantly, she can participate in the SPC musical production.

After delivering a monologue against “uniqueness, eccentricity, etc.” and in favor of being part of “a large mass of normal people” Lily (implicitly) dumps Fred perhaps to return to the French graduate student (who promises no more sodomy). Violet (implicitly) ends up with Fred, a character remarkably similar to her.

Furthermore, Lily breaks up with Violet’s crew of eccentrics (resolving the tension introduced in the first scene). But she agrees to take part in the dance recital. The exact dialog is:

Violet: But you’ll still do the part?
Lily: Yeah, of course.

Cut to a title card: “Dress rehearsal.”

Dress rehearsal

Like that. And then the whole cast does a Fred Astaire dance number (“Things Are Looking Up”). Lily and Fred kiss at the end of the number. That’s the end of the movie. There’s a coda in which Violet teaches the audience how to do a dance (“sambola!”) she invented. The cast dances together again (Lily is paired with Xavier, the French grad student in this coda, but not in the Astaire climax).

This dance number is clearly an homage to Old Hollywood musicals. It is not “realistic,” but then neither is the ballet from An American in Paris (1951). Yet here we have one of the puzzles of the movie: An important (?) plot point (?) had been that only clinically depressed people could be in the show. Violet qualifies now, but: How can Lily agree to be in the show? How can Fred dance with Violet?

I realize that once the music starts and Violet dances out the door we have left reality behind, but surely we are still in the regular movie reality before Violet dances out the door, and yet Fred and Lily are canonically included in the musical of the depressed. When the whole cast joins in, we find that the only people in the “Things Are Looking Up” number who “belong” are Violet and an extremely eccentric character named Freak Astaire. You will notice that Freak Astaire cannot be his real name, and that his name is pointedly not Fred.

Who is this Violet character, anyway?

“People aren’t exactly as you assume,” Rose says, revealing Violet to be literally “crazy” (her term). Rose knew Violet in her youth; Violet is not her real name (it’s Emily Tweeter); she suffers from OCD compulsions. One is tempted to take Rose at her word here, but her story of Violet’s youth (told when Violet is absent) takes a sudden and melodramatic turn. Violet’s parents perish in an unexplained and unexpected way. Is that part true, too? Is any of it?

Because we later learn that Rose is herself faking—consistently, “Method”ly—her English accent. She is an American who merely visited London briefly. The only independent corroboration about the Emily Tweeter story comes from Fred, who frequently makes things up (e.g. his name) and who admits that in this case he misremembered. Violet herself makes things up, such as a fictional cousin in Philadelphia she trots out in various guises in various conversations. We have liars lying about liars and then dancing a dance they are mostly ineligible to dance.

The structure of the film is in some ways its strangest part. Violet becomes depressed fairly early on. She remains depressed. She leaves town, finds hope in soap, returns to campus…and is still depressed. She explains that she’s actually in a tailspin. This goes on. Although full of plans to overcome others’ depression through dance and scents, she cannot overcome her own.

Until, I suppose, the final dance number, which will prove significant.

These are the basic building blocks of the movie. What are to to construct from them? I’m not 100% sure, but this is my groping towards an attempt.

“Still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently” •Nabokov

Violet’s character in a nutshell: She is always trying to impose her will on the world. Rose’s account of young Violet/Emily trying to keep her parents alive through the magic moving of a suitcase, whether “true” or not in the context of the film, certainly rings true. Thus do I will, and thus do I make manifest.

Lily notes that groups sort themselves the way they do for a reason, and Violet’s crew is indeed generally made up of people who refuse to be constrained by reality. In Heather’s case, she may just be too dumb to understand that Xavier, unlike Zorro, can start with an X, but Rose is willfully inventing herself. She is “from London” in the sense that she was once there and came from there; this bit of sophistry she links to glorifying God by overcoming oneself.

(Fred’s casual treatment of reality is, similarly, obvious.)

Now, throughout the movie, Violet attempts to tap dance. People make fun of her lame dancing. She has no reason to be dancing, really. Whereas the obsession with scents is shared with her roommates (and perhaps Heather believes most in the healing power of good smells, Rose most in the damaging power of bad ones), dance is Violet’s thing. Other dancers, such as Aubrey Plaza’s Debbie, are openly hostile to Violet’s dancing. One way of viewing the movie is a way in which either through force of character or superhuman power (not a bad definition of the capital-W Will), Violet manipulates events to allow her to dance.

Violet brings Lily into the fold—Lily attracts potential suitor Fred—Violet then exposes Fred as a fraud (read: eccentric), which is poison to Lily’s preference for mundanity: In this way, as Lily recoils from Fred, Violet acquires a dance partner.

Furthermore: Violet constructs (i.e. wills) suicidal ideation for Priss and then rescues her from the same—Priss steals Violet’s boyfriend—Violet sinks into depression precisely so she can have an excuse to dance in the depressive revue. You’ll notice that Violet cleverly invalidates the alternate method of relieving depression (olfactory therapy) by appearing to embrace it; but the soap does not work, not on Violet and not on Doar Dorm; it is not “transformative” (Violet’s optimistic word). With no hope in soap, Violet has little choice but to turn to dance, the eventuality she desired all along.

Perhaps it is ascribing excessively occult power to the will to suggest that Violet somehow manages to arrange things so that Fred (not, recall, the name by which he is originally known) takes the identity of Freak Astaire (not, recall, his real identity) to allow him symbolically to dance with her. I mean, there’s something going on with the passing along of the Fred name! But, regardless, since her preferred dance partner cannot skip down a lane with her and kiss her in a fountain (in the context of the depression revue, b/c he’s not depressed), we are treated not to the show, but, significantly, merely a dress rehearsal. Anything can happen in a dress rehearsal!

I also wrote this history book

But our big musical number / anti-depression course / romantic kiss is a dress rehearsal in another sense. If Violet’s skill is reality creation—if we are supposed to believe that her story is the story of a woman who wills her own destiny—then “Things Are Looking Up” is a mere aperitif for the true event, the thing she wills above all else. What follows the dress rehearsal? why, the main event, of course. And the main event here is the sambola!

One is tempted to point to “Things Are Looking Up” as the moment the movie enters fantasy land, but it is in the coda that Violet turns directly to the audience and demands that we obey her. We become the subject to her will as surely as in-movie reality does. Dance like this! Do it!

The sambola is Violet’s triumph over reality. I guess you could see the movie as Violet spiraling into madness, but in the context of the film it feels more like triumphing over sanity. Mere reality can no longer stand firm against the terrifying power of Violet’s will!

Come see me this Saturday!

In Guilford, CT!

Indeed it’s said that the banality
Of evil is its greatest shock.
It jokes, it punches its time clock,
Plays with its kids.
•Vikram Seth, Golden Gate (1986).

In the middle—the exact middle—of Pulp Fiction, there is a conventional action movie. It even stars Bruce Willis! You know the plot: A down-on-his-luck boxer betrays the mob for one big score; now he has navigate the perilous labyrinth that is L.A., fighting gangsters (and worse!) as he tries to bring his girlfriend to a new and better life.

There’s a “big bad” he has to fight—that’s Marcellus Wallace, whose shifting relationship with our hero Butch marks the climax of this action movie. But along the way there’s another confrontation with another gangster: one of Marcellus Wallace’s henchmen, Vincent Vega, whom Butch dispatches silently, in an off-hand and almost accidental manner. When Butch fights the big bad, it’s personal: The two battle with fists as well as guns; Butch drops some action movie callback tough-guy dialog (more on that later); now this is a fight!

Oh yeah! I write books!

If you buy one, you'll make my day!

But in an action movie, before the big bad and the fight fight, there are the faceless goons. Usually they come in waves, mowed down by machine gun fire or just punched out one at a time. But the action movie under consideration is comparatively short, and we only have room for one faceless goon, so down he goes in one quick impersonal barrage of gunfire.

Already you are leaping from your seats, eager to point out that Butch cannot treat Vincent as a faceless goon, because they met before! The night Marcellus paid Butch off, Butch and Vincent shared a brief, inexplicably hostile encounter at English Bob’s bar! This is true, but you’ll notice that in the context of the action movie itself (“The Gold Watch” segment, I mean) Butch never references this earlier encounter. Now, when he fights Marcellus, he sure references the earlier part of the movie—this very scene! In true action-movie fashion, Butch quips a bunch of callbacks as he punches his foe in the face (“that sting is pride blah blah”). But that foe is the big bad. The faceless goon, contrarily, remains faceless. Butch doesn’t say “Take that, Palooka!” or “How do you like them apples, Punchy?” as he shoots Vincent. If Butch recognizes that goon at all, he never breathes a word.

But, yes, you’re right about the rest of the movie. In the rest of the movie, Vincent Vega is far from a faceless goon. The rest of the movie humanizes Vincent Vega, insofar as it’s, you know, a movie about Vincent Vega. He’s a dancing, dating, wise-cracking, Elvis-stanning hit man! What’s not to love?

In this way, Pulp Fiction invites us to think about every faceless goon in every action-movie goon squad. Maybe the guy James Bond just pushed into a volcano recently won a twist contest. Maybe the guy Chow Yun-fat shot twice, once with each gun, had had a really bad day, cleaning out a bloody car while some smarmy jackass called him a dork. Perhaps the 1990s were the peak time for asking us, the audience, to find a professional killer charming, but certainly John Travolta sells it well. It would be a rare viewer who watches Vincent Vega get blown away without feeling, in some sense, bad about it.

Contrast Vincent’s death with Marvin’s. Marvin is another Marcellus henchman. He’s the guy who lets Jules and Vincent into Brett’s apartment to recover the briefcase. He’s the guy who gets his head blown off (via Vincent) in the car.

We are certainly asked to compare the two deaths; I mean they run parallel. Each one is a sudden gunshot precipitated accidentally or almost accidentally by an abrupt jolt. Butch shoots Vincent with a start when the toaster pops; Vincent shoots Marvin with a start when the car hits a bump (or at least that’s his story). I saw Pulp Fiction in the theater back in the day, and I can assure you that the audience reacted to Marvin’s death quite differently from Vincent’s: With Marvin, the audience laughed. Marvin becomes a gag, his body a kind of reverse MacGuffin everyone is trying to get rid of. Marvin really is a faceless goon, a background presence with only a line or two. He gets no banter. He gets no twist contest. He gets no humanization. And so his death is as exhilarating as any faceless goon’s in a John Wick movie. Ha ha, “brain detail.”

Except we should have learned something. The death of Vincent should have taught us that we are wrong about the death of Marvin. Arnold Bennett once wrote1 that a reader should spend at least as much time thinking about a book as reading a book (those who do not are “simply insulting [the] author”); surely this applies to movies as well. But viewers have traditionally frittered away their Pulp Fiction thinking time on untangling the mildly twisty timeline of the film, and failed to consider the humanistic point. You cannot both mourn Vincent and mock Marvin. Once you mourn Vincent, your enjoyment of every subsequent action movie2 should be compromised!

Not really, because most of us are capable of compartmentalizing our emotions and suspending our empathy; but doesn’t something nag at the back of your skull anyway? Will you ever (while watching a movie) be truly happy again?

When a felon’s not engaged in his employment,
Or maturing his felonious little plans,
His capacity for innocent enjoyment
Is just as great as any honest man’s.
•W.S. Gilbert, The Pirates of Penzance (1879).

