Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith

A dark and disturbing graphic masterpiece

I’m a lifelong reader of comic books, and Barry Windsor-Smith is one of my favorite artists—easily top 3 if not number one (Will Eisner and Jack Kirby would be high on my list as well, just to show you what league BWS is in). Not to sell him short, Windsor-Smith is also a writer of comics, and, unlike many in the superhero line, he often inks, colors, and sometimes even letters his own pages. Early in his career, Windsor-Smith developed an idiosyncratic style, highly detailed, lyrical, and romantic in nature, resembling what comics might look like if drawn by the Pre-Raphaelite painters. His best-known work is probably his Weapon X story from 1990 to 1991, which, when combined into graphic novel form, comprises the definitive Wolverine origin story. Having started his career with Marvel in 1969, Windsor-Smith has been a comics professional as long as I’ve been alive, and at 75 he is still going strong. He recently produced what might be his magnum opus. His graphic novel Monsters, a 365-page black-and-white hardcover, was published in 2022 by Fantagraphics Books. Monsters won the Eisner Awards that year for Best Graphic Novel, Best Writer/Artist, and even Best Letterer (Windsor-Smith himself).

In the 1960s, a young man named Bobby Bailey walks into an army recruitment office, hoping to enlist. Because of his lack of education and the fact that he lost an eye when he was younger, the recruiting officer, Elias McFarland, won’t take him for the regular army. He does, however, recommend Bobby for a secret government program that might be able to use him. This project, dubbed Prometheus, turns out to be a twisted Captain America-esque experiment, originally conceived by the Nazis, of using genetic engineering to create some kind of superhuman soldier. McFarland soon regrets having signed Bobby up to be a guinea pig for Prometheus. Tortured by guilt, he decides to investigate what became of Bobby. As Bobby’s past and present are gradually revealed, Windsor-Smith flashes back to Bobby’s childhood and beyond to his father’s encounter with Nazis in World War II. Those events from the past set in motion a tragic story, decades in the making, involving a complex web of connections between the Bailey and McFarland families, an Ohio police officer, and a Nazi scientist.

Monsters is a deeply dark and disturbing work. It has some science fiction elements that comics readers will be familiar with, but it is a highly literary novel in its character development and psychological themes. Because of its prodigious length, expert plotting, and ready-made storyboards, this novel reads like a feature film just waiting to be made. Given the subject matter, it would probably be an indie arthouse horror film from studio A24, directed by somebody like Robert Eggers or Nicolas Winding Refn. This is not a story for the faint of heart, as it includes scenes of torture, child and spousal abuse, murder, and rape, but these scenes are brief and integral to the story, not gratuitous.

The writing is ambitious, and the art is impeccable. Visually and narratively, Monsters calls to mind Will Eisner’s graphic novels of the 1970s and ‘80s, such as his A Contract with God trilogy. The lengthy page count allows Windsor-Smith to take his time telling the story. Conversations between the characters run their course as they would in real life, without feeling crammed into a limited number of panels. Who else in comics today devotes that kind of time and effort to character development? Maybe once or twice a decade, much like Eisner, a comics auteur comes along that shows us the apex of what the comic art form can be. Right now, Windsor-Smith is that artist. In terms of literary merit, Monsters can hold its own against most works of contemporary fiction, and among graphic novels, Monsters is a masterpiece.

A page from Monsters (from the publisher’s website)

The Naturalist’s Illustrated Guide to the Sierra Foothills and Central Valley by Derek Madden

A model nature guide with beautiful art

I’ve never been to the Sierra Foothills nor the Central Valley of California, and there’s a good chance I may never go there. Like many people who enjoy the outdoors, however, I fancy myself an amateur naturalist, and I enjoy reading books about nature. The Naturalist’s Illustrated Guide to the Sierra Foothills and Central Valley was published in 2005, first under the title of Magpies and Mayflies, and then reissued under its present title in 2020. I bought this book for two reasons, 1) because it was a Kindle Daily Deal, so why not? and 2) I just love the illustrations. The art is by Derek Madden, a professor of biology at Modesto Junior College. Madden is also the primary author of the book, with help from Ken Charters and Erinn Madden. Although the art is in black and white, Madden’s depictions of plants and animals go way beyond the diagrammatic line drawings you typically see in such nature guides. These are really some gallery-worthy drawings. As a nature-inspired artist myself, I like having Madden’s work as a stylistic reference for how natural illustration should be done.

Enough about the pictures; how about the text? The book is divided into categorical chapters, starting with plants and fungi, then covering animals under the headings of invertebrates, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. This is not so much a field guide that one would use for identifying species in the wild. Although it could serve that purpose to some extent, if that’s your main concern then you’d be better off getting a guide with color photographs. Madden doesn’t cover every species in this geographical area, and in some cases, such as insects, he only discusses wildlife at the family level, not the species level. What Madden tries doing with this book, however, and he succeeds quite admirably, is to explain the life cycles and behaviors of these living things and how they fit together within the Sierra Foothills and Central Valley ecosystem. Although I don’t live in California, many of these same species, or at least their families, reside in Kansas, where I live, so much of the information in this guide is relevant to me and other nature lovers who live elsewhere in North America. 

