“WHEN TRUTH IS DEAD, ONE LETTER REMOVED“ THE BOOK MAN BY PEYTON DOUGLAS
Chris Buse (RIP)
*This review contains spoilers.
Full disclaimer. Before I get started with my review of “The Book Man”“, let me tell you that I have known the author for many years. But this is me starting with a lie and that wouldn“t feel appropriate, or maybe it does, given the book that I“m about to review. See, I have never met Peyton Douglas because he isn“t real. He is an invention, a lie within a lie, if you will, only that we“re more generous in regard to this kind of thing were fiction is concerned. We even have a name for a little deception such as this. We call this a “pseudonym”“, and I would wager that this practice of using an assumed name for a piece of work, not always for fiction mind you, is as old as writing itself. So then, let me tell you that the imagined author Peyton Douglas is the pen name for the very real writer Jason Henderson. This is neither hush, hush nor on the QT or me placing a blind item in the gossip column of your local newspaper. The truth is revealed right in Jason“s handle on Twitter and we all know, the internet or people on social media never lie. But then, to be fully honest, and I for one would never lie to you, I have indeed known Jason for many years, though like with the imagined writer Peyton Douglas we have also never met. To me, Jason Henderson is but a voice on the podcast “Castle of Horror”“ where he and his friends (and his wife) assemble once a week (well, kinda) into a kooky quartet of horror movie aficionados to discuss all things within or even without the horror genre. Purely by chance, like so often with other podcasts I will listen to regularly, I stumbled upon their show one night like five or six years ago. I can even tell you the episode. Jason and the team were discussing the 1984 movie adaptation of Stephen King“s “Children of the Corn.”“ Since I grew up in the 1970s and mid-1980s, King used to be big deal for me. As many of you most likely know from your own experience, King is not the kind of writer you discover, especially not when you are still a kid, but who discovers you, provided that you are the nerdy type that is. Then, books like those written by Stephen King will whisper to you in a bookstore, and even though you“d never heard of this man and you have no idea really what this book is about, you know it is for you. You just know. And you know it even more when you walk around with your dog-eared copy of “Salem“s Lot”“ or you even dare to show it to a parent or a classmate, and they will tell you that this is “silly stuff”“. They didn“t hear the message you heard, because the message was not for them. They“ll have to wait until such an author hits the big league, the mainstream. Then, when it“s suddenly the hip thing to do, they“ll ask you: “Have you heard of Stephen King? Man, you need to read these books.”“ Or they“ll pretend that they“ve always been one huge fan of the man. Though some are too young to remember, but King made it big in the early 1980s. He was the first horror writer to hit the mainstream. Not only were his hardcover editions stacked up like boxes of detergent in every bookstore, or even your local supermarket, none of his works, not even his short stories, were safe from Hollywood. Needless to say, that back then I watched most of the films those got turned into, until I lost interest sometime around 1983. King had become a commodity, and it would be a fair assessment to say that his books no longer spoke to me, not like before, not even with a whisper. Consequently, I never saw “Children of the Corn”“ (I have read the short story) and I still have not to this day. I“ve heard it“s pretty bad, though. Still, why not listen to a podcast discussion of the film (these things are for free after all, at least for the listeners), especially if you“ve an hour or two to kill at night? What got me hooked and why I come back to the “Castle of Horror”“ podcast each week, was not the movie the group was discussing, I still believe it is pretty bad, nor the label “horror movies”“. It was the personalities of the team. Notice that I didn“t say “people”“, and for good reason. Being a podcaster myself, I“ll let you in on a secret: something strange will happen once the mic is turned on (and that tiny green light that tells you, “watch yourself, the camera on your laptop is now activated). The weird thing is, you become somebody else. I don“t mean this in a way recording artists often talk about their “stage persona”“ or like an actor who goes all method on you, who will tell you “that he or she got lost so deep in the role that they had a hard time finding their way out.”