Books are better than movies, right?

Everyone knows what Stand by Me is about. It’s a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story. Young Gordie LaChance undergoes a harrowing and even Campbellian journey into the wilderness towards death, and comes out of it on if not a man then at least well on his road to manhood. Without this journey (which is, of course, nearly the entire runtime of the movie), his life would have been different; weaker; incomplete. He would never have become (because the movie is also a künstlerroman) the writer he grows up to be. Gordie becomes fully human over the day and a half of the events of Stand by Me.

Sure, that’s what most of Stand by Me is about. But this is a movie with a twist ending. This is Sixth Sense. This is Witness for the Prosecution. This is a twist so clever I didn’t realize it the first half-dozen times I watched the film.1

The movie, you will recall, takes place in 1959, when Gordie is twelve. But it has a frame narrative in which an adult Gordie (presumably in his late thirties) reminisces about the events of the summer of ’59. By the end we learn that he is typing up his memories on a very 1986 personal computer, crafting one of those stories he has excelled at since his youth. Here in the mid ’eighties, Gordie (Gordon?) lives a successful bourgeois life in a neatly-manicured home in the suburbs. He is a (professional, apparently) writer. His study has built-in bookshelves and double (!) doors. He has fathered a twelve-year-old (approx.) son. He has, the movie wants us to perceive, “made it.”

And outside, as Gordon finishes up that story of his, lurks that twelve-year-old son. Young Gordie Jr. and his friend, they want to go to the swimming pool. They reeeeally want to go to that swimming pool. For the last hour they’ve been loitering, waiting for dad to drive them. The last shot of the film is everyone piling into the car and motoring away for summer fun.

Now, the parallel between Gordie Sr. and his friends on one hand and Gordie Jr. and his friend on the other hand are right there in the text. Adult Gordon looks dead at the two young ’eighties chums and types: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” It’s pretty overt.

And like Gordie Jr., 1959 Gordie wanted to go somewhere. His parents weren’t going to take him. So did he spend an hour wingeing about it until finally a harried father drove him down the Back Harlow Road? No, he did not. He packed up camping equipment and a gun, purchased provisions, and set out on a perilous overland voyage, quite literally risking life and limb. He got to swim, too, but in a leech-infested swamp.

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Now, at last, Gordie Jr. wants to swim in a pleasant, safe, chlorinated suburban pool. When the lifeguard cals “adult swim,” he will whine a little, but soon he’ll bully his father into forking over a buck or two for pretzels at the concession stand. Soon it’ll be all-swim again, and he’ll go back to playing Marco Polo until his watchful father says it’s starting to get late. “Aw, shucks,” he’ll say, but it’s a short drive home.

All of that sounds better than leeches! Who would want to suffer through a trip like young Gordie’s? But remember: The first eighty minutes of the movie assert that this trip is how Gordie became a man! His very humanity is vested in a train-dodging, gun-toting, corpse-filled journey. And he has spent his adult life systematically stripping his son of any chance of becoming fully human in turn.

How do you get to the pool? Do you walk? It can’t be a two-day journey! Do you hitchhike? What if you got on a bike? There’s no way that pool is more than a hour away by bike—and you’ve already spent an hour whining about the fact that you’re not being driven there!

But Gordon Sr. never says, “Find your own way to the pool.” He never says, “If the pool is too far away, find a pond nearer by.” He never says, “Go make your own fun with your own friends; you shouldn’t need me.” He doesn’t even say, “Maybe if you wander around, you’ll get to see some deer.” Instead he says “I’ll be right there.”

“That’s what he said a half hour ago!” But his cowed child, perpetually trapped in infancy, crouches sulkily and waits. And what’s his father doing this whole time? “Abide awhile longer in your ape-like state while I contemplate my own humanity!” While I contemplate my own humanity! He’s thinking about the very moment he became more than his child!

Gordie Jr. never has a chance. Haunted with Oedipal fears, Gordon laC., like Saturn before him, has consumed his son.

My book Impossible Histories has a whole chapter about Boomers and Oedipus, but perhaps Stand by Me lays out more effectively everything I had to say.

And that’s what Stand by Me is about.

Great film, though.

Your Favorite Bad Movie podcast

starring me! & the Atomic Brain!

Here’s a 1936 recording of the Carter Family singing “Cannonball Blues.” They dropped several different recordings of this song, with slightly different structures, but this one is fairly typical, and we’ll use it as our text. For your easy reference, I present the lyrics below:

Oh, listen to the train
Coming down the line
Trying to make up all of her lost time
From Buffalo to Washington.

You can wash my jumper,
Starch my overhauls,
Catch the train they call the Cannonball
From Buffalo to Washington.

My baby’s left me,
She even took my shoes.
Enough to give a man these doggone worried blues!
She’s gone. She’s solid gone.

Yonder comes the train,
Coming down the track
To carry me away, but it ain’t gonna carry me back,
My honey babe, my blue-eyed babe.

I’m going up north,
I’m going up north this fall.
If my luck don’t change I won’t be back at all.
My honey babe, I’m leaving you.

Now, I’m not a folk music historian, and I’m not here to unriddle the origin of this song, but it’s clearly a variation of the “Buffalo to Washington” model. There are a lot of songs with a similar tune and chorus, and the subject matter can be pretty flexible: This version (1926) is about the assassination of William McKinley; this one (1944) is about Charles Lindbergh’s Nazi sympathies. But most of them are more like this Woody Guthrie recording (1944), which shares some lyrics with the Carter Family’s “Cannonball Blues,” although it has a different title.

(By the way, all these songs are great, and you should listen to them all.)

In fact, a lot of songs share some lyrics with “Cannonball Blues.” Some of these lyrics (“yonder comes a train,” “my baby left me”) are such commonplaces that they don’t even count, but just to give one example of a larger lyrical echo, compare this stanza from “Little Black Train“:

There’s a little black train a-coming,
Coming down the track.
You’ve got to ride that little black train,
But it ain’t a-gonna bring you back.

Long before postmodernism, in 1930, Lil McClintock released a song that was just a pastiche of several older ragtime songs, blended together. You could call it a medley, but the blending is more seamless than your usual medley; the end result sounds like one song with a couple different hooks, and lyrics that incidentally make no sense.

And this kind of pastiche is exactly what many songs in the folk/blues continuum are: collections of conventional tags threaded together. Any one tune could have hundreds of potential verses. Because old recordings were done in one take, the lyrics a record ended up preserving may have been simply whatever verses the singer happened to think of during that one recording session. Some late-’20s/early-’30s folk and blues records are more or less field recordings, local unprofessionals jamming in front of a microphone; their usual improvisation ossified by receiving one official form. It’s oral tradition captured at the very last moment it was oral tradition.

(Something similar can happen outside of traditional music: the Beach Boys muffed the lyrics to the second verse of “Barbara Ann” on their hit live recording, and now no cover band remembers the original, preferring to bluff through something similar. Even Mike Love will forever sing the “wrong” lyrics, just because someone (probably Dean Torrence) forgot the “right” ones once in 1965.)

So: What is the Carters’ “Cannonball Blues” about? Can we piece together a narrative?

• It starts (stanza one) with a train moving quickly.

• In stanza two, the speaker addresses someone and says that she (?) can do three things: Two involve laundry and one involves catching a train, presumably the fast train from the first stanza.

• By the third stanza “my baby,” presumably the person from stanza two, has left, taking with her, indeed, some articles of clothing. Probably she left by train.

• But next thing (stanza four), the narrator is himself threatening to leave by train, and never return.

• He will, in fact, in stanza five, go north, and not return unless his fortune changes. This time, the “I” is leaving the “you,” although whether the “baby” who previously left is the same as the “honey babe” the singer is leaving is unclear. Perhaps she came back? Perhaps it is just her memory he leaves? Significantly, the “I” is heading north, the opposite direction of both the Buffalo-to-Washington Cannonball and the departing “baby.”

(I “gendered” the narrator, but the Carters leave it primarily ambiguous; not only did different Carters of different sexes sing the song on different recordings, but neither they nor other artists of the period were averse to singing across gender lines. The unambiguous genderings in the song are 1. the train and 2. “my baby” in stanza three, both of which are female.)

There’s plenty to talk about and debate in this summary, but still this is a reasonably coherent “plot” for a song. Of course, its slim coherence is probably more or less an accident. If the singer leaves a woman who already left him (as happens here), it could be because I haven’t thought seriously about this song enough and it could be because Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time, but it’s probably because A.C. Carter was just stringing together different folk tags, more or less at random.

In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges suggests that one can “select two dissimilar works—the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say—attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres“; in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” he more explicitly endorses trying to read the Odyssey as a copy of the Aeneid (instead of vice versa), or reading The Imitation of Christ as though it had been written by a Modernist. The problem with either of these plans is that any critic who tried to write in this way would soon give up in disgust, having concluded he was wasting his time. I’m not here to valorize authorial intent, but I have to acknowledge that given a choice, we almost always choose to consume texts created with some level of plan, and not, say, random collections of poetry magnets. In a word, Borges’s proposal is not persuasive; no critic is persuaded that this is a good use of his time, no reader is convinced that criticism about randomly generated texts is worth reading.

But anyone who listens to “Cannonball Blues” is going to want to interpret it. This is true of a great many folk songs. Furry Lewis sings in “Kassie Jones” that he left Memphis to spread the news that Memphis women don’t wear no shoes, and this may be a double entendre and it may be flight of fancy, but you can’t hear Furry Lewis sing it without wanting to know.

In the same manner that a photograph, especially a photograph isolated and branded as a work of art, freezes time in such a way that the viewer is able to/is forced to look at one moment in what we all know is an ongoing spectrum of moments…in the same manner, a folk recording freezes an evolving oral tradition, or even one singer’s changing repertoire (Furry Lewis sang many versions before and after the linked one), creating a permanent esthetic object we can contemplate. If the object is good enough—musically good enough, I mean—then the listener is going to want to consume it again and again, and a naturally curious listener will want to know, eventually, what the song is about. Saying “this is a Dadaist text, and it’s not about anything” is not a very satisfying option. The text as word may be simply piggybacking on the skills of guitarists like Maybelle Carter or Furry Lewis, but the end result is the same: a text that demands explication.

And of course it helps that the building blocks are flexible. When the Carters sing that they’re “going up north next fall” they are escaping a bad relationship; when Woody Guthrie sings the same line he is merely looking for a new gambling venue, that light-heeled rapscallion. “Little Black Train” is a song explicitly about death, in a way that “Cannonball Blues,” for all their shared lyrics, is not.

My message to Borgesians is: If you want to play the Menard but find all your fanciful analyses silly or unpersuasive, look to the folk-blues canon for a rich vein of the ore you need.

My message to folk fans is: Everything you are listening to is probably a series of arbitrary and random occurrences, but you have almost no choice but to drag a kicking and screaming meaning out of it. In this way folk music is no different from everything else in your life.

[My urban fantasy novel Immortal Lycanthropes, the one Cory Doctorow called “perfectly wonderful and wonderfully perfect,” is available starting now for $2.99 on (shudder) Kindle! You can get the regular or a special sanitized version with all (v. few) references to sex or drugs excised so you can show it to your mom. I’m proud of this one! Please check it out!]

