Book reviews: rich guys, cult leaders, schlock horror, debt and architecture

It’s a mixed bag. I’ve had a lot on since I last updated here, and reviewing books has fallen by the wayside, surprising no-one.

What is surprising, though, is that I’ve kept up the reading! I’m up to about thirty books for the year thus far, which is why you’re getting a baker’s dozen (plus a few extra) in this post. I had some enthusiasms make themselves known through this brace of books, as you’ll see. It’s, uh, a lot. Hopefully there’s something in there to pique your interest. And if not, hopefully you’ll heed my low-scored warnings .

Seduction: Sex, Lies and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood by Karina Longworth.
My rating: four stars.

Or in this case, the listening. This was my fourth audiobook of the year, the story of legendary pants-man/weirdo Howard Hughes’s time in Hollywood, and the knock-on effect that his presence there had on the actresses of that burg.

It made sense for me to listen to this book in audio format: Karina Longworth, its author, is the brains and the voice behind You Must Remember This, the podcast about the history of Hollywood, insalubrious or otherwise. I think I would’ve felt a bit odd reading Longworth’s work, so in my ears it went.

A few years ago I read a couple of biographies of Howard Hughes: one immensely detailed and thoroughly boring, and one terribly written but full of gossipy, jars-of-piss details. Longworth’s text takes the middle ground, sprinkling solid research with a dusting of rooting and payoffs. As you’d imagine, there’s a fair bit of aviation included, but there’s a wealth of detail about the development of Hollywood through the lens of women who’ve come to the town to make their lives.

I learned a bunch of stuff I hadn’t known – and saw referenced repeatedly in Babylon when I finally watched it – about the growth of Hollywood and the confluence of entertainment and morality that surrounds the place and the industry. I felt like the book was good background info to help make sense of James Ellroy’s bennies-and-jazz riffing about the same period, which is probably not the purpose of the work, but it’s a handy addition.

The book feels very Longworth, if you’re familiar with the podcast – wry digs abound – but the investigation and narration is faultless.

Bunny by Mona Awad.
My rating: four stars.

Have you wanted a book that tells you the unholy truth about exactly how irritating college writing programs are? A book that examines the horrible pain of not being part of the in-group? Of not having someone neat to date? Of always wearing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, and demonstrably not fitting in? And, in case I didn’t mention it, that tells you how fucking dreadful cliques of writing students and their supervisors are?

You, my friend, need to read Bunny. It’s a story of transitioning from the margins to the in-crowd, and testament to the fact that creation is an iterative process and, well, sometimes shit goes wrong. The writing speaks of alienation and affection with an honesty of experience that’s difficult to fault, and I think it’s this essential honesty that helps the reader suspend their disbelief for the, well, the more out there stuff that goes on.

(Of that there’s plenty, and I’m not going to spoil it for you.)

How much did I invent in the end? Probably a lot. Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things? my mother always asked me. I don’t know, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.

Despite the fact that the title kept inserting bits of Morrissey’s ‘And Now My Heart Is Full’ into my brain, this book’s combination of mean girl group dynamics, Lovecraftian group projects, longing that could’ve come from a Cure song and clear-eyed evisceration for writers’ wank ensured I was enthralled. It’s smart critique disguised as TikTok-friendly genre popcorn, and I fucken loved it.

Man in a Cage by Patrick Nevins.
My rating: three stars.

This is a strange, short novel that I think I liked better before I read it. The idea of it – the story of a man who visits Gabon and lives in a cage, who studies the speech of primates and who neglects his family in favour of trying to figure out how to chat with chimpanzees – was appealing to me as it represented the sort of fool’s errand that informs something like Oscar and Lucinda.

Nevins’ work is absolutely fine. Enjoyable, even! But I didn’t feel much more than interest as I read it. The book, I was to discover, is a fictionalised version of the life of an actual man who did all the things I mentioned in the paragraph above. Richard Garner’s story unfolds with an undertone of questing sadness, an attempt to alleviate something within himself by messily tramping about the world, trying to transpose the meaning of the English language on wild animals and Gabon locals alike.

There’s a certain element of colonialist critique in the text, but it takes a back seat to the creation of a thumbnail sketch of Garner’s inner life. Yes, religious incursion is bad, but have you considered that Richard might fancy a nun? Eh.

Look, I was invested. Parts of the book were quite affecting. But I do wish it had remained on my TBR as an as-yet unread [potential] pleasure.

The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple by Jeff Guinn.
My rating: five stars.

Important note: it wasn’t Kool-Aid that Jim Jones had his adherents drink as his cult crumbled in Guyana in 1978, It was a cheaper ersatz version: Flavor-Aid. So when people refer to ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ you can correct them in terms of both terminology and price.

