4. Grotesque

By Natsuo Kirino

Four books in one month -- in January, no less.  Pretty sure it's a record!

Hubs got me Grotesque for Xmas when he couldn't find Out. The cover photo and thickness of the book kind of deterred me from jumping into it, though I read the first couple of pages.  It began with an unnamed woman with the strange habit of envisioning what her future children would look like if she had sex with whatever man who happened to cross her path.  She wouldn't be obsessed about the men themselves, more how their physical characteristics would mesh with hers in their theoretical offspring.  I found this mindset off-putting as I  sensed this was going into the territory of transgressive fiction, but it was also written in such a fascinating way that only Kirino could do (with the aid of a good translator!).  However, I ended up leaving the book at my MIL's for a couple of years.

When I finally brought Grotesque back home to read, I learned the reason behind this woman's obsession with inherited physical traits. She herself was of mixed ancestry: her mother was Japanese and her father was a Swiss national of Polish descent.  While the narrator had inherited her parent's unremarkable looks, her younger sister Yuriko possessed a startling beauty, the kind of "monstrous" beauty that would upend the lives of both sisters.  Thus, the narrator had always hated her sister.  When she became a teenager, her parents and sister had to move to Switzerland and the narrator stayed in Japan with her maternal grandfather because she had been accepted into a prestigious school.

 Now that I look back on it, I realize that Grandfather was out on parole and the presence of a studious high-school-age granddaughter in his household must have helped make him seem more trustworthy in the eyes of this monitor. My grandfather wanted to hoodwink his probation officer, and I wanted to stay in Japan. We needed each other to accomplish our goals, so in a way we were partners in crime. To top it off, I was able to talk to my grandfather about all of Yuriko’s shortcomings. These were truly the happiest days of my life.

 

Reading about the Q High School for Young Women reminded me of the teen K-drama, Friendly Rivalry, I had been watching with my 13 yo.  The social hierarchies and the bullying were very much on par whether you were a female student in Japan or South Korea.  Your status was determined whether you were considered an insider or outsider.  If you were an insider, you would have entered Q High School via the Q elementary school stream.  Anyone who didn't enter QHS this way was deemed an outsider and there wasn't anything you could do about it, unless you were very cunning or exceedingly beautiful, both of which were rare.  Within the insiders was the wealthy, status-oriented inner circle. Even though every student had to wear the same uniform, the insiders determined the right school bag to carry, the right socks to wear, ie. Ralph Lauren which had the little red embroidered logo visible.

Let’s start with the matriculation ceremonies... The high school freshmen were divided into two distinct groups: those who were continuing on from within the Q school system and those who had entered that year. At a glance it was easy to discern which group was which. The length of our school uniform skirts set us apart.
  Those of us who were entering for the first time—each and every one of us—having successfully passed the entrance exams, had skirts that fell just to the center of our knees, in exact accordance with official school regulations. However, the half who had been in the system since elementary or middle school had skirts that rode up high on their thighs. Now, I’m not talking about the kind of skirts that the girls wear today, skirts that are so skimpy they’re hardly there at all. No, these skirts were just the right length to provide a perfect balance with the girls’ high-quality navy-blue knee socks. Their legs were long and slender, their hair the color of chestnuts. Delicate gold pierced earrings glistened in their ears. Their hair accessories, and their bags and scarves, were very tasteful, and they all had expensive brand-name items that I’d never before actually seen up close. Their elegant sophistication overwhelmed the newly arrived students.
  The difference was not something that would softly fade away with the passage of time. There is no other way to explain it but to say that we new girls lacked what the others girls possessed seemingly by birth: beauty and affluence. We new girls were betrayed by our long skirts and our cropped, lusterless, jet-black hair. Many of us wore thick, unflattering glasses. In a word, the incoming students were uncool.

As an "outsider" the narrator fared ok at QHS by keeping her head down and leading a quiet but relatively happy life with her bonsai-obsessed grandfather in a working class area of Tokyo.  However, during her second year, her mother committed suicide in Switzerland and Yuriko wanted to move back to Japan.  To the narrator's dismay, her sister would  also attend the same high school, but to her relief, Yuriko had  opted to stay with family friends, who were only too happy to have such a beautiful being live with them.  What the narrator didn't know was that Yuriko had learned at a young age to use her beauty to seduce men and began an illicit relationship with her uncle as well as the husband of the house that she's staying!  With the help of a closeted male student, who also happened to be the son of a QHS prof, Yuriko soon commodified her greatest asset, her beauty, by prostituting herself to whomever was willing to pay.