One criticism of the book, and it’s a small one, is that Madden, being a biologist, only covers living things. I’ve always thought of the term “naturalist” as being someone who studies nature in its totality, including nonbiological natural processes such as geology, hydrology, and meteorology. Naturalists like Darwin, Humboldt, and Thoreau certainly broadened the scope of their writings to include such topics. Definitions of natural history vary, however, some including geology and habitat studies, some not, so maybe my quibbling is unreasonable.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and learned quite a bit from it. It’s really a model of how such regional natural histories (not full-color field guides) should be done, and the stunning art by Madden is a bonus. I wish I had an all-encompassing one-volume guide like this for the area in which I live. If you reside in California or frequently visit the region in question, all the better for you.

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Sittin’ around talkin’ about doin’ somethin’

Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940, is set during the recently concluded Spanish Civil War. Hemingway worked as a war correspondent in Spain during the war, and he references some real historical figures and events in the text. The narrative is informed by Hemingway’s own experiences of the war, as well as second-hand knowledge he gleaned as a journalist, but this is not an autobiographical novel like A Farewell to Arms.

Robert Jordan is an American who has volunteered to serve on the side of the Spanish Republicans in their fight against Francisco Franco’s Nationalists. The leftist Republicans have the support of the Soviet Union, while the right-wing Nationalists are backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In his civilian life, Jordan is a professor of Spanish at the University of Montana, but in his guerrilla life he is an expert in demolitions. A Soviet general has tasked Jordan with blowing up a bridge in order to prevent fascist troops from thwarting a major Republican offensive. In order to fulfill his mission, Jordan needs the support of some locals, so he rendezvous with a band of anti-fascist guerrillas made up of Spaniards and Gypsies. Jordan joins them in their hideout in a mountain cave, where they plan their upcoming strike. Among the group, Jordan meets María, a young Spanish woman raped and orphaned by the fascists, with whom he falls in love. 

The first 270 pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls consist of Jordan and this band of partisans sitting around their cave talking about what they’re going to do. Frankly, the book really could have used a lot less of that. The last 200 pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls, however, consist of the characters actually doing what they said they were going to do, and those 200 pages make for a very good novel. One wonders why Hemingway waited so long to get the ball rolling. The answer, as I’m sure some lit critic would tell me, is character development. Much of that intended development, however, feels more like stunted growth.

Hemingway made some odd stylistic choices when writing this novel. The most glaring and persistent is that he decided to use the second person pronouns “thee,” “thou,” and “thy” throughout. At first, I thought this was his way of showing the contrast between the Spanish “usted” and “tu,” but that turned out not to be the case, since the word “you” isn’t used anywhere in the book, regardless of degree of intimacy. Another awkward convention that Hemingway employs is that whenever a swear word is spoken in dialogue, he substitutes the word “obscenity” instead, as in, “Go obscenity yourself!” It’s like the written equivalent of bleeped profanity on television. Was this really necessary in 1940? Apparently so, since the Post Office banned it as obscene anyway, but this stilted and sanitized language undermines the book’s realism. Another faulty dimension to the novel is the romance between Jordan and María, which now reads as a stereotypical story of a White Anglo male colonizing a subservient third-worlder. Despite portraying Maria as a survivor, Hemingway makes her dumber than she needs to be, which feels like he’s just fueling some shady male fantasy.

I’m not a huge Hemingway fan, and none of his books have ever really blown me away, but For Whom the Bell Tolls is the best work of his that I’ve read. Although there is enough depth to this novel to qualify as high literature, at times it often reads like a Clint Eastwood movie (Two Mules for Sister Sara and Where Eagles Dare come to mind). If you can endure the first half, the rest makes for a compelling read.

Essential X-Men, Volume 11 by Chris Claremont, et al.

At the height of mutant popularity

In the early 1990s, the X-Men were the most popular characters in Marvel’s comic line (although Spider-Man probably could have argued that point). So popular, in fact, that Marvel decided to supplement their long-running Uncanny X-Men title with an all-new comic named just plain X-Men (now known as Volume 2). This was in addition to X-Factor, X-Force, Excalibur, and the solo Wolverine magazine. Marvel’s trade paperback Essential X-Men Volume 11 celebrates this heyday of mutantkind by reprinting Uncanny-X-Men #273 to 280 and X-Men issues 1 to 3, along with a few crossover issues of X-Factor, The New Mutants, and The New Warriors. All of these issues were published in 1991. I was actively reading Marvel comics at this time and own at least half of these issues, but thanks to this Essential volume I was able to bridge some gaps in continuity.