“ No, it“s more like you become a part of a fiction yourself. You“re inside the story you are telling. And buried deep within this fiction, the narrative, the story you“re telling your listeners, is a revelation, the truth that you“re one of those vessels to whom novels or movies or comic books will whisper. Thus, I am telling you a lie when I tell you that I know this man Jason Henderson, but I am also deceiving you when I say that this is far from the truth. I know him in a way I know myself. I know that Jason is a man to whom books will whisper. He is the kind of person the books will find. I know this about him, because I have listened to hundreds of hours of him speaking about the books and the films that have found him. I know it even more since I have read Jason“s latest book “The Book Man.”“ But wait, this is a book review (supposedly), right? Enough of the writer already, what the heck is the book about and why should I read it? I mean all is fine and dandy, but if a book is not about x or y or if it does not have the right kind of characters and if these right characters don“t do x or y, why should I invest my time? My answer is: I have already told you. “The Book Man”“ is about the books that“ll find you, and will whisper to you, that is, if you are the right kind of person for them. Before you say: “I knew it! This is where only those who“re sensitive enough, or nerd enough, get the gifts, and those who claim that they were always fans of Stephen King look like fools or like your common jock or both, let me disappoint you. What is so brilliant about this novel (“The Book Man”“) is that the books we encounter in the story are what is special, the people they whisper to are not. Everybody can be a hero; everybody can find a book in a dingy second-hand bookstore or your Barnes & Noble or on the internet that will speak to them personally. Yes, there is a fun cameo by a monster geek who learns about what he should do with his life once the right book finds him and speaks to him (via the printed text that does appear in front of his disbelieving eyes), but you don“t really need to be special, and let me tell you, by stealing a line from an 80s pop band called Prefab Sprout, you “couldn“t bear to be special.”“ Because in the narrative, those people who find these books (they are called “blanks”“ by the way) so that they can find you or your spouse or your neighbor or the jerk from your workplace, they have a task you might not want to take on. To tell you one thing about our protagonist Frannie (short for Frances) Cohn or her uncle Saul, they are this bespectacled ten-year-old boy named Roy Thomas who saved a bunch of comic books from the very real fires into which his parents, their PTA and church group banished too many of these four-colored wonders created by men and women like Al Feldstein, Marie Severin and Jack Kirby when burning comic books was the thing du jour for upstanding citizens, only that Frannie and her uncle must not safeguard the blanks from a well-intentioned, albeit poorly informed righteous mob, but from the big bad of this novel, the titular “Book Man”“, who is called Penamue as Frannie learns with the help of one of the blanks and her own magic genie (only in her case we are talking about a doll-sized golem, an anthropomorphic being created from clay given life by the Jewish faith). “The Book Man”“, the book, is about demons, magic, religion (which is its own kind of magic) and books. But the magic is not limited to these books that will show you your future, if they whisper to you, or to the kind of spellcasting that would make John Constantine or Tansy Saylor proud (in fact some of the quirkier elements of the novel would feel right at home in a 80s Vertigo Comic or even more so in Fritz Leiber“s seminal novel “Conjure Wife”“). “The Book Man”“ is also about this magical place that lives in nostalgia, in this case California of the late 1950s, a decade in which the author was not alive yet. And with a setting like this, the book has to be about surfing, and it is. And let me tell you this, this is where Jason“s prose really shines. Being the co-author of the non-fiction book “California Tiki”“ (with the always entertaining, always knowledgeable Adam Foshko), has given Jason the kind of vocabulary and insights into surfing any writer who dares to ride a pipe can only dream of. Plus, he makes it all as engrossing and wistful to read that you can taste the air and you feel the warm sand on your bare feet or the tremendous power of a big one rising under your fiberglass-covered surfboard and you rising with the wave as you lift yourself up to your full height. This is the kind of magic you want from a writer who rides his prose as smoothly like the old Hawaiian kings of yore mastered their oa boards. But really, is this book about surfing, and is it about California?