For a nymphomaniac like myself, I suppose there could be no job more suitable than prostitution; it is my God-given destiny. No matter how violent a man might be, or how ugly, at the moment we’re in the act I cannot help but love him. And what’s more I’ll grant his every wish, no matter how shameful. In fact, the more twisted my partner is, the more attracted I will be to him, because my ability to meet my lover’s demands is the one way I can feel alive.

  That is my virtue. It is also my biggest flaw. I can’t deny a man. I’m like a vagina incarnate—female essence embodied. If I ever were to deny a man, I would stop being me.

  I suspect there are lots of women who want to become prostitutes. Some see themselves as valued commodities and figure they ought to sell while the price is high. Others feel that sex has no intrinsic meaning in and of itself except for allowing individuals to feel the reality of their own bodies. A few women despise their existence and the insignificance of their meager lives and want to affirm themselves by controlling sex much as a man would. Then there are those who engage in violent, self-destructive behavior. And finally we have those who want to offer comfort. I suppose there are any number of women who find the meaning of their existence in similar ways. But I was different. I craved being desired by a man. I loved sex. I loved sex so much I wanted to screw as many men as I could. All I wanted were one-night stands. I had no interest in lasting relationships.

The views on prostitution was disappointingly simplistic, even cringey, but what made Grotesque compelling was the deep dive into the damaged psyches of the female characters as they navigated a very competitive prestigious high school: the narrator, her younger sister Yuriko, and her classmate, Katsue. There was a fourth character, Mitsuru, but there weren't any chapters devoted to her POV.

Even though the book was written like in-depth character studies, the outer blurb made it seem more like a crime novel, a la Out.  The novel also began with the narrator as an adult in her late 30s finding out that her old classmate Katsue had been murdered, then about a year later Yuriko was also found murdered under similar circumstances.  Both women were working as prostitutes when they were killed, but the difference was while Yuriko plied her trade full-time, Katsue was a white collar professional employed at a prestigious engineering firm.  The author was inspired by a true story which had generated a lot of media attention in Japan at the time.

I also learned partway through the book, that the English translation in the Penguin Random House (Vintage International) edition featured significant omissions from the original Japanese text.  According to Google AI, approximately 200 pages were cut from the original Japanese, reducing the total length from roughly 800 pages to 600. The most significant change was the removal of an entire final section. In the Japanese version, the narrative concluded with a section where the son of Yuriko's sister turns to male prostitution, with the narrator profiting from his activities. This section was entirely cut from the English edition. The cuts were made by the publisher to reduce length, with some parts deemed repetitive or unnecessary for the English-speaking market. Despite these cuts, the translation is still regarded as an accurate representation of the core story, although it omits a dark, concluding character arc.

Grotesque's over-arching MO was the exploration of female psyches damaged by a class-based, capitalistic, patriarchal society obsessed with status and appearance. Some break societal taboos and embrace their sexuality as a misguided attempt at liberation. A woman like Yuriko would exploit herself as a commodity for what she perceives as her own ends, but when her beauty faded, she realized she really had nothing.  A woman like Katsue, plagued by a deep-seated need for recognition, threw herself into academics and got hired into a good position at a prestigious firm. She eventually became deeply jaded, and turned to prostitution to achieve a twisted sense of self-worth. 

  I handed him my business card with a self-important flourish. A look of shock washed over Arai’s face.
  “I’m sorry if it’s rude for me to ask, but why do you do this sort of thing if you have such a good job?”
  “Why, you wonder?” I gulped down my beer. “At work nobody pays any attention to me.”
  I’d let slip a bit of my true feelings. It was only until I was thirty that I worked with such zeal. When I turned twenty-nine I was sent to a separate research facility. My rival Yamamoto worked only for four years and then quit to get married. 
That left only four of the women who’d originally entered the firm with me... When I turned thirty-three, they finally brought me back to the research office. But there wasn’t a single interesting person there anymore. All the men I had entered the firm with had long since been promoted to higher positions in the inner administration, where women would never be accepted. The younger female office assistants clearly didn’t like me. University women who had entered the firm after me were working less and getting ahead. In short, I had slipped off the fast track. I had clearly been shifted from the winners to the losers. Why would that be? Because I was no longer young. And I was a woman. I was doing a lousy job aging and I could no longer build a solid career.
  “It’s really gotten to me. I feel like I want to get revenge.”
  “Revenge? On who?” Arai looked up at the ceiling. “I suppose everyone feels like that from time to time. We all want revenge. We’ve all been hurt one way or another. But the best thing to do is keep on going as if none of it matters.”
  Well, I didn’t agree. I was going to get revenge. I was going to humiliate my firm, scorn my mother’s pretentiousness, and soil my sister’s honor. I was even going to hurt myself. I who had been born a woman, who was unable to live successfully as a woman, whose greatest achievement in life was getting into Q High School for Young Women. It had been all downhill since. That was it—that was why I was doing what I did, why I turned to prostitution. When it finally struck me, I started to laugh.