Anatomy of a dungeon

I’ve spent a lot of my life playing Dungeons & Dragons, and a lot more of my life thinking about the dungeons thereof. When I say dungeon, I mean a place where adventurers can face peril and gain treasure, or perhaps even merely a place with a map and a key, suitable for gaming in. I guess the local castle or thieves’ guild could count as a dungeon, but let’s focus a moment on cooler dungeons—ancient ruins, underground tunnels, and labyrinthine caverns. You know the kind of place I mean.

Good dungeons are exciting and playable and all that, but a dungeon is also (like almost everything) an esthetic object. I love to read through a good dungeon! And I want to talk here about what makes a good, an esthetically good, dungeon esthetically good.

None of what I’m going to say is particularly radical, or even novel—I learned it all by reading old TSR modules, after all! Only briefly will I point out that much of what makes a good module (interesting NPCs, say, or Erol Otus art) is somewhat orthogonal to what makes a good dungeon.

A good dungeon should have 1. an origin, 2. a history, and 3. an ecology. You can get along without all three (a natural cavern might have no real origin, a dungeon built yesterday might have no history, and Tomb of Horrors—well, that place may lack an ecology), but you probably need two out of three, and all three is the norm.

And let us keep in mind: A good dungeon should be many things (exciting, surprising, etc.), but for esthetic reasons, a good dungeon should also be legible.

The origin

This is what I mean by the origin of a dungeon: Someone has to have built this thing, and doubtless for a reason. As I said, a natural cavern skimps on this section, but a purely natural cavern is more or less a wilderness adventure with a roof. Usually, someone decided to appropriate these caves for their own use, and it behooves the game master to determine who and why.

You know the classic reasons: A wizard built this dungeon to house his treasure (Ghost Tower of Inverness). A ruler built this dungeon to be his tomb (Pharaoh). A cult built this dungeon for the performing of strange rituals (Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun). A sorceress built this dungeon to house something for later access (Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth). A giant built this dungeon to live in (Against the Giants). A demi-lich built this dungeon to lure adventurers to their doom (Tomb of Horrors, at least in the Labyrinth of Madness retcon).

Let’s imagine (I’m winging it here) that a benign wizard, possessing an evil artifact he cannot destroy, hides said artifact in the center of the impenetrable labyrinth of doom he constructs for the purpose. A hypothetical origin.

Obviously, it’s possible for a dungeon to persist quite simply in fulfillment of its intended purpose (such as a hill giant chief’s steading, say), but I prefer dungeons to be ancient in their construction, and of origin most occluded and obscure. The basic shape (or “bones”) of the dungeon, its neglected nooks and crannies, and perhaps even a sealed-off subbasement will give hints to the dungeon’s original purpose, but much of this purpose will be overwritten by the perpetual noise that is its…

…History

A building rarely perseveres forever in its original intent, which is how Limelight got set up in a decommissioned church. Imagine in the Middle East (in our Earth Prime) an ancient Semitic pagan temple that got converted into a Hellenized Greek pagan temple, later rededicated as a Christian church, and finally rerededicated as a mosque. Bet it happens all the time, and it may have been a stable or a storeroom somewhere in between.

Gary Gygax’s Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun provides a canonical example: As soon as the Tharizdunites move out of their forgotten temple, a bunch of norkers move in. The norkers don’t care about worshipping Tharizdun—they just want a place that keeps the rain off.

My high-fantasy-adjacent books

This is, I think, of the greatest importance to crafting a satisfying dungeon: The history of a dungeon should exist against, despite, or in ignorance of its origin. Often the top level or a dungeon—I mean, the one most easily accessed by people walking in off the street—is crammed full of humanoids who have set up their own little fiefdoms, Keep on the Borderlands-style. Perhaps the humanoids have discovered a level-one treasure room (left by a previous tenant), and are living high on the hog of its gold pieces. Perhaps they hear deep moans from below their feet, and have come to regret building their home in a dungeon the origin of which they know little of.

When I say “a previous tenant” I don’t necessarily mean the original builder. Wave after wave of settlers may have come in and displaced each other sequentially. Perhaps each wave has been driven down into a progressively lower level of the dungeon. Perhaps they have left nothing behind but their graves (and undead?) and their own slight modifications on those original “bones.”

If a dungeon was built millennia ago (as a good dungeon should be), then dozens of waves of inhabitants are not only possible but likely. The result might be illegible (which, recall, a good dungeon should not be)—but not every wave needs to be important or leave its mark. Two or three could, though, and quite legibly. Lizardmen carve their inscriptions over the defaced inscriptions of hobgblins. Cloud-giant sized sarcophagi are denuded of their bones, and kobolds then interred therein instead, twenty of them lying side by side like railroad ties.

Previous adventuring parties are absolutely a possible part of a dungeon’s history. Their mangled corpses can provide treasure or (from manner of death) hints about what kind of creature lurks around the corner. Perhaps there are prisoners, still alive, in iron cages in the kitchen. Perhaps they’ve been changed into wights, harder to hit or turn now, what with the magic armor their undead forms still wear.

As an example of a slightly baroque but still (I think) legible dungeon history, I’m going to spin something below. This is based off our labyrinth of doom example. If you don’t care to read a bald summary of a thousand years of fake history, skip this part.

So this benign wizard wants to hide an evil artifact, remember? Now, I suppose it would make sense that the benign wizard would (for extra security) construct his labyrinth of doom with no entrance…but imagine a kingdom of dwarves, canonically prone to digging too deep, managing to breech its walls quite accidentally. Attracted to the inlaid gems used to craft the enchanted sigils designed to stave off detection magic, the dwarves incorporated the larger (and outer) corridors of the labyrinth into their underground kingdom (this creates a kind of double dungeon, with a first level that is regular dwarven halls, leading into a realm with older stonework). Pry out those gems, dwarves, and…

Soon, evil cultists desperate to reclaim the artifact lost for centuries (and now locatable because the nondetection sigils have been compromised), have moved in and with their summoned demons defeated the dwarves. But despite their blood rituals and thaumaturgy, they could never unravel the riddle that would gain them access to the inner levels of the labyrinth, and so eventually they all died of old age, disappointment, or betrayal / cultic infighting. They left behind only innumerable location-bound extraplanar servants (now bored and aimless), horrible pentagrams, vandalism, and that legion of dwarven undead they raised.

Over time, a crew of tinker gnomes could well move in to the dwarven halls above, only to fall in turn to a large swarm of wererats (or something similar). The gnomes’ automata wander up and down the levels of the dungeon endlessly, occasionally still dispatching an unwary ’rat.

Rumors of the dungeons below the dungeon have brought various adventuring parties, seeking passage through the upper level. The ’rats used to permit adventurers freely (or with a small gratuity) to go through their lair to die in the deeps, whereupon the wererats would send some furry little rat allies down to plunder the corpses of all gold and magic. At one point the ’rats acquired thereby an iron flask with a marid in it, and a combination of marid-hostility and bungled wishing for renewable fresh water blew a raging river right through the heart of the ’rats’ domain. Unable to ford the torrent of water, they’re now trapped down there, on the wrong side of a river that intersects the only corridor “out”—trapped in a dwarven hall with no way to the surface and only evil below them, kept alive only by a magic item (rod of splendor or the like) and in perpetual fear it’ll run out of charges. (Or perhaps they can fish? I mean, they have a river.)

With the wererats locked in on the far side of the river, a tribe of gnolls has settled into the rooms around the entrance.

This gives us:

•Right as you enter: a dwarven subterranean palace populated by hostile gnolls.
•A hard-to-cross underground river with, on the other side, ravenous wererats bristling with magic items. This would still be in dwarven-dug tunnels.
•As you pass down the deepest dwarven tunnel, through which dangerous automata scamper, you enter the labyrinth proper. Here are the dwarven undead, the demons (left behind, probably bound to the labyrinth, and certainly hungry for blood), and perhaps a small group of miserable dwarves, long since mutated into derro or duergar thanks to the experiments of blood cultists, skulking in the shadows of a forgotten side corridor and adept at avoiding all (demonic) danger.
•And once you figure out the way in that the cultists did not, you are merely in the next level of a labyrinth specifically built to keep adventurers out. Traps and tricks again. Perhaps some golems. At the very heart a most dangerous guardian—a planetar, maybe, keeping its eternal vigil over the evil artifact, or alternately a tasked guardian genie riding on the back of a guardian daemon.

Interrogated gnolls might not know anything of the larger dungeon, other than they can hear wailing from beyond the river at the edge of their demesne. The wererats know (but will they tell?) about the history of the gnomish automata, about the marid-river, and perhaps they have a pretty good idea about the horrible blood cult below. The cult’s remaining demons know much, if they are cajoled to tell, about the dead dwarves, the cult, and the labyrinth. And of course everywhere in the labyrinth are DANGER TURN BACK signs in an ancient tongue, which you may interpret as you will.

This brings us to the hard part:

Ecology

It is probably impossible to make a dungeon ecology work, which is why very few intelligent bipeds choose to live their whole lives underground. The sun, it turns out, really helps keep an ecosystem viable. Fantasy ecosystems rarely make sense even outdoors, as there are always too many carnivores. (Count the number of lions appearing in the average Tarzan novel.) Underground only makes it worse.

But we’re supposed to try, right? Our job is to try to make sure every monster in a dungeon has 1. stuff to eat, 2. a place to poop, and 3. enough elbow room that they don’t go crazy. The third one won’t apply to ants, say, but it will to goblins or drow or what have you.

The easiest thing is to let the monster leave the dungeon to forage. Bats fly out of their cave every night, and so do vampires. The gnolls in our labyrinth of doom example are no problem at all. They can hunter-gather outside or rob caravans or whatever.

99¢ how is possible???

Things are more difficult deeper inside the dungeon. How does Moria get its food anyway? Light-shy funguses and subterranean rivers full of cave fish can provide some help here, as can magic. The river can also carry away the poop! Other potential latrines are just any kind of bottomless crevice or (my favorite) a hellmouth. For a thousand years these svirfneblin have been pitching their filth into a one-way portal to the abyss, and when the players have to interact with a demon, they are going to find that demon extremely incensed, not to mention filthy.

One good trick is to have the dungeon be at the end of a garbage chute—the garbage chute that foraging monsters on level one employ. Food waste (or, you know, solid waste) from an ogres’ stronghold could feed a lot of dungeon creatures. Perhaps access into the dungeon is only available through the garbage chute, a suitably disgusting entrance for adventurers (put an otyugh at the bottom!).

Or there’s always the old standby of an underground magical forest or garden providing food for all! Just a big cave with miraculous trees lit by a secret sun. I bet Ibrahim Ebn Abu Ayub had a subterranean garden; why can’t whoever built dungeon x? The point is, I don’t care how you do it, you just need to put something in to justify all the hungry umber hulks and beholders flitting about down in the deeps.

Xorn, of course, eat minerals, which are plentiful underground. Rust monsters eat metal. Ropers, it is implied, can eat many rocks. Etc.

It’s clear that early D&D play imagined an ecosystem build around adventurers. Mimics, trappers, lurkers above, and gelatinous cubes are all creatures that seem to have evolved in dungeons where hapless characters trundled through often enough that they could be a primary food source. Outside of one of those city-adjacent megadungeons where PCs line up to take a creaky wooden elevator down to their selected level, this doesn’t make much sense to me.

