Books to Seek Out
Pelton’s writing style fully acknowledges the absurdity of the world-and reminds me of the black humor dramatized in a movie like MASH, where the triage doctors have to joke about the death around them in order to remain human.
Interspersed with these facts, Pelton includes essays about the various locations from his own first-hand accounts or those of his fellow contributing journalists. Among the most moving is the account of Chechnya’s villagers who, with nowhere to run to in the face of a Russian military offensive, decide to remain in their village and put a funeral for one of the recently killed villagers, lit by the trace fire of missiles. There’s more horror, black humor, and, yes, goodness and dignity in the face of death in this atrocity exhibit than in any hundred novels you might care to sample.It’s no surprise that the CIA apparently buys each new edition of this book, since the information contained in it seems like prime intelligence. (Not: Th amout of tiepografical er rors in book xceed thr per paige bt the bock are worth riding de sprite this foct.)
The Other Side of the Mountain
By Michel Bernanos
(Houghton Mifflin, 1968)
With Candide-like brevity and the sanctity of spare prose, Bernanos chills the reader with one of the most quietly horrific accounts of an explorer’s journey to another place. The book is long out of print—a situation that should be rectified immediately. This little piece of the alien and the alienated gets under your skin in a myriad of unsettling ways. It begins as a simple Robert Louis Stevenson/Melville story of a youth indentured at sea to a brutal crew… who becomes lost… who turns to cannibalism… who then passes into a strange land:
All around us was the liquid void. The day grew lighter and lighter and on the horizon a curious red hue preluded the sun-a color akin to blood. Slowly it spread. I had never seen anything quite like it and for a moment I imagined I was having hallucinations. I was amazed to see that when the sun finally rose it was entirely speckled with this same strange color, as if it had suffered a wound…
Until gradually the narrative’s inexorable and steady pace by itself acclimatizes us to upcoming disaster with image after image that will remain with you long after the last page has been read. Some books are strange fish. They fit no known pattern. Their scales flicker with an emerald and unknowable light. But you’d be mistaken to throw them back.
Moonshadows
By J.M. DeMatteis, illustrated by Jon J. Muth
(Graphitti Designs, 1989)
Other books—or graphic novels/comics in this case-tackle the theme of transformation: of movement through the elements of society to some form of transcendence. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shuffles Daedelus through all the traps offered by society: religion, classicism, etc. In Moonshadow, the epynonymous protagonist is born in an intergalactic zoo created by an enigmatic “pure energy” race of smiley-face whimsters called G’l-Doses who destroy whole civilizations and rescue still other civilizations. As a teenage, Moonshadow, product of a human mother and a G’l-Doses father, is provided a space ship by his father and, accompanied by a degenerate nonhuman named Ira, sets off on what he believes will be glorious adventures. Instead, his tale of woe—his transformation through experiencing all the evil humankind has to offer-makes the reader want to weep… pulled back from the shedding of tears by the sheer blackness of the author’s vision and the great variety of styles/beauty of the illustrator’s art. Like Candide, like Daedelus in his immolations, but more like Daedelus in his transformations. Seeded through with low humor and black humor, touched with a hint of divine insanity (and marred by an amorphous ending), Moonshadows touches the heart in the same ways as a book like Stepan Chapman’s The Troika: by tearing bits of it out of you.