Our narrator, who chose to remove herself from the rat race, fared no better, living a bitter, miserable existence. She even corrupted her precious blind nephew, the illegitimate son of Yuriko.  At first she was overjoyed to learn he was blind, but he too would later see his aunt's true self. Even with the missing section, Grotesque was still extremely dark, bleak and pessimistic.  

 Perhaps you believe I am exaggerating. If so, then you are mistaken. For a girl, appearance can be a powerful form of oppression. No matter how intelligent a girl may be, no matter her many talents, these attributes are not easily discerned. Brains and talent will never stand up against a girl who is clearly physically attractive.
  I knew I was by far more intelligent than Yuriko, and it irked me no end that I could never impress anyone with my brains. Yuriko, who had nothing going for her but her hauntingly beautiful face, nevertheless made a terrific impression on everyone who came in contact with her. Thanks to Yuriko, I too had been blessed with a certain talent. My talent was the uncompromising ability to feel spite. And whereas my talent far exceeded those of others, it was a talent that impressed no one but myself. I fawned over my talent. I polished it diligently every day. 

Even Mitsuru (who reminded me of the alpha girl in Friendly Rivalry), who seemed like the only QHS student smart enough to not play the game and rise above the petty competitiveness, plus she possessed a sense of self-worth that the other female characters were incapable of having, did not escape the system unscathed.  The bright shining future remained out of grasp when she got herself sucked into a religious cult. She was even imprisoned for being involved in murder!

None of the women could transcend their situations, resorting to suicide, cults or prostitution! To be fair, the male counterparts weren't really that better off, most of them resentful, vindictive assholes. The only character who was finally able to escape her circumstance was Mrs Johnson.  After she learned her husband had been having an affair with Yuriko under their roof, she divorced him. Even though she had been damaged by awful people, she managed to move one and live a life of her own.

I would have to say though that the ending was most unsatisfying. Even without knowing about the Random House excision, there were some unresolved storylines. About halfway into the novel, a Chinese man named Zhang was introduced. We never found out how Katsue died.  Zhang had admitted to killing Yuriko but denied killing Katsue. Even though Katsue was with Zhang in that sordid apartment, she had left and went home.  The unnamed narrator resorted to prostitution as a way to make ends meet.  Her grandfather died, so she knew she had to pay for his funeral expenses, move out of the gov subsidized apartment as the lease was under his name. She also wanted to buy the computer she had promised to her nephew Yurio so he could compose music. By the time she turned her first trick and lost her virginity, she had hatred for Yurio and he had also begun to despise her. 

If anything, the editors should have shortened the section about Zhang, no matter if his storyline was fascinating, there were good reasons:

- even though his story had similar themes about poverty, economic instability, exploitation, etc. it didn't fit with the female-focused narrative

- we learn later that his deposition was partially fabricated; it was possible that his time with the politico's daughter didn't happen at all and that he had forced his sister into prostitution and later killed her

What impressed me, though, was how deeply Kirino went into the socio-economic backdrop Zhang grew up in.  It made me remember my last trip to Hong Kong when I was 15.  We did a day trip into the mainland to visit the village my dad grew up in.  This was in the late 1980's so very close to Zhang's time period. I had an old Mamiya SLR that used to belong to my dad who gave it me for my b&w photography class. I remember walking around taking photos and noticed some young women who were glaring at me with undisguised envy at my blue jeans and leather combat boots.  I wasn't wearing anything fancy, and none of my clothing were even brand names, but they saw I was a Westerner with the kind of privilege and opportunities they could only dream of having. Reading about Zhang's jealousy made me think of those young village women.