But of course, much of a dungeon exists outside of ecology. Much of a dungeon is just traps ’n’ tricks, but additionally you have gnomish automata, most undead, golems, living statues, elementals, animated furniture, (possibly) devils and demons—no ecology needed because these guys never eat! Some magical creatures could potentially hibernate for centuries, waiting for something, anything to come by. And of course magic can spontaneously “unfreeze,” or even summon from elsewhere, monsters that have had no need, all this time, to poop. Genies in bottles; anything in a mirror of life-trapping.

In our labyrinth of doom, the gnolls are gravy—the wererats have a magic item and perhaps can fish—the automata and the undead and the demons are anecological—that leaves the small remnant of derro. Can these guys be justified? Can we imagine them eating fungus? Perhaps there is an enormous cavern of fungus they know the twisty underground way to (is it natural? if not, how did it get there? accidentally summoned into existence by a worshipper of Juiblex, lord of slimes and molds?). Perhaps, though, they have become reduced to plundering the ancient tombs of their ancestors, whose bodies were preserved in brine like pickle mummies. The derro must feast upon the flesh of these dead.

See me at the Night Market!

Are there enough dead? How about water? Where do they poop? If these questions have no justification, remove the derro. They were there; they just died of starvation and rickets centuries ago.

Or maybe leave the derro alone. Honestly, ¾ of the monsters in any given module don’t really make sense where they are, but get left in for the sake of playability. Who am I to judge?—ah! the compromises our art must suffer!

The delve

Of course, a dungeon alone is just a potentiality. A dungeon is there to get hacked.

Generally a hack starts with a hook. “Fetch me the Soul Gem” (Ghost Tower of Inverness)! Someone needs to expel these horrible creatures from the Caves of Chaos (Keep in the Borderlands)! The Margrave of the March of Bissel has invested in your hack in return for 15% of the treasure (Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth). Of course, one could just tell the party they wake up in a dungeon and have to find a way out (The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan), but that’s a well one can only visit so often. The key with a hook is that it can either be in ignorance of the dungeon’s origin or because of the dungeon’s origin.

In our hypothetical labyrinth of doom, the party could 1. be tasked with a. clearing gnolls from a dwarven ruin, b. recovering some ancient dwarven treasure, or c. locating a particular gnomish automata, all in ignorance of the actual labyrinth (which, if they penetrate it, may pose a pickle—is it a labyrinth best left unhacked?).

Or they could 2. actually seek the evil artifact at the dungeon’s heart because a. they have found a novel way to destroy it, and want to do so before a more competent cult hacks the dungeon, b. they need it for a particular one-shot purpose for the greater good, whereupon they intend to replace it, or c. maybe, hey! evil artifact! Who wouldn’t want that (depends on the payers, eh?)?

I'll be at Westport Story Fest!

The key into the heart of the labyrinth—I mean way past the door that the cult never opened—could be 1. an actual riddle that the party has to solve with superior cleverness to evil cultists, 2. a gimme (item or knowledge) the party recovered somewhere else, and have come to this dungeon to put to use, or (probably best) 3. a similar gimme found elsewhere in the dungeon, perhaps on the corpse of a previous adventurer (who was seeking to pull a 2.) or in the wererats’ hoard plundered therefrom, its meaning unknown until the party comes to the impenetrable entrance to the labyrinth. I say probably best because: While hiding the key to your labyrinth’s penetralia inside your labyrinth is a rookie move that experienced wizards seem often to indulge in, hiding said key far far away, on your person, say, until you die, only to have the key brought to the labyrinth by a doughty adventurer who plundered your grave and sought next to plunder your labyrinth, only to die a wandering monster death on the way…this is choice!

Here is where legibility comes in. Note that even a party who simply blunders upon out hypothetical dungeon (Oo! Dwarven ruins! Let’s fight some gnolls!) will, by the very act of exploration, uncover more and more of the place’s history. If they dare cross the torrent of water, they will find wererats who may be hostile (or may bargain for food), but will certainly have some small information (the legends of our people tell that a century ago, adventurers used to go down that hall and never return). Proceeding deeper, the party will find plenty of reminders of the exploits of the blood cult. And the labyrinth itself could be literally legible, or festooned with admonitory magic mouths (“Whoever you are, you do not want to free the head of Vecna!”). By the time they have reached the heart of the labyrinth, they should have enough information (having gone in, remember, blind) to decide what to do with the artifact therein.

Legibility is hard to ensure in a hack, which is why designers often fall back on clunky apparatus such as journals left behind, or desperate scrawls on walls. I say “clunky,” but such ruses are often absolutely necessary if a party is not going to wander through strange room to strange room in a strange dungeon, merely murmuring, “How strange.” Archeologists find old buildings and spend their lives puzzling over and arguing about the functions of various rooms—I’m not saying that should never happen, but a dungeon is more satisfying if it makes a little more sense alongside the literal wonder (I wonder what this room was for…).

Fortunately, the party can access tools archeologists rarely can, such as speak with dead, commune, divination, stonetell, etc. But also those clunky journals. Even a chatty lich can fill in blanks.

I suppose, from a player’s point of view, learning the history of the part of the dungeon TK can provide valuable hints for the hack. But what are hints compared to the esthetic object of a well-crafted dungeon?

My only regret, now, is that I like my labyrinth of doom dungeon idea and I cannot spring it on my players because at least some of them may read this substack.

I want to find the first American graphic novel—I say American simply because I know very little about comics of other countries; so put down your Tintins and your ACK hardbacks, and let’s see where this leads us.

Wait: What’s a graphic novel anyway?

Some years ago—I think it was 2008, and was certainly no earlier—I found myself in the audience for panel discussion with graphic novelists. Somehow the rest of the audience was composed of people who had never read a graphic novel. They seemed confused by the idea. A panelist mentioned that there were graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare plays, and several audience members seemed to latch onto that fact. They asked, somewhat timidly, if it might be possible to create a graphic novel that was an adaptation of…someone else’s plays? The panel had to assure them that not all graphic novels were adaptations!

This seems an absurd story for NYC in 2008, but I was there. It’s a true story. Surely it couldn’t happen today!

Graphic novel is a terrible term. It is never used with any kind of precision. The three graphic novels most non-nerds are likely to have encountered are Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home, none of which are novels (being memoirs). Somehow Harvey Pekar’s Our Cancer Year and Joe Sacco’s Palestine and John Lewis’s March and Derf’s Kent State are all graphic novels despite their non-fiction credentials. Adrian Tomine’s 32 Stories and Gilbert Hernandez’s Fear of Comics are graphic novels despite being quite explicitly collections of short stories.

Some people claim they reserve the term graphic novel for a book appearing originally as a bound volume as opposed to serialized in a comic. These people are probably having you on; they probably also claim to floss thrice daily. I’ve worked for decades selling comics, and such a distinction is not industry standard. No one primly refuses to label Watchmen or Maus graphic novels because they were originally serialized, any more than we would refuse to label David Copperfield a novel because it was originally serialized. People say “graphic novel” and they just mean a comic with a spine. The word is used interchangeably with trade, which is itself a ridiculous term because it is short for trade paperback and yet is constantly used to refer to hardcovers.1

If a collection of Garfield strips or a Batman Archives volume are graphic novels, that’s one thing. But I’m looking for something a little different. I tend to think crafting definitions is a fool’s game, so we will, perhaps, at best tease out eventually what I mean by graphic novel, but I want at the very least a book in comics form that would be called a novel if it were prose.

Let’s eliminate some suspects

Yeah, I mean, let’s get two out of the way immediately.

The first book to call itself a graphic novel is Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978); it’s not a graphic novel, though, at least not in the sense of being a novel. It’s a short story collection. It’s not a genre short story collection, though, and that was unusual at the time. But still not a novel. Also 1978 is going to be a hard sell for first of anything.

[ETA: Oops! First book to call itself a graphic novel was actually Beyond Time and Again by George Metzger (1976); I blundered, but that doesn’t end up changing much of our larger point.]

So let’s look back; all the way back. The first comic printed in America is The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, which appeared as a newspaper supplement in 1841 and a book in 1849. At eighty pages of continuous picaresque story,2 it’s certainly a novel. But it is immediately disqualified for not being American. It’s an unlicensed ripoff of an unlicensed British ripoff of a Swiss comic by Rodolphe Töpffer! You can’t just make your Eurocomics American through translation and crime!

Several other American graphic novels so-called of the era were reprints of European publications by Töpffer or George Cruickshank. Discard them all! But we still have…

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•Journey to the Gold Diggins, by Jeremiah Saddlebags by James A. and Donald F. Read (1849)

Here’s our first contender. It’s indisputably the first original comic in America (that anyone knows about; much lore is lost). It’s a self-contained book. It’s 63 pages of running coherent narrative (about an Easterner who travels to California to search for gold; fortunes and misfortunes; etc.). Shouldn’t this be the first graphic novel?

But here we run into problems we would have addressed earlier under the header Töpffer had we not discarded Töpffer out of hand. Because Jeremiah Saddlebags is very much in the vein of Töpffer. The Read brothers were clearly influenced by and perhaps cribbing off of Töpffer. Both Oldbuck and Saddlebags dance a merry dance that annoys their neighbors; both escape from their respective prisons by growing thin enough to squeeze through a narrow aperture (below).

But lack of originality is hardly the problem. The problem is that we’re looking for a book in comics form that would be called a novel if it were prose and Saddlebags feels less like a comic and more like a protocomic. The transitions between panel and panel (what Scott McCloud would call closure) are often as vast as a picture book. A great deal of the weight of the narrative is borne by the caption below the picture. As the Read brothers lacked some of Töpffer’s genius, there is even less “motion” than in the earlier book. It’s curiously static. Look how much happens between these two panels!

This is someone groping towards comics. So: Is it then comics?

Maybe I’m reaching for an analogy that’s inaccessible but: If I was going to pick the first novel in English I might say Oroonoko and I might say Robinson Crusoe, but I wouldn’t pick Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde because Rosalynde (pick it up and you’ll see what I mean) is a protonovel. And Saddlebags is a protocomic.

You can find examples of more recent (i.e. real) comics written in this style of staccato, isolated panels: Lynda Barry, Gilbert Hernandez, and Daniel Clowes have all worked this way, and I’m not about to criticize them.

Do you believe me if I say that these panels are different from the panels of Saddlebags? I hope so.

So is Journey to the Gold Diggins, by Jeremiah Saddlebags the first American graphic novel?

PROS
•Literally the first American x, whatever x is, and maybe it’s a graphic novel

CONS
•Perhaps a protographic novel.

You may disagree, but I don’t think this counts, and I’m going to keep looking. Our second contender:

•The Rev. Mr. Sourball’s European Tour: The Recreations of a City Parson by Horace Cope (1867)

I’m jumping ahead a couple decades to a book that is less obviously indebted to (i.e. swipe-filed from) Töpffer. It is, in fact, in some ways the anti-Saddlebags, arch and ironic where Saddlebags is lowbrow slapstick. If Saddlebags is trying to emulate the novels of Tobias Smollett, Sourball is trying to emulate…not Jane Austen maybe, but Maria Edgeworth?

Rev. Sourball goes to Europe for his health, all on his congregation’s dime. He is obliged to fake illness to keep himself in Europe, but eventually his congregation runs out of money and he returns home. That’s the plot. Sorry, spoilers.

