D.H. Lawrence once wrote that "one loses one's sickness in books." I don't know if that's quite right. I read like a champ, yet I'm a fairly boring guy with few kinks that I'm willing to admit to. I have never killed a man. I have never had anonymous sex with multiple partners (my loss, I suppose). I have never even faced off against Ultimate Evil armed with only my wits, a flashlight, and a roll of duct tape. Consequently, the sicknesses I have to lose are easily handled by massive infusions of alcohol and by a strict program of yoga, emetics, and curmudgeonly behavior. Okay, I might be a huge fan of "Gilmore Girls" and vegetarian cookbooks, but those aren't as much signs of sickness as of postmodern metrosexual wimpery.
No, I usually go to books to find my sickness. I tend to prefer works that simultaneously attract and repel with an aplomb rarely found in standard "horror" fare. So, in tribute to this season where all America goes in search of their sicknesses and usually comes back with nothing more than a cheap torn costume and a bellyache, I have decided to offer up to you, gentle reader, a highly personal list of my favorites of what my wife recently dubbed my "awful" books.
There are no horror novels on this list, because they bore me to tears. Instead, the selections run the gamut from autobiography to experimental fiction. Yet these are the ones that gave me nightmares, or at least ruined my week admirably. At the root of this list are two questions: why do people choose to read a book they know will upset them; and what does it accomplish? Luckily, I'm no philosopher, so I can only offer pat answers. I like such books because I have an active imagination yet little ambition to be an Airborne Ranger or ninja, and what they accomplish is to allow me to satisfy the kinky parts of said imagination without actually getting down in there in the muck. They let me be a tourist rather than a resident.
So, without further ado, puffery, or hijinks, the list:
Written in Ellroy's signature staccato prose, the book is unflinching in its depiction of his mother as a flawed woman and equally unflinching in dealing with James' own Oedipal obsession with her death. Ellroy is brutally honest as he lays bare the wellspring for the darkness that underlies his novels. All the standard plot elements he uses in his fiction are here: random acts of mayhem; a preoccupation with avenging violence against women; corrupt and incompetent cops; Los Angeles as a living thing in its own right; and underneath it all, a ten year old boy madly in love with his dead mother.
The Killer Inside Me is the story of a small-town deputy named Lou Ford, a quiet man who everybody likes just fine: normal, good neighbor, nice enough guy, until the sickness comes out and people suffer and die. The breakthrough that makes this novel transcend Thompson's limitations as a writer is that Thompson wrote it in the first person, making sure the reader is along for every bit of torture, murder, and cruelty. This one made me feel dirty, yet I found it too entertaining to stop reading.
Of all the books on this list, I can't honestly recommend this one without reservations. But if you are a fan of American hard-boiled crime fiction, I suggest you test your mettle and see how much you really like it.
Like so much of Bukowski's fiction, Ham On Rye is thinly veiled autobiography. In this case we explore Buk's young life in California, including his first encounter with alcohol (thumbs up!), his monstrous father, his high-school stint in the ROTC, several fights, some unpleasantness with women, and numerous trips to the doctor's office to have his boils lanced. Although other Bukowski works could have made this list, this is in my opinion his best-written novel, and the one that keeps coming back on me.
Despite the aforementioned obsession with bodily functions, Naked Lunch lives up to its legendary status and makes the grade as Burroughs' best novel. All his experimental prose elements are working, his imagery is vivid, and I cannot for the life of me get the image of the Willy The Disc sucking the junk out of some poor dying junkie's body out of my head.
A random flip through its pages reveals the following wisdom: "Deteriorated schitzos sometimes refuse to move at all....Initial proctosis and the inveitable purulent discharge-- which may pass unnoticed in the shuffle-- is followed by stricture of the rectum requiring intervention of an apple corer or its surgical equivalent....Bedpans full of blood and Kotex....The President he is a junky but can't take it direct because of his position....sometimes have to slip my penis under his left eyelid...."Cut him down, Mark!" she screams. Mark reaches over with a snap knife and cuts the rope....The centipede is rushing about in agitation...."
