It would probably be fair to say that any follow-up to a phenomenal horror trilogy like The Indian Lake Trilogy would naturally be somewhat disappointIt would probably be fair to say that any follow-up to a phenomenal horror trilogy like The Indian Lake Trilogy would naturally be somewhat disappointing. It may be fair to say, but it would also be inaccurate.
Stephen Graham Jones’s latest “deconstructed slasher/teen horror opera” is as intense, horrific, funny, emotionally draining, and poignant as his last three novels, and then some.
“I Was a Teenage Slasher” is the story of Tolly Driver, a skinny, awkward teenager with a peanut allergy and one friend—-the town’s only Indian, a girl named Amber. Tolly is also a slasher.
He doesn’t want to be. And, frankly, he doesn’t even know all the “rules” of being a real-life slasher, which is where Amber comes in handy. She loves slasher films. She knows all about the slasher’s motivations (almost always revenge), the fact that a slasher needs a “brand” (in Tolly’s case, he kills with a never-ending supply of leather belts), and who the final girl is. This may be a problem, because there are multiple candidates in town.
The novel is set over a few days in the summer of 1989 in a small Texas town of Lamesa, where Tolly’s wave of mutilation starts with a very weird pool party.
Jones has done something utterly crazy and unheard of: he’s written a slasher novel from the viewpoint of the slasher, and—-on top of that—-made him absolutely lovable.
Sure, he kills a bunch of teenagers, but they all (kind of) deserve it. Or do they? Therein lies the crux of Tolly’s moral dilemma. He’s compelled to kill these kids for (in a cosmic sense anyway) valid reasons, but, deep down, he knows that they are just kids like him: dumb and prone to making bad decisions that they will regret later in life.
This novel reminds me a lot of a 1988 horror/comedy called “Heathers”, starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. Jones doesn’t mention it as an inspiration, but I’m fairly certain that he had to have seen it. Regardless, both have a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek approach to teen murders that could only have been set in the pre-Columbine pre-“Woke” 1980s. Jones is certainly tapping into that vibe, while simultaneously properly excoriating it....more
I think there is something wrong with Paul Tremblay. Mentally, psychologically, perhaps even spiritually. There is some evidence, based on his writingI think there is something wrong with Paul Tremblay. Mentally, psychologically, perhaps even spiritually. There is some evidence, based on his writing, that Tremblay may not be technically human. There is something alien or demonic lurking beneath and between the words he puts on the page.
That said, Tremblay is one of the coolest fucking horror writers writing in the field currently. Nobody else is doing anything like what he is doing. And I say that with a love and respect for a lot of great contemporary horror writers: Stephen Graham Jones, T. Kingfisher, Grady Hendrix, Cassandra Khaw, Joe Hill, Sarah Gailey. Just to name a few.
Tremblay’s latest novel, “Horror Movie” is, like most of his books and short stories, a veritable mind-fuck. It works on so many levels, and can be enjoyed on so many levels, but it digs deep under the skin and gestates for a long time, often giving birth to really uncomfortable and horrible little thoughts that eat tunnels of madness in your brain.
He’s also fun. Brain-devouringly fun.
There is no way that I can describe or summarize this novel without giving spoilers, so I won’t even try.
Instead, I’ll just say that it is the following: a thoughtful examination of the horror genre, a deconstruction of teen slasher films, an homage/critique of horror film fan(atic)s, a moving account of teen angst and suicidal ideation, a castigation of youth, extremely gory and fucked up.
Tremblay, you are one brilliant, insane son of a bitch....more
Patrick Bateman, it must be noted, had an unusual obsession with Donald Trump. Indeed, Trump is mentioned at least a dozen times throughout Bret EastoPatrick Bateman, it must be noted, had an unusual obsession with Donald Trump. Indeed, Trump is mentioned at least a dozen times throughout Bret Easton Ellis’s now-iconic 1991 novel “American Psycho”. I’m just throwing that fact out because it seems significant.
Indeed, Ellis’s novel—-controversial when it was first published—-still seems significant now, in 2023, for reasons that are not dissimilar to the reasons cited 33 years ago.
I did not read the book 33 years ago. I was graduating high school when the book came out. My summer of ’91 was occupied with packing for college and living with that nervous excitement that precedes a major life-change: freshman year of college. I didn’t have time to read it, even if I wanted to, which I didn’t. In fact, the book was never really on my radar.