At the heart of “The Book Man”“ is a character many readers (or moviegoers) know all too well, not only these days, but more so. Our protagonist Frannie, who is fifteen-about-to-turn-sixteen when we meet her for the first time in the narrative, is “the girl who can do everything.”“ This is what you learn about her and this is what you“ll have to accept about this character, at least for a major part of the book. She is the rare character who“s an outsider but who“s very outgoing and who makes new friends quite easily. Frannie is a geek girl who likes to read books and who is witty and who knows her pop culture references like that. Yet she“s also the outdoor type who excels at any sport and who not only picks up surfing after a few trial runs, but she“s a “natural”“ at it, and she can do it better than most of the surfer dudes who“ve been riding the waves for years. And the spellcasting, remember? Frannie is much better at it than her mentor, her Uncle Saul. But before you can type the word agenda in the comment box below (not you, but you and you know you want to), let me remind you, that Frannie isn“t real. Well, so much is true for any fictional character, yes, but Frannie is not literally (or even figuratively) a “fictional character”“. She is a “trope”“. For while “The Book Man”“ is horror book (and believe you me, there“s some horrific content to be found in these pages), it“s also one of those novels which are commonly marketed as Young Adult Literature, a sub-genre of publishing Jason knows a thing or two about. And as it turns out, so do you. I don“t mean this in the “Twilight”“ sense with its teen angst and vampires that sparkle in the sunlight but further back, to your childhood and mine, before the YA label even existed. Remember the books about the private school students who found themselves marooned on a seemingly deserted island (an island still untouched by the nihilistic realism of William Golding“s “Lord of the Flies”“); the boy detectives, the girl reporters. These were the kids who could do everything. They were smarter and better, no matter the situation and against all odds. They were better than all the adults, because the kids who read these books, the kids who these books were written for, wanted self-validation. They knew they were better than the adults, since they knew all kinds of stuff, they knew things the adults had forgotten and could no longer see, and because, as a kid, and even as an adolescent like Frannie, you were fearless. Frannie is all these character tropes, because she needs to be for the story to work. But like “The Book Man”“ is not about surfing (and maybe it“s not even about California, really), this is not who Frannie is. As Jason takes her (and us) on one surf ride after the next, this is akin to looking over the shoulder of Hemingway as he depicts bull fights in Spain. Whereas the latter is quite gruesome, and the former is a sport, in the frame of a fictional narrative they are neither. The answer lies in the text, in every word. Whereas some will go so far as to claim that the word matador itself is derived from the word maveth (which in Hebrew means death), it“s more commonly tied to the Latin expression “mactare”“ which stands for “to kill”“. Yet if we go back further in time, the original meaning of “mactare”“ wasn“t the simple “to kill”“ but “to honor by sacrifice”“. This is what Hemingway shows us when he writes about the dance between the matador and the bull, or in Jason“s case, when Frannie and her friends ride the waves. They write about writing, the struggles this entails, the sacrifices. It“s only once you enter “the zone”“, this special place other than artists, known only to professional athletes or dedicated surfers in Southern California or Hawaii, if you achieve this state of doing and not doing, of going with the flow yet controlling the flow in one and the same instance, that you become a master of two worlds. It“s a battle you won“t win, not even if you kill the bull, because it is not the bull who is sacrificed with honor, but the matador, the writer, the artist, the athlete, and, in Jason“s narrative, the surfer. Ultimately, it“s a story about writing, if this wasn“t that obvious from the title “The Book Man”“. It“s a tale about those brave enough to ensure that we have the books that will find us, the books that“ll whisper to us, the books that“ll tell our future to us. Ultimately, “The Book Man”“ is about the sacrifices of life. Like the poetic surf imagery that makes us long for a time (and a place) when we were “the kids who could do everything”“, we understand that life won“t always be this easy, because it has never been, this easy. There are sacrifices, not only if a blank book whispers to you that your future lies in the arts or in professional sports. Though Franny is innocent (we assume), she is no innocent. She learns about sacrifice within the first few pages of the novel. What Jason does, is that he sidesteps