Here's the plot, as much as one can be discerned. Tyrone Slothrop is a member of the US Army working intelligence detail during World War II. As a young child, Slothrop was subjected to psychological experiments in which his sexual urges were displaced onto objects. As a consequence, the map of Slothrop's sexual conquests in London corresponds to a map of rocket hits on the city. This unique connection with the rockets provides Slothrop with a sort of homing ability, and he is set loose in Germany to locate a new German super-weapon, the V2 rocket. As Slothrop moves deeper and deeper into Germany in search of the V2, his world becomes populated by malevolent soldiers, cartoon characters, mad scientists, and human weapons. At that point, things get kind of weird.
If you have a couple months to kill and no pressing obligations, you can do much, much worse than hide yourself away with Gravity's Rainbow and the Companion to same.
Hardy, who's a pretty bleak writer by any measure, delivers a tragic story of characters caught up in destinies they created but cannot control. It makes this list by virtue of Hardy's seeming belief that the innocent are born to suffer and the incredible restraint and power Hardy demonstrates in recounting such a standard, simple, classic plot.
I'm also looking forward to reading Krakauer's Under The Banner of Heaven which no doubt will further erode my faith in the essential reasonableness of mankind.
Many of the key images from the book are burned on my brain: blue skies against the red fields of sorghum, streaked with the blood of Chinese peasants and soldiers; Uncle Arfat screaming as he is skinned alive by the Japanese; a goat seeming to shit ammunition as its tied-shut anus is cut open to expel the contraband bullets hidden within; dead mules floating down the river, their bodies bursting in putrid green pools. They come back to me like unwelcome memories and taint my happy times.
What pushes this over the top from nauseating spectacle to one of my favorites is this: Mo Yan populates his novel with people who commit acts of unimaginable cruelty and self-interest, and these impulses throb just below the surface of their daily existence. Yet he creates characters, who, in all their cruelty and kindness, are quintessentially human. More than anything else I've ever read, Red Sorghum claims to reveal the savagery that infuses civilization.
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And there you have it. This is my list, and mine alone. If you dig Dean Koontz, Steve King, or Danielle Steele, prefer Women to Ham on Rye or think I'm a total candy-ass for including Thomas Hardy on a list of my favorite "awful" books, by all means please make your own list and leave me be. But aside from that caveat, I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks. If you have any suggestions, please--my "to read" shelf is getting pretty bare.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
"awful" in the older sense I see, very fine job and much to think about. So, does this go in the Halloween pile? thanks!
2 - Johno
Yep: Halloween.
"Awful" seemed like the best word to describe the stuff I read, so there ya go. It's also how my wife described my collection, as in "Jesus, Johno, all you have are awful books!" So, awful. But great too. Language is so funny!
3 - Eric Olsen
cool, thanks! "Awe" is the root word of "awful" and "awesome"
4 - Johno
Exactly! I love it! "Awful" originally connoted something like divine power that struck fear and wonder into you, but not terror or loathing as the current meaning has it. These books definitely fit that bill for me.
Oh, and also, I just like to bloviate about my tastes and opinions. Thank you, Blogcritics!!!
5 - Eric Olsen
No - thank YOU!
6 - Rodney Welch
Glad to see you have a taste for both Thompson and Pynchon. The great thing about The Killer Inside Me is that it's such a brilliantly bleak black comedy. Lou Ford -- Barney Fife on the outside, Richard Speck on the inside.
I love Pynchon, but he baffles me. I've read Gravity's Rainbow three times over the last twenty years and I still don't really think I got it. I'm not sure where exactly my sense of what's going on breaks off; I just know that by the time I get to the "Byron the Bulb" section I've usually been wandering for a couple hundred pages. I probably ought to get that Companion thing and start over.