To stretch myself and expand my knowledge, I wanted to continue my schooling and go on to higher-level classes. But my family was poor. They could only afford to send me to the village elementary school. When I realized that my dreams would never be realized, I suppose—like a tree whose roots are stymied and twisted and not allowed to grow—I began to nurture a dark jealousy in my heart, an ugly envy. I believed fate had determined that I would be born into this miserable existence.

  Going elsewhere to seek work was the only way people like me could escape this fate. When I went to Guangzhou and Shenzhen, I worked long and hard, thinking all the while that eventually I also would be able to enjoy a wealthy life and save money just like the people from those regions. But after I came to Japan, I was overwhelmed with the feeling that my plans were utterly hopeless. Why might that be? Because the wealth of Japan was beyond compare even to that of China’s port cities.
  If I had not been Chinese, if I had been born Japanese, I surely would not be experiencing these hardships now. 

All the characters were such awful, awful people. The narrator was just self-aware enough to be fascinating, but not insightful enough to see beyond the machinations of societal pressures.  Still, I kept on reading, sucked into the quagmire of their neuroses because Kirino's writing is so captivating. She could be as brutal as Patricia Highsmith about the most damaged, garbagey people on earth, and I'll still keep reading.  That nastiness often got channeled via the narrator.

  During lunch break, Kazue sauntered over to my desk, beaming with confidence. She placed her lunch box on an empty chair and dragged the chair over to my desk with a rattling screech.
  “Is it okay if I eat with you?”
  She’d already sat down before she asked. Typical. I turned a frosty gaze on her. Dog! Fashion nightmare! Jerk! She looked even more repulsive today than usual, so repulsive I just wanted to shout abuse after abuse at her. She’d tried to curl her hair. Usually it hung limply down over her head like a helmet, but today it stuck out on both sides like a wide-brimmed hat. You could still see the lines where the curler pins had pressed down on her hair. And to make matters worse, today she’d somehow rigged her tiny drowsy-looking eyes so that she seemed to be double-lidded.
  “What’d you do to your eyes?”
  Kazue brought her hands up slowly to her eyelids.
  “Oh. These are called Elizabeth Eyelids.”
  She’d gotten hold of some beauty product that Japanese women glued to their eyelids to give them the extra fold they craved, because they thought it made their eyes look Western. She’d spied on one of the insider students attaching them to her eyes in the restroom. Just the very thought of Kazue holding that two-pronged toothpick-thin plastic wand up to her eye while she applied the device made my skin crawl. And then her skirt had shrunk so drastically that you could see halfway up her skinny thighs. She’d worked so hard at being attractive that she ended up looking more ridiculous than ever.
  The other girls in the class poked one another in the ribs when they saw Kazue and made no effort to hide their laughter. It made me sick just to think that others thought we were friends. I hadn’t minded so much when she’d just been the ugly know-it-all, but this new transformation was thanks to Yuriko, which made it all the worse.

A quote from translator Rebecca Copeland:

Grotesque is a difficult work. It is long. It includes a variety of narrative voices and narrative forms. The main narrator is untrustworthy; and the entire novel challenges concepts of truth and lies. Perhaps it is not unreasonable, then, that the translation as well participates in this narrative game by also appearing “truthful” but also somehow deceitful. In a way, paraphrasing Ryan Fraser (Underground Games: Surface Translation and the Grotesque), all translations are “grotesqueries.”

 

Despite finding Grotesque fascinating and extremely well-written, I decided to not keep it in my library because it's just too damn dark. However, I've noted many of the translated passages because I love Kirino's writing so much.

3. 84, Charing Cross Road

By Helene Hanff

I do love second-hand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to “I hate to read new books,” and I hollered “Comrade!” to whoever owned it before me. 

I wanted to start off with this lovely review that perfectly captured my feelings of 84, Charing Cross Road (though I dispute the "aging" bit as Hanff was only 33 when she began her correspondence with Frank Doel in 1949!):

Epistolary fiction had always captured my fancies, but I never knew non-fiction of a similar kind could possess far more power to entwine the reader in its vast web of human intricacies ranging from the art of letter-writing, to the art of conversation and how human compassion can traverse miles and miles of oceans to make a mark on people one has never met, seen, or even heard about. The potency of words is such that seemingly polarized people are woven together in a relationship that transcends the barriers of friendship and love and all other abstract notions mankind has come to acknowledge and define.

