BAUDELAIRE'S REVENGE by Bob van Laerhoven

This was a random find at the library, but I found it enjoyable.

It's 1870. Paris is in turmoil, with the Franco-Prussian War and the populace's attempts to distract themselves from what seems like inevitable doom. Commissioner Lefevre, a lover of poetry and carnal pleasures, investigates a gruesome murder in a brothel, and finds the killer has left behind a note...which is a quote from Baudelaire, and seemingly in the poet's handwriting. But the poet has been dead for three years! Has he risen from the grave?

More murders ensue, with some gruesome mutilations as well. What is the point? What is the goal of the murderer? There's lots of historical detail here, and we also start seeing things from the killer's point of view, but it's obvious it's an unreliable narrator here, and it's not until the end that we know what their motivation is, and the nature of their secrets.

It's not bad at all, but it has its weaknesses. From the start I knew a certain character was going to be more than they seemed and would be a traitor. Author van Laerhoven seems to push certain ideas and concepts almost too much. The sexual content is somewhat explicit and often quite perverse. (Even from my jaded viewpoint, it was a bit much.) There's occasional blips of racism but they're always in the context of a first-person narrative so they can be forgiven for being the viewpoint of a person of the time...and a bad person at that.

The big problem for me was that it was a bit too reminiscent of another work I'd read years ago, that involved a similar plot device with another famous author. (NEVERMORE, by Harold Schechter, if you must know.) I'm sure it was a coincidence but it was a bit of a letdown.

Still, it's Paris, it's decadent, and it's got an appealing character in Commissioner Lefevre, and I almost wish van Laerhoven would bring him back. We'll see about that.

ALRAUNE, by Hanns Heinz Ewers

Every so often, I'll read something that's thoroughly fascinating, but yet leaves me somewhat squicked out. This is one of those works.

Alraune, by Hanns Heinz Ewers and published in 1911, is the tale of scientist Jakob ten Brinken and his friend Frank Braun, who are fascinated by heredity, and to see it in action, they set about experimenting with artificial insemination, impregnating a slatternly prostitute with the semen of a depraved murderer. A daughter is born, Alraune, a beautiful child who is taken in by an upper-middle-class family.

Alraune, however, lacks scruple. Beautiful and perfectly mannered, she brings destruction to everyone around her. Every chapter is an episode in which some foolish soul is drawn to her as a month unto a flame, and ends up self-destructing in one way or another. And it's not just men; women also fall head-over-heels for the cruel Alraune, and are destroyed by her.

Finally, close to the end, Alraune genuinely falls in love and has a romantic idyll with her one of her creators, Frank Braun. Alraune belatedly develops a guilty conscience, begins sleepwalking....and ultimately meets her end.

It's hard to approach this book objectively. A plot revolving around heredity and eugenics, from a Germany that was only a couple of decades from being taken over by the Nazi party, can make even the most hardened reader cringe. It's important to remember that this was a time when the topics of heredity and eugenics were big in the public consciousness even here in the U.S. and in other countries. In 1912, a year after this book was published in Germany, American psychologist Henry H. Goddard published his infamous study, The Kallikak Family, which made claims that "feeblemindedness", mental disabilities, and criminal tendencies were hereditary. Of course, even Goddard's contemporaries pointed out that he overlooked the role of malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies in the developments of the "feebleminded" Kallikaks. In our present days of being over-nourished, we forget that vitamin deficiencies were a real problem. Everyone consumes iodized salt these days, and we've forgotten that iodine deficiency doesn't just cause goiter, but can also lead to intellectual disabilities. The Kallikaks of Goddard's study were also a poor backwoods family; naturally issues such as isolation, inbreeding, and poverty should have been in play. Modern critics have also pointed out the possibility of widespread alcoholism in the family and chronic fetal alcohol syndrome from one generation to the next. Stephen Jay Gould, in his book The Mismeasure of Man, makes a case for Goddard's data being fudged and photos of the backwoods Kallikaks being doctored.