the type of story that is often most closely linked to the YA sub-genre, the story of initiation. These tales, which are almost always centered around a young person (think Holden Caulfied in “The Catcher in the Rye”“ as your prime example), break down into three distinct stages: the innocent, the experience, the epiphany, or if you want this in more simpler terms: entrance, transformation, exit. Though when Jason writes about the beach, the surf and the surfing of the 1950s, this setting and also his writing style (though much less flowery) are highly reminiscent of Ray Bradbury“s most touching and arguably best story of initiation, “The Lake”“ (first published in the May 1944 issue of Weird Tales). Here you see the three stages perfectly: a boy and a girl enjoy the last days of summer. The girl drowns. The boy, now a man, comes back many years later. This is when the body of the dead girl is discovered. He understands that you have to let go of the past, or you will never grow up like his dead friend. But there is the story behind the short story. Bradbury, who wrote the story two years prior to its publication, did rework it several times with each subsequent publication. The writer also reworked the tale about what had inspired him to write it in the first place. In an essay he wrote, he claimed that when he was seven, his “blonde cousin almost drowned”“, whereas he later indicated in an interview, that when he was eight or nine, he was at the beach one day, and he heard about girl who had just drowned. In a way, this can be read as a now older man putting some emotional distance between the little girl involved in the near fatal accident and himself, while allowing his imagination to play out a previously unthinkable scenario. Ray Bradbury makes the sacrifice to live through a gut-wrenching experience for his craft while shielding himself from the personal consequences. Franny, the way Jason builds the story, experiences a loss of innocent rather immediately when her best friend (her only friend) dies in an accident she herself just barely survives. There is a sense of loss and guilt as you“d expect, but this only sets her on a journey. It is real loss, which is only meaningful once it is rooted in experience and closer to her epiphany, she will feel at the moment she suffers defeat for her own hubris, and thus, this is the moment, when we have a rather crafty writer pulling the rug from under the reader and the girl who can do everything in a way we did not see coming. Though it should be pretty obvious from the start, since it“s a book about writing, the novel “The Book Man”“ reveals a truth about its heroine: Frannie Cohn“s story is the hero“s journey.
In the three-act structure that is a hero“s journey, the second act is divided into two parts. The first part is often referred to as “Descent”“, the second part as “Initiation”“. Like Luke Skywalker in the second “Star Wars”“ movie, Frannie enters a vision quest, and she must enter “the inmost cave”“, which is Uncle Saul“s abandoned former restaurant. Frannie meets the gods (in her vision) while she is tested by the evil that is the Book Man. This is when Jason shows us how truly original the villain is that he has created. I won“t spoil the fun for you. Needless to say, that since this is when the heroine has to withstand “The Ordeal”“, that Jason goes all in with his vivid description of a horror that is unique and ties perfectly in with what he is telling us about books and writing and texts themselves. This is also when Frannie creates another ally for herself and her crew, and we see the birth of the doll-sized golem they name Emmett, since the word emet (truth) is carved on every golem“s forehead. The little clay man is pure delight. He even has a tiny cigar, the source of a running gag that works every time. The golem is a reward for readers who“ll most certainly like this fanciful anthropomorphic being created from clay. The little golem is this story“s R2D2, and he is quick with the sarcasm and wisdom simultaneously. Since “The Initiation”“ kicks-off with a reward, a reward is what our heroine gets. There“s a big party at the beach called “the luau”“, and this is when Frannie is put on her path to adulthood in a romantic sense, hence her initiation or, as we learn from the novel, this is when Frannie puts on shoes for grown-ups for the first time. But since the hero“s (or heroine“s) journey requires “a kill”“ and “an honor by sacrifice”“ as well, this is when the hero descents into the underworld (which is a dangerous night surf in this case), and there“s a death. Consequently, it is from her lowest point that the heroine must embark on the last part of her quest. After a devastating loss, now the hero must prove his (or her) mettle. But with the emotional toll Frannie has sustained on her journey (the hero“s quest is a physical journey as well as a psychological and an emotional one) the third act (“The Return”“) starts with