 

Such is the relationship between an aging scriptwriter hailing from New York, the vivacious Helene Hanff and a certain Frank Doel of Marks & Co., booksellers located in London at the eponymous 84, Charing Cross Road. Ms. Hanff has an unquenchable thirst for English literature and in search for now obscure classics does she begin her acerbic albeit sidesplitting correspondence with the booksellers situated miles away from her shabby apartment. Ms. Hanff stumbles upon the book dealers through an ad placement made in the Saturday Review of Literature. From here onwards starts a warm and compassionate relationship between her and Mr. Doel on whom the responsibility of delivering her books falls on. This relationship is penned down in form of letters spanning almost twenty years.

 

I loved loved LOVED this book!  It was SUCH A DELIGHT.  Charming, witty, cozy and yet brimming with intelligence and affection.  And this unlikely friendship between a brazen NYC writer and reserved English bookseller, which spanned decades and the vast expanse of the Atlantic ocean, was real. I think I read it within 24 hours as the breezy, epistolary format made it very easy. And I didn't want it to end. It had to though, as Frank Doel unexpectedly passed away from illness in 1968.  This was not a surprise for me as I had already the watched the film adaptation back in May 2024. 

Apparently, 84, Charing Cross Road was one of Anne Bancroft's faves and her husband Mel Brooks bought the rights to the book for her birthday, which was how we ended up with the wonderful film starring Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins (with a young Dame Judi Dench as Mrs Noel). I was so fond of the adaptation that I put the book on my list. When I'm not in a rush to read something, I prefer ordering secondhand books from the USA as there is much more range and choice. Sure enough, I found this paperback Penguin edition for only $4.75 USD ($5.23 total with tax!) in great condition.

 

I had ordered the book to be delivered to my MIL's address when we were there during Xmas but I left it somewhat late and the book arrived shortly AFTER we had already returned home. It languished at my mother in law's for several months. I never told anyone to look for it until my SIL found it, still in its unopened envelope, during a summer visit after the Patch-Addario family had left. Hubs was finally able to bring it back in September!  By then I had lost my momentum. Some more months passed before I finally remembered I wanted to read 84 Charing Cross Road, and here we are.

 

I learned later that Hanff was an Anglophile and autodidact. Unable to afford a college education during the Great Depression, she undertook a comprehensive, self-taught English literature course that lasted over a decade. She was then in her early thirties, scraping a living as a freelance scriptwriter and magazine journalist. Her unconventional education was structured around the writings of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Q"), specifically his lectures at Cambridge University. Hanff discovered On the Art of Writing by "Q" in a library and used his recommendations as her syllabus, covering authors and texts he admired.  Under ‘Q’s gentle, ghostly tutelage’, the self-study process took approximately 11 years because she would stop her study to investigate unfamiliar references and texts, as the scholar had assumed the reader would be already familiar with these books.  

So I started reading Q. Who assumes I’ve read The Fairie Queene and Paradise Lost. So I read Paradise Lost and find I need to have read the New Testament. So I read the New Testament and find I need to read the Latin Vulgate. And my Latin reader says the rules governing the ablative are the same as in English. A-ha. Thanks a LOT!

Hanff didn't want to bother with the library because she wanted to have her reference books within easy grasp.  When she inquired at local booksellers, she discovered that the American editions of the English books she wanted were of lesser quality and/or over-priced. When Hanff spotted the Marks & Co ad, she wrote to them and the rest was history.  

Gentlemen: Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase ‘antiquarian book-sellers’ scares me somewhat, as I equate ‘antique’ with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books . . .

It's a niche genre, I guess, but I love reading about under the radar autodidacts, like The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Another fact I learned was that Gene, Hanff's editor, was mentioned in her letters as being Chinese.  It was well-known that editor Genevieve Young was instrumental in getting 84, Charing Cross Road published. Young also had a fascinating legacy and bio of her own, entering the publishing business in the early 1950s, when there were few female editors and even fewer Asians.

It was bittersweet how Hanff finally made the journey to London well after Frank Doel had passed on and Marks & Co had long been shuttered. Even though Hanff made enough money to support herself relatively comfortably and was setting aside money for her trip, minor emergencies kept eating away at her savings. I think air travel was still prohibitively expensive for the average person during the 50s and 60s and ocean travel took longer.  Ironically, it wasn't until after 84, Charing Cross Road was published in 1970 that Hanff would afford to finally travel to London!  She wrote about her experience in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, which is now on my list.

