Countdown to Halloween: The Corpse-Keeper

Often considered the Edgar Allan Poe of France, Charles Baudelaire wrote some of the greatest French literature of all time. His magnum opus, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), is one of the world'smost lauded books of poetry. Indeed, recognizing a fellow genius in Poe, Baudelaire was responsible for translating the American writer into French and securing Poe's reputation for the world. Baudelaire's decadent, daring fusion of the erotic and the macabre can be seen everywhere in the modern horror genre, whether one knows his name or not. One should.

I'm not here to celebrate his literary credentials; I'm here to share with you some of his most grotesque, morbid, and horrifying poetic imagery that's just perfect for our next Countdown to Halloween.

Packed tight, like hives of maggots, thickly seething,
Within our brains a host of demons surges
Deep down into our lungs at every breathing,
Death flows, an unseen river, moaning dirges.

from "To the Reader"

Like angels who have bestial eyes
I'll come again to your alcove
And glide in silence to your side
In shadows of the night, my love;
And I will give to my dark mate
Cold kisses, frigid as the moon,
And I'll caress you like a snake
That slides and writhes around a tomb.

from "The Ghost"

Do you come from deep heaven or do you come from hell,
O Beauty? Your eyes, infernal and divine,
Pour out both goodness and crime,
And for that you can be compared to wine...

You walk over the dead, O Beauty, and mock them.
Among your jewels, Horror is not the least charming,
And Murder, among your dearest baubles,
Dances amorously on your proud body.

from "Hymn to Beauty"

Remember, my love, the object we saw
That beautiful morning in June;
By a bend in the path a carcass reclined...

Her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore,
Sweating out poisonous fumes
Who opened in slick invitational style
Her stinking and festering womb...

And the sky cast an eye on this marvelous meat
As over the flowers in bloom.
The stench was so wretched that there on the grass
You nearly nearly collapsed in a swoon...

From back in the rocks, a pitiful bitch
Eyed us with angry distaste,
Awaiting the moment to snatch from the bones
The morsel she'd dropped in her haste.

--And you, in your turn, will be rotten as this:
Horrible, filthy, undone...
Yes, such will you be, o regent of grace,
After the rites have been read...

Ah then, o my beauty, explain to the worms
Who cherish your body so fine,
That I am the keeper for corpses of love
Of the form and the essence divine!

from "A Carcass"

Countdown to Halloween: By the pricking of my thumbs...

“First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.”

Indeed. So begins Ray Bradbury's iconic 1962 dark fantasy novel. Hard as it may be to believe, it's true that I've never read it! In the early '90s I made my way through a handful of Bradbury's other classics - Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Illustrated Man, etc. - but Wicked has simply sat on my shelf uncracked and unloved. Every October since then I've glanced at it high upon my bookshelves and thought, "Time to read Something Wicked This Way Comes," but I never did. Until now - but I'm barely on page 40 as I write this entry (Jim and Will are watching the ghostly silent carnival men set up tents at 3:00 a.m.).

So in lieu of an actual book review, I will just post some of the wonderful covers of various editions of the book from over the years.

This 1970s' Bantam edition is the copy I'm reading now.

The always-weird JK Potter cover was part of a series of reprints in the late '80s.

A UK edition not quite as fantastical as the others.

I remember seeing the Disney adaptation of it about 20 years ago and, of course, can recall nothing of it!

A 1999 hardcover edition.

Something Wicked still, happily, turns up on school reading lists, as do several of his other major works. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some reading of my own to do.

This post is part of the Countdown to Halloween.

For more great Ray Bradbury book covers, see the wonderful coffee-table tome Bradbury: An Illustrated Life.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy (1987): Horror in Hollywoodland

The woman is severed, the two halves of her pale, bloodless body placed as carefully in a Los Angeles lot as one would hang a painting in an art gallery. Her face bears a camprichico smile, battered sunken eyes, a pulped nose. Cigarette burns stubble her breasts, one of which is still attached by only a gristle of meat. Beneath the rib cage, nothing. She is disassembled.