(I wonder if this is going to get me in trouble with the mix-up drink online communities?)

This is a horrifying book. It’s remarkably well written and annotated, and author Jeff Guinn has unearthed a huge amount of grim detail through both research and intensive survivor interviews. What we get is the unvarnished story of Jim Jones, a man in possession of incredible powers of persuasion, who really seemed dedicated to the benefit of his followers – he was in favour of socialist policies to benefit the greatest numbers, and was antiracist in a time when that wasn’t really a thing – until he wasn’t.

And when he wasn’t, he really wasn’t, and that’s where we end up with almost a thousand people being persuaded (or forced, largely) to commit suicide in the wake of an assassination of a US Congressman, visiting to investigate reports of highly cult shit.

(Pretty reliable reports, as it turned out, given that the guy leading the show had claimed to be Jesus a whole bunch of times.)

The book excellently surveys Jones’s life and his adoption of Pentecostalist approaches to ministry and communication, and his creation of the Peoples Temple, the organisation that facilitated his descent into coercive control, drug-induced paranoia, faked assassination attempts, bullshit ‘healings’ and ultimately, mass murder. There’s enough grey areas in the guy’s life that it’s easy to feel sorry for him – his childhood is awful – but then you are informed that as a kid he liked to hold funerals for roadkill and thought Hitler was neat.

Even though you know that this story doesn’t end well, it’s still a body blow to learn exactly how badly things go. This is a terrible, terrible story with an awful end visited on people who – in the main – wanted to embrace their faith and find a better life. What they found was a man wracked with self-doubt, addicted to speed, and with a penchant for obedience and terrible sunglasses.

If you want to know the whole story, this is the book to read.

The Forgotten Island by David Sodergren.
My rating: three stars.

After reading about a whole lot of death in the jungle, I figured the best way to get my head straight was to read about, uh, a whole lot of death in the jungle.

Thankfully, this is death of the schlockiest kind, and it’s great. There’s nothing big nor clever going on here: Thai hotel construction crews discover some horrific shit and flee the island in terror, leaving the place to the encroaching greenery, and the drunken ramblings of the survivors.

As for Koh Wai Island? Well, it’s still there, though you won’t find it on any maps, the Thai government having quietly had it stricken from existence after the first and second rescue teams failed to return.

Years later, a full moon party piss-up goes wrong, and a bunch of backpackers (including feisty some fiery Scottish sisters) end up on the same island. Predictably, a whole lot of terrible shit occurs, involving monsters, incels, gratuitous violence and love.

Sodergren writes this stuff incredibly well, and it tweaks some kind of Proustian madeleine nerve, only for the smell of cigarettes and the hot plastic of VHS rental cases. It’s cinematic and stupid, and it knows that it’s stupid and that’s why it’s great.

From now on, if I ever got out of this, I’m wearing nothing but sports bras and granny pants for the rest of my life.

These books (he’s written a couple more with equally video nasty titles) are a few bucks in ebook format, and well worth your time if, as a child, you ever watched terrible horror movies through the protective shield of your fingers.

The Woodwitch by Stephen Gregory.
My rating: four stars.

Or, Patrick Bateman Goes To Wales.

A folk horror-adjacent tale, this brief novel is an examination of obsession, toxic masculinity and phallus-shaped flora in a lawyer-in-the-sin-bin version of Withnail & I. The main character, Andrew Pinkney, is a solicitor who’s been sent to a cottage in Wales until the small problem of him knocking a female coworker/potential lover out after she laughed at his flaccid wang goes away.

(Reminder: 1988 was a different country.)

Anyway, whether it’s cabin fever, whether it’s damp seeping into his bones (this is Snowdonia, after all), whether it’s the jeers of the locals or the increasing bad behaviour by his dog, Andrew doesn’t take to the country life. He becomes fixated on obtaining a perfect stinkhorn specimen, and of making a peace offering with it. The lengths he’ll go to to ensure this – well, let’s just say they’re probably not considered typical horticultural behaviours.

This rural gothic tale is a nasty piece of work, and does exactly what it’s supposed to. Solicitors, man.

Maggie’s Grave by David Sodergren.
My rating: three stars.

I have a feeling that Sodergren’s books are going to become a form of comfort reading for me, in the same way that I inhaled Stephen King’s books when I was a teenager (although notably with hundreds fewer pages. Based on how much I enjoyed The Forgotten Island, I gave this one a go and found that it was another example of finely tuned b-movie schlock, albeit in a different setting.