Chris Claremont, the premier X-Men author since 1976, was still cranking out good work in 1991. The end of Volume 11 marks the end of his long run. Claremont writes about half of the issues in the volume, and Fabian Nicieza most of the other half. The main villains antagonizing the heroic mutants in these issues are the Shadow King and Magneto. The Magneto stories are better because they remain mostly in science fiction territory with a little bit of politics thrown in, while the Shadow King plots are mostly mystical and psionic mumbo jumbo, with the action often occurring within some character’s mind. The whole purpose of these plots seems to be to get as many mutant characters as possible into the pages, and Claremont manages to do that while still keeping the stories interesting and reasonably intelligent. Almost all of the dozen core X-Men are quite appealing characters, but the army of also-rans that populate X-Factor, the New Mutants, or X-Force seem excessively ephemeral. Just about every villain the X-Men faced in 1991 employed some form of mind control, which serves the purpose of getting the X-Men to fight each other, thus giving fans the chance to see Wolverine fight Gambit, or Professor X fight Colossus, or Rogue fight . . . Strong Guy.

Marvel’s series of Essential paperbacks reproduces classic comics in black and white on newsprint paper. Often the pages are scanned from the original inked artwork. In this volume, however, colored art has been scanned as grayscale halftones. At times this renders the panels difficult to read, as when all the characters are wearing nearly the same shade of gray. A trend began in the ‘90s of placing less importance on inking and more on digital coloration. As a result, inking of that decade often consists of fine-lined chicken-scratch cross hatching with very little shadow. The colorist would then go wild in Photoshop. In my opinion, this trend was a step down from the classic Marvel style. Of such chicken-scratch artists, however, Jim Lee was clearly the king. He draws about half of the issues in this volume, and his work looks beautiful. Although the ‘90s were not a great decade for Marvel art overall, they usually put their best artists on their popular X titles. Guys like Whilce Portacio and Andy Kubert, both of whom pencil issues in this volume, aren’t quite up to Lee’s level, but they’re still good artists for this era.

I believe Claremont and Lee’s X-Men #1 is still the highest-selling comic book of all time. Like most of the other issues in this volume, it’s a fun, thrilling, well-executed comic. There’s nothing here that will be considered a classic masterpiece like Claremont’s earlier Dark Phoenix Saga, but these stories succeed as action movies if not as Shakespearean drama. Things at Marvel would soon go downhill from here, but this volume provides a nice trip down memory lane.

Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland

Midwestern farm tales not quite ready for rural realism

Hamlin Garland was one of the pioneers of the realist movement in American literature, along with his contemporary Stephen Crane. Garland’s particular area of expertise was writing stories of farmers and rural life in the Midwest. Raised on a farm himself, Garland moved on to the big cities of Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where he practiced his literary craft and eventually won a Pulitzer Prize, among other accolades. His first book of fiction, Main-Travelled Roads, a collection of 11 short stories, was published in 1891 and immediately established him as a successful man of letters.

Garland was born in the rolling prairie lands of southwestern Wisconsin near the village of West Salem, in the vicinity of La Crosse. Garland’s hometown was apparently the model for the fictional town of Bluff Siding, also near La Crosse, where several of these stories take place. A few of the stories have recurring characters that appear in loosely connected narratives, somewhat like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. A few others take place in unspecified rural locations in what Garland would have called the West, but which we now think of as the Midwest or Great Plains.

In a brief foreword to the collection, Garland explains that he wanted these stories to express the daily hardships, back-breaking toil, and depressing drudgery of farm life. That might have made for a great book if he had stuck with this idea. While a negative view of rural life does appear throughout the book, its impact is watered-down by country-bumpkin humor, Ma and Pa Kettle-style accented dialogue, and unrealistic happy endings. Even so, many critics of Garland’s day found the realism off-putting and vulgar. Garland’s naturalistic writing style was groundbreaking for 1890s America, too avant garde for some critics of the time, but Main-Travelled Roads feels tame compared to the darker fiction of the muckraking era of a decade or two later, when writers such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Frank Norris brought American literary naturalism to its apex. Garland could also be considered the godfather of the regionalist movement in American fiction that would culminate in the work of Willa Cather and William Faulkner.

All of these stories are good, but few are great. They all generally start off as a blunt and gritty portrait of a poor farmer’s plight, but in the second half they veer off into rosier feel-good territory. The best entries in the collection stop short of melodramatic endings and conclude with a more realistic contentment. Among these are “The Return of a Private,” about soldiers returning home from the Civil War to their Wisconsin farms, and “A Day’s Pleasure,” about a farmer’s wife’s rare day in town. In the likely autobiographical tale “God’s Ravens,” a farm-born writer decides to leave Chicago and head back to his hometown to live a healthier stress-free life. He and his wife soon discover, however, that you can’t go home again, as they have trouble fitting in with their rustic neighbors. “Under the Lion’s Paw” takes a proto-muckraking stab at socioeconomic issues facing poor farmers. “A ‘Good Fellow’s’ Wife” concerns a small-town bank failure, but it’s told in a more humorous style.

