Rabbit Pellets
Easter gave us three egg hunts, one party and one enjoyable visit to my parents'. Leftovers abound, not to mention hard boiled eggs and enough candy to melt the teeth of an average sized school district, and another holiday is in the books. Holidays are big around here, given my wife's festive dedication and our two little children.
So now it's time to write a small bit about the third book of the vintage trio I've been writing about, Behold This Woman by David Goodis. I think I believe in John Irving's opinion that a good book review is the result of the reviewer having read all of an author's books, hopefully gaining an understanding of what the author is all about and therefore being able to appreciate the effort and risks taken with the book in question. In large part due to this principle, I haven't tried to review these three books, merely offer a perspective on something a modern reader can gain from an undeservedly "forgotten" book. And in this case, I haven't read anything else by Goodis, although I have an omnibus edition of four other works.
When dealing with a book of horror, or a book with a horror, a challenge is always how to depict the evil without destroying the sense of horror. Once the big bad is revealed, it's difficult to keep it scary. In Behold This Woman the horror is a woman, and not one who on the surface has any special talents or evil characteristics. She is an egotistical, designing woman with enough surface charm and personality to beguile a series of lesser burning males. She's a maneater but she's drawn so well, from her need to please herself by good food served by a belittled domestic, and so full of her own life, that the horror inspired, while wholly unsupernatural, is simply the more terrifying for it.
Clara's method of bringing her step-daughter in line is to physically beat her and then comfort with her with understanding, reaching out to her and confiding in her while encouraging the daughter to do the same. Broken down, the step daughter gives in and suddenly it dawns on the reader that Clara doesn't merely want to destroy the daughter or get her out of the way but to corrupt the daughter and convert her from a fine, normal young woman to a fresher version of herself. Evil spawns evil.
The "normalness" of the situations in the book remind me something of Donald E. Westlake's The Ax where an otherwise decent man does evil things after being laid off from his job. He advertises fictitious positions and murders the respondents, thereby eliminating the competition for a new job. The man has nothing against these people and is otherwise a normal human being leading a mundane life.
The difference in the two books is that in The Ax, the protagonist makes a conscious decision to do a series of evil things. In Behold This Woman, it's scarier because there is no such clear boundary to be crossed. It's evil by degrees and it has enough in common with people we all know to contain more than a little truth. It's fiction that's not stranger than fiction, but almost as real as real life. And therein lies the horror and the source of the book's ability to keep the reader enthralled.
There is a murder but it's more opportunistic than planned and no less evil. And there's give and take in the resolution of the novel where some good guys don't make out so well and some of the gray ones see some redemption. And then there's Clara, the shrew next door, and the final results of her designs. This is a very absorbing book, with pictures painted rich and full by the words of David Goodis, deep and heavy with an understanding of daily life in the trenches. Very highly recommended, and I look forward to reading more by Goodis, even if I have to scrounge reading copies of disintegrating paperbacks from used book sites on the internet. Easily worth it, and, I think, more worthwhile than concentrating on the bestseller list.
So now it's time to write a small bit about the third book of the vintage trio I've been writing about, Behold This Woman by David Goodis. I think I believe in John Irving's opinion that a good book review is the result of the reviewer having read all of an author's books, hopefully gaining an understanding of what the author is all about and therefore being able to appreciate the effort and risks taken with the book in question. In large part due to this principle, I haven't tried to review these three books, merely offer a perspective on something a modern reader can gain from an undeservedly "forgotten" book. And in this case, I haven't read anything else by Goodis, although I have an omnibus edition of four other works.
When dealing with a book of horror, or a book with a horror, a challenge is always how to depict the evil without destroying the sense of horror. Once the big bad is revealed, it's difficult to keep it scary. In Behold This Woman the horror is a woman, and not one who on the surface has any special talents or evil characteristics. She is an egotistical, designing woman with enough surface charm and personality to beguile a series of lesser burning males. She's a maneater but she's drawn so well, from her need to please herself by good food served by a belittled domestic, and so full of her own life, that the horror inspired, while wholly unsupernatural, is simply the more terrifying for it.
Clara's method of bringing her step-daughter in line is to physically beat her and then comfort with her with understanding, reaching out to her and confiding in her while encouraging the daughter to do the same. Broken down, the step daughter gives in and suddenly it dawns on the reader that Clara doesn't merely want to destroy the daughter or get her out of the way but to corrupt the daughter and convert her from a fine, normal young woman to a fresher version of herself. Evil spawns evil.
The "normalness" of the situations in the book remind me something of Donald E. Westlake's The Ax where an otherwise decent man does evil things after being laid off from his job. He advertises fictitious positions and murders the respondents, thereby eliminating the competition for a new job. The man has nothing against these people and is otherwise a normal human being leading a mundane life.
The difference in the two books is that in The Ax, the protagonist makes a conscious decision to do a series of evil things. In Behold This Woman, it's scarier because there is no such clear boundary to be crossed. It's evil by degrees and it has enough in common with people we all know to contain more than a little truth. It's fiction that's not stranger than fiction, but almost as real as real life. And therein lies the horror and the source of the book's ability to keep the reader enthralled.
There is a murder but it's more opportunistic than planned and no less evil. And there's give and take in the resolution of the novel where some good guys don't make out so well and some of the gray ones see some redemption. And then there's Clara, the shrew next door, and the final results of her designs. This is a very absorbing book, with pictures painted rich and full by the words of David Goodis, deep and heavy with an understanding of daily life in the trenches. Very highly recommended, and I look forward to reading more by Goodis, even if I have to scrounge reading copies of disintegrating paperbacks from used book sites on the internet. Easily worth it, and, I think, more worthwhile than concentrating on the bestseller list.
posted by Rick Ollerman at 1:28 PM
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