(If you’ve got a schlock schtick that works, why change it? This is unashamed genre fiction, and it’s refreshing to read something that knows so completely what it is. Are there fucking teens? Yep. Is there ancient evil? Yep. Town secrets? Yep. Gore and ick? Fuck yeah.)

This time, it’s a story built around the grave of a purported witch – one that actually exists! – which really means it’s built around the grave of a woman harried to death by superstitious fuckers. Naturally, she’s pissed at the fact that helping out some burghers with their children problems results in her being murdered, so she persists through time, waiting for some teens to fuck on her grave and, well, start some shit.

(To be fair, the town of Auchenmullan, where the story is set, sounds pretty boring, and gettin’ some on a grave would be a reasonable way to while away some hours/minutes, depending.)

Was this parenthood? Love and fear combined into one tiny ball of unimaginable stress? Probably.

The grim existence of the book’s four teenage protagonists is captured well. Sodergren nails the feeling of small-town boredom, of the grinding familiarity of village life miles away from Inverness. He nails the feeling of life passing by, of the gradual ossification that flows from life in a dying hamlet. Until, that is, a US hitchhiker and a pissed-off reanimated corpse turn up.

Once you’ve seen a witch tear a man inside out from his arsehole, you’ve seen it all.

To put it mildly, all hell breaks loose. The hidden stories of the locale are brought into the light (with a soundtrack of disco) and punishment meted out to those who richly deserve it. And all this happens across the space of a couple of hundred pages, allowing you to dip into despair and ultraviolence over the course of an afternoon, brushing off the dust of the grave in time for dinner.

Result.

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes.
My rating: two stars.

I was certain I would like this, and I was absolutely incorrect.

Nightwood, you see, is a book I was meant to read while I was at university. It’s a key modernist lesbian romance, features tortured text and T.S. Eliot thought it was good enough to a) edit b) smooth its path to publication and c) bang on about it interminably. I never got around to reading it while at university, and have lugged this particular copy (with its unremovable sticker from the Co-Op Bookshop) from city to city for something like thirty years now.

Turns out I should’ve made room for something else. This didn’t appeal to me; I was uninterested in the characters, was eye-rollingly irritated by the grasping-for-profundity tone of the piece, and disappointed by the trumpted (yet somehow nonexistent) perversity. These people aren’t perverse: they’re just annoying .

I suspect if I’d read more about the people who are the inspiration for book maybe I’d be a bit more into it, but I’m not going to take that swerve just to give this another go.

TLDR? Read Isherwood’s The Berlin Novels instead.

(My copy has made it to the local community book swap library, so if you know where I am and want to give this a go, feel free – but I don’t advise it.

Burn You the Fuck Alive by B.R. Yeager.
My rating: three stars.

I was amazed when I read Yeager’s Negative Space last year. It was a horrible, breathtaking piece of work, a version of Stranger Things is all the kids in Stranger Things were on ketamine and curiously suicidal.

Unfortunately, Burn You the Fuck Alive isn’t quite of the same calibre, though I must admit that it has an absolutely killer title. The book is a collection of shorter fiction interspersed with discomforting illustrations. It feels a little bit like taking a peep into the journal of someone who’s not quite right which is probably the point. It’s a bit like a holy text: elements of great verbosity contend with scratchings which bear significance only to their creator.

He tells me he can get me anything I need. “Okay,” I say. “Cool.” Then he leans in real close—skin smelling like old yolks, breath like rotten cabbage—and asks if I’ve heard about the Buried Man.

The stories here are of gig economies and hollowing out of the self, with a fair amount of bowel-tingling ick. Town histories and the darker parts of the self collide, with the thin film of sanity a consistently early casualty. Yeager’s skill is in putting disquieting feeling into words, and while this selection isn’t necessarily the best showing of that skill, there’s some nerve-probing inside that hits home all the same.

Debt: the First 5000 Years: by David Graeber.
My rating: four stars.

This is the second Graeber I’ve read (the first being Bullshit Jobs) and I am definitely a fan of his adoption of the side-eye as a default position towards capitalist economics. This time the work is much less a polemic and much more a straightforward history, though that burning critique is still at the root of the author’s examinations.

Money has no essence. It’s not “really” anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political conten­tion.

Despite the title, Debt doesn’t just discuss the concept of debt: it picks apart the whole nature of money and of economic systems, questioning conventional wisdom – hello, bartering – and generally putting the whole drift towards fiat currency and thence to the sort of untethered numbers-in-the-void place we’re at now. It delineates the shape of our lives, formed as they are by this concept of value and worth, and – importantly – takes an anthropological viewpoint rather than a straight economic viewpoint.

