Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder by John Waters

(hb; 2019: nonfiction)

From the inside flap

“No one knows more about everything─especially rude, clever, and offensively compelling─than John Waters. The man in the pencil-thin mustache, auteur of the transgressive movie classics Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and A Dirty Shame, is one of the world’s great sophisticates, and in Mr. Know-It-All he serves it up raw: how to fail upward in Hollywood:; how to develop musical taste, from Nervous Norvus to Maria Callas: how to build a home so ugly and trendy that no one but you would dare live in it; more important, how to tell someone you love them without emotional risk; and, yes, how to cheat death itself. Through it all, Waters swears by one undeniable truth: ‘Whatever you might have heard, there is absolutely no downside to being famous. None at all.’

“Studded with cameos, from Divine and Mink Stole to Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, Patricia Hearst, and Tracy Ullman, and illustrated with unseen photos from the author’s personal collection, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters’ most hypnotically readable, upsetting, and revelatory book─another instant Waters classic.”

Review

Know-It-All is an amusing, smart-minded and sometimes laugh-out-loud read from the Pope of Filth, who dispenses advice, anecdotes and observations, gleaned from his years of experience. As one might expect, his advice is sound, his stories sometimes are a bit dirty, and humor laces many of observations. While it is not one of my favorite books by Waters─some of his wilder tangents lost me─it is worth reading, maybe owning for a few bucks.

The Guardian by Jeffrey Konvitz

(pb; 1979: sequel to The Sentinel)

From the back cover

“Evil is raging on the twentieth floor of an apartment building on the West Side. In an open window, a hideous blind nun perpetually gazing. . .watching. A body burned beyond recognition. Then two more murders. . .strangely connected. And the discoverer, a beautiful young woman, raped. Her innocent child exposed to horror. Her husband, furious, relentlessly set on revenge. A cool, calculating, laughing priest intent on saving more lives from destruction. And so it begins. . .powerful, satanic, terrifying.”

Review

Possible spoilers in this review.

Guardian is a strange, problematic and disappointing sequel to The Sentinel. Several things mar this ambitious, unwieldy novel.

One of these glaring flaws is the expanded homophobia (initially seen with the slovenly, craven lesbians in Sentinel). While this expressed disgust is reflective of the characters and their Catholicism in both novels, Konvitz lays it on thicker than necessary in Guardian, shoe-horning that outsized hatred into the storyline, even basing one of its key twists on that disgust.

Also, there are too many subplots, red herrings and Satanic cannon fodder characters running around, making Guardian feel like an odd, badly cobbled together tale. Sentinel was a focused, organic work for the most part; Guardian is not.

Not only that, Charles Chazen, revealed to be Satan-with-limited-powers in the first book, now has the abilities of the Almighty: he can strike anyone, anywhere, at any time, whereas in Sentinel he had boundaries─he inflicted influence over and visions onto select people but he could not kill them outright. In Guardian, he can. I write this last criticism bearing in mind that Chazen/Satan has been unbound from the Sentinel’s brownstone. That said, Chazen’s sudden power blossom reads like Konvitz discarded series consistency and opted for plot convenient, Omen-like ubiquitous satanic dread.

This brings me to what I like about Guardian. I appreciate its dark atmosphere, consistent with its source novel. I like that it features some of the characters from the original book, and it shows the process through which the priests sought and psychologically groomed the next Sentinel candidate─it is clear that Konvitz wants to expand the storyline, not merely write a pro forma sequel.

Unfortunately, its flaws outweigh its bleakish joys, and Guardian comes off as a rough draft in need of serious editorial whittling. If you must read it, buy it for cheap or, better yet, borrow it from your local library if you can.

People Who Knock on the Door by Patricia Highsmith

(hb; 1983)

From the inside flap

“. . .It begins when Richard Alderman becomes a born-again Christian and starts to tear apart the fabric of his life.

“Arthur, his teenaged son, rejects the church; Robbie, several years younger, adopts his father’s views. Caught in the middle of the ensuing web of lies is Lois Alderman, wife and mother, trying to do right, trying to keep her family together in the face of hypocrisy and inevitable tragedy. When an attempt is made to regulate Arthur’s love life, an unhappy situation becomes frighteningly worse.

“Like vultures preparing to feed, the Aldermans and church elders circle and attack, tearing at each other and unveiling at each other and unveiling disconcerting notions of justice.”

Review

People is a good, pressure boiler novel, made incisive by Highsmith’s usual, eagle-eyed take on human light and darