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	October 2006:: issue 36
	Books This Month 1. The Keep by Jennifer Egan 2. Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert 3. Severance by Robert Olen Butler 4. H.P. Lovecraft by Michel Houellebecq 5. Cinema Panopticum by Thomas Ott 6. The Helmet of Horror by Victor Pelevin 7. Home by Olaf Breuning   Feature Book News Credits/About Us Scary What keeps you up at night? Giant rabbits with teeth? Climate change? Premonitions of imminent doom? In honor of October, we touch on the many flavors of fear this month: Beheaded celebrities have their final say in Robert Olen Butler's Severance, controversial French author Michel Houellebecq dissects the life and work of horror master H.P. Lovecraft, and a creepy, wordless comic offers unsettling vignettes straight out of the Twilight Zone. Playing off our anxieties about technology, Victor Pelevin rewrites the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as a chat-room conversation. Jennifer Egan delivers a disquieting new novel, and Elizabeth Kolbert's essays explore the rise of global warming. To close things out on a lighter note, we delve into the history of a hair-raising collection of German children's stories. - Toby Warner

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Fiction The Keep by Jennifer Egan   Published: August 2006   Pages: 239   Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf   Links: Author site The Believer interview Author in NY Times Egan's Look At Me   Synopsis An ancient, history-laden Eastern European castle is refurbished by two American cousins with their own dark history. Review One never knows exactly who the main character is in Jennifer Egan's latest novel, The Keep. In this onion of a book, the reader keeps peeling back layer after layer — to reveal an even more intriguing and engrossing plot — without ever being sure which of the three main characters is speaking, or which is even real. The book begins with Danny, an aimless, thirty-something New Yorker, arriving late one night at an Eastern European Gothic castle, to which Danny's cousin Howard has summoned him in order to help convert the castle into a hotel. It is soon revealed that Howard and Danny share a traumatic childhood event that may — or may not — factor into why Howard invited Danny to the castle. It is also soon revealed that the entire story is being told by Ray, an inmate at a maximum-security New York State prison, who's taking a writing class to get away from his oppressively insane cellmate. Here are all the tropes of a modern thriller: an ancient castle, ghoulish legends of murdered twins, instruments of torture, an evil baroness locked up in a tower, a troubled childhood secret, and an imprisoned murderer. And yet, as the story progresses, none of these potential points of conflict is revealed to be the one on which the plot turns: none is the dark secret it seemed at first to be. One has to respect Egan for offering the reader such potentially lucrative plot points and then choosing to let them lie. They serve the essential purpose of drawing the reader into the story and driving the plot at a relentless pace. Yet Egan somehow manages to deftly manipulate them without allowing the narrative to falter. The story being told is not about Danny, or Howard, or Ray, or even the ancient castle and the murdered twins. The story is about imagination as a path toward healing and escape. It is about the power of fiction to both imprison and set free. Egan has crafted a world in which all of the characters are imprisoned in one way or another (if not in a physical jail or labyrinth or keep, then in various mental squirrel-cages, including addiction), but she has also given us the key: a world in which magical thinking actually works. - Sage Van Wing back to top

Nonfiction Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert   Published: March 2006   Pages: 210   Publisher: Bloomsbury USA   Links: Author bio Official book site New Yorker interview NY Times review Kolbert's The Prophet of Love   Synopsis A journalist documents the reality of climate change. Review Early on in Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Elizabeth Kolbert notes that the effects of global warming are most visible in parts of the world that are scarcely populated. In the last three decades, climatologists have noted significant changes in air and water temperature — not to mention varied animal migration patterns, glacial melting, and rising tides — but these are most felt in places such as Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska. This isn't to say that there aren't indications of climate change all over the world, but it just so happens that the most alarming indications surface where there are very few onlookers. The genius of Elizabeth Kolbert's technique lies in her ability to shrink the gap between our awareness of global warming and our experience of it. Even in spite of a recent surge of media attention, global warming continues to masquerade as a hypothetical foe. The average person has little sensory experience of climate change, and, given the urgency of other global affairs, it's not hard to see why the risk remains spectral. Kolbert began Field Notes from a Catastrophe as a series for the New Yorker, and the published book retains its journalistic slant. Its writing feels more like reporting than prose, and Kolbert conspicuously resists interpretation. She travels, interviews various experts, and collects data. She spends most of her time in the Arctic but she also visits university labs and observatories. Her findings speak for themselves: temperatures in Greenland have risen almost 20 degrees in a single decade; ice sheets are melting more quickly than scientists had previously feared; and butterflies are appearing farther and farther north of their native territories. In short, it's getting hotter. At times, the glut of data feels a bit redundant, and one may wonder if Kolbert's magazine features were sufficient treatment. But it is the repetition, in the end, that gives the book its power. These 210 pages contain enough documented evidence of global warming and its hazards to terrify even the most complacent reader. By the end of her narrative, Kolbert has done away with our willed ability to see global warming as a distant threat — or worse, a theory. It is nothing less than a rapidly encroaching reality. With scientists warning that we've only got decades to act, Kolbert bravely dives into the guts of what actually will need to be done. - Gena Hamshaw back to top

Fiction Severance by Robert Olen Butler   Published: September 2006   Pages: 263   Publisher: Chronicle Books   Links: Author profile Don Swaim audio interview NY Times Review Author in Zoetrope: All-Story Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain   Synopsis Off with their heads: the final thoughts of history's severed noggins as imagined by a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer. Review Can a gimmick transcend its gimmickry? As gimmicks go, Robert Olen Butler's is a nifty trick: the epigraphs for Severance inform us that a human head remains in a state of consciousness for one and a half minutes after decapitation, and that people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute in a "heightened state of emotion." Simple math means that the heads in each of Butler's 62 stories get exactly 240 words for their narratives — first-person, stream-of-consciousness glimpses of the lives they led. We hear the dying thoughts of many of the (in)famous beheadings of history, from 40,000 BC to 2008: John the Baptist remembers with almost erotic passion the moment of Christ's baptism; Anne Boleyn, the miscarried baby boy who was her last chance to produce a male heir for Henry VIII; Marie Antoinette, her childhood in the royal palace at Vienna. Other heads have been forgotten by the march of time — a slave, a factory girl, a murdered farmer. But Butler gives the nod (so to speak) to more imaginative cases as well. Medusa gets a turn, as do both St. George and his vanquished dragon. We hear from a chicken killed for Sunday dinner, and the final piece depicts Butler's own decapitation in 2008 — "on the job," at a book signing. It's Butler's artistry, though, that is the real attraction — the talking-heads shtick would otherwise lose its novelty after just a few stories — and by its end, the book becomes an intensely personal (if inherently speculative) tour of history and literature, rendered in urgent, splendid prose and steeped in pathos. In Butler's hands, his subjects' final thoughts turn most often to the joys of living, whether seminal moments of their biographies or intimate memories known only to a fictionist's pen. The beheaded have 90 seconds of rapture: a fleeting, liminal moment wherein corporeal life and ethereal death are bridged, paradoxically, through severance. When time runs out and their stories end, all that follows is a blank, black page. - Chris Parris-Lamb back to top

Fiction H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq   Published: 2005   Pages: 150   Publisher: McSweeney's Books   Links: Author bio NY Magazine review Guardian review H.P. Lovecraft unoffical site   Synopsis French novelist Michel Houellebecq seems a strange bedfellow for New England gentleman and horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, but this book, half-lit-crit, half-fan-letter, draws out their common hatred for life. The volume also includes two stories by Lovecraft and an introduction by Stephen King. Review Noted misanthrope Michel Houellebecq is undoubtedly the living writer most qualified to write about noted misanthrope H.P. Lovecraft. Happily, Houellebecq happens to be a fan, and a zealous one at that. Curiously, the author of the disturbingly sex-saturated novels Platform and The Elementary Particles finds resonance in Lovecraft's resolute refusal to let sex, money, or morals infiltrate his terrifying, phantasmagorical worlds. Lovecraft's currency is fear, and his interest in the body is confined to dismemberment and grotesqueries. Houellebecq's basic premise — that good horror writing (and good writing in general) is aligned against the world, against life — finds a perfect poster child in Lovecraft's biography. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a New England gentleman who eschewed the creep of modernity, a deeply and virulently racist xenophobe, and a frail, bookish creature enamored with faeries. Houellebecq reads the reclusive scribe's life as a series of negations of the friable world. Lovecraft's dreams and neuroses were sufficient for him. Indeed, the amoral evil of his imagination was infinitely more satisfying than any of his real-world haunts — such as the Lower East Side where he failed to find a job, or New England, where he returned to die. Both Houellebecq and Lovecraft share a distaste for mankind. But while the former repudiates its own terms, the latter creates a parallel world, one of evil creatures and coincidence, which his prose cracks open like a geode. It is this world of Cthulhu and Yuggoth, with which readers have fallen in love. Yet it is Lovecraft's underlying abnegation of living that Houellebecq finds the most compelling. Compared to these proud misanthropes, Stephen King, who writes the introduction to the essay, comes across as a goof. Mr. King claims his inspiration comes "when Mr. Idea Man [speaks] up from his Barcalounger at the back of [his] head." One can almost feel Houellebecq and Lovecraft cringe. King traffics in "boo!" moments; Lovecraft unleashes fear, horror, and unspeakable terror onto this world, with which he feels neither kinship nor empathy. - Joshua David Stein back to top

Comics Cinema Panopticum by Thomas Ott   Published: 2005   Pages: 80   Publisher: Fantagraphics Books   Links: L'Oeil électrique interview (French) Publisher's Weekly review Ott's The Hook   Synopsis With whiffs of the Twilight Zone and early-20th-century woodcuts, Thomas Ott's collection of obsessively detailed, wordless, scratchboard comics is a creepy delight. Review Comics owe a weighty debt to the Swiss. Genevan Rodolphe Töpffer invented the medium in 1833 with a series of "picture-stories" composed of sequential images separated by panels with a running written narrative. But what if Töpffer had left out that last bit? Text is about as vital to comics as sound is to film, an especially useful comparison when dealing with the work of contemporary Swiss comic artist Thomas Ott. Printed in black and white, Ott's Cinema Panopticum immediately recalls early silent horror films. The characters' expressions are grossly exaggerated; and, aside from chapter headings and incidental signs, the book is entirely wordless. The eponymous Cinema Panopticum is a penny arcade in a forlorn carnival. One day, a little girl parts the curtain and wanders in to watch its five macabre, short films in succession — alone. These Twilight Zone-esque tales form the book's five chapters, each of which teems with grotesquely giant bugs, hideous illnesses, and surprise endings that would make Rod Serling proud. Even amidst these hair-raising details, it's Ott's technique that is the real showstopper: the painstakingly created, wonderfully creepy drawings are rendered in that most eccentric of mediums, scratchboard. The overwhelming blackness of his pages, tempered only by finely scratched, white lines, recalls the early-20th-century woodcuts of Lynd Ward and Franz Masereel. Ott's work, published by L'Association, had been kicking around Europe for a while when Fantagraphics realized the ease of "translating" wordless comics and began putting out his collections on this side of the Atlantic. Like its EC horror comic forebears, Cinema Panopticum is not all doom and gloom, and an undercurrent of humor, albeit black and absurdist, runs through the book. It is this playfulness that makes Cinema Panopticum a truly delicious read. Underneath all the ghoulish thrills, Ott's love for his work is palpable. Like the crypt keeper, he invites us to share it with him. - Andy Warner back to top