I considered this book different enough from Saddlebags to examine on its own, but the objections that haunted Saddlebags are all still here. The pages are captions with illustrations. The illustrations sometimes operate in ironic counterpoint to the captions, which is “sophisticated,”

but we’re still in the realm of the picture book here. With the exception of one particularly energetic sermon (much flailing), this book is even more static than Saddlebags. Also, with one panel per page and many blank (!) pages, the whole thing is only like thirty panels. I have a hard time calling that a novel!

PROS
•We’re still in the nineteenth century, so it sure feels early.

CONS
•Still a protographic novel.
•Too short.

I say nope to this one.

•The Brownies by Palmer Cox (1887)

Oh, come now. This is just a poem with illustrations. Who even nominated this book?

PROS
•Rather charming

CONS
•Oh, come now
•I think Palmer Cox was Canadian

•A Story without Words; or, The New Regime in the United States by William E. Arnold (1894).

Now here’s something different! I’m not quite sure what, because I don’t know much about the (second) Cleveland administration, but this book assures me it was bad. It assures me it was bad through a montage of images depicting America under Cleveland. The images have little to do with each other, but of course by their very juxtaposition, the reader cannot help craft a kind of narrative out of them.

I’m sure knowledge of the times would help the narrative make more, you know, sense. One guy is helpfully labeled “Blount,” so I googled him up and he’s James Henderson Blount. But most people are anonymous.

The donkey in the upper left, helpfully labeled “Dem. party,” stands upon a slowly crumbling platform, helpfully labeled “Dem. platform.” The increasing precariousness of the wobbly donkey gives the sequential narrative an actual (as opposed to merely implied) sequence, although the fact that the donkey never falls is some disappointing anti-Chekov’s-gun meta nonsense if you ask me.

An interesting experiment, but I can’t call it a graphic novel.

PROS
•Tries something different, no?

CONS
•Not sure if it’s comics
•Still too short

Please check out the books I write

•Willie and His Papa and the Rest of the Family by Frederick Opper (1901)

Frederick Opper was definitely a guy who could do comics—creator of the legendary Happy Hooligan, after all—but before he drew Happy Hooligan he drew political cartoons. Yeah, it’s still politics here.

I’m going to reject this one pretty fast, but I want to use it to point out the direction we’re heading. Opper offers us a consistent group of characters: brothers little Willie and rambunctious Teddy, their father, and nurse Hanna. You may have already identified William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, although somewhat more obscure and also inexplicable is Mark Hanna (McKinley’s campaign manager). The father is, as always, helpfully labeled “trusts.” Their episodic exploits present a narrative of sorts, a narrative propelled by the rise of Teddy Roosevelt and (in general) the ongoing fortunes of the McKinley administration, If you know your history, you will know that this should give the book a rousing climax, but Opper never gets that deep into 1901. Instead he wraps things up with a final page featuring the grim bit of foreshadowing depicted above.

Insofar as Willie has a narrative, though, it is an accidental narrative. It is a diarist’s narrative. These are individual cartoons, and the connection between them is more tenuous than the narrative connections is Saddlebags or the metaphorical connections in A Story without Words.

PROS
•Pretty long
•Characters tell a story, as characters will

CONS
•A series of gag panels is not a graphic novel, no matter what we pretend

But with the inexorable trajectory of a train racing Buffalo to Washington, we are headed down the path that Opper has charted.

•Buster Brown and His Resolutions by R.F. Outcault (1903)

Maybe something comes before this—Poor Lil Mose or something—but take Buster Brown as a symptom. If we can determine that Buster Brown and His Resolutions is among the earliest of graphic novels (spoiler: we’ll do no such thing), we can always go back and look for the very earliest among its precursors. If there were not already in 1903, there would soon be plenty of books very similar to Buster Brown and His Resolutions.

Here’s what Buster Brown gets right. It is, at last comics. From this point on, I won’t be able to say the word “protocomic.” Just look at that closure! Egg McMuffin comics!

But each comics adventure lasts for two pages, and then things start over. It is the Groundhog Day / Cemetery Man / treadmill hell of the comics strip. It’s no more a graphic novel than your favorite Dilbert collection.

I should also add that, because (as with many of the books discussed up to now) Buster Brown is only printed on one side of the page, there are only thirty-some odd pages of content in the book.

PROS
•Egg McMuffin comics!

CONS
•Not in the least a novel (i.e. not a sustained narrative)
•Also not a novel b/c it’s too short

If we can finagle our way around those cons, we might find ourselves lucking into a graphic novel

•Between Shots by Percy Crosby (1919)

Like Opper and Outcault, Percy Crosby has cartooning credits, having gained immortality of sorts with his kid strip Skippy. If you don’t know Skippy, you certainly know its offspring: Peanuts is an homage to/reaction against Skippy, and Calvin and Hobbes is just Skippy + Barnaby.

But that’s all in the future! In the future Percy Crosby would create America’s most popular strip and then drink himself into the madhouse while Skippy peanut butter runs off with his intellectual property (strange but probably true). Our mission is to see if back in 1918 Crosby could also create the first American graphic novel.

Probably not, right?

Crosby was a professional cartoonist when WWI started, and he continued to cartoon from the literal trenches, his work sent back to the states for syndication. The first collection of these cartoons, That Rookie from the 13th Squad (1918), was full of solid gags like this:

Hardly a graphic novel any more than Buster Brown (or Dilbert). But then came his follow up, Between Shots, which is on one hand more of the same,

but on the other hand has a narrative arc: The book starts with our rookie sailing to France; he serves under fire; he lingers in France after the Armistice; he sails for home and kisses the first American sidewalk and the hem of the first American girl he meets.

This is not only a narrative, it is a narrative with more gravitas than any comic hitherto examined (it’s the Great War, bro!)! But, much like in Willie and His Papa above, it is the accidental narrative of history. Crosby was a solider, and drew disembarking comics when he disembarked; frontline comics when he was at he frontline; postwar Paris comics after the war; nostotic comics as he performs his nostos. Almost any American soldier (casualties excepted) is going to have the same story in the same order. C’est la guerre!

PROS
•A protracted narrative on a serious subject
•Actually printed on both sides of the page, so it’s just as long as it looks ( >100pp.)

CONS
•The narrative is an accidental afterthought

I am still rejecting this. But what would happen if we could find a comic with a narrative that someone had actually planned out; you know, like a story?

My latest book—one week old!

Knights of legend!

•Moon Mullins by Frank Willard (1927)

(I’ve never actually read the 1927 Moon Mullins, but I read a 1929 volume known as Moon Mullins Series 3, and I’d wager it’s the same basic thing. Assume everything I say about Moon Mullins Series 3 refers to Moon Mullins [Series 1].)

And here we’re on to something! Here we have a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In payment of a gambling debt, Moon Mullins receives what he does not know to be a stolen car. Trouble with the cars’s real owners, trouble with the law, and then, at last, the true culprit is unmasked. Happy ending. The book starts elegantly, introducing first the car’s owners, establishing a conflict with our protagonists, later alluding to the fact that their car is stolen, and only then interweaving in the gambling debt. It ends in a somewhat odd fashion—the whole plot is wrapped up nicely, and then there are three pages of somewhat extraneous and random material. That’s only three pages, but as the whole book is only 46 pages long, it’s not an insignificant percentage.

Fred Willard is a great cartoonist—perhaps not as great as Percy Crosby was in 1927, but certainly better than Percy Crosby was in 1919, when the last book we examined came out. This is a solid story with solid cartooning. And yet…

Moon Mullins was a daily comic strip. This volume in question is a collection of daily strips, one strip per page. Strips were bigger back then, and you can fit more action into Moon Mullins’s four panels than you can in the one or two panels of a contemporary daily strip like Mark Trail or Mary Worth—46 days of Moon Mullins has enough story to feel like a graphic novel, something that sounds counterintuitive to the newspaper reader of today.

I know I said way back at the beginning that being originally serialized was no impediment to being a graphic novel; I cited Watchmen and Maus; I’m not crazy. But although Moon Mullins is serialized and has a perfectly good narrative, it seems perverse to me to call 46 strips yanked from an ongoing run the first graphic novel. Fred Willard didn’t plan for it to be a novel, especially not a 46-page one like this book! We know that’s true because the story is only 43 comics long—three extraneous days at the end. He was just spinning yarns, one after another.

Moon Mullins ran for almost 25,000 strips over the course of eight decades. Not all of it was a serial narrative, the way it was in the ’20s, but a lot of it was. Can we really pretend that Moon Mullins is just a sequence of hundreds of novels? I have a hard time pretending that.

I picked Moon Mullins because it’s old and I like it. It’s the first collection of this kind I could think of. But many other strips of the era also found themselves easily falling into discrete stories, many were also collected into books, and for all I know some of them may predate 1927—

(Oh! Poking around, I just found that Little Orphan Annie had it’s first collection in 1926! Later Annie collections were “novelistic” (such as 1933’s LOA in Cosmic City), and maybe the 1926 collection is, too)

—but here’s the thing. Even if Barney Google or Gasoline Alley didn’t have 1920s collections that encompassed single stories, they still had those single stories. Follow me here. In 1937–38, the Mickey Mouse comic strip had a long story sequence known as “The Monarch of Medioka.” To the best of my knowledge, it was not published as a standalone volume until 1988. But if it was a novel in 1988, wasn’t it a novel in 1938? If all the chapters of a book are published serially ala David Copperfield, but the chapters are never collected between two covers…isn’t David Copperfield still a novel? This is not necessarily a hypothetical question. Horatio Alger’s Cast upon the Breakers was serialized in the nineteenth century but not collected until the 1970s. Isn’t it a nineteenth-century novel?

What I’m saying is that if we can take 46 Moon Mullins strips out of 25K and call it a graphic novel, can’t we take 46 strips any number of times out of the infinite sea of comic strips and generate hundreds or thousands of retroactive graphic novels? Which one of those is first? Am I talking crazy here?

PROS
•A lengthy narrative in sequential-art form
•More satisfying as a narrative than any of the above, honestly

CONS
•Just a small moment, drawn ex post facto from an ongoing story
•Potentially opens the floodgates for an infinite number of ex post facto graphic novels, and then where would our quest be?

Let me just say that from here on in, I mean for this book and all following, if you disagree with me and want to take any of these picks as the first graphic novel…I can’t really fight you. I don’t think they’re the best answer, but they’re not bad answers. Maybe on another day I’d agree with you. I’ll come to my pick, and it’s not yet, but pax to all who diverge from my judgment.

Nevertheless, despite their merits, I cannot bring myself to accept Moon Mullins, or Little Orphan Annie, or hypothetical Gasoline Alley in the Adventure of the Sudden Skeezix. This road (which we have followed through Opper, Outcault, and Crosby) is a dead end. But there are other, surprising roads, arising from unexpected directions.

•Wally’s Gang #91 by Frank Johnson (1928)

No one saw this coming, but at some point in the 1920s, a kid in Chicago started filling notebooks with comics about a bald narcissist and his gang of sweater-wearing pals. This is before comic books existed—only strip collections like the Mullins above—but young Frank Johnson did not make strips. He made…um…graphic novels?

Frank Johnson apparently never showed anyone his comics. He died in 1979, and somehow much of his life’s work eventually made it into the hands of comics historians, who have curated it into art shows and selected some for publication. What happened to the first ninety (!!) notebooks of Wally’s Gang is anyone’s guess, but the ninety-first, completed in 1928 when Johnson was sixteen, is, yeah, kind of a graphic novel. A composition notebook, its blue guidelines used to help freehand panel borders, holds a penciled adventure in which Wally seeks to win a bike race despite the machinations of various frenemies.