This is a dense work, and the level of research undertaking is vaguely alarming. Still, Graeber takes pains to ensure it doesn’t bog down too long in any one area, and dumbs it down enough that someone like me (fabulously finance-illiterate) can start to discern the picture he’s presenting. There’s a lot that undoubtedly went over my head, but I certainly feel better informed about the structures of the world than before I began.

In 1694, a consortium of English bankers made a loan of £1,200,000 to the king. In return they received a royal monopoly on the issuance of banknotes. What this meant in practice was they had the right to advance IOUs for a portion of the money the king now owed them to any inhabitant of the kingdom willing to borrow from them, or willing to deposit their own money in the bank—in effect, to circulate or “monetize” the newly created royal debt. This was a great deal for the bankers (they got to charge the king 8 percent annual interest for the original loan and simultaneously charge interest on the same money to the clients who borrowed it) , but it only worked as long as the original loan remained outstanding. To this day, this loan has never been paid back. It cannot be. If it ever were, the entire monetary system of Great Britain would cease to exist.

A strange occurrence: Debt is narrated by Grover Gardner, who read the audiobook of The Stand I listened to a while ago. Occasionally I’d be knee-deep in the weeds of developing economic standards and matters of trade and I’d have a momentary brain-snap and wait for a psychic bad guy to show up. This is most likely not the most common reaction to the narration of this work, but forewarned is forearmed.

Helter Skelter: the True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi.
My rating: three stars.

Another one I’ve meant to read for years and have only just completed: this is meant to be the book about the Manson Family murders. I mean, it was written by the man prosecuting Charlie and his kooky klatsch, so it should be the best there is, right?

Well, turns out it’s not. There’s a lot of moments throughout where Bugliosi grandstands with a whole lot of hey how good am I? sort of elements, and any inconsistencies in either investigation or prosecution are sidestepped (at best) or ignored (at worst). Vince comes across as a bit of a self-smelling dick, though it could also be that I have him and Vince McMahon frankensteined into a single, horrible Vince, which is probably not all that far from the truth.

That said, the book is eminently readable. There’s a lot of detail in here that still has the capacity to shock: the Cielo Drive murders are relayed in all their senseless brutality, and the changes wrought upon the pot-wreathed havens of the beautiful and famous across Los Angeles are ably conveyed.

Looking back on his involvement with the Family, Dennis told me: “I’m the luckiest guy in the world, because I got off only losing my money.”

A lot of what I’d picked up about the murders through cultural osmosis has its roots in this book, and I’m glad I read it, if only because it set me up superbly for what was coming next.

Chaos: the Truth Behind the Manson Murders by Tom O’Neill.
My rating: four stars.

Oh man. Imagine if Fox Mulder had been really into 1960s LA rather than those boring fucking aliens. Imagine a book that’s the living embodiment of the idea of an author as a conspiratorial loner with a noticeboard full of dates and red string leading to file cards. Imagine if people who hadn’t spoken on the record about what they knew about murder, what they knew about laxity in procedure, could be convinced to discuss things, decades after the fact. That’s what you get here.

What unfolds is a story, begun as a magazine profile, that becomes a two decade obsession, reeling in CIA drug tests, law enforcement complicity, the sex lives of the rich and famous and enough information to potentially overturn the convictions in the case.

Oh yeah, and it links to Kennedy.

(Look, that’s the point at which I said “oh you’re fucking kidding me!” aloud, but it’s kinda plausible.)

The book is an attempt to question the veracity of the official narrative, and it absolutely does that. There’s much more connecting what happened all those years ago with wider, more powerful networks, and while it’s unlikely that we’ll ever receive an answer that ties everything up neatly, there certainly is a lot more that could do with explanation.

Were I to recommend a book to read about the Manson murders, particularly if one had already read Helter Skelter, this would be the one. (Reading Helter Skelter helps make some of the digs at Bugliosi a bit more three-dimensional, so I recommend it for that reason, but it’s not entirely necessary to get along with O’Neill’s incredible tales. Is it a bit loose? For sure, and I feel like the structure could use some tweaking, as it just… ends. But in terms of a wild ride, this is golden.

Manson: the Life and Times of Charles Manson by Jeff Guinn.
My rating: three stars.

I remember buying this when it came out, thinking that a modern biography of Manson would be of interest and something I should get right on to. Apparently I then left it on the [virtual] shelf for eleven years which goes to show exactly how organised I am.

When I discovered this was another Jeff Guinn book, I was ecstatic: surely it would be as good as his Jim Jones tome?

Sadly, the answer is no.