7 - Johno
Rodney, if you aren't up to the long, hard slog of "Gravity's Rainbow," I'd suggest working up to it-- seriously. Both Neal Stephenson and Umberto Eco mine similar territory, and if you can get through "Cryptonomicon" and "The Name of the Rose" (There also exists a readers' guide to this-- use it), "Gravity's Rainbow" seems like less of a mountain to climb.
Barney Fife/Richard Speck!!! Why didn't I think of that? Damn you, Rodney Welch!!
8 - Mark Saleski
when i got to the end of Gravity's Rainbow i likened it to piecing together an enormous jigsaw puzzle...thousands and thousands of pieces.
all the pieces were gray.
9 - Eric Olsen
I don't see "The Name of the Rose" in the same light as "Gravity" at all. I never did make it through "Gravity" nor did I much care about drifting away from it because there wasn't any "door" I could find in which to enter the thing, Ugh.
Whereas I found "Rose" very vivd, compelling, easy to follow as a story even if the philiosophy, semiotics, theology and the like were dense. They were like plug-ins that once you got through them you were back to the story, plus philosophy was one of my majors and comparative religion one of my minors so I at least knew the reference points.
It has been 20 years since I tried "Gravity" but I can't imagine putting in the time and effort to try it again.
10 - Rodney Welch
I've made it through Gravity's Rainbow on the occasions I've read it, just never with total comprehension. I found with Mason & Dixon, though, that Pynchon is more decipherable if you take him slowly -- like, real slowly. Of course, that may have had something to do with the book, which was plenty complex, even if it wasn't as complex as GR.
11 - Mark Saleski
i even bought Vineland...because i was kind of enthusiastic about Gravity's Rainbow during the first hundred or so pages...but then i lost interesting (despite forcing my way to the end).
here's what i remember about it:
- slothrop
- imipolex G
- missiles
- some scene were the guy's eating these really disgusting 'candies'
12 - Johno
Rodney, I totally understand. That's why, when I finished GR, I said "what the hell...?" and started over again. I'm not going to claim I understood the book-- I got totally swamped during the taffy-pulling scene-- but I LOVED it anyway.
Like you, I found Mason & Dixon more decipherable. I thought it might have been because I was pursuing an MA in US History at the time, but it's possible it's just a more well-integrated novel. I really need to read that one again.
13 - Johno
Mark-- I thought Vineland was total poo. It's hard to believe Pynchon wrote both books.
Eric, I agree with you in that "Name of the Rose" is a more user-friendly story in which the difficult parts are more illustrative than crucial. But I kind of view them both as 'metafiction' in which the book can be enjoyed on several levels depending on the reader's body of knowledge, imagination, and commitment to reading. A further parallel is that both Pynchon and Eco have turned out some real dogs of late: "Vineland," "The Island of the Day Before."
14 - Rodney Welch
I only mildly liked Vineland. I liked V. more. Never really thought much of The Crying of Lot 49, but maybe I read it too quickly.
Mark -- Surely you also remember the toilet scene and -- while we're on the subject -- the "Mistress of Night" scene, where the girl poops in the guy's mouth? Made me sick for three days.
15 - Eric Olsen
damn coprophages
16 - Mark Saleski
.....oh yea....i forgot about that. it didn't make me sick...just laugh. (not sure what that says about me)
17 - Eric Olsen
a better title might have been "Gravity's Dildo"
18 - Tom Johnson
I've been thinking about delving into Gravity's Rainbow but it seemed daunting during the bookstore-flipthrough. Now I'm thoroughly confused: intrigued, yet discouraged. Intriguingly discouraged; or maybe discourage intrigue. Now I've got to read it just to see what everyone's going on about, and now I'm even less certain of what I'm getting myself into . . .
19 - Johno
The coprophagy scene is really what put the book on this list.
But Red Sorghum really puts all the others to shame. Gory, horrid, and brutal, yet utterly mesmerizing.
But don't blame me if it puts you off your lunch.