Both art and story are crude, but crudity is no barrier; we’re just looking for priority (and Johnson would get much better as he aged, of course). He completed 37 more increasingly competent volumes of Wally’s Gang, plus various side projects, before he died, but its only the first volume that concerns us—or rather the ninety-first, since at least it survives. Is it a graphic novel?

On the one hand, clearly yes. It’s a long narrative, it’s a comic, and it’s bound together as a book. It’s only one in a series of volumes about Wally and his gang, but that is no more an obstacle than it is for Tarzan or Nancy Drew novels.

But it’s also not published. It’s not even inked! Am I going to say that the first graphic novel in America was secretly scrawled out by a sixteen-year-old obsessive and hidden in a trunk for decades?

Comics, as we will return to later, is among other things a tradition. Young Frank Johnson is self-consciously aping that tradition, but he’s not part of it. He’s not inside it. You can’t make outsider art3 unless you’re outside it! No one ever saw his work, at least until after he died (in 1979). If you invent a polio vaccine and then never tell anyone, I don’t think you get to “scoop” Salk. I’m nixing this.

(Also it’s only like 30-odd pages long; I know some later volumes are 100+ pages, but I don’t know what year we reach that length.)

PROS
•More or less just a regular graphic novel

CONS
•Too short
•Never published
•Outsider art
•Dead branch

•God’s Man by Lynd Ward (1929) 

From almost the exact opposite direction and one year later we get out next contender: a “novel in woodcuts” (per the cover) told entirely without words by Lynd “Biggest Bear” Ward.

Unlike a teen mad genius amusing himself in a (presumably) basement, Lynd Ward was a fine artist addressing big themes in art and politics. His book is an adult book, by both definitions of the term—I mean it’s about modern alienation and it shows boobs.

So: It’s self-consciously a novel. It’s sequential art. Do we have a winner?

Here’s my objection: God’s Man looks like a graphic novel to us, but this is because we live in a post-Scott McCloud world. I said I wanted the first graphic novel to be in comics form, and Outcault, Crosby, Willard, and even Johnson were self-consciously making comics. They were trying to work in the comics tradition (Outcault practically invented it). But Ward is operating in a different tradition, self-consciously aiming to be like Belgian artist Frans Masereel who made earlier “wordless novels” (not considered here due to insufficient Americanness). And I do mean self-consciously—the woodcut medium, the page-sized panels, the progressive politics: Ward is Masereel’s disciple.

And Ward did not think he was making comics any more than Masereel thought he was making comics. No one else thought they were making comics either—Thomas Mann called one of Masereel’s books his favorite movie (!). In his retrospective essay on “pictorial narrative,” Ward name-checks comic books and comic strips (as well as Egyptian murals) but makes it clear that his inspirations are all fine artists.

God’s Man (and Ward’s subsequent, similar, silent books) is well worth reading for fans of the graphic novel, but it can hardly be the first graphic novel if it is trying so hard not to be the very thing that graphic novels must be viz. comics.

PROS
•In some sense it’s a graphic novel

CONS
•It’s only comics thanks to Scott McCloud!
•Go back to Europe!

•She Done Him Wrong by Milt Gross (1930)

Milt Gross is a great cartoonist!—only Percy Crosby, of all the people we’ll consider, is better—and in 1930 he wrote what he called “the great American novel.” So is it the first American graphic novel? This is honestly the closest we’ve come so far, but I’m still going to say no.

She Done Him Wrong is in content a parody of Hollywood melodramas but in form a parody of Lynd Ward’s God’s Man (and similar works). The art is as close as Gross’s pen can come to emulating a woodcut. (If you didn’t know what he was aiming at, you might wonder why the pictures looked that way). Gross is, in other words, still working in the Masereel tradition—and note again the tie-in to movies. Sure, Gross is himself a cartoonist, a veteran of comic strips and (later) comic books, but that fact doesn’t make She Done Him Wrong comics any more than it make Gross’s various prose works (Nize Baby, Dear Dollink, etc.) comics.

This is going to be my objection to the other wordless American novels an energetic young contrarian might want to trot out to stymie me—William Gropper’s Alay-oop (1930), Fiacomo Patri’s White Collar (1938), or Myron Waldman’s Eve (1943), say. These books represent a parallel tradition, similar to comics, someday to be absorbed by the rubric comics, but operating on its own set of assumptions and ultimately to a greater (Patri) or lesser (Waldman) extent looking back to or through Ward.

PROS
•Closest thing yet

CONS
•We’re still in Masereelland
•We never left

(While I have this Milt Gross in my hand, I’ll also summarily dismiss his 1939 That’s My Pop Goes Nuts for Fair, a souvenir book from the 1939–40 NY World’s Fair, as being more a series of vaguely connected gags than an actual narrative. I calls ’em etc.)

•Four Immigrants by Yoshitaka Henry Kiyama (1931) 

Okay, now we’re out of Masereelland, and things are interesting again. Because in 1931 a Japanese expatriate in California published a semi-autobiographical account of the adventures of four Japanese immigrants in San Francisco—as a hardcover book made up of fifty-two two-page comics episodes (so that’s 104 pages in the book).

Yoshitaka Kiyama had initially intended the comics in his book for syndication in Japanese-language Californian newspapers—there were fifty-two installments so it could run weekly for a year—but that never materialized. In 1927 Kiyama displayed the comics at an art show (he was also a fine artist), but he didn’t publish them until ’31.

Our four heroes—with big dreams and the new American-friendly names Henry, Fred, Frank, and Charlie—enter San Francisco by page two, try hard to get along in the new country, and on the final page two of the four head back to Japan. So we have a plot, and at 104 pages, that plot makes a novel.

One could carp that this is (like so many so-called graphic novels) not a novel but a memoir. I obviously have no idea how much is made up here, but I dismiss said carping by the purely subjective handwaving that (unlike, say, Fun Home) Four Immigrants reads like fiction. Frederick L. Schodt in his introduction to the 1999 reprint says that “while Kiyama took certain liberties and created some composites of experiences, the story in the manga…was far more of a documentary that [he] had originally suspected,” a statement that backhandedly supports my subjective impression. If you have to interview an author’s daughter to learn that he’s not writing fiction, then, brother, that means the text presents as fiction.

So don’t worry about that. But I’m going to carp nevertheless. This book is neither outsider art (like Frank Johnson’s) nor an attempt at aping European art models (like Lynd Ward’s), but it’s also scarcely inside the American comics tradition. It’s published in America, but it’s got one foot in Japan. I don’t want to be jingoistic here, I just mean that if I’m going to exclude the whole stream of wordless graphic novels as being a parallel tradition, surely I should exclude this one as well.

My talk of traditions is complicated by the fact that Kiyama (like Johnson but unlike Ward) is clearly inspired by the American comic strip, right down to the (idiosyncratic for a Japanese) panel placement. But although Kiyama published his novel in two different ways (publicly at an art show and (better, for our purposes) as a hardcover), it does not seem to be widely distributed, even among the limited potential American audience (of Japanese readers). It must have had more readers than Johnson’s comics, but but, honestly, how many more?

So I’m saying no.

PROS
•Technically published

CONS
•We are still technically in the land of newspaper strips, even if this one didn’t get off the ground4
•Super obscure
•Insufficiently American

I’m going to skip right over The Bowser Boys (1948) because we already did Frank Johnson, and he hasn’t cleaned up any of the “cons” problems with Wally’s Gang except the length (The Bowser Boys is 80 solid pages, much of it actually inked (!)); BB is also as episodic as any strip collection, even if these boozy lowlifes could never have passed a syndicate’s censors. Skipped! To get to the good stuff, viz.:

•It Rhymes with Lust by Drake Waller, Matt Baker, and Ray Orsin (1950)

And here it is, trumpets sound etc. In 1950 publisher Archer St. John sought to cash in on the rise of mass-market paperback books by creating a “picture novel”—projected first in a series, even if the series never materialized. Comics veteran Arnold “Doom Patrol” Drake, one half of the Drake Waller pseudonym (Leslie Waller was the other) came up with the term “picture novel” as well as the picture novel logo. The book was (he told The Comics Journal in 2006, the year before his death) his brain child, a longer, more adult comic to appeal to “ex-G.I.s who read comics while in the service.”

For the art they got Matt Baker, by far the best draftsman of any cartoonist we’ve encountered, and one of the highlights of the Golden Age of comics. Baker is perhaps best remembered today for drawing that Phantom Lady cover (#17, 1949) that gave Fredric Wertham such conniptions in Seduction of the Innocent, but he’s more than just a cheesecake artist. It’s not really important for our purposes that his work on It Rhymes with Lust be great—although it is great—but it is important that it be comics, and it’s certainly that—the wordy, dialog-heavy kind of comics that would remain in favor up through the 1980s.

(I have no idea who Ray Orson is; I guess he inked this piece.)

Outside of the art, It Rhymes with Lust isn’t very good, just a trashy melodrama——but this is comics, so that makes it better! We’re looking for a novel in comics form, and in 1950 the comics form meant sometimes funny animals but often straight-up trash. Lust delivers! What could I possibly say against it? No surprises here; I will not be the first to hail It Rhymes with Lust as the first American graphic novel, although I hope the rigorous scientific method I have used to come upon this answer was of some value.

PROS:
•A graphic novel in every sense of the word

CONS:
•None…

…oh, except that this book ↴ came out the same year and no one knows which one was released first.

I’m arbitrarily choosing the one I’ve read. Begone, Mansion of Evil! ❦

Appendix: Where can I read these things?

Many of these books are public domain, and available free for all; many others have been reprinted, and are inexpensive. I’ve tried to collect places the curious can find the texts to check my work/nitpick my errors:

•The Adventures of Obadaiah Oldbuck: public domain
•Journey to the Gold Diggins: public domain
•Rev. Mr. Sourball’s European Tour: public domain
•The Brownies: public domain
•A Story without Words: public domain
•Willie and His Papa and the Rest of the Family: public domain
•Buster Brown: public domain, but I don’t know where to find the 1903 collection; a 1904 collection is here
•That Rookie from the 13th Squad: public domain
•Between Shots: public domain
•Moon Mullins: Series 1 in public domain, but I don’t know where to find it. Series 3 was reprinted (alongside Series 5) by Dover Press in 1976 as Moon Mullins: Two Adventures
•Wally’s Gang & The Bowser Boys: Earlier this year Fantagraphics started reprinting these works with Frank Johnson, Secret Pioneer of American Comics Vol. 1
•God’s Man: This has been reprinted several times, including by Dover Publications and in the Library of America Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts volume 1
•She Done Him Wrong: reprinted by Fantagraphics in 2006
•That’s My Pop Goes Nuts for Fair: reprinted as Milt Gross’ New York by IDW in 2015
•not all the wordless books mentioned have been reprinted to my knowledge, but Firefly Books’ Graphic Witness collection contains some (the second edition has five wordless novels to the first edition’s four)
•Passionate Journey was also reprinted standalone by Dover
•Four Immigrants: translated by Frederick L. Schodt as The Four Immigrants Manga and published in 1999 by Stone Bridge Press
•It Rhymes with Lust: reprinted in 2007 by Dark Horse and in 2006 as a special bonus feature in The Comics Journal #277
•Mansion of Evil: no idea; it never happened!