Manson tells a pretty good story – particularly in recounting Charlie’s youth and the combination of self-help books (seriously, Dale Carnegie has a lot to answer for), Scientology and canny prison code-switching in the creation of his methods of control – but there’s a lot in here that seems to be an undisguised retread of elements of Helter Skelter. I get that that’s likely to happen, given that Bugliosi’s book is based. on actual trial documentation, but I had deja vu too frequently for this trip through memory lane to be all that enjoyable. Informative, but bland.

I think this would have been a better book to read second in my Manson exploration, as O’Neill’s book fills in a lot of the story told here with a more propulsive tone. (And a lot more conspiratorial craziness, let’s face it.)

(I’m hoping Guinn’s recent book on David Koresh and the Branch Davidians is a little more fulfilling, as I figure I’ve got to get the story from somewhere less lurid than Preacher of Death sometime.)

Hawksmoor by Kerry Downes.
My rating: four stars.

If you’re going to read a book on Nicholas Hawksmoor, the contemporary and partner of both Wren and Vanbrugh, then you really should read this one. Largely because it’s the book, stemming from Downes’ PhD work on the then-unheralded architect.

If you haven’t heard of Hawksmoor, you’ve probably seen his work: the top of the towers on Westminster Abbey are his design, as are several churches throughout London, and huge swathes of other buildings he collaborated on. My favourites are his churches, particularly Christ Church in Spitalfields, which is somehow even more terrifying and uncanny in person.

I’ve had a copy of this book for some years, and decided to finally plough through it in preparation for a rereading of Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, and an upcoming trip to London. It’s very much the sort of book an architecture wonk would like: a raft of pediments and porticos, and a deep grasp of the design goals Hawksmoor had in mind.

While the text is occasionally dry, the pictures are remarkable: the capturing of these places to film really is lightning in a bottle. The personality of shadow – apparently an especial interest – come across vividly.

(There’s not so much of the Satanist magnetism that supposedly fuelled Jack the Ripper: you’ll have to check out Alan Moore’s From Hell for more of that.)

Funland by Richard Laymon.
My rating: three stars.

When you read Funland there’s a key point to remember. It overrides any of the horrific tales of abuse of the unhoused, it trumps the dynamics of peer pressure in beachside communities, and it even overtakes the novel’s criticism of the entertainment pier, or the punk subculture.

It is that Laymon is a boob man. I mean it. You think you’ve met boob guys before? You haven’t met Laymon. He is the most boob-focused dude around. Funland proves it, because it has the most per-capita references to breasts that I can remember reading in pretty much any text, including pornography.

This is partially due to the fact that a bunch of the characters are teenagers, one of them a blow-in to the beachside town in which the action takes place. This blow-in, nicknamed Duke as soon as he sets foot on the pier, is particularly horny, especially for a lifesaver named Tanya who would have a great shot at being in a Baywatch reboot, particularly if it involved hunting vagrants for sport.

You see, this delightful beachside community has a vigilante group that’s making targets of the homeless. Trolls, they call them, and most of their interactions are shameful, but not lethal. So, they hunt trolls in packs using some Billy Goat Gruff-styled language, and it’s fun and games until it invariably isn’t.

The rest of the story involves the standard Stephen King-adjacent kids-fighting-something except in this case it’s, uh, people with no place to live, instead of a giant unearthly spider-thing. (Also, they’re all 16 and up, so them boning each other isn’t quite so IT-level squick, iykyk.)

There is, of course, a section set in an old funfair, and it ticks the usual “don’t go in there you fucken idiot” boxes that you’re imagining, but most of the book seems to be about a) cops trying to get it on and b) war on the underprivileged. The fact that the ringleaders of the group come from the upper classes is unsurprising, but given the typos in this thing, I’m not sure Laymon’s making much of a statement about class warfare: it just means he’s got a place with a spa in it when some characters need a bone-zone setting that would’ve been fancy when this was published.

This is the first Laymon I read, and it filled its role – brainless weekend-away entertainment – admirably. It did seem a little bit like the $2-shop version of King’s stuff, though. I’ve a few more on my shelf, so I’m sure I’ll make my way through them before passing them on to the local community bookshelf, but I’m in no especial hurry.

(This is now the end of these reviews. Hopefully, it won’t be quite as long until the next batch.)

When I said I had a lot on, I meant it: this past while has been a lot work-wise, and there’s been a load of planning for an upcoming trip happening. COVID has gone through the house again (collectively it’s the fourth time in a year) and there’s just been a lot taking focus.

The thing that took my focus the most, however, was the rapid decline of my old mate, Thurston, who I miss every day.

Hug your pets.

If you’re after some good bookish times, please check out my profile on TheStoryGraph.
If you’d like to buy me some books to review, there’s a wishlist over here.