This was also not far from the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision in the U.S. Supreme Court, that ruled that state laws requiring compulsory sterilization of the "unfit" and intellectually disabled did not violate the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment. Forced sterilization continued in the U.S. but declined after WWII; even so, some states still have eugenics-related compulsory sterilization laws on the books, but they are not enforces, and as late as 1981 forcible sterilizations occurred in Oregon.

Even some of Edgar Rice Burroughs' works seemed to endorse eugenics; his posthumously-published novella "Pirate Blood" has a modern descendant of Jean Laffite suddenly drawn into piracy because of heredity.

So you can see that it wasn't unique to Germany. Still, it's disquieting today to read. Even now we're struggling with the idea that maybe some things ARE hereditary, such as a tendency to alcoholism, while at the same time decrying any sort of forced eugenics as immoral.

There's also the woman-as-destroyer trope. Again, this was nothing new, in Germany or anywhere else. German dramatist Frank Wedekind gave us the play "Earth Spirit" in 1894, and its sequel "Pandora's Box" in 1904, that tracked the trail of destruction left by Lulu, a seductress who loves and ruins everyone she meets until meeting her destruction. These were adapted as the 1929 silent film Pandora's Box, starring Louise Brooks, and Alban Berg's 1935 opera Lulu.

Of course, we see this in American media; just look at the 1933 film Baby Face, in which Barbara Stanwyck fucks her way to the top and wreaks havoc on the way. And reading this, I was also reminded of the notorious 1969 trash novel Naked Came the Stranger, in which a woman retaliates against a cheating husband by catting around with every man in her neighborhood, and leaving wrecked relationships, ruined marriages, and even a corpse or two in her wake. (Yes, I read it a few years ago, mainly for a laugh.)

The question of misogyny raises its head when these works are discussed, and I'd say that depending on where you're coming from, Alraune and Lulu and other works can be seen as misogynist. Women are destructive, they bring ruin to all around them. Conversely, some have claimed works like these (especially Lulu) to be proto-feminist, in showing a woman with agency who owns her own sexuality and doesn't need to subsume herself to a man in order to make her way in the world...and I would say that these views are also legitimate.

It can be hard to say what is really misogynistic or feminist sometimes. You may know of (or remember) the series of trash films about a lady Nazi named Ilsa, flicks like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheikhs. They were made to be exploitation, and for years they were, but then they were embraced by a younger generation of women who saw them as empowering. Star Dyanne Thorne has expressed her amazement at the women who would come to her at conventions to praise those films. I personally have seen similar at burlesque shows; once "girlie shows" were for drooling old men who wanted to ogle scantily clad women, but now I've found that burlesque is empowering for women who see it as a way of owning their sexuality and declaring the beauty of their bodies just as they are. As I've said before, we shouldn't be too quick to judge; the exploitation of one generation can be the empowerment of the next.

So...back to Alraune....

Some have also voiced revulsion at how Ewers became involved in the Nazi party (most notably Jess Nevins) but it's worth pointing out that Ewers got involved mostly because of his own nationalism and Neitzschean philosophies. Ewers doesn't seem to have been an anti-Semite (his books feature positive Jewish characters who are patriotic Germans) and he was, to use a modern term, "heteroflexible" which eventually put him at odds with the Nazis. In 1934, most of his works were banned by the Third Reich and his assets seized; he died of TB that year.

Is Alraune a Nazi work? Not really, I'd say. The use of eugenics as a story element can be uncomfortable and problematic to modern readers, but it's no worse than other works of the period. It was a time when even the "good guys" of the world took eugenics seriously. There was still a lot we didn't understand. It's also got a lot of decadence and depravity simmering under the surface, the sort of thing the Nazis would have disapproved of.

It is a misogynist work? That can be up to interpretation. It can be a male fevered fantasy of destructive female sexuality....or can be an exploration of how a woman can own her sexuality and defy the repressive and hypocritical society around her. And as destructive as she is to men, ultimately men are powerless against her, and it takes another woman's actions to bring about her end.