A canonical list of Dr. Seuss's conjoined characters: Additions welcome!

I. Naturally conjoined

•“Lads with the Siamese Beard” (PM (1941)).

•“a long, twisting eel” (McElligot’s Pool (1947)).

•“a very odd family of deer” (If I Ran the Zoo (1950)).

•Whitney and Judson (The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953)).

•detail from a circus parade (If I Ran the Circus (1956)).

•“When Better Horses Are Breeded, Broder will Brood them” (original sketch (1956)).

•the Brothers Ba-zoo (Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? (1973)).

•detail from wackiness (Wacky Wednesday (1974)).1

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II. Habitually conjoined

Interpreted loosely, every stack of creatures, every pouched kangaroo, or Thidwick might count here, but I am looking specifically at creatures whose identity requires them to exist in conjunction with others.

•“a new sort of hen” (If I Ran the Zoo (1950)).

•To-and-Fro Marchers (If I Ran the Circus (1956)).

•Through-Horns-Jumping-Deer (If I Ran the Circus (1956)).

•”The Economic Situation Clarified” (New York Times Magazine (1975).2

•you, etc. (Oh, the Places You'll Go! (1990)).

III. Do these count?

•“The Facts of Life” (Judge (1934)).

•Liberators of America (PM (1941))?

2

The NYT Magazine ran the image, cropped, with a poem in the middle of it, looking something like this:

This image, and the information concerning it, comes from the excellent book The Zaks and Other Lost Stories (2022).

“What can I but enumerate old themes…”
•Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1939).

Some artists return again and again to their favorite well, same old bucket in hand. Alfred Hitchcock never tires of reminding people that they are one false accusation away from being a fugitive from justice; Jane Austen has a hard time keeping readers in suspense about whether or not her heroes will get together in the end (they will); J.W. Waterhouse will paint the same beautiful woman over and over and she will never have ears; Lord Byron didn’t get the Byronic hero named after him by, you know, mixing it up.

But few artists have hammered on the same theme as resolutely as Daniel Manus Pinkwater; and no artists I can think of have ever looked back at their particular obsession and commented on it so thoroughly, even savagely, as Pinkwater did in his 1985 volume Young Adults. In this review, I’ll (I.) consider the book in question, (II.) briefly touch upon Pinkwater’s favorite themes, and (III.) try to tease out how one book of dirty jokes—I mean the book being reviewed—reexamines and critiques these themes.

Part I: The Structure of the Work

All of Young Adults is divided into three parts: two novellas and one chapter of “a novel to be completed sometime or other.”1 (The first novella was published three years earlier as a separate, apparently stand-alone work. The rest of the material appears for the first time in Young Adults.) Let’s take these parts one at a time.

a. The first novella, entitled Young Adult Novel

In this section we meet the Wild Dada Ducks, five high school students who are devoted to the early twentieth-century art movement Dada. They all have Dada names such as the Indiana Zephyr or Captain Colossal—Charles the Cat is our narrator—and these names are all anyone ever uses (with a lone exception: At one point a counselor lets slip that Igor’s “slave name” is Maurice). They dress, as befits serious artists, in a dignified fashion, meaning neckties and also perhaps baby carriage wheels and a banana on a string etc. The Ducks are aware that “Dada is generally a misunderstood art movement”; as might be imagined, despite their attempts to bring culture to Himmler (!) High, the Dada Ducks are not very popular.

Young Adult Novel is quite explicitly a parody of young adult literature as it existed in the mid-eighties—or at least part of it is. The Ducks are engaged in an ongoing collaborative art project, a Dada young adult novel titled Kevin Shapiro, Boy Orphan. Several chapters of this art project are interpolated into the narrative of Young Adult Novel. As any YA protagonist of the time might, young Kevin Shapiro suffers through abuse, addiction, pregnancy (a surprise, that one), and then “instead of winding up with a lecture from some kindly adult about moral responsibility and another chance for Kevin, we [the Ducks] would just kill him off from time to time. [Later] we would just bring Kevin back for another chapter of tragedy and degradation, and kill him again when it got boring.”

The slim plot kicks off when the Ducks learn that a kid named Kevin Shapiro actually attends their school. This, the real-life Kevin Shapiro, is a shrimpy comic book nerd, and the Ducks decide to make him a local celebrity through their art. By miracle, they succeed, but an embittered Kevin Shapiro, who just wants to be left alone, uses his newfound popularity to lead the rest of the school in a lunchtime assault on the Ducks, in the course of which our heroes are coated with mushy Grape-Nuts.

Unable to fathom what went wrong, the soggy Ducks seek a moral from their experience.

“It has no moral,” their leader (known as the Honorable Venustiano Carranza (President of Mexico)) tells them. “It is a Dada story.” With these words, Young Adult Novel ends.

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b. The second novella, titled Dead End Dada

Disheartened—explicitly by the looming threat of nuclear annihilation and implicitly by their humiliation at the hands of Kevin Shapiro’s followers—the Dada Ducks decide to give up on Dada and embrace Zen Buddhism instead.

Unfortunately, the newly rebranded Dharma Ducks know almost nothing about Zen, and have to cobble together an understanding from memories of kung fu flicks, one specific issue of a Dr. Wizardo comic, and (especially) a brown-rice-themed health food cookbook.2 Aware that their comprehension is inadequate, the Ducks seek out a Zen master, homing in on the only Asian person they can find: Sigmund Yee, owner of the local laundromat. Yee wants no part of this; he calls the Ducks “little racist bastards,” accuses them of being addled by drugs, and chases them away, but our heroes decide that Yee is behaving exactly as a real Zen master would and search for coded wisdom in his statements.

The Dharma Ducks will need all their Zen fortitude because a series of amusing mishaps soon gets them publicly labeled as chronic masturbators, whereupon they are forced to attend three periods of remedial gym every school day (ostensibly so they’ll have no energy left over for self-abuse). A litany of sufferings then rains upon our heroes: health problems; dead pets; academic failure; compulsory attendance at the Anti-Communist White American League Rifle and Machine Gun Class and Sunday School; “Captain Colossal’s parents announced they were getting a divorce. They told the Captain it was mostly his fault”; etc. The parallels to the sufferings of Kevin Shapiro, Boy Orphan, are right there on the surface to be picked up by any passersby.

Meanwhile the real Kevin Shapiro is dating three cheerleaders at once, drives a convertible, and has just been accepted into Princeton.

Finally, while meditating on the floor of a poultry slaughterhouse (the Dharma Ducks have been running out of places to practice their religion), our heroes achieve what a chapter title labels satori, or enlightenment. They realize that they have been wasting their lives on Zen, and that all this time they should have been focusing on…revenge! Revenge against Kevin Shapiro and Sigmund Yee and their high school principal. With their bloodthirsty vows, and with the implication that in the future the Ducks will emulate only Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the novella ends.

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c. The third part: “The first chapter of The Dada Boys in Collitch, a novel to be completed sometime or other”

Ostensibly a lone chapter from a hypothetical novel that has never materialized, this section is still half as long as either of the two novellas that precedes it; in other words, it is the single longest chapter in the whole volume.

Our heroes have now hied to the hallowed halls of Martwist College—two of them have enrolled, and the other three come along because “Wild Dada Ducks stick together.” They are all now resolutely devoted to their “ultimate hero” Mozart, and have reverted to their old name (Wild Dada Ducks) under the assumption that Mozart would approve.

In college, the Ducks find what they never could in high school—a kind of community of the damned, made up of fat kids, queer kids, “obnoxious” kids, etc., as well as one violent and frequently naked self-proclaimed genius named John Holyrood. When the Ducks’ dorm room cum Mozart shrine is trashed in a John Holyrood-centered orgy, our boys face expulsion—but by that point they have already met Henrich Bleucher, a forest-dwelling leprechaun with a thick German accent and ambiguous supernatural powers who gives lectures about prehistoric cave paintings at an outdoor classroom cobbled together out of kitchen chairs and a ping pong table. Realizing they can get a better education from this freakish little hermit than from their lame college classes, the Ducks rob Holyrood at knifepoint and flee, to live as outlaws in the woods. Here their education can commence. End chapter one. End the third section. End the whole book.

d. The book in toto

The arc that the Dada boys’ story follows is only mildly unconventional. They suffer and squirm through the vagaries of adolescence, and end up the first chance they get abandoning the civilization that has betrayed them. If you except the fact that there are five protagonists and not one, it’s not so different from a canonical bildungsroman such as Knut Hamsun’s Hunger.

And yet the Young Adults volume consistently frustrates any attempt to read it as a coherent whole. Even though only the first part was ever published separately, the second and third parts retain the fiction that they are discrete, autonomous units: Dead End Dada spends an entire chapter recapping the events of Young Adult Novel, and the opening chapter of Dada Boys in Collitch summarizes (more rapidly) both novellas. Furthermore, Hunger may have had an “open” ending, as its protagonist, in true bildungsroman style, sails off to new adventures—but at least it’s an ending! Here comes THE END of Hunger, and you put the book down satisfied to have completed something. The Dada Boys in Collitch is just an opening chapter of a promised work. The one thing you have not done is finished reading…anything!

This is hardly accidental. When the Ducks put on a Dada play and read, card by card, a shuffled poker deck verrrrrry slowly—we are told that the audience (highschoolers trapped in a cafeteria) found it a frustrating experience. A Dada story should frustrate, should it not? Conventional YA novels come to a conclusion, but Kevin Shapiro, Boy Orphan reboots and goes on forever. As bonus material, Pinkwater includes extra chapters of Kevin Shapiro, Boy Orphan allegedly sent to him by young readers after the publication of Young Adult Novel. In one “fan chapter,” Kevin has his first-ever birthday party, and all the guests are poisoned and die. “How will I explain about the fiery angel that warned only me to eat nothing?”

e. A judgment

Young Adults is the funniest book written in the twentieth century, or at least one of the top five.3 I hope I’ve made that clear. We live in a particularly humorless time, and I’m sure many readers will find the Ducks too unpleasant, too “unprofessional” or too “privileged” or too whatever our particular bogeymen may be. In the Ducks’ defense, they’re reacting against a world gone mad—on the macro level of geopolitics, they claim, but really on a micro level in the sense that every authority figure or system they encounter is corrupt, hostile, mendacious, or evil, and often all four. If you were just looking for a nihilistic book with a bunch of fairly dirty jokes and a vague tie-in to Modernism, I would recommend this one. You’ll be satisfied.

But that is if you read Young Adults on its own. Young Adults is merely a great book, but that is scarcely all it is; rather, it is a deconstruction and a confession and an analysis of Daniel Pinkwater’s entire oeuvre.

This is where things get interesting.

Try these books of mine…

Part II: The Structure of the Structure

Every single novel-length book Pinkwater wrote before Young Adults4 (and many he wrote after) follows an identical pattern. You can shoehorn his novellas into the pattern, if you want, as well, but the novels are clearer, and we don’t want to get bogged down in minutiae.

This is the pattern:

§1. A young man is dissatisfied with his life (sometimes suffering through a living hell, sometimes merely bored).
§2. He falls in with a slightly strange character.
§3. That character brings him into a world that is more than slightly strange. Somewhere around here we leave the fields we know.
§4. The protagonist has a mystical experience.
§5. In a state of enlightenment (or something!), the character returns to 1.