Her second half begins above her pubic bone, her legs spread in a necrophiliac's wet dream pose, an open gash like an arrow pointing towards her vagina. Her knees are broken and a triangle of flesh is missing from her left thigh. We can easily read the secrets she will never tell: days of unspeakable torture, and, in her portrait photos, of dreams deformed into horror. She is the Black Dahlia, a young woman named Elizabeth Short, and her murderer will never be found.

My introduction to this disturbing real-life horror story came in the form of James Ellroy's 1987 novel The Black Dahlia, which I read for the first time in 1991. It is the masterful crime writer's fictional account of this infamous unsolved murder case, complete with a wish-fulfilling conclusion. It's a relentlessly intense pulp novel, bursting at the seams with violence, perversion, macho aggression (and weakness), and the gutter-glimmer of a Hollywood buried beneath nearly 60 years of history.


Two young LA cops burning with ambition and haunted pasts, Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, become obsessed with the alluring murder victim Betty Short. Glamor photos of her in tight black dresses with her pale blue eyes—as well as the gruesome images of the famous corpse she would come to be—become talismanic. Each finds his life in disarray because of it. Now all of the LAPD is on the case as the largest manhunt in the state's history gathers to find the murderer, but in the end only one man will be strong enough to handle (or, indeed, care) about the truth.

Ellroy rubs our noses in the grit and the dirt of investigating the murder of a beautiful girl on the skids; as Bucky and Lee roust lowlifes in LA's warzones you can smell the cheap liquor, the stench of bum urine, feel the California heat as it shimmers on the blacktop, your bourbon hangover gripping your skull like a vice as you try to slice through inter-departmental bullshit, the politics and the lies, to find out who killed a worthless two-bit beautiful piece of cheap Hollywood cooze (as Ellroy might put it).

The atmosphere is heavy with neon, rain-slicked streets at night and reeking bachelor pads, sunlight filtered through venetian blinds, men and women frozen in a time we can only imagine as film noir. The dialogue is realistic, staccato, and filled with the period tough-guy slang of bebop jazz and cop-shop talk. The plot twists and turns, with a long jaunt to filthy Mexico graveyard, where Bucky literally digs up his past; to the early Hollywood machinations of (real-life) Keystone Kops director Mack Sennett and mobster Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen. Lee Blanchard disappears, leaving Bucky to fend off three women: Kay Lake, who loved Lee; Madeleine Sprague, a Dahlia-lookalike; and the Black Dahlia herself, who even in death casts a spell over men.

Ellroy ends his novel with the killer caught; the Black Dahlia's final hours revealed in gut-wrenching detail ("She bit on the gag and blood from where I took the Joe DiMaggio to her teeth came out due to her biting so hard. I stuck the knife down to a little bone I felt, then I twisted it"); one of the saddest of all unsolved murder mystery cases finally laid to rest. The climax is drawn out over the final 30 pages in a jagged wave of secrets uncovered and killers come forth.

Ellroy gives you your money's worth, that's for sure. This book is so dark it's virtually a horror novel; horror not in the sense of Stephen King but in the true sense of the word: awe at the depths to which humanity can sink and how it stains all our lives. Ellroy calls this book his "Valediction in Blood" and it's easy to see why: as a boy, his own mother was killed by an unknown man, and here in The Black Dahlia, he has solved one murder for another. RIP.

Mia Kirshner as Short in the not-so-good '06 movie version

Boxing the Compass: Crime Classics of the Early '70s

There's just nothing else like 'em. These really aren't up there with Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, or Night Moves, but they all have that realistic, mundane, day-in-the-life-of-crime vibe that reached its apotheosis in Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, and The Sopranos. Respect.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973, dir. Peter Yates)

Robert Mitchum's performance here as the titular criminal is masterful as he tries to escape his fate; his wheeling and dealing isn't the work of a master con artist—even though it may seem that way at first—but the frantic scramblings of a man who knows he's doomed but can't admit it to himself. Who could? Caught between the Irish mob and the Feds and one seriously low-level gunrunner, he does everything he can to avoid another trip to the big house. The way this one plays out is pure '70s grit. Terrific Boston locales too. I suppose the only odd thing here is how a man of Mitchum's age could have kids barely in grade school. This was recently released on a Criterion Collection DVD.