 

There are so many wonderful online reviews of 84, Charing Cross Road.

From A Literary Love Affair:

By the time she wrote to Marks & Co., Hanff ’s pursuits had become, frankly, arcane. Her first few letters include requests for a very particular edition of Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers, de Tocqueville’s Journey to America and Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Four Socratic Dialogues.

But Helene Hanff is no dry old blue-stocking. She reads with the seasons, ordering ‘Dear goofy JH’s’ (John Henry Newman’s) The Idea of a University for Lent, and Pepys’s Diary for long winter evenings. On 25 March 1950, she writes to say that, with spring coming, she requires a book of love poems:

 No Keats or Shelley, send me poets who can make love without slobbering . . . Just a nice book preferably small enough to stick in a slacks pocket and take to Central Park.

Had she ever been in love? Rumours after her death suggested that her heart had been broken by some high-ranking American whose identity she kept under wraps for the sake of his wife and family. Was she lonely? We cannot tell. All that is clear from her letters is that for this single woman in her ‘moth-eaten sweaters and slacks’ books are friends and companions, and antiquarian books especially so. She loves ‘inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins’; she rejoices in the way that the books sent by Marks & Co. ‘open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to “hate to read new books”, and I hollered “Comrade!”’

In response to these wild, wise-cracking, passionate outpourings, ‘FPD’ of 84, Charing Cross Road is, at first, stiff: ‘Dear Madam’, his letters begin, and they are cautious almost to the point of curtness. Undaunted, Helene Hanff works at puncturing his reserve. ‘I hope “madam” doesn’t mean over there what it does here’, she writes, and on the rare occasions that she does not like the books he sends her, she makes no bones about it...

And that is how providence seems to operate, blocking the paths we think we want to take and then introducing unexpected openings in the form of opportunities and delights more wonderful than anything we could have dreamed up for ourselves. This was Helene Hanff ’s experience and, since meeting her through the pages of this book, it has been mine too. Nowadays if I find myself on Charing Cross Road it is with a sense of gratitude and wonder; and the knowledge that the best things come unbidden.

From A Life in Books:
 

The funny thing about Helene as an author is that she could not write fiction. She never made it as a playwright, though Lord knows she tried, and studied her art. She wrote scripts for TV shows, and reviewed books for film companies to advise on how well they might be adapted as films. The Lord of the Rings was one of her great ordeals, because she absolutely hated it, and charged her employers ten times her usual fee as recompense for the mental torture of trying to summarise the plot. (This explains clearly to me why she was not able to write fiction.)

I realized that there were many, many authors, and books, in the long history of English as a literature, that she just had to read. But the New York libraries couldn’t supply what she needed (she had a passion for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century essayists), and she began to order books from Marks & Co, who had advertised their services as an antiquarian book-finding service in the New York Times Saturday Review of Books.

If you like the sound of 84 Charing Cross Road, but want to find out more about her, try Underfoot in Show Business, and Q’s Legacy. There is also a what-I-did-in-London book, called The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, about when Helene finally gets to visit London, to see the BBC filming her book, and there’s also a book of New York reminiscences, Apple of My Eye. I’ve also found, to my great delight, that there’s a biography of Helene’s life, by Stephen Pastore, which I now have to read after a lifetime of vague guesses. 

 

2. The King in Yellow

By Robert W. Chambers

Saw this hardcover edition while browsing Walden Pond Books in   Oakland.  We (the Purves-Brebner clan) were in the area to pick up a Christmas tree at Brent's near the Grand Lake Theatre and had also consumed some delicious Asian-inspired pastries at Bake Sum.

So yes, I saw The King in Yellow and got Olman to pick it up for me as a Xmas present.  I also found a used copy of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, which happened to be on Olman's list.  Too bad for him though, finders keepers!
I first heard about The King in Yellow as a literary influence on True Detective S1, and it's been on my list ever since.  

Recently, I acquired a HP Lovecraft box set under purely consumeristic circumstances. I was taking advantage of Black Friday sales to do some early Xmas shopping and Indigo had a sale on Kpop albums, which is what my daughter is into collecting now.  Albums qualify for shipping, but I needed another $12 to reach the minimum amount for free shipping.  I saw that certain paperback box sets were half price so I got a HP Lovecraft box set for only $12.50 and as a minor horror buff, I've always been curious about his work.  Anyway, I was aware that author Robert Chambers was an early influence on Lovecraft, so I thought it was a nice coincidence when I saw this nice Pushkin Press edition from 2017 at Walden Books.