It would test the reader’s patience to endure my running through the plots of several more books, but look briefly at Lizard Music: Victor (the only Pinkwater protagonist this side of Charles the Cat to be deprived of a last name) is bored and listless when his family leaves for the summer without him (that’s item §1). He hooks up with the Chicken Man, a strange character based on a real-life Chicago eccentric (§2). Together they travel to an invisible floating island named Diamond Hard (§3), where Victor enters the House of Memory and has a unique experience he does his best to describe (§4). He brings home a stuffed animal he had lost somewhere in his childhood and a newfound desire to become something like the Chicken Man himself (annnnnd §5).

In Alan Mendelsohn, §1 is Leonard Neeble, and §2 is Alan himself. In Worms of Kukumlima, §1 is Ronald Donald Almondotter, and §2 is Sir Charles Pelicanstein. In Avocado of Death, §1 is Walter Galt (and his pal Winston Bongo), and §2 is Rat. You can work through these on your own.

But already you have whipped out your copies of Joseph Campbell and are insisting that this pattern is so ubiquitous as scarcely to need mentioning. This is the monomyth and blah blah Star Wars blah blah thousand faces. But Pinkwater’s books are unusual in that they never stop insisting that their heroes’ journeys are sometimes explicitly but always implicitly steps towards a transcendent, mystical experience. Perhaps the clearest explication of this experience comes in Borgel (the first Pinkwater novel published after Young Adults): therein Melvin Spellbound says, “I wanted to laugh. Or cry. I knew I could never figure out what was causing all these strong feelings in me. I wanted to stay there, looking at the shining Popsicle forever.” (This is more explicit in context; also, in context the Popsicle part makes sense.) But you can see it in Ronald Donald Almondotter’s search for Kukumlima (which one can only find when lost) or Leonard Neeble’s crossing over into Waka-Waka (which can only be achieved by meditation).

The meditation Leonard Neeble uses to reach Waka-Waka is heavily coded as Zen meditation, and indeed Leonard leaves for Waka-Waka from a garden festooned with Buddha statues. Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism especially, is all over the Pinkwater canon: The Snarkout Boys shop at the All Night Zen Bakery; Harold Blatt (The Last Guru) invests in the Zen Burger; psychic Lydia LaZonga (Baconburg Horror) goes to a Zen Chiropractor. Dueling Buddhist and pre-Buddhist sects such a Blong or the Silly Hat Order make frequent appearances. Before Harold Blatt invests in the Zen Burger he makes his seed money at the racetrack, betting on a horse named after the Buddha’s own horse (Kanthaka). Pinkwater, in his autobiographical works, has made it clear what a great debt he owes to his readings in Zen. His apprenticeship to sculptor Navin Diebold5 he codes as a Zen master/disciple relationship, complete with puzzling koans. When Pinkwater gets Diebold to read a copy of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Diebold exclaims, “Hell of a thing! I’ve been a Zen Master all this time and I didn’t even know it.”

I don’t want to press this too hard; certainly the Buddhist trappings are often just ornamental. But the mystical experiences at the heart of the Pinkwater novel are coded as satori frequently enough that the reader has to understand them through this lens. And I know I’m being slightly coy about what exactly a §4 “mystical experience” entails—but that’s part of the problem with mystical experiences! Georges Bataille wrote an entire book about transcendence (L’expérience intérieure) and I read the whole thing and didn’t understand a word of it.

One interesting aspect of these intérieure experiences as Pinkwater’s characters internally experience them: They’re often disappointing. Victor from Lizard Music is probably the only protagonist ever to be completely satisfied four stars would Zen again. Ronald Donald Almondotter meanwhile is threatened with a diet of nothing but crunchy granola forever, Eugene Winkleman (Yobgorgle) with a diet of fish flakes. The Snarkout Boys, like some kind of Lovecraftian narrator, learn of the cosmic peril that besets the earth and immediately fail to prevent or subvert it. Leonard Neeble drinks fleegix and it tastes “lousy.”

But afterwards Leonard Neeble, who had started the book in junior high school hell (§1) returns to our world from Waka-Waka and finds his place. “I was taking over Alan Mendelsohn’s old job.” As surely as Victor was seeking out the Chicken Man’s.

Part III. The work in the domain of the structure

This is, of course, not a review of a half dozen novels Daniel Pinkwater wrote in the ’70s and early ’80s. This is a review of Young Adults! So our job is to determine how Young Adults fits into what we might want to call the Pinkwater monomyth.

One thing to notice before we plunge in is that Young Adults is often a straightforward parody of tics or even scenes from these earlier Pinkwater books. Already mentioned is the fact that Pinkwater’s characters tend to flirt with Zen; and so the Dada Ducks declare it inferior to glorious revenge! Furthermore Pinkwater’s books often revolve around chickens, so the Ducks put on an unendurable play titled The Chickens of Uranus. The Balkan Falcon is a dark mirror of the Magic Moscow. Or: Leonard Neeble manipulates his therapist to get himself out of gym class,6 so the Dada Ducks try to manipulate their therapist—that’s when they’re publicly branded as onanists and assigned extra gym.

But such trivia is merely cute. More importantly, each of the three sections of Young Adults engages with our monomythical superstructure in unique ways.

a. the first novella, YNA

In Young Adult Novel, Kevin Shapiro is placed in the role of the Pinkwater protagonist at §1: He is a dissatisfied, alienated, antisocial nerd enduring high school by keeping his head down. This situation is unusual, because Charles the Cat is narrating the story,7 not Kevin Shapiro; and yet Kevin Shapiro, like any good protagonist, is the first character to appear in the book. In fact, the entire first chapter of Young Adult Novel is about Kevin Shapiro—it’s about how he’s a drug-addicted criminal who is murdered and fed to pigs (because it’s a chapter reprinted from Kevin Shapiro, Boy Orphan), but it’s still about him.

Kevin Shapiro meets some slightly strange characters (§2), and these are the Dada Ducks. In other words, while previous books had been from the (first-person) point of view of the alienated young man (§1), Young Adult Novel is from the point of view of the strange characters (§2) themselves.

And in this book, and in this book alone, the alienated young man wants nothing to do with the strange characters! He is openly hostile to them. “I’ll punch out your face, see?”

This hostility throws our monomyth off its monorails. Kevin Shapiro’s epiphany is not an internal one, but rather an elevation by popular acclaim to unprecedented power. “I think he may be God,” the Honorable Venustiano Carranza (President of Mexico)) says of Kevin Shapiro on first meeting him, and indeed Kevin assumes the status of a god-king whose “word was law.” But Kevin is a cruel, vengeful god whose sole motivation is to humiliate the Dada Ducks. The structure cannot continue.

Kevin barely makes it to §3, and if he goes further, he’s not telling.

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b. The second novella, DED

By Dead End Dada, the Ducks, more alienated than ever, have assumed the role of §1. This is a reversal of other novels, in which the §1 figure takes the “old job” of the §2 figure. Our alienated Ducks only need to find a good §2 and they’ll be well on their way to experiencing a proper Pinkwater structure, and not the travesty of the first novella.

Unfortunately, they find no strange character. The individual they set their sights upon, Sigmund Yee, wants (like Kevin before him) no part of this plan. He, too, is openly hostile to the Ducks. (“Go do teenage crimes somewhere else!…Leave Yee alone!”) Once again the structure falls apart. The Ducks get no closer to §3 than a laundromat or a poultry slaughterhouse.

c. The chapter of an unfinished work

The Ducks come to college having failed twice to experience properly the book they are in. They are like characters who have blundered through a mystery novel without either leaving or finding any clues; characters in a romance novel who neither fall in love nor break a heart. They are genre misfits.

And at first it seems like they’re headed for a third strike, because the §2 they encounter is John Holyrood, a filthy, mooching poser who brings them nothing but trouble. There’s every evidence that he’s not even that strange—he’s a normie faking it to get girls and free liquor.

But Holyrood is a false flag. Holyrood is a red herring. As should be clear from the thorough Cliff Notes trot above, with the Holyrood situation falling apart around them the Ducks encounter the real deal in Henrich Bleucher. Bleucher does not hate the Ducks (as Yee or Kevin Shapiro did). Bleucher is not trying to use the Ducks (as Holyrood did). Bleucher leads the Ducks off into the woods to lecture them about art. Igor suggests that he already knows there is more to Bleucher than meets the eye—but of course there is! Soon, presumably, the Ducks will be abandoning reality altogether, well on their way to a mystical experience—but before that happens the book ends.

d. Come up with a clever title here. Don’t forget!

In this way the Ducks finally succeed, if only off the page, or in the hypothetical pages of a never-written work. It takes them three (or possibly three and a half) tries, but they are finally participating in the Pinkwater monomyth.

Later in his career, Pinkwater more and more often offered art as a way of experiencing whatever mystical event underpins §4. Recall that the soi-disant “Zen Master” Navin Diebold is a sculptor. In Pinkwater’s only personal account of a mystical experience (as related in the autobiographical Fish Whistle), it comes to him while he is contemplating a de Kooning painting.8 When Victor reappears years later in the novel Bushman Lives! he is the curator of an artists’ collective. In Chicago Days, Hoboken Nights, Pinkwater imagines a Vietnamese artist known as (significantly?) Duck having “ascended to Nirvana” because he managed to “completely comprehend the true nature of reality in the clear light of Buddha.” Pinkwater mentions that Duck is a better artist than he is.9

The Dada Ducks start out dedicated to art, specifically Dada, and end up dedicated to art, specifically Mozart. Is Dada truly (as the title claims) a dead end? Do the Ducks need Mozart to move along towards the mystical experience? Is it significant that, although he promises to speak on diverse academic subject, Bleucher’s opening lecture is an art lecture?

Perhaps it is foolish to look any deeper into what is, ultimately, “a Dada story.” Or perhaps a mystic always looks deeper. Three-quarters of a millennium ago, Izzidin Al-Muqaddisi wrote: “The man who fails to extract the significance from the sharp creak of the door, the buzzing of the bee, the barking of the dogs, the industry of the insects in the dust; he who knows not what is signified by the motion of the cloud, the shimmer of the mirage, and the shading of the mist; this man does not number among the perceptive ones.” I probably should have looked for a Zen quote instead, but let it stand.

e. “Salvabitur vix justus in die judicii; ergo salvabitur.” –Langland

Every once in a while a friend will recommend an anime to me, but grudgingly admit that you have to sit through twenty or thirty hours of mediocre episodes before it gets really good. There are comic book series I have pitched, in vain, to people in the same (wade through fifty poor issues to earn the next fifty good ones) terms.

If you want a full appreciation of Young Adults, perhaps it is true that you should read a half dozen earlier Pinkwater novels, and then go on to read another dozen later books. You will never again find a work, I think—not Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins!, not Bukowski’s Pulp—that so aggressively comments on and subverts a writer’s oeuvre. Victor’s life would have been very different if the Chicken Man had just been a jerk; or a loner; or an opportunist. Young Adults acknowledges this, and runs this plot that Pinkwater clearly loves so well through the wringer three different ways. But there is still a note of hope: The Dada Boys have to struggle through two books just to reach the spot Victor or Leonard Neeble start at—but they still ascend.

And that is the note of hope for prospective readers who do not want an assignment of nearly a score of books to plow through: As I mentioned, even when read alone and in complete ignorance of any other Pinkwater book, Young Adults is still one of the five funniest books of the twentieth century, so maybe just start there. You’ll want to keep going.