Fiction The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur by Victor Pelevin   Published: April 2006   Pages: 274   Publisher: Canongate Books   Links: Author bio Bomb interview Guardian interview Pelevin's other books: A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia Buddha's Little Finger   Synopsis A bizarro updating of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, set entirely in an Internet chat room. Review Since rocketing to dizzying, imaginative heights after the Soviet grip on the arts loosened, Victor Pelevin has spent his bright literary career orbiting the realms of the surreal and the irrational. His latest contribution to the post-Soviet Russian literary canon proves that he has yet to come down from his heroic head-trips. A radically weird updating of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, The Helmet of Horror occurs as a chat-room discussion, wherein a handful of aliases begin to appear, not knowing how they came to be there, and enter into dialogue about their surroundings. Their thread is titled "Ariadne." Rather than the interconnected, free realm of the Internet, the cyberspace of the novel is a closed network of computer terminals installed in identical, single-occupancy cells, which may (or may not) be physically near one another. Inside each is a locked door covered by strange inscriptions, and any details the occupants try to offer about their identities are censored by omnipresent "moderators." Able to manifest themselves only as disembodied linguistic constructs, the characters band together to understand their universe and to find a way out. The key to all this is a mysterious virtual-reality mask known as the "helmet of horror." Fueled by Pelevin's trademark dark humor and his impeccable skill as a satirist, the novel leads us through a strange reality built on half-knowledge, dreams, and mutated literary and pop-cultural references (Romeo and Juliet, Star Wars, Japanese manga, Batman, Christianity, and even Merrill Lynch all make appearances) on the way to a denouement that doesn't disappoint, for all its strangeness. Even if we are condemned to remain imprisoned in our own faintly glowing cubicles, at least we have a writer like Pelevin to pound at the bars. - Stephen Dougherty back to top Art Home by Olaf Breuning   Published: 2004   Pages: 158   Publisher: JRP/Ringier   Links: Official site Artist's bio NY Times Review of Breuning's Art   Synopsis Olaf Breuning presents a behind-the-scenes-look at his wacky, satirical world of costumed extremists and nomadic protagonists. Review "Do Not Come to Easter Island!" is what the prudish travel agent wrote to Olaf Breuning when he inquired about getting permission for his pending photo project. Naturally, Breuning embarked the next day to shoot the famous, monumental Moai heads, complete with bunny-ears and rabbit-teeth, in an image that mixes one part blasphemy with two parts prankster-playboy. Similarly adolescent exploits from Breuning, a 21st-century Martin Kippenberger, are given full exposure in this single-volume monograph in French and English. Home documents the artist's photos, films, and installations from 2001 to 2004 in brilliant color spreads, filling entire pages with Breuning's lunatic characters and over-the-top stage sets. It follows a double show at two venues in France, the Musee d'Art moderne et contemporain in Strasbourg and the Magasin Centre National d'Art Contemporain in Grenoble. Taking its title from the artist's first medium-length film, Home also features a terrifically engaging behind-the-scenes narrative of the film's production from its star, Brian Kerstetter. Writing with a breezy, blog-ready style, Kerstetter recounts how the duo hired (and overpaid) a Vegas prostitute not to have sex with them, why Breuning orchestrated a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon, and the funny details of other gonzo-style episodes in Tokyo, Machu Picchu, and the outskirts of Queens, New York. These masterfully reproduced images showcase the temporary-Halloween-store madness that pervades Breuning's work. No costume is too tacky to include in his photographic tableaux; his subjects sport army fatigues, vampire teeth, cheap wigs, and hideous makeup, all the while posing with the seriousness of Shakespearean troupe actors. Mexican day-of-the-dead skeletons and ghosts haunt his installations, lending the scenes an air of kitschy, ethnographic mysticism. The final section of stills and production shots from Home halts the film's careening tempo, allowing a lingering look at a masterpiece that Breuning calls "particularly stupid." - Jessica Kraft back to top