The King in Yellow was my first completed book in 2026 (not counting The Antifa Comic Book) and I was able to finish it within a few days.  It's really a collection of four short stories.  The original 1895 publication contained more stories but apparently it's just the first four that are thematically connected by a cursed play called 'The King in Yellow' which somehow ends up in the hands of various characters. When someone reads the second act, terrible things befall them, ie. they start losing touch with reality and become haunted by a ruined, mythical city called Carcosa, unwittingly serving a cult-like deity known only as Hastur, the Yellow King.  Apparently, the world of Carcosa was inspired by Ambrose Pierce. 

The first and probably best story was "The Repairer of Reputations".  The setting is a dystopic 1920s America that has become quite militaristic and Randian (before Ayn Rand and the military-industrial complex came about).  People of Jewish descent and other undesirable foreigners have been deported and a state has been established for African-Americans. The narrator, Hildred Castaigne, observes the official opening of a "Lethal Chambers" at a public park in Manhattan, for anyone who wants to painlessly end their life so as not be a burden on society.  We soon learn that our dear Hildred is not quite right in the head.  Not only had he suffered a head injury from a fall, he had also been committed for a period of time inside an asylum.  At some point he had also read "The King in Yellow" and often visits the creepy Repairer himself, a Yellow King devotee who happens to live above the store that's run by the father of his brother's fiancée.  I like the part when Hildred thought he was alone inside his shabby apartment admiring himself in mirror as he wore his golden crown but when his brother came upon him, he was really just wearing a cheap, dime-store trinket. The reader is basically plunged inside the unraveling mind of a man who's becoming more and more paranoid and deranged until he commits a terrible act.

As a Goodreads reviewer wrote: it is a bracing and imaginative bit of darkness on the page and, to me at least, quite wonderful. the style is so breezy, the pacing so brisk, the imagination so fertile and so oddly modern, the experience was pure pleasure. it is hard to believe that this story was written over a 100 years ago.

The next story, "The Mask", was ok and probably my least favourite as it was more melo-dramatic than creepy or chilling.  It takes place in Paris and involves a love triangle between young painter named Alec, a sculptor and would-be alchemist named Boris, and their love interest, Genevieve.  Boris has discovered or created a magical solution that can transform any organic object or living thing into lightly veined white marble.  It's unclear how the golden liquid came about, but it's strongly implied that it came from the same world that brought about "The King in Yellow".  Tragedy soon befalls the hapless trio. 

Next was "In the Court of the Dragon", also set in Paris, about a man pursued by a sinister church organist who is after his soul.  That pretty much sums up what is probably the shortest of the four stories and the least developed.

Last was "The Yellow Sign" and we're back in Manhattan (Greenwich Village) in "contemporary" times, ie. the 1890s. This time, an artist and his model are troubled by a sinister churchyard watchman who resembles a "plump white grave-worm".  Tessie keeps having the same recurring dream where she sees Scott lying inside a funeral casket being taken away by a horse-drawn carriage.  As their relationship develops, Tessie gives Scott "a clasp of black onyx, on which was inlaid a curious symbol or a letter in gold", which she happened to find one day near Battery Park.  Then soon after, Scott finds The King in Yellow in his collection, "a book bound in serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase." It is, inexplicably, "The King in Yellow", a book he has studiously avoided: "If I ever had had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages."

So we have come full circle, and our two young lovers are doomed towards a sad demise. This wiki site has a good plot summary.

The King in Yellow collection was an enjoyable read.  I did not expect it to be so readable.  TBH, I expected it to be less accessible and weirder, because after all, The King in Yellow is supposedly a classic example of weird fiction.  The stories were macabre in tone, full of creeping dread and gothic romanticism, with characters who are often artists or decadents, inhabitants of the demi-monde.  But the supernatural or occult references were very subtle and minimal.  This was not a bad thing, just not what I expected.  Still, very glad I read this.
 

1. The Antifa Comic Book (Revised & Expanded)

By Gord Hill

In mid-November, Olman and I visited the Expozine Fair. It used to be conveniently held in the Plateau inside a church basement but in recent years it's been taking place further north, like the Villeray area.  