Main-Travelled Roads is a better-than-average collection of short fiction from the end of the 19th century, but it suffers from too much hillbilly comedy. If you’re looking for a work of fiction that really does portray the harsh reality of American farm life with brutally naturalistic realism, I would recommend the 1921 novel Dust by Marcet and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, set in Kansas.

Stories in this collection

A Branch Road

Up the Coolly

Among the Corn-Rows

The Return of a Private

Under the Lion’s Paw

The Creamery Man

A Day’s Pleasure

Mrs. Ripley’s Trip

Uncle Ethan Ripley

God’s Ravens

A “Good Fellow’s” Wife

Slowhand: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton by Philip Norman

Read the autobiography instead

Published in 2018, Slowhand is a biography of guitar legend and three-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Eric Clapton, written by Philip Norman, a British rock journalist who previously published several biographies on the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Slowhand is ostensibly a full cradle-to-the-present biography, but it focuses heavily on Clapton’s early career and gives short shrift to anything that happens after about 1986.

Norman’s primary area of concern in this book is Clapton’s love affair and marriage with Pattie Boyd. Clapton’s love for Boyd inspired the song Layla, one of the most powerful love songs in the history of rock. The real story of their romance, however, is far from enchanting. Boyd was the wife of George Harrison, one of Clapton’s closest friends. Clapton stole her away, although George really didn’t seem to mind, and once Clapton had her, he really didn’t want her anymore. Poor Pattie. Why does Norman spend almost half the book on this relationship? Because Norman is first and foremost a biographer of the Beatles, so in this book what matters most to him is Clapton’s connection to the Beatles, which is through George by way of Pattie. Norman also clearly relishes cataloging horror stores of drug abuse, alcoholism, and infidelity. Once Clapton gets clean and sober, Norman doesn’t want to talk about him anymore.

Another favorite topic of Norman’s is the fact that Clapton was abandoned by his mother, which Norman repeatedly cites as the reason or excuse for just about every action Clapton has taken in his life. Norman has really nothing good to say about Clapton in this book, but, granted, a lot of that is Clapton’s fault. For most of his life, he wasn’t a very nice guy, at least not to women. It is just rather depressing and kind of annoying to read a book about a terrible person by someone who really doesn’t like him much. In his autobiography, Clapton is very open and reflective about the bad things he’s done in his life, yet you can also see him making strides to become a better person. Clapton writing about himself comes across more objectively than Norman’s take on him and gives a fuller, well-rounded portrait of the man. So why take Norman’s word for it, when you can get the story straight from the horse’s mouth?

If you don’t know anything about Eric Clapton, then this book will certainly give you a good overview of the general story of his life. If you are a fan of Clapton, however, and have followed his musical career, you’re likely to know just about everything Norman relates in this volume. He’s mostly synthesizing information from other biographies and prior rock journalism. In the book’s introduction, Norman says that he just found out that Jim Gordon, drummer for Derek and the Dominos, was in prison for killing his mother. I knew that thirty-odd years ago when I was in high school, because I’m an Eric Clapton fan, and I read Rolling Stone. The book also contains some dumb errors that should have been caught by a copy editor. At one point Norman confuses Duane Allman with Gregg Allman. “Greg” [sic] was neither Clapton’s “guitar blood-brother” nor did he die in a motorcycle accident (p. 286). Song titles aren’t always exact, like Phil Collins’s “Something in the Air Tonight”? These may seem like paltry complaints, but if any average-joe rock fan can point out these mistakes, then there’s no excuse for Norman getting them wrong.

For any number of reasons, you’re better off reading Clapton: The Autobiography. Though it’s far from a perfect book, you learn more about Clapton, and it’s just a more interesting read than Slowhand.

The 13 Culprits by Georges Simenon

Pre-Maigret short stories

The introduction to The 13 Culprits opens with a fun quote from author Georges Simenon: “I haven’t written that much. I’m already 29 and I’ve only published 277 books . . .” A few years before that statement, in 1929, Simenon was hired to write a series of short mystery stories for the French magazine Détective. Those stories were called The 13 Mysteries, The 13 Enigmas, and The 13 Culprits. These 39 Détective stories are formatted in such a way that the reader is presented with the facts of the case so that he or she can try solving the mystery themselves before the detective weighs in at the end with his conclusions. These stories may have eventually been published in book form in French, but I believe the Culprits are the only ones to have made it into English translation thus far, and not until 2002. 