Oh, I had heard about it, and when I arrived on campus and met new friends, many of whom were far more literate than myself, I overheard the conversations about how misogynistic and racist and homophobic the book was, and how vile Ellis must be. I would never read such a book, and anyone who did (and, God forbid, liked it) must be the worst kind of disgusting monster, the type who probably voted for George H.W. Bush and liked war and date rape and celebrated awful holidays like Columbus Day, which was nothing more than a celebration of imperialism and genocide. (This is how I talked in college. Not because I actually necessarily believed this shit, but mostly because I was trying to get cute college girls to play with my penis, and most of them talked like this, too.)
It would be three decades before I picked up “American Psycho” and actually read it. And, weirdly, liked it.
Nobody told me that it was hilarious. The fact that it is a very funny, very dark satirical comedy seemed to have been skipped over or ignored in the many conversations I had had about the book.
Also, I was old enough and mature enough as a reader to now distinguish the fact that the virulent misogyny/racism/homophobia evident in the book was not coming from Ellis but was, in fact, a symptom of the protagonist’s psychosis. Ellis did such a good job of getting in the head of a deplorable, soulless, homicidal monster that, I now recognize, many readers came away thinking that Ellis was the monster. People also often forget that Frankenstein was the name of the monster’s creator and not the monster itself.
Being more well-read than I was as a freshman in college, I saw the blatant allusions to Jane Austen, and how Ellis was painting a satirical picture of the vapid and shallow consumer culture of the “Me-First” rich white upper class. I saw in Patrick Bateman the parody of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film “Wall Street”, in which greed and self-interest is played up as a virtue in Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko. I understood where the obsession that Bateman had with serial killers like Ed Gein and Ted Bundy came from, as serial killers were kind of all the rage in the ‘90s.
I even saw the parallels between “American Psycho” and Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”, in which Bateman—-clearly Ahab—-suffers from an obsessive-compulsive quest to find his own white whale: a conscience or any kind of emotion that would make him feel human in some way. New York City and Wall Street become, for Bateman, the rough seas that he must sail. His vicious and inhuman murders become a kind of religious rite he uses to summon something—-anything—-lurking beneath his superficial existence. I even understood the three chapters in which Bateman extolls the discographies of Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News: three of the most popular and, in many ways, vapidly commercial artists of the ‘80s. They are the epitome of shallowness, which describes Bateman to a ’t’.
And, of course, the constant references to Trump (which, since the book was written 20 years before Trump had any vocal designs of being President, is simply bizarrely prescient), a man who, even at that time, was a human imprimatur of everything sleazy and gauche regarding the wealthy, are voluminously apropos.
The book still shocks. For today’s post-Trump post-Covid audience, that’s definitely a good thing. If the book didn’t shock or disgust readers, that would be too horrible to contemplate.
I can understand why this book is much loved and much hated. It’s not a book that would engender mild feelings of indifference or “meh” in anyone who reads it. One either loves it or hates it.
I’m on the “love” side, and it’s because I understand what Ellis was trying to say. He was expressing a disgust and hatred for a warped sense of reality and dark side of humanity that he saw hiding in plain sight and that could only grow into something more dangerous—-and, in fact, did under Trump’s presidency. For this reason—-and all of the others previously cited—-“American Psycho” is, in my opinion, a vital American literary classic....more
Spoiler alert: In which I try not to give too much away but inadvertently reveal a lot more, probably, than I should have, for which I am very sorry. Spoiler alert: In which I try not to give too much away but inadvertently reveal a lot more, probably, than I should have, for which I am very sorry. But you’ve been warned…
Gus Moreno’s debut novel “This Thing Between Us” has my vote for Best Horror Novel of 2021, in a year that has, apparently, produced a lot of excellent horror novels.
Moreno is part of this New Weird Horror trend that seems to have taken off in the last few years, spearheaded by authors like Stephen Graham Jones, Catriona Ward, Paul Tremblay, Cassandra Khaw, Grady Hendrix, Tiffany D. Jackson, just to name a few that have received positive buzz.
I can’t say that I have read even a few of the horror novels in the past year. Hell, I recently discovered Stephen Graham Jones and Grady Hendrix, so I’ve got a lot of catching up to do…
That said, It’s been hard not to notice a renaissance of extremely exciting new horror voices out there, all of them bringing their own unique twists and brand of horror.
Moreno’s novel does many things well, not the least of which is overturning the reader’s expectations at every page.