Interestingly, Alraune is the second book in a trilogy about Frank Braun; I think the first is now available in a new translation, and the third may be in the works. Alraune is available in a new translation as an e-book; the introductory essay by the translator is most entertaining.

Am I sorry I read it? No, not at all. And while I'm not its biggest fan, at the same time there was something about it that I found compelling, even if it was just as a window into another time and another mindset that may not be as far away from ours as we think. And I'd say there's a strong possibility I'll look into any other works that are currently available. Yes, there were times I squirmed mentally, but life is shallow if we never take a good hard look at the things that disquiet us.

Alraune has been filmed several times, including a famous 1928 version with Brigitte Helm of Metropolis, and Paul Wegener, director of The Golem.  The latest was in 1952, with Hildegarde Knef and Erich von Stroheim. Its influence can be seen in other works....Species, anyone?

Maybe not required reading, but good if you want to confront some uncomfortable questions.

THE THREE IMPOSTORS by Arthur Machen

Arthur Machen is one of those seminal authors that everyone respects and pays homage to, but too few have actually read. I discovered him long ago via an anthology reprint of an episode from this, the deservedly famous "Novel of the White Powder," and I was hooked.

The Three Impostors (published 1895) is an interesting work; while it contains quite a bit of horror, at its core it is a mystery novel, albeit one with ambiguous elements that leave the door open to horror. It features Machen's occult detective Dyson, a somewhat pretentious and sometimes ineffectual presence, but oddly likable. He has pretenses of being a writer but is really an idle dilettante, but often finds himself in weird situations.

The novel is separated into a number of episodes. In the first, "The Adventure of the Gold Tiberius," Dyson, with his Watson (aka Charles Phillipps) find a gold coin in the street, only to discover it is an unbelievably rare and valuable Roman coin. In "The Encounter of the Pavement," they seek the person who dropped the coin, a furtive young man in spectacles, only to encounter someone else looking for the young man, a gent who proceeds to tell "The Novel of Dark Valley." In that, the man tells a tale of being hired as a secretary by a mysterious Englishman who then takes him to America, and then off to an isolated area of Colorado, where he eventually learns his employer is the head of a gang of criminals and is almost lynched when the locals mistake him for his boss. It's actually a fairly forgettable tale; I had to skim it again to remind myself of what went down.

Next is "The Adventure of the Missing Brother," in which Dyson and Phillipps are approached by a young lady who claims to be the sister of the mysterious man in spectacles, but who then proceeds to tell "The Novel of the Black Seal." This is one of the more famous parts of the book, and sometimes anthologized on its own. In it, the woman recounts how she took a job as a secretary to a scholar who lived in the wilds of Wales. The scholar is studying the primitive traditions of the aboriginal peoples of Britain (a repeated theme in Machen), and has the "black seal" of the title, an object that has an inscription in seeming cuneiform, and which is described as "Ixaxar" in an old Roman text, which also explains it as a holy object to a deformed, short people who dwell in the hills. Eventually, his researches lead him to a boy who is a seeming changeling, and then, well, things happen, kind of. It's a tale more shuddersome for what is implied rather than what actually happens, and all the horrors are offstage....still, it's most unsettling and a story that makes a sundrenched countryside seem macabre.

Next up is "The Incident of the Private Bar" where Dyson and Phillipps meet a man who claims to be afraid of the young man in spectacles, and who paints a picture of him as a manipulative con artist. Then comes "The Decorative Imagination" in which Dyson tries to figure out what's going on, and their new friend Burton tells "The Novel of the Iron Maid," a slight tale in which the man tells of visiting a friend who collects torture implements, and witnesses him being accidentally slain by the "Iron Maid" of the title.

Then is "The Recluse of Bayswater" in which they encounter a reclusive young woman, who tells the very, very famous "Novel of the White Powder." She claims to be the sister of a young scholar who was horribly run down, and whose family doctor prescribed a medication in the form of a white powder. At first he seems well, and then behaves oddly, eventually becoming a recluse who never leaves his room. The sister consults the doctor, who analyzes the medication....and horrors, it's not what he prescribed, but something hideously different....