French Connection II (1975, dir. John Frankenheimer)

Since the original French Connection swept up the major Oscars in '71 a sequel was practically a foregone conclusion. Missing the estimable Roy Scheider (lost at sea with Spielberg and co. for Jaws) FCII might not boast his and Hackman's buddy routine and the New York mean streets, but it has a harrowing forced addiction/detox sequence and parts of Paris the tourists never see. Hackman pushes Popeye even further in his single-mindedness, although he still takes the time to get drunk (in a hilarious scene with a French bartender) and try to pick up hot French chicks. The climactic shootout with Charnier (Fernando Rey), the bad guy from the original, is terrific, and the final shot reduces the action movie to its barest essential. The poster doesn't lie.


Charley Varrick (1973, dir. Don Siegel)

This character-driven heist-gone-wrong piece is best known today as the origin of a line from Pulp Fiction ("a blow torch and a pair of pliers"), Joe Don Baker's hired killer Molly who seems to be an inspiration for Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, and this unexpected exchange between Varrick (the estimable Walter Matthau) and a willing lady:

Charley Varrick: I like your bed. You may find this hard to believe but I've never slept on a round bed.
Sybil Fort: Is that so?
CV: What's the best way? North, south, east, or west?
SF: That depends on what you had in mind.
CV: What I had in mind was boxing the compass.

Walter Matthau makes a dirty double-entendre?! Probably his best one since "It took me three hours to figure out that 'F.U.' was Felix Unger!"


Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974, dir. Sam Peckinpah)

Reviled by many, considered by some to be Peckinpah's masterpiece, this existential modern-day western Mexican manhunt features the always-welcome Warren Oates. It revels in cruelty, grunginess, misogyny—indeed, misanthropy—slow-motion death, and some terrific lines. Shoving off goons hanging around a cemetery: "Don't look at me with your goddamn fuckin' eyes!" To an already-dead body as he shoots it: "Why? Because it feels so damn good!" And to his prostitute girlfriend who objects to gathering up the head of a man dead and buried: "The church cuts off the feet, fingers, any other goddamn thing from the saints, don't they? Well, what the hell? Alfredo's our saint. He's the saint of our money, and I'm gonna borrow a piece of him." Apparently when Oates saw Tom Waits on TV in the mid-'70s, he exclaimed, "That guy stole my act." He was probably speaking of this scene:



Also contains the classic bit, perhaps a cinematic anomaly, of trying to kill crabs with tequila. Yes, those kinds of crabs. There is nothing Warren Oates cannot do. Respect.

The Public Image, Y'all: Rip Torn in Payday (1973)

"Argh! Fuck y'all! I'm not public property!" So growls country star Maury Dann in the little-known 1973 character study Payday. A road movie taking place over two frenzied, pill-popping, Wild Turkey-guzzling, bird-hunting and groupie-fucking days, Rip Torn gives it his Method-acting best as the kind of man who knows he can create any kind of mess and his handlers will pick up the bill. "You're just a rich little child with a lot of toys," a woman tells him, but you've pretty much figured that out by that point. Payday invokes the madness of the road--if it doesn't quite achieve full-on insanity, it reaches a decent point of intoxication and sleepless edginess.


Dann is equal parts Hank Williams and Barnum & Bailey, but he's got the attributes reversed: he's not that talented in the art of country music but can certainly take advantage of all the suckers that surround him; he likes to get fucked up but actually might not be that great of an entertainer. Despite ostensibly taking place in the honky-tonks of the era, only the opening sequence gives any real glimpse of that world, with Torn wailing away on the corny "She's Just a Country Girl," (all songs are by Shel Silverstein) winking and mugging to the desperately unhip patrons.