the refusal to return. It“s only once her mentor Saul reminds Frannie who she is and what her role in the world is, that the scenery switches via what“s called “the magic ride”“ from California to Hawaii. After Frannie has received “the elixir”“ and “the token”“ (in her case, a dybbuk box for trapping such a demon and a big surfboard made of oa wood) can she confront The Book Man, whose powers have only grown due to the mistakes Frannie and Saul have made along the way (after an initial victory that had come far too easy). But like any hero on this journey, Frannie fails again. What is described as “the rescue from without”“ saves her from certain death, namely her uncle. And it is only then that Frannie realizes the full meaning behind the golem“s words: “The answer that is certain is the one that is wrong.”“ The day will not be theirs with the words from Saul“s magic books, but in order for them to win, for her to win, Frannie must become “the master of two worlds”“. Had she only had one mentor, the girl who is good a everything would have failed. But luckily, some of the best stories aren“t written on any paper, but on things as futile as the waves and the surf of the Pacific. And since the hero concludes his quest with a resurrection before he returns home as a changed person, it“s a resurrection that she conjures up. It“s only when both her teachings align, and she adds the raw emotional heft of a tale Hooky told her, that she can leave her old self behind like the protagonist in “The Lake”“, who knows that his path lies forward once the body of his drowned friend Tally is brought up from the bottom of the lake where the blonde girl once perished at the end of summer. The dead have their future stolen from them, they can never change, hence, once they are brought back, their futures are limitless, their futures are a million roads that have never been travelled and will never be travelled. Frannie“s future though, lies in the waves for one last moment, once she“s returned home. She and Newp approach the surf with their boards like the once and future kings of Hawaii her lost friend Hooky had told her about and who she had summoned. But it“s truly one last summer, since Frannie, unlike Tally, has a future. As Jason tells us: “She was something else now.”“ Aren“t these the best journeys? Those that let you come home, albeit for just a moment, for you to look around with the knowledge that there is a world beyond the last rays of a summer which once seemed endless. And beyond the waves, there“s a brand-new life.
While the temptation might have been strong to bring us to a world, within his narrative, that is a 1950s as it never existed outside nostalgia and wishful and wistful longing, the endless beach party with young men as handsome as James Darren and blonde, bronze-tanned girls like Sandra Dee, also known as the heroine Gidget from a series of beach films, in fact, “Gidget”“ (1959) kicked-off this particular sub-genre, Jason resists the call and whisper from other fictional works while he also acknowledges that they exist in our world as fiction. Indeed, the surfer tropes in “The Book Man”“ are tightly linked to “Gidget”“, whose real name (in the film) is Francine. Like Frannie, Francine is a “flat-chested tomboy”“ who isn“t interested in any “manhunting”“, but who attracts the attention of several man, least of all a guy twice her age, an analogue to Hooky. And like Frannie“s erstwhile mentor, the man the other surfers call “The Kahuna”“ is Korean War Air Force Veteran; the war has made the men philosophical it seems. And yes, there“s a big party at the beach as well, another luau. But ultimately, “Gidget”“ is a story of initiation while “The Book Man”“ is not. And, thankfully, the world of the 1950s Jason Henderson unfolds in front of our eyes and our imagination is less made up of candy-colored dreams like Gidget“s world, or Marty McFly“s in “Back to the Future.”“ There are two pivotal scenes when he breaks rank with the world of fiction he presents and when he almost breaks the fourth wall. As we learn during a side plot, Betty and Truly, the girl folk band Newp manages, are booked to perform on the Ed Sullivan show. But once news footage from the luau makes it back to the producers of the show, an event at which this girl band took the stage, Newp receives a phone call from one of the TV ladies who is a bit embarrassed in that she was to be the bearer of bad news. The Ed Sullivan people have cancelled them. When Frannie learns of this, she immediately demands to know the reason. When a still stunned Newp replies: “”¦ they said that they don“t think we present the kind of image the show“s viewers are comfortable with”“, she assumes this must be because he was inappropriately attired at the beach party, that the image the young surfer presented of himself had made it back to the producers via the local news crew: “Oh my god,”“ Frannie fumed. “Because of your freaking cutoffs below your jacket? Because of the beatnik thing?”