This year's fair was really crowded - at least during that Saturday afternoon.  I was hoping to look at some D&Q publications but their tables were packed making it hard to stop and browse due to the steady motion of moving people.  There wasn't anything that stood out for me as I circumnavigated the crowded space.  

I finally found refuge at the Anarchist Bookshop section as they had arranged their tables into a C-shape, so that I could actually take my time in their little area, which was thankfully empty of people for some precious minutes.

This was how I came upon The Antifa Comic Book.  I didn't buy it right then and there though it was the only item I ended up purchasing at the fair.  The guy manning the table was friendly and handed me a flyer for a left wing book sale happening the following month near Metro Pie-IX. I didn't stay long at the Expozine fair as it was impossible to browse at your own pace without being jostled, or having to side-step someone, or wait your turn to do anything. I ended up leaving and met Olman near an Asian import shop in St-Hubert Plaza that was going out of business. We had tacos at a Mexican deli mart down the street.

The Antifa Comic Book was first published in 2018, and the copy I got was the 2025 revised and expanded edition containing new material that depicted events such as the 2021 U.S. Capitol attack, the 2022 convoy protests in Ottawa, even the 2017 mosque shooting in Quebec.  You could also tell which entries were new by how the graphics had been illustrated. The newer pages (like the one on the right) were drawn with thinner black lines and printed with less saturated colours compared to the older pages (like the one on the left). 

There was an odd entry that didn't seem to fit with the previous content in the Canadian section. It went from a brief history of fascist movements in Canada (from 1930-1990), the A.R.A Toronto (Anti-Racist Action), and then the following page portrayed the 2011 Norway Attacks -- when a far-right extremist set off a car bomb in Oslo, then traveled to a Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utøya and went on a shooting spree killing dozens of people, mostly teenagers, simply for being "privileged" progressives.  Then the pages went back to the USA.  So the Norway section was an add-on and should've followed after Sweden.  Pragmatically, it was probably simpler to append the new pages rather than insert them between older sections, even though content-wise, it didn't make sense geographically.

In any case, I'm really glad I picked up The Antifa Comic Book.  Many reviewers, like this one, agreed how timely a book like this is during these turbulent times.  It was a fascinating read and very informative, covering key historical moments, like the birth of anti-fascist movements in Nazi Germany, continuing into the Spanish Civil War, even touching on the Second World War’s British Blackshirts and Anarchy in the U.K. and ending on Trump's presidency and Elon Musk taking over Twitter. It also gave an overview of the rise of nationalist right-wing groups on a global scale and how they use propaganda and technology to spread their ideas.

Even though I was already aware of how easily democratic freedoms and rights can be taken away, how important anti-fascist movements are and how history is always repeating itself, the book really helped give me a clearer overview by portraying key historical events and how it led to our somewhat frightening world situation today. 

Back in September, a certain so-called US president issued a statement defining “Antifa” (which hardly exists as a formal organization) as a domestic terrorist organization.  Hmm, I wonder why.  So much crazy shit has gone down since then, it's been overwhelming and fatiguing.  Minneapolis had been under seige by ICE since December and barely a week had passed in 2026 when a number of American citizens got shot and killed by ICE agents, most notably a mother.  And now so-called POTUS is obsessed with buying Greenland. Greenland! It just never ends, and there are no limits to what the wrong people in power can and will do.

Other things I learned from The Antifa Comic Book:

• It was Mussolini who granted state sovereignty to Vatican City. I had always assumed this as done centuries ago, but turns out this was done as recently as the mid-20th century.
• This I already knew, but the book confirmed that it's always the privileged and wealthy (monarchists, industrialists, aristocrats, high-ranking military and police officers, church officials, nationalists) who tend to fund and/or establish fascist movements.  Today, the list includes tech oligarchs and corporate billionaires, like Ronald Lauder (CEO of cosmetics giant Estée Lauder) who gave DT the idea of acquiring Greenland as he has vested interest in Arctic expansion and access to resources.
• I did find one small factual error. The July 24 mass stabbing in England that resulted in the deaths of three little girls did not happen at a school, but at a dance studio that was having a Taylor Swift theme day.  I could see how "school" was a quicker way to summarize the incident as it involved elementary school aged girls, but it wasn't accurate.

I'm certainly now interested in checking out The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book by Gord Hill.  The question I have though is, can I be anti-capitalist and also still love shopping?