The face Dann presents to his fans is one much different from the one he shows in the backrooms and hotel rooms and parking lots and even at his old mother's rundown rural home. Sly, charming, and ingratiating when socializing with regular folk, he's willful and destructive behind the scenes and not above cheaply "seducing" one of the prettier "unhip" patrons or smarmily trying to get out of a speeding ticket. Still it's painful to watch the his humiliation at having to brown-nose an unctuous DJ ("Pigfucker son of a bitch") at a hick radio station, trying to get out of a public appearance by presenting the guy with a bottle of Wild Turkey while on the air ("Here's some game birds I shot"). We can see how promoters pressured and used veiled threats on stars--and how much the artists resented it but felt powerless to fight back. But Maury Dann is not exactly afraid of fighting back. He's a precursor to the "outlaw country" stars like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson that would soon rejuvenate the genre.

His manager, no-nonsense, Pepsi-swilling Bob (Jeff Morris) routinely gets Dann out of scrapes ("I don't care how you fix it, get me out of this town tonight"), and the affabale, chauffeur/wanna-be chef Chicago (Cliff Emmich) does whatever Dann wants--and eventually takes the biggest fall of all for him. The two women along for the ride are Mayleen (Ahni Capri) his "girlfriend," and Rosamond (Elaine Heilveil ), a young groupie Dann pilfers from his soon-to-be estranged best bud Clarence (Michael Gwynn). Rosamond and Dann have sex in the backseat of his Cadillac while they think Mayleen is asleep next to them. This of course turns out terribly. Mayleen confronts the younger woman in a gas station ladies' room: "You'll never see 21 birddogging other women's men. Get the message?" Rosamond, suddenly wise beyond her years, lights a smoke and coolly replies, "I believe I do--do you?" Zing!

But ultimately, all women are expendable, interchangeable, left on the side of the road. Literally so, for Mayleen, abandoned with a wad of cash that Dann tells her is more than she's worth. Uh, zing?

I took great pleasure in seeing the details of period and place as the entourage of good ol' boys swung through the '70s South: men's hair severely parted and oiled, gas-guzzling American cars made of steel and leather, cowboy-style Levi's, enormous belt buckles, and long-sleeved pearl-button-snapped Western shirts that any y'alt.country dude would kill for.

Its screenplay by cult novelist Dan Carpenter, Payday, despite good characterization, seems a tad under-ambitious, indifferently directed by Daryl Duke (Silent Partner). In the dramatic confrontations Torn is doing most of the heavy lifting. Still, the climactic sequence, which finds Dann taking off in a Cadillac into the country in a desperate attempt to escape his fate while ruminating acidly on his childhood, is well-done and keeping quite in character. The title Payday implies not only his getting cash for his appearances but also the movie's final scene. It's worth sticking around for. Grab a bottle of Wild Turkey and enjoy.

No Such Thing as a Cretin: The Ramones' Rocket to Russia (1977)

It's about summertime and I've been cruising around in the new ride, blasting an oldy-old favorite: the Ramones' third album, Rocket to Russia. It was perhaps the second or third Ramones album I owned back in the mid-'80s, and I wasn't expecting much as my friend who gave it to me told me it wasn't as good as their debut. How wrong he turned out to be.

Released in November 1977, at the commercial, pop-cultural height of the filth and fury known as Punk Rock, Rocket to Russia was make-or-break time for the band. Sire Records was gearing up for some serious sales and betting a lot on the band. It's no wonder, then, that the album has the band's cleanest, leanest, most accessible sound, refined to defiant, power-chorded perfection, with Joey Ramone's shouts, hiccups, and croons perfectly suited to the full-throated singalong quality virtually every song here has.


How any rock lover can resist the obvious, sugary-yet-substantial charms of intro tune “Cretin Hop” with its no-nonsense two-chord shuffle that opens the album escapes me. Once Dee Dee's bass and Tommy's drums wallop in, the song immediately introduces the album’s good-time freakshow tone.