This is the most famous part of the novel, and probably the only Machen story most have read. It actually works well out of the context of the framing story, and has an almost-perfect buildup of horror and suspense, with a satisfying payoff. You will probably find this in any number of anthologies, so check your book collection, you may have it already.

Finally, we have "The Strange Occurrence in Clerkenwell" in which Dyson finally finds the man he's been pursuing, and then learns "The History of the Young Man with Spectacles." He turns out to be a student who fell in with a certain sinister Dr. Lipsius, who runs a secret society dedicated to re-enacting pagan orgies (and, it's vaguely hinted, occult ceremonies and Black Masses). The society wants that coin, and the young man decides to take the coin and clear out. It's then that Dyson and Phillipps learn that all the people they've encountered were impostors, and the tales they've heard were intended only to distract and mislead them.

Finally, in "The Adventure of the Deserted Residence," we have a conclusion that's actually fairly gruesome and tragic. Dyson makes it to the end, but again, he's fairly ineffectual and arrives too late.

It's an interesting variation on Victorian horror, when Decadence was really coming into its own, and free of the "antiquarian" trappings of M. R. James and his imitators, who I love, don't get me wrong, but it's good to see someone of the era going his own way. I've seen Machen classed as one of the "Visionary" school; he prefigures Lovecraft in using the horrors that are just outside human perception, and horror through inference. Lipsius is very decadent, obviously, with his staging of pagan orgies for fun and profit, but Dyson is Decadent, representing the values of spleen and impuissance, and a certain neurasthenia, in his approach to the world. He may be a detective, but he's not a very good one, and seems to be doing it more for the amusement value than out of any sense of right and wrong. That, and his fascination with the weird and uncanny.

Lipsius is also somewhat underused, but he's one of those villains who's best left a cypher. I love his name, though, and once I wanted to use my own version of him as a villain in a horror RPG. I might use him again.

"The Three Impostors" is a mixed bag but is definitely worth reading for those wanting something different from the Victorian age, and to look into a work that influenced many later writers. It's easily available for free, or almost free, online, and there are plenty of used copies out there, like the Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition from 1972 pictured above; that's a lovely addition to your bookshelf.

The Collected Connoisseur, by Mark Valentine and John Howard

Another set of the adventures of a supernatural sleuth! Only in this case he's quiet modern...and very different from the usual pulpiness. These stories are obviously influenced by visionary authors like Machen and by the Decadents, making quite my cup of tea.

The Connoisseur (his name is never given) is a collector of antiquities and objets d'art. He has an inheritance, actually works ("regular, if uncongenial, administrative work"), and lives modestly in a cathedral town. Every story revolves around some antique or piece of art, and there's a lot of 'em.

Among the strange objects involved in these stories...

• Pottery made with clay from a sacred well
• A rare book of poetry dedicated to a ghost
• A strange silver sphere
• A rocking horse
• A surreal charcoal sketch
• Iron finials on old buildings
• Rare stamps
• A weathervane
• An ebony cane

Some stories also involve unusual architecture, performance art, music, and even a trip on an old ferry. The stories range from mere hauntings and possessions to spectral loves and revivifications of ancient gods to an attempt to bring on a Biblical holocaust. There's also a manuscript of a polar expedition that has weird encounters. And in a couple of the stories the Connoisseur is called on to investigate a weird happening.

There's some great writing here, too. The prose is artistic, sometimes surreal and dreamlike, and while there's a moment or two when it overwhelms the story, it doesn't take over and the plots are still allowed to shine through when it matters. The time period is vague, and sometimes the characters seem like they're from the 30s or 40s, but there's also references that make it clear these stories are set in the modern world, only without much (if any) mention of things like cell phones and computers.