In The 13 Culprits stories, the suspect in the case has already been tracked down and in some cases apprehended before the story starts. The details of the crime are revealed to us through the interrogation of the suspect. These questionings are conducted by an examining magistrate named Froget. He bears more than a passing resemblance to Simenon’s famous detective Inspector Maigret, who would make his debut in 1931. Froget is a large laconic man of pale skin and surly temperament. He only says as much as he absolutely needs to, and he intimidates his quarry with uncomfortable silences. Froget definitely seems more tightly wound than Maigret. You wouldn’t want to be questioned by either one of these formidable law enforcement professionals, but at least Maigret seems like someone with whom one might enjoy drinking a beer.

I’ve read about 30 of Simeon’s novels, but this is my first experience with his short stories. I can’t say that I was thrilled with this collection. The solve-it-yourself format of the stories amounts to a lot of confusing details being dumped on you before Froget declares his verdict. You already know that the culprits are guilty, for the simple reason that Froget is questioning them. With the whodunit already figured out, it is still left for Froget to ascertain the how and the why. The process of solving these cases is very similar to that employed by American teenaged sleuth Encyclopedia Brown. The suspect slips up with some contradictory or erroneous detail in their testimony, by which Froget nails them. In most cases, Froget really doesn’t have enough evidence for a conviction, but that’s not even considered since the whole point of the story is merely to solve the puzzle.

Unlike Encyclopedia Brown, however, the crimes here are more hard-boiled than some kid stealing a bike. Simenon delivers the gritty film-noir look at the underbelly of Paris that one expects from him. He also doesn’t shy away from sexual content. One story even has a transvestite, which was pretty racy for 1929. Just as in his Maigret novels, Simenon comes up with some really interesting and compelling back stories for these culprits, but they feel very rushed in this short format. One thing that’s interesting about these mysteries is that almost none of these culprits are French. Instead, they come from all over Europe, plus one African from the Congo. 

If you’re a fan of Simenon, these stories may be worth a look, but don’t expect anything that measures up to a Maigret novel. The 13 Culprits stories feel like a series of quick sketches leading up to the creation of Maigret. Since Simenon wrote about 500 books, however, he’s got plenty of other mysteries that are more worth your time than this.

Stories in this collection

Ziliouk

Monsieur Rodrigues

Madame Smitt

The “Flemings”

Nouchi

Arnold Schruttinger

Waldemar Strvzeski

Philippe

Nicolas

The Timmermans

The Pacha

Otto Müller

Bus

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

Championing skepticism above superstition

The Demon-Haunted World, published in 1996, is a collection of essays by astrophysicist turned popular science communicator Carl Sagan (1934–1996). Many of these essays were originally published as articles in various magazines and then adapted for this book. In particular, Sagan mentions Parade magazine, a nationwide Sunday newspaper supplement, as one recurring venue for his writings. Four of the book’s 25 chapters were cowritten by Sagan’s wife and frequent collaborator Ann Druyan.

In this book, Sagan tackles many different categories of the paranormal or pseudoscience, including angels and demons, reincarnation, ghosts, spiritualism, communication with the dead, hypnotism, UFOs, witchcraft, and more. Sagan begins by assessing the state of each belief in today’s society, and then talks about ways of addressing such topics. By explaining the scientific method and the logic techniques of “baloney detection,” Sagan instructs readers in how to practice intelligent skepticism. Probably because of his astronomical interests, the most thoroughly covered topic in this volume is that of UFOs and alien abductions. Sagan looks for scientific reasons behind why so many people claim to have been abducted and sexually abused by extraterrestrials, which leads him into the psychology of hallucinations and false memories. In addition to such supernatural myth-busing, Sagan also laments the sorry state of science education in America and offers suggestions on how we can improve scientific literacy. He is also critical of the scarcity of sound science presented in the news media, political rhetoric, and popular entertainment.

There are few figures of my lifetime that I admire more than Sagan. As far as I can recall, I agree with everything he has to say about matters pertaining to science and religion. He was a veritable knight in elbow-patched blazer the way he fearlessly championed rationalism and science to an overly religious and superstitious American public. The fact that I agree with his views so unilaterally, however, makes the reading of his writings less than exciting for me. I find this common when reading other writers of an atheist or freethinking bent. They’re basically just telling me things I’ve already figured out for myself. Sagan doesn’t have to convince me, because I was already convinced before I picked up the book. 

For similarly minded readers, the best this book has to offer is its revelations on just how pervasively pseudoscience and superstition have permeated our society. Since the book was published in 1996, I would assume the statistics Sagan cites regarding the number of Americans who believe in biblical literalism, ghosts, psychics, alien abductions, and so on are outdated, but I’m afraid those statistics have probably only gotten worse since then. The internet (which existed in 1996 but didn’t dominate our lives to the extent it does now) has only amplified conspiracy theories and tall tales of the paranormal, and it seems like American politicians become more religious and less scientific with each election. If you are a rationalist, and you weren’t already ashamed of American anti-intellectualism, you’ll likely be mortified after reading The Demon-Haunted World.