Here I was, going into the book thinking it was going to be a darkly humorous examination about our exhausting fascination with technology. The protagonist, who is dealing with the recent death of his wife, blames the death on the purchase of a smart speaker called an Itza (a thinly-veiled Alexa) that essentially takes on a life of its own, playing loud music at odd hours of the night, ordering ridiculous packages like a dozen pink dildos, and re-setting alarms so that you’re late for work. It’s “Christine” for the millennial set.
Then, not even half-way through, the book becomes something else, something darker. It starts going all “Hereditary”, replete with pentagrams and animal sacrifice and ancient Mexican demons called the Cucuy, which is commonly called the “Mexican boogeyman”.
Then there’s this (not-so-funny) nod to Stephen King’s “Cujo” which erupts into so much amazing blood and guts: again, not what I was expecting.
Then it becomes this Lovecraftian cosmic horror straight out of a Laird Barron story.
Then it becomes a tearjerker about the protagonist’s inability to deal with grief and depression about losing his wife, and how it affects his other relationships, and how emotionally fragile we are as humans.
It’s also a love story.
It manages, somehow, to be each one of these things all in one, but it never feels disjointed or awkward. On the contrary, it flows beautifully, like a boat cruise through the nine levels of Hell.
This is true horror, in every sense of the word, which is why it gets my vote for Best Horror Novel of the year....more
I will give Garth Ennis credit where credit is due. His latest graphic novel, A Walk Through Hell is something that some of his previous graphic novelI will give Garth Ennis credit where credit is due. His latest graphic novel, A Walk Through Hell is something that some of his previous graphic novels could never be accused of: subtle.
Let’s be honest: Ennis—-the brainchild behind such series as Crossed, Preacher, and The Boys—-is as subtle as a fistfuck with brass knuckles. I’ve always kind of liked this about him, but it can get tiring. And most of the time, Ennis’s idea of horror was less horrifying than it was just plain disgusting.
A Walk Through Hell is genuinely scary at times, and Ennis’s decision to tone down on the gore and amp up the dread succeeds wonderfully in this.
Not that there isn’t gore in this, but it’s definitely extremely subdued, especially when compared to, say, Crossed. Ennis isn’t trying to gross the reader out in this, like he was in Crossed. He’s actually making a pretty strong social commentary about our times. It is, actually, a running theme with Ennis, but one that often gets subsumed by the blood and guts in his previous novels: humanity is a good and fragile thing, and we can all lose it if we’re not careful.
That this is a blatant anti-Trump story is obvious. Ennis doesn’t shy away from or hide his politics. And yet, it never feels very political, mainly because the political aspects take a backseat to the story’s spiritual aspects. Yes, A Walk Through Hell tackles some heavy religious and theological issues, as only Ennis can tackle them.
Preacher was religious, too, although Ennis’s religious (more aptly anti-religious) commentary in that series always came across as more of a mean-spirited attack on Christianity. Not that Christianity, in my opinion, doesn’t deserve it.
In this series, however, Ennis comes across as more fair-minded, which is weird to say in a graphic novel series in which it is more than implied that God not only doesn’t exist but that God, as a concept, is merely a cruel joke played on humanity by the Devil, who created the idea of Heaven and God for mere shits and giggles.
Yet between the lines, Ennis, I think, is saying something a little more hopeful: If God doesn’t exist and all that we have waiting for us at the end of life is either fire and brimstone or bleak nothingness, then how can we explain the good and the beautiful in the world? If Evil is the way things should be, and Good is the aberration, the fact that humanity has successfully survived this long and has, indeed, done some good and created some beauty, at the very least seems to suggest an iota of a possibility in the existence of God.
Who knew Ennis could be so fucking spiritual?...more
Okay, so Guillem March’s beautiful graphic novel Karmen is breath-taking to look at but is depressing as hell, as it is about death and, specifically,Okay, so Guillem March’s beautiful graphic novel Karmen is breath-taking to look at but is depressing as hell, as it is about death and, specifically, suicide, for which March’s very adamant stance is: don’t do it. I stand behind that 100%, but this story is so sad it will make one want to slit his or her wrists. Ironic, huh?
Anyway, in issue #4 (out of five; thankfully not the final one, so March still has time to redeem himself): Catalina finds out that the guy she’s had a crush on her entire life and the reason she killed herself has a huge secret that may have been helpful to know in preventing her suicide; Karmen is in trouble with her boss, a middle-manager civil servant in the afterlife who doesn’t like what Karmen is doing, which seems to be allowing the newly-dead some extra time to tie up loose ends or at least find some semblance of closure.