“Isn’t a song about cretins in poor taste?” an interviewer asked guitarist Johnny Ramone back in the day. “No,” he said, “because there really isn’t any such thing as a cretin anymore. Same with pinheads. If we did a song about retards, that’d be in poor taste.” Holy shit—he’s dead fucking right! You’re gonna have to trust me on this—it was in a fanzine I bought at a Ramones show in 1989 that was actually a reprint of a fanzine from the ’70s—whew.

There's the nihilist's anthem "I Don't Care," a punk dirge in which Joey declares "I don't care about this world/And I don't care about these words." "Ramona" is a bittersweet confection with a lovely melody about a girl and the kids who love it loud; ditto the poison-pen love letter “Locket Love.” One of Joey's earliest songs, written before the Ramones, is the plaintive ballad "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" (a roaring cover by Ronnie Spector in 1980 with Cheetah Chrome on guitar truly does the song justice). Can’t go wrong with the delights of the covers of “Do You Wanna Dance?” and the live staple "Surfin' Bird." These two songs are a perfect example of what endeared me to the Ramones when I was a teen, that they seemed to get it right: innocence without irony, absurdity without cruelty. Wouldn’t it be funny if we, you know, covered a forgotten one-hit wonder pop song with power chords, tuneless vocals and an irresistible beat?

Of course there are the stone-cold classics: "Teenage Lobotomy." "We're a Happy Family." "Rockaway Beach." No Ramones show would be complete without them. And then there's the song that I consider to be just about the most perfect pop song ever written, "Sheena is a Punk Rocker."

An ode to free spirits and non-conformists everywhere, to New York City, and to the power of identity that the best rock'n'roll provides, "Sheena" is everything that makes the Ramones great in 2 minutes 47 seconds:

"Well, the kids are all hopped up and ready to go/ They got their surfboards and they're heading/ to the Discotheque a Go-Go/ But she just couldn't stay/ She had to break away/ Well New York City really has it all—Oh yea-ah, oh yeahhhh!"

Second verse, same as the first. A put-the-top-down, fist-in-the-air, sing-along radio-friendly classic if ever there was one. However, when it was released as a single, radio stations took one look at the phrase "punk rocker" and recoiled in fear. Really. It's funny to think today that that phrase once struck horror into the stoutest of record company hearts, but it's true. Once the American music industry saw the Sex Pistols, punk was simply "safety pins, vomit, anger, snot." The whole thing was terrifying, mystifying, verboten.

Ah well, surely the less-threatening sounding "Rockaway Beach," with its Beach Boys-go-garage vibe and unforgettable chorus ("Rock-rock, Rockaway Beach/It's not hard, not far to reach/ We can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach") would leap to the top of the charts and ensconce the Ramones in the nation's warm bosom.

Except that this sunny, funny, delightful little ditty was released in the dead of winter. And it died. And that was it. Rocket to Russia, charting at Billboard #49 (1980's End of the Century would chart a few spaces higher) stopped cold. Despite relentless touring (for the next 19 years!), the spectacle of Punk Rock was a "dangerous" one, and any band associated with it was thrown out with the bathwater. Plus, audiences outside of New York City's Lower East Side just couldn't get with four geeky-looking guys in motorcycle jackets, Captain America T-shirts two sizes too small and ripped-up blue jeans—straight-leg, not flares!—not when there was John Travolta looking so suave and so dapper in his disco get-up. But come on, people, look at these fucking hipsters!

Today the reputation of the Ramones is beyond reproach; unbelievable as it may seem to all those radio DJ detractors and pretty people who were busy buying up those Styx, Foreigner, ABBA, and Bee Gees albums in 1977, they are firmly established as one of the most important bands in rock'n'roll history. Who ever would have thought?

Well, all the cretins, pinheads, and teenage lobotomies throughout the world, that's who. There are such things after all.