And the menaces aren't always cut-and-dried examples of the supernatural menagerie. Some are ambiguous, like a ghost that might also be a bit of time slippage. There's also some cults and witchcraft and sorcery. Sometimes it's quite mystical, and there's hints of a hidden world just out of site that may not be quite evil or good, but with an agenda of its own that we may be swept up in...or trampled under. It's like the realization we sometimes have that we're not the center of the universe, and that our gods may not be good or evil, but have their own purposes and may even be indifferent to us.

The Collected Connoisseur is available in physical format, at some pretty outrageous prices, but Tartarus Press has made available a very reasonably-priced electronic edition. I highly recommend this!

THE SHANGHAI GESTURE by John Colton

On a whim, I managed to track down John Colton's original play, The Shanghai Gesture, to read over the holidays. (My recent chatter about Josef von Sternberg brought it to mind.)

It was actually a rather controversial play back in 1918, with protests from the Chinese embassy and accusations of morbid racism. It criticizes Western imperialism in Asia, and tackles taboo subjects like prostitution, addiction, and racial mixing. A scene of a white girl being auctioned off as a sex slave to lascivious Chinese coolies is something out of a Sax Rohmer novel.

Mother God Damn is the madame of the biggest brothel in Shanghai, as well as the keeper of the secrets of the city's western aristocrats. Her secretary is a bankrupt Englishman, working off gambling debts. She's planning a lavish dinner party in celebration of the Chinese New Year, and invited the cream of Shanghai's western ambassadors and businessmen, none of whom dare to refuse. It's all part of a huge scheme of revenge against the arrogant Sir Guy Charteris, who struts in hoping to make Mother God Damn his mistress. Also showing up are Prince Oshima, a dissolute Japanese diplomat, and Poppy, his English girlfriend, a well-dressed hoyden who's a self-dubbed nymphomaniac as well as an alcoholic and drug addict.

In the decadent atmosphere of the brothel, all sorts of plots and counterplots unfold. It's ripe melodrama with touches of Greek tragedy, but it's so trashy by modern standards, like an overproduced and underthought Lifetime TV movie. The attitudes toward race and racial cross-breeding are horribly quaint and outdated, and it's also ruthlessly classist.

The play is rarely produced, with good reason; unless done as overheated camp melodrama, there's really no place for it today. (It was revived by the Mirror Repertory Company in 2009, to mixed reviews, but actually featured an Asian actress playing Mother God Damn for the first time. The picture at top is from that production.) Also, the stage directions call for huge and lavish sets, something most companies would balk at or just make do with minimalist substitutions. The Shanghai Gesture is regarded as something of a minor classic of the theater, but upon reading it I'd guess that its reputation is more about notoriety than actual quality.

And now for the von Sternberg connection....he made it into a movie in 1941. It was heavily bowdlerized, naturally. Mother God Damn became Mother Gin Sling. The brothel became a casino. Poppy, instead of being a drug-and-booze-addled nympho, became a compulsive gambler. It at least had Gene Tierney in luscious Oleg Cassini gowns as Poppy. I saw it years ago; it's not bad, kind of an early noir, but also with that trademark von Sternberg decadence and an odd scene were Walter Huston (as Charteris) seems to be flirting with a brawny coolie (played by Mike Mazurki). 1941 was also an odd year for making this; by then things had become too decorous and von Sternberg's earlier excesses were no longer welcome. Still, it's out there, and might be worth a watch for the sake of a chuckle.

If someone ever mounts a production of this, I'd enjoy seeing it (if I can get to it). The play can be a little hard to find; I borrowed a dusty copy from the Pratt library in Baltimore, and checking on Abebooks shows copies available from $50 to $99. Read it if you can find it, but don't expect much from it. It's an amusing relic, little more.

REQUIRED READING: Clark Ashton Smith's "The Dark Eidolon" and "Morthylla"

I first read these stories years, years ago, in the late 80s. And twenty years later, I still love them and consider them some of Smith's best work.

So here's a little spoiler-ridden analysis...