FEATURE Struwwelpeter   Children today demand iPods and cell phones at eight years old (call it the cult of the child). Contrast this with the gruesome, 19th-century child-rearing fables on display in the nursery-rhyme picture book Der Struwwelpeter. In this infamous classic, the methods are nightmarish, mean, and, sometimes, devastatingly final. Thumbs are severed from the little children who suck them, while other tots are burned to ashes for playing with matches. The specter of death may loom large in many children's books, but it rarely rears its head. In these grisly tales, however, the lesson seems to be love 'em to death — literally. It's "something Hitler could have written on mescaline," according to Bob Staake, who has illustrated a new edition for Fantagraphics. Staake says he was drawn to Struwwelpeter because he couldn't believe it wasn't a joke of some sort: "but I soon learned this was the German way of child-rearing; scare the crap out of your kids and let 'em know that if they don't eat all their peas, some weird-looking clown will burst out from behind a curtain and slice their nose off with an ax." Heinrich Hoffmann (1809-1894) was a German physician and director of a state mental hospital. He wrote Der Struwwelpeter as a Christmas gift for his son, Carl, in 1845. Hoffman had complained that he could only find "long tales, stupid stories, beginning and ending with admonitions like 'the good child must be truthful' or 'children must keep clean,' etc." His hair-raising alternatives sold briskly and the manuscript was translated into more than 30 languages (including a rather loose English translation by Mark Twain). Hoffmann's drawings (of, say, fat Augustus starving to death) often contain more humor and pathos than his blood-thirsty rhymes. None other than Maurice Sendak once commented, "Graphically, it is one of the most beautiful books in the world." Staake's new drawings, though modern and vibrant, rely primarily on geometric shapes reminiscent of early computer animation — as if these suffering children and gun-toting rabbits were created on a single layer in Photoshop. While the cover image is reminiscent of the gross-out Garbage Pail Kids, Staake's interior spreads are sleeker and stylized — more akin to Soviet propaganda posters. Aside from its influential design, the book's longevity is due to its blend of good intentions and nasty outcomes — a heady mix that makes it an enduring epitome of questionable taste. - Chris Gage back to top BOOK NEWS A few notable bits of recent book news. Indian writers unite for gay rights (Guardian) Over 100 cultural leaders in India, including Arundhati Roy, Amartya Sen, and Vikram Seth, petition a "colonial-era" law prohibiting homosexuality. George Saunders: one lucky genius (The Post-Standard via Maud Newton) Saunders receives a phone call while writing in Marfa, Texas that his intellect has earned him a $500,000 MacArthur Award, no strings attached. Airport security measures threatened Harry Potter's last chapter (BBC) J.K. Rowling says she'd rather take a boat than check the hand-written manuscript of the last Harry Potter. Coming Soon: A new Tolkien epic (Guardian) Christopher Tolkien fills in some missing pieces of his father's manuscripts to publish The Children of Hurin, which details more adventures of elves and hobbits in Middle Earth. Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz dies at 94 (BBC) The BBC recalls Mahfouz's evenings spent discussing culture and ideas with friends, fans, or the person at the next table. Don't forget to footnote (In These Times via Arts and Letters Daily) Plagiarism is on the rise in America, from high schools to Anne Coulter. The New Yorker's success story (Guardian) How does The New Yorker manage to be both intellectual and a best-seller? Political fiction sometimes wears lighter masks (Bookslut) Bookslut explores how a few recent fictional works illuminate our political reality better than nonfiction. back to top

	CREDITS Editors Toby Warner Mark Mangan Paul Laster Jocelyn K. Glei McKay McFadden Nick Merritt Chris Gage Editors-at-Large Larry Weissman Sean McDonald Contributors Stephen Dougherty Gena Hamshaw Jessica Kraft Chris Parris-Lamb Joshua David Stein Andy Warner Sage Van Wing Production & Design Anjuli Ayer Jessica Bauer-Greene Morgan Croney Sascha Lewis Cover Art Olaf Breuning "Vikings" (detail), 2001 from Home Two C-Prints on aluminium Courtesy Galerie Nicola von Senger, Zurich All Rights Reserved   ABOUT US Boldtype is a monthly, email-based review of books published by Flavorpill Productions. Our mission is to cover five to seven books each month that are worth reading. No money is accepted from any publishers, writers, reviewers, or marketing or PR companies. In addition to this monthly review of books, Flavorpill also publishes nine other email magazines, covering ART, FASHION, NEWS, MUSIC, and cultural events in five cities — NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO, CHICAGO, and LONDON. MEDIA PARTNERSHIPS Every month, Boldtype presents one exclusive media partner. Click for more information about advertising opportunities on Boldtype and across all Flavorpill publications. FEEDBACK We welcome any and all feedback — comments, criticism, and even effusive praise. To reach the staff at Boldtype, please email us at editor. SUBMISSIONS If you have a book that you would like us to consider for review, please send an email to books or mail a copy here: Boldtype c/o Flavorpill Productions 594 Broadway, Suite 1212 New York, NY 10012
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