Fortunately, this book is so well-written that Sagan may very well have changed many minds that were on the fence about astrology, witchcraft, UFO abductions, and the like. His tone throughout the book is that of a hopeful educator. He wants to change people’s minds, but he doesn’t stoop to insulting people’s beliefs. He does, however, go after some prominent paranormal hucksters. Though I felt like much of the book’s content was familiar and just plain common sense, I’m glad somebody wrote this book. The world (or at least the United States) really needs it, and no one could have written it better than Sagan.

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Too absurd to alarm

Austrian-Czech author Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in modern European literature. In the early 20th century, he pushed the envelope of what literature could be by applying dark, dystopian, surrealistic, and deliberately absurd imagery to existential themes of modern life. Kafka wrote three novels—The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika—all of which were unfinished at the time of his death but nevertheless were left complete enough to be hailed as masterpieces by literary critics of the last century. The Trial was first published, posthumously, in 1925, but was written about a decade earlier. I had previously read Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis and found it worthy of high regard. The Trial, on the other hand, left me quite disappointed and even annoyed.

The Trial concerns the legal troubles of Josef K., a chief clerk at a bank. On his 30th birthday, two law enforcement officers show up at his apartment to arrest him. The nature of his offense is never disclosed, neither to K. nor to the reader. The particular agency these officers work for is unknown, and it doesn’t seem that any formal charges are ever made. K. is not taken into custody, but released on his own recognizance, able to live and work much the same as before. It is made clear to him, however, that he is regarded as a criminal and will have to undergo a long, complicated, and labor intensive trial process that will likely dominate his life for years to come and may result in a serious sentence. In the process of preparing for his trial, the workings of which he knows almost nothing, K. consults a number of people for assistance, including lawyers, a businessman, and a painter. 

Much like George Orwell’s 1984 and other 20th-century dystopian novels, The Trial reflects the unfortunate reality of Justice in many authoritarian and non-democratic nations. The fact is, there were, and probably still are, many countries where you could be dragged out of your bed in the middle of the night, for no specified crime, imprisoned, tortured, and/or executed. There are moments in The Trial where Kafka brings that horror vividly to life.

The effect is ruined, however, by the juxtaposition of such political paranoia with humorous and absurdist elements. The legal proceedings described are unrealistically byzantine and bizarre, and the details are often revealed through somewhat silly conversations with characters that I assume were meant to be satirical characters. Every woman K. meets along the way throws herself at him, and he engages in bumbling, fumbling romances with a few of them. The overall effect is something like that of a German expressionist print. On the one hand, the rude, angular depiction of human figures engenders disturbing feelings of anxiety, revulsion, and paranoia. On the other hand, there is also something humorous about the rather cartoony and distorted style of expression. Sometimes that humor is intentional (as in George Grosz) and sometimes not (as in Egon Schiele). In The Trial, it is hard to tell what is intentionally humorous and what is not. For today’s reader, a century after the book’s initial publication, the difficulty is compounded by an ignorance as to what life was really like in Bohemia or Czechoslovakia a hundred years ago. For example, court proceedings in The Trial are held in the attic of a tenement building. Was that a real thing? Or is that just a joke?

Having only read a couple of Kafka’s works, I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s overrated. I do feel fairly confident, however, in saying that The Trial is overrated. If literary critics want to hail one innovative early-2oth-century Czech author as a godfather of modernism, my pick would be Karel Capek rather than Kafka.

The Bondman by Hall Caine

Brother vs. brother in the icy North Atlantic

There is a good chance you’ve never heard of Hall Caine, but at one time he was one of the most popular authors on Planet Earth. His book The Eternal City is the first novel to have sold over one million copies worldwide. Caine’s novel The Bondman, published in 1890, may not have achieved such record sales, but it was still a blockbuster bestseller for its day and firmly established the author’s international success. The story of The Bondman takes place in Iceland and on the Isle of Man, which is located between Great Britain and Ireland. Although born in England, Caine was of Manx (Isle of Man) heritage and later settled there to become that island’s biggest celebrity and favorite son. He also wrote The Manxman, which Alfred Hitchcock made into a silent film. Prior to writing The Bondman, Caine made a research voyage to Iceland to see that country firsthand. 

Rachel Jorgenson, the daughter of the governor of Iceland, is betrothed to marry a Danish count of her father’s choosing, but instead she elopes with a burly Icelandic fisherman named Stephen Orry. Unfortunately, Orry turns out to be an abusive drunkard, and he abandons Rachel and their newborn son Jason, who are left to live in poverty. When Jason grows up, he vows that he will track down his father and kill him, or, if the old man is already dead, he will wreak his vengeance on any of Orry’s offspring. Meanwhile, Orry has run off to the Isle of Man, where he fathers another son, Michael, with a woman of ill repute. Orry mellows in his old age and has a change of heart. He regrets what he did to Rachel and realizes what a terrible father he has been, so he leaves Michael with the governor of the Isle of Man, who raises the boy lovingly in relative wealth. When Michael grows into a man and learns of his father’s history, he vows to find Rachel and his long-lost brother and help them in any way he can. Thus, we have two brothers from two different islands, who have never met, hunting each other down for opposing reasons, each unbeknownst of the other’s motives.