The spirit of Catalina, a young woman who committed suicide, is being led through the city, and her own life, by the mysterious freckle-faced angel ofThe spirit of Catalina, a young woman who committed suicide, is being led through the city, and her own life, by the mysterious freckle-faced angel of death Karmen.
Cryptic, strange, and quite beautiful, issue # 3 of Guillem March’s existential comic book “Karmen” sees Catalina coming to the realization that she is, indeed, dead and that she wasted her life.
We also learn a little bit about Karmen, who, unlike her other angels of death, has a personal agenda of her own for her clients, whom she refuses to treat as a mere job, rushing them through the bureaucratic process of shuffling off their mortal coil.
What that agenda is, however, remains to be seen…...more
Bret Easton Ellis’s 1985 novel “Less Than Zero” is one of those literary time capsules that is useful when one wants a glimpse at a certain mentality Bret Easton Ellis’s 1985 novel “Less Than Zero” is one of those literary time capsules that is useful when one wants a glimpse at a certain mentality of a certain type of person in a certain place and time. In this case, it is a glimpse at rich white kids of Los Angeles, CA, circa mid-1980s. It is fascinating, illuminating, disturbing, depressing, ugly, funny, horrifying, and beautiful. It is also the primary source for nearly every cliche about the 1980s ever utilized since.
I have never seen the 1987 film adaptation starring Robert Downey Jr. and Andrew McCarthy, although I wouldn’t mind seeing it, despite my knowing that Ellis found it to be very disappointing. According to Ellis, nearly everything about his novel that he thought was important was gutted and replaced with sentimental gimcrack. What remained was a soulless shell of a film (with a killer ‘80s soundtrack, of course), which is pretty typical of Hollywood and, not ironically, perfectly illustrative of everything Ellis was trying to say about that city of angels.
Ellis has gotten a bad rap for being vapid, purposely controversial, amoral, and offensive: and those were criticisms from the critics who liked him.
To be fair, and from someone who is coming to Ellis for the very first time (I recently read “White”, his most recent book, which was different from his other work in that it was his first piece of nonfiction and a memoir), it seems to me that Ellis’s writing in “Less Than Zero” is more journalistic and observational than prurient and voyeuristic.
If he was going for prurient, he failed miserably, as there is nothing very erotic or sexually exciting in the book. Indeed, the few sex scenes in the book are (in order of appearance) an awkward sympathy fuck, a pedophiliac snuff film, and a homosexual rape scene. If you happen to get off on any of that, there is something seriously wrong with you. Sorry to be judgy, just sayin’...
And, well, if there is an opposite to “voyeuristic”, then this book defines it, because one cannot unsee or unknow any of the horrible things one comes across in its pages, as hard as one tries.
Still, the book is important, and riveting, in its unflinching look at the spiritual emptiness of an entire generation of children. It’s perhaps more apropos today, looking back at the “lost youth” of the ‘80s, and seeing how those children have become adults and parents and pillars of their community. (This may explain why Ellis wrote a sequel, “Imperial Bedrooms”, in 2010, that answered the question of what the kids from “Less Than Zero” ended up becoming thirty years later.)
The Clays and Blairs and Julians and Rips of the world are all now at that age where they will soon be receiving the AARP magazine. They are all at that age where suffering from arthritis and gout and sciatica are the norm. They are all probably dealing with vapid and amoral teenagers themselves, hearing in the back of their head the phrase what goes around, comes around. They are several years past failed marriages and stock market crashes that left their 401ks in the garbage and deaths of parents and any other mid-life crises, and---assuming they haven’t committed suicide, died of cancer, or been thrown into federal prisons for tax evasions or corporate illegalities---they are entering the back nine of their twilight years, awash in the existential fear that their empty lives are truly meaningless and forgettable in the cosmic scope of things....more
“We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.” ---Colson Whitehead (p. 214)
Zombies have become, in this 21st-century post-mode“We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.” ---Colson Whitehead (p. 214)
Zombies have become, in this 21st-century post-modern zeitgeist, a template for our collective fears of cultural complacency, apathy, and indifference. These shuffling, wayward hordes of lifeless creatures devoted solely to consumption are, essentially, our own worst selves. Zombies are us.