“ She is brought up in an orderly world, Dwight D. Eisenhower“s 1950s, even more so since she and her parents are immigrants and Jews. The way you look, the way you are dressed, is important to Frannie, because she has internalized what her parents have taught her: people will be watching you, people will be watching them. Hence, when she, Saul, Truly and Newp travel to Hawaii in the third act, she makes sure that Newp will look his best: “Newp wore a tie, because Frannie told him it was required for flying and anyway a man should travel with dignity.”“ Dignity being the watch word. I will admit freely that I was as naïve as Frannie when I hit this passage about Ed Sullivan cancelling the girls“ act. It is Truly who does understand. Jason brings this point home in a subtle way when he has her say: “They don“t want a mixed band.”“ This is a wakeup call, perhaps not only to Frannie, but to any white reader who never has to think about such things: “Did it really work like that? Someone could see a dark face and say it doesn“t belong on TV?”“ It did, and it very well might still, and Jason knows this. In 1959, years before Hugh Hefner became the robe-encased self-parody of himself, he aired his first program on mainstream television. Dubbed “Playboy“s Penthouse”“, the show presented what was made to look like a typical party at the publisher“s Chicago home (in fact, it was a sound stage at a local ABC affiliate). Viewers could experience how this swinging bachelor hung out with his friends, who were big time celebrities, personalities from the arts and musicians. And who wouldn“t want to live vicariously through this? While this variety program was innocent for its time, the publisher of Playboy ran into trouble quickly. Since Hefner greeted African American performers like he counted them among his pals, which he did, and Hefner gave them equal screen time, many TV affiliates did what organizations will always do, when their expectations are not met. They threatened a boycott. They told ABC that they wouldn“t carry the show unless certain changes were made i.e. Hefner needed to cut down on the number of black faces viewers at home were exposed to. Not only did Hefner refuse, he made ABC to back him up. The program was a big hit regardless. Truly, in Jason“s story doesn“t have this kind of power. There“s no white man white knighting for Truly, only a Jewish girl who is so wrapped up in her learned sense of what“s the proper thing to do when you present yourself to others, that she isn“t of any help, and her righteous indignation of the white middle class and her astonishment that this is even “a thing”“, aren“t very helpful. It“s only later, once Frannie is on her magic ride (in a helicopter no less) and she learns that “They had Japanese in the US Navy”“, that she realizes that you can“t fix this by putting on a pair of slacks or a nice tie. Dignity was not a dress you could wear. It“s only when Frannie“s willing to tear up her nice dress, as you must when you confront evil, as obvious as The Book Man or as subtle as another rejection based on skin color, that she learns that appearances no longer matter nor should they have ever mattered. That they do, to some, lies at the heart of the second gut-wrenching punch we encounter in the world of the 1950s Jason creates for us. Hooky, the “Big Chief”“ of the surfer kids, was once Clifford Carmichael. We never learn his rank in United States Air Force, but we find out his identification number, AF28 248 933, and that he once was a pilot. Hooky was, it seems, the arrogant wunderkind artist who flew too high to spite the gods themselves. And with many great artists, his story is one of tragedy, and while Jason only spends very little time on his experience, what we do experience is the most poignant war time tale you“ll encounter this side of Harvey Kurtzman“s stories for EC Comics. In the end it“s the kindness of strangers and the ignorance of his band of brothers that make Cliff into the man who sheds all of it to live in a hut on the beach he“s built with his own hands, a man who yearns to be one with nature. In the original legend, Rabbi Loew ended the Golem“s existence by removing the letter “e”“ from emet, thereby changing the word to “dead”“. The books that will whisper to some, these “blanks”“, they will tell you about your future, but they are books without words. And thus, we have the most comforting truth of all revealed to us in “The Book Man.”“ The truth other people know about you or they think they know about you, is dead. Your story exists the way you write it. And that is the truth.
A comic book reader since 1972. When he is not reading or writing about the books he loves or is listening to The Twilight Sad, you can find Chris at his consulting company in Germany... drinking damn good coffee. Also a proud member of the ICC (International Comics Collective) Podcast with Al Mega and Dave Elliott.