A lot happens in The Bondman. In every chapter, someone is being born, married, killed, imprisoned, elected governor, or relocated to some foreign land. One could say that there’s never a dull moment in The Bondman, but he or she would be lying. Despite the multinational scope and all the momentous events, each chapter is bogged down in a lot of tedious verbiage. The characters engage in much discussion of what’s happened or what’s going to happen. In most cases, the outcomes of these conversations are a foregone conclusion, but one still has to sit through them anyway. Realism is not a major concern in this romance, as the character’s lives are entwined in an intricate web of coincidental encounters and mistaken identities. It somewhat calls to mind the byzantine plot of The Count of Monte Cristo, but Caine’s web is not as skillfully spun as Alexandre Dumas’s. I admired the clever construction of the plot, with all its cyclical occurrences and karmic retribution, but I can’t say that I greatly enjoyed the reading of it.

The Bondman is an adventure romance in the vein of Sir Walter Scott (Rob Roy) or Robert Louis Stevenson (The Master of Ballantrae). The positive aspects of Caine’s writing don’t quite measure up to those two Scottish greats, yet he does share some of their faults. Like Scott and Stevenson, the writing is often clumsily antiquated, the plot elements so heroic they’re predictable, and the very Britishness, Scottishness, or Manxness of the cultural and historical references can be a chore for the ignorant American reader to wade through. (Just to prove I’m not anti-British, James Fenimore Cooper’s novels often have the same problems.) After reading The Bondman, I might say there’s a good reason Caine has been forgotten while the other aforementioned authors are still widely read. If you are really into classic books by Scott, Stevenson, or Cooper, however, The Bondman might be right up your alley.

X-Men Epic Collection, Volume 5: Second Genesis by Chris Claremont, et al.

Successfully reinventing the wheel

Given the proliferation in X-Men characters, comics, and films since the 1990s, it is hard to believe that there was a time when The Uncanny X-Men was one of the least successful comic books in the Marvel pantheon. In fact, the title was essentially cancelled in 1970 after issue #66, following which old stories were rerun for the next few years. The X-Men comics came back to life in 1975 with the publication of Giant-Size X-Men #1, a landmark issue in which Marvel took the drastic step of replacing the founding X-Men with an almost all-new team of heroes. The result was a personnel-change comeback perhaps second only to AC/DC’s Back in Black. Marvel’s X-Men Epic Collection Volume 5 reprints this landmark Giant-Size issue, as well as the newly revived Uncanny X-Men issues 94 to 109. The volume also includes an Iron Fist crossover and two Marvel Team-Up crossovers consisting of a couple issues each.

Nowadays there are dozens of X-Men in various teams, but prior to 1975, the X-Men were defined as five characters: Cyclops, Iceman, Angel, Beast, and Marvel Girl, plus a couple hangers-on like Havok and Polaris. For their new team, writer Len Wein and Dave Cockrum made the bold choice of introducing three brand new characters—Storm, Colossus, and Nightcrawler—that would fortuitously turn out to be very popular. They also repurposed some previously introduced mutants, the somewhat forgettable Banshee and the overachiever Wolverine, who would go on to become arguably Marvel’s most popular character since Spider-Man. Cyclops was the only official holdover from the original X-Men, though Jean Grey/Marvel Girl was often on hand, beefed up with new and improved powers. 

Another formidable addition to the X-Men was to its creative team. Writer Chris Claremont joined Wein for issue #94 and would soon take over to become the definitive X-writer for decades to come. I have always thought Claremont was a bit overrated, but after reading this volume of early second-generation X-Men, I have to admit that his stories here are very good. As far as the art is concerned, there is certainly nothing to complain about. The very talented Cockrum pencils most of the issues included here, only to be followed by the even better John Byrne. Sal Buscema handles one of the Team-Up crossovers. If “Our Pal” Sal is the worst artist in your comic book, you’ve got one damn good-lookin’ comic book. As is always the case with the Epic Collection paperbacks, these classic comics are reprinted in vibrant full color.

As for villains, Magneto, the Sentinels, Black Tom, Juggernaut, Eric the Red, and the Living Monolith all make appearances. Most impressive, however, is the creation by Claremont and Cockrum of the empress Lilandra of the Shi’ar and her defenders the Starjammers. This new race of celestial beings would prove to be enduring and popular guest stars in many a Marvel comic to come.