This perhaps explains the popularity of the genre. Vampires are cool, but they’ve always been a bit snooty, high-falutin’. You have to really work at being a vampire, and, if you do succeed in attracting a vampire’s attention, there’s no telling if he/she is going to turn you or merely exsanguinate you. Vampires are like their own strict country club, with membership qualifications that are always elusive. That’s why zombies are more popular: anybody---everybody---can be a zombie.
It’s this egalitarian nature of zombiehood that Colson Whitehead both celebrates and laments in his brilliant 2011 novel “Zone One”, a post-apocalyptic literary novel that both pays homage to the genre while defying it.
The protagonist of “Zone One” is a young New Yorker named Mark Spitz (not his real name) who survived the initial onslaught of the zombie apocalypse. After the military rolled in and created safe zones throughout the country, some semblance of normality has returned. Survivors have jobs, some businesses are up and running, TV and radio are operational again, a hierarchy has been established in which some people seem to be in control of the situation.
Mark, however, has his doubts. For him, pessimism is a survival mechanism. He sees it happen all the time: someone gets too optimistic, he lets his guard down, and that’s when the zombie lurking in the alleyway leaps out and rips his throat out. Better to be always thinking the worst and prepared for that surprise attack.
Mark is one of a team of civilian clean-up crews whose job is to go into buildings, after an area has been cleared by the Marines, to find “stragglers”. These are relatively harmless zombies who have gotten stuck in a former memory of a forgotten life: zombie janitors who push mops over the same stretch of floor for eternity, zombie office workers who sit in a cubicle waiting for paperwork that will never reach their desk; zombie secretaries waiting for phone calls that will never come. Floor by floor, Mark and his crew clean out buildings that will probably never be renovated.
Cracks start appearing in the new post-zombie world: reports of other human outposts going dark, i.e. communications are mysteriously down; a noticeable increase in zombie hordes on the outskirts of the safe zones; civilian crews noticing more hostile behavior from the supposedly docile stragglers.
Then, of course, shit gets real. As it always does in zombie apocalypse stories. And as it should.
Among Whitehead’s rather lengthy sections of beautiful prose and scathing satirical social commentary (some may say these sections drag, but whatevs) is a great balls-to-the-wall zombie apocalypse novel, one that may appeal to both the John Updike/David Foster Wallace literati as well as the fans of grindhouse movies by George Romero and Lucio Fulci. Or not. Those two types rarely cross over, so Whitehead is writing to a pretty small niche audience.
If you happen to fall into that cross-over audience, however, “Zone One” may be your cup of blood and guts. I mean “tea”....more
Horror doesn’t always have to be psycho killers, monsters, and ghosts. Occasionally, horror is simply the byproduct of loneliness and existential dreaHorror doesn’t always have to be psycho killers, monsters, and ghosts. Occasionally, horror is simply the byproduct of loneliness and existential dread. It’s the unshakable sense that one’s best days are in the past, that this is as good as it will ever get, that the gods have forever turned their back on you.
Iain Reid’s debut novel “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a horror novel, and it’s a spooky one, but it’s also just very depressing and uncomfortable, because it captures what it feels like to examine your life and come to the horrifying realization that you are not whom you thought you would become. This is, I’m pretty sure, a feeling that most people have at some point in their life.
Almost the entire novel is set within the confines of a car during a road trip during a snow storm. At night.
That, right there, should give one the immediate sense of where this novel is, mentally.
The narrator is an unnamed college-age woman with her boyfriend, Jake. They are going to visit his parents, who live far out in the country. She has never met his parents. Besides the normal nervous trepidation of meeting the parents, she is also nervous for another reason.
As the title implies, she is considering possibly breaking up with Jake, a decision that she has not come to lightly. Throughout the course of the novel, she flashes back to moments in their relationship, good and bad, perhaps trying to convince herself to stick with it. But she ends up simply deciding that her decision to end things is the right one.
Things take a weird turn when they arrive at his parents. To say more, of course, would be spoilers. To say anything would be spoilers, which is a testament to Reid’s ability to create fear based on very little actual information.
Reid’s novel is a mystery in which we are given only half the clues, and many of them, we suspect, are red herrings.
Reid’s novel may be short, but it has an emotional impact that far exceeds its diminutiveness. It’s also just creepy and weird, in a really good way. It will make one want to keep reading, despite that niggling sense that something horrifying awaits one at the end even if you have no real reason to think so....more
The roughly thirteen essays and one short story that comprises W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic book “The Souls of Black Folk” transcends its journalistic musThe roughly thirteen essays and one short story that comprises W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic book “The Souls of Black Folk” transcends its journalistic musings into true literary art. The lyrical prose, coupled with deep philosophical concepts, turns what could have been merely a profound reportage of the state of black people in the U.S. at the turn of the century into a masterpiece in American Black Literature, an incredibly important one at that.
At the heart of Du Bois’s book is a scathing criticism of the Atlanta Compromise, a speech given by Booker T. Washington in Atlanta, Georgia in 1895. In that speech, Washington promoted the idea of vocational education for young black men and women at the expense of higher education. The idea was to give former slaves and the children of slaves a chance to be vital members of the Southern workforce, in order to make money and eventually make their way in the world. Washington also emphasized that the discussion of equality would be tabled for now. He felt—-misguidedly, according to Du Bois—-that equality would develop naturally over time.
Many critics, including Du Bois (who, it must be noted, supported Washington’s speech initially), began to realize that the entire system was set up for black failure, as white people in general and Southerners specifically, did not want to see blacks succeed, ostensibly for economic reasons (blacks would take white jobs, white people did not want to work with, or for, black business owners, etc.) but primarily for white supremacist reasons.
Du Bois also felt that higher education—-black colleges that emphasized arts and sciences—-offered something intangible to black people that farming and factory work simply couldn’t provide: a spiritual world that recognized beauty and a path to spiritual riches.
His belief that black people would grow weary and embittered, turning to criminal and self-destructive tendencies, due to a lack of self-respect brought on by feeling that they are nothing more than expendable cogs in an economic machine were, sadly, prophetic.
Written in 1903, Du Bois’s book has as much resonance today as it had at the beginning of the 20th century, which is an incredibly disturbing statement....more
One of the most important books in American Literature, Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” is a surrealist satirical socio-political horror novel that atOne of the most important books in American Literature, Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” is a surrealist satirical socio-political horror novel that attempts to examine the American Black Experience via a series of incidents in the life of the narrator, a nameless black man who claims to be invisible, metaphorically speaking. Unlike the invisible man of H.G. Wells’s novel of the same name, whose invisibility is a literal condition brought on by a lab accident, Ellison’s narrator’s invisibility is a condition of his race and of society’s distorted view of race.
At the beginning of the novel, we meet him living in a basement apartment, his “hole in the ground” where he spends his time re-examining his life up to this point. The rest of the book is told in flashback, recounting the incidents that led to his becoming invisible.
Ellison published “Invisible Man” in 1952 to critical acclaim. Heavily inspired by existentialism, the novel examines issues of racial identity and the social aspect of racism in regards to American society. Ellison wrote his novel in a unique experimental form that is both complex and immensely readable. Each chapter reads like a biblical parable, full of symbolism and deeper meaning. While interpretations may vary from reader to reader, much of Ellison’s allusions stem from real-life experience, and many of the characters are modeled after actual people in his life.
It helps to know a little about Ellison’s life before reading “Invisible Man”. At the very least, it’s useful to have some knowledge of where Ellison was coming from and the basis for some of his allusions.
****
Ellison planned on being a jazz musician. He attended the Tuskegee Institute (now known as Tuskegee University) in Tuskegee, Alabama, the famous black college founded by Booker T. Washington, to study music.
In the book, the narrator fondly recalls his underclass days at the unnamed black college he is attending. Everyone on campus reverentially refers to the Founder, also unnamed but clearly based on Washington. Ellison criticizes Washington’s “idealized” view of the Black Experience through the character of Dr. Bledsoe, the college president, who chastises the narrator for a situation in which the narrator, acting as chauffeur for a visiting white patron, accidentally shows the white patron the wrong side of the tracks, where the poor, uneducated, and “uncivilized” black people live---a place in which no decent black person would ever step foot.
Clearly, Ellison is critical of the Washingtonian mentality that says that, in order to survive in the white man’s world, a black person must be compliant, polite, and not too “uppity”. True equality is unattainable, according to this worldview, but a black person can still be successful in the white man’s world if they simply act responsible.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the book’s most surreal and disturbing scene, the famous “battle royal”. In this scene, the narrator as a young high school graduate is invited, along with other black classmates, to a gathering of prominent white community members. The narrator is under the impression that he is to give a speech, the speech he gave at his school graduation. Instead, he and the other young men are blindfolded and thrown into a boxing ring, where they are to beat each other up. Afterwards, the bloody and battered young men are told to retrieve money scattered on the floor, only to find that the floor is electrified. The young men jump around violently, attempting to gather the money.