The crossovers are included for continuity, but they’re really not very important in the grand scheme of X-things. I would rather have gotten several more issues of The Uncanny. They’re not bad comics, however, so I’m merely quibbling over technicalities. When all is said and done, X-Men Volume 5 is a very good entry in Marvel’s series of Epic Collection comics.

The Best of 2024

Top ten reads of the year
In 2024, Old Books by Dead Guys matched 2023’s output of book reviews with an even 100 posts for the year. Listed below are my ten favorite books read this year, arranged chronologically by date of publication. (None of them were actually published in 2024; this is Old Books by Dead Guys, after all.) It just so happens that this year’s list is half fiction, half nonfiction. Surprisingly, the oldest book on this year’s list is 1925, but there are a few history books that reach back further to tell of dead guys in earlier times. I read a lot of Nobel Prize winners this year (15 books), but none of them made the list. Click on the titles below to read the full reviews.

 

The Cotton-Pickers by B. Traven (1925)
This novel, which takes place shortly after the Mexican Revolution, follows an American drifter wandering through Mexico. When he and a handful of companions sign on as cotton pickers on a Mexican farm, their adventures reveal the ugly truth of imperialism, classism, and racism south of the border. A gallows-humor comedy told with down-to-earth matter-of-fact bluntness, Traven’s writing is remarkably forthright and uninhibited, with the unpretentious feel of vintage pulp fiction.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven (1927)

The basis for the 1949 Humphrey Bogart movie of the same name, this novel tells the story of three American drifters in Mexico who decide to stop chasing dead-end jobs and start prospecting for a mother lode of gold. This realistic and unromanticized story of friendship and greed is an adventure novel that rises to the level of great literature. Traven’s original novel expresses anti-capitalist, anti-church, and anti-imperialist sentiments not found in the film.

Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses by Georges Simenon (1959)
Not the first time a Maigret novel has appeared in one of these best-of lists, and it probably won’t be the last. In this installment, Inspector Maigret is called in to investigate the murder of the CEO of a popular brand of cookies. Maigret uncovers secrets of the family business that reveal a motive for the killing. This is a good, perplexing murder mystery with an interesting supporting cast. It’s an exemplary entry in the consistently entertaining Maigret series.

True Grit by Charles Portis (1968)
This novel was adapted into the famous John Wayne movie, but the later Coen Brothers’ version is closer to the book. Mattie Ross, the elderly narrator, tells the story of how, as a 14-year-old girl, she accompanied the cantankerous marshal Rooster Cogburn on the hunt for the man who killed her father. This intelligent, funny western can be enjoyed even by readers who thought they’d never read a western.

Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth by Richard Fortey (1997)
Fortey, a senior paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum, provides a four-billion-year biography of life on Earth, following the course of evolution from our planet’s first molecules of living matter to we humans today. Though written for a popular audience, the content is not dumbed-down, and the text is filled with fascinating details.

Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History by Joel Selvin (1998)
The text of this band biography is an oral history assembled from interviews with about forty different persons who lived and/or worked with Sly and the band. (The reclusive Sly himself did not participate.) What starts out as an inspiring and triumphant story of a talented musician turns into a shocking and tragic tale of a deranged, violent, drug-addled control freak.

The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century by Peter Watson (2000)
This is essentially a history textbook, but instead of focusing on political events, wars, or world leaders, it concentrates instead on developments in the arts, sciences, and humanities. The result is a very ambitious, panoramically erudite, and thoroughly engaging intellectual history of the twentieth century. Watson summarizes countless published books by the greatest thinkers of the century and compares and contrasts them articulately. No matter how well-read you think you are, you’re bound to find much to learn from this impressive work of staggering scope.

Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842 by Nathaniel Philbrick (2003)
After almost every European country had made its round-the-world voyages, the United States decided to do the same by launching the U.S. Exploring Expedition to circle the globe, explore the Pacific, and search for the as yet undiscovered Antarctica. Philbrick’s book is not so much about the Expedition’s discoveries as it is about the terrible leadership of its captain and the personnel conflicts that ensued. Nevertheless, this is a riveting narrative of nautical exploration.

The Golden Cockerel and Other Writings by Juan Rulfo (2017)
Mexico’s (and perhaps Latin America’s) most highly respected author is known for only publishing two books, but this volume reprints an additional “lost” or “forgotten” novel of the early 1960s, The Golden Cockerel. Also included is a mixed bag of short stories and essays previously uncollected in English translation. Rulfo fans will be delighted by the long lost writings in this volume. 

El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten History of Hispanic North America by Carrie Gibson (2019)
Since the first Spanish conquistadores landed in the New World, Hispanics and Hispanic culture have had a profound effect on the development of North America. Journalist Carrie Gibson corrects the Anglo-biased histories of North America with this objective and well-researched account of historical and cultural events in the U.S., Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

  

Old Books by Dead Guys has been posting these year-end lists since 2013. To see the top tens from years past, click on the “Best-of lists” tag and scroll through the results. Happy reading in 2025!