Humiliation is the point of this exercise, but the greater point also seems to be subservience: do whatever the white man wants, no matter how awful, and you shall be rewarded.
Indeed, the narrator is rewarded. He is asked to give his speech, which he does, while the white men continue talking and laughing and making every effort to appear that they aren’t listening, until the narrator comes to his part in the speech where he talks about “social equality”. Suddenly, the white men are quiet. One man says, “Boy, don’t you mean ‘social responsibility’?” The narrator gets the message. He caves and responds that he misspoke.
The black scholar is, according to Ellison, a sham. The black college is an attempt to create an educated (enough) workforce of black men for the white man. The narrator has bought into this philosophy.
After the incident with the white patron, Dr. Bledsoe sends the narrator to New York City with sealed letters of recommendation and instructions not to open them. It is this part in the book where the narrator has his eyes forcibly opened.
****
Ellison’s interest in music eventually shifted toward writing, and he left Alabama to go to New York City, where he became friends with influential black writers like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.
In the book, the narrator travels to Harlem of the 1930s, but his experience---unlike Ellison’s---is anything but pleasant. When he attempts to find a job, a compassionate white interviewer lets the narrator know what is in Dr. Bledsoe’s letters of recommendation. Apparently, the college president has nothing nice to say about the narrator and instructs the interviewers to give him any menial job available and one that will prevent him from ever coming back to college.
Feeling betrayed, the narrator finds a job at a paint-making factory that specializes in white paint. Ironically, this paint is manufactured proudly by an older black man, who lords over his factory with an irrationally territorial fanaticism and paranoia. When he erroneously suspects the narrator of having dealings with the union, the two argue, neglecting a machine that causes an explosion. When the narrator awakens, he is in a hospital attached to the factory, where the white doctors on duty perform nightmarish mind experiments on the narrator, including electro-shock, for no apparent reason.
This part is probably the most surreal and open to interpretation, although it seems clear that Ellison is making some pretty vicious commentary about industrialized blacks, those young men who have graduated from the Washingtonian school of thought regarding meritocratic upward mobility.
Mr. Brockway, the black man who works in the factory, has a fear and hatred of unionizing. The narrator does not have an opinion one way or the other about unions, but he is not necessarily against them. This is perhaps Ellison’s criticism about the lack of unity among black people to better themselves as a race, as opposed to capitalistic competition in order to better themselves individually.
This episode in the book leads to the narrator’s “revelation” period, in which he discovers a positive force within the ideals of Socialism.
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In real life, Ellison’s relationship with Socialism began with his mother, who was a proud Socialist Party member. In the book, the narrator falls into his political views when he is recruited by the Brotherhood. Attracted by the idea of true equality between the races, the narrator becomes one of the Brotherhood’s star members, only to gradually become disillusioned and, later, disenfranchised by the group.
The ends begin to fray for the narrator when many of the blacks in the community he has recruited into the Brotherhood begin to leave, due in large part to a man called Ras the Exhorter. This outspoken, angry Jamaican-born activist preaches a violent overthrow of the white people, believing that the races can never live in peace with each other, and whites will never truly see blacks as equals. Ras is modelled after Marcus Garvey. Ellison does not agree with the Garveyist worldview, either, painting it as too militant and doing more harm than good within the black community.
Yet, Ellison has also become disillusioned with the Socialist movement, which ultimately turns its back on the black community and those black members who have not lived up to expectations.
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In the end, the narrator sits in his room, contemplating his life and choices up to that point. He begins to feel the stirrings of hope again at the realization that his invisibility has an up side: it has enabled him to be his own man, with his own thoughts and feelings, rather than a tabula rasa upon which others vicariously attempt to imprint their own thoughts and feelings. He realizes, too, that, while he hasn’t found the answers, he can’t abandon the black community. In the end, the narrator realizes the importance of both social responsibility and the continual search for social equality.
“Invisible Man” deserves to be hailed as one of the most important books in American literature. It is the first real intellectual existential novel about the Black Experience, and as someone who has never lived (and never will live) It, it has the significant virtue of making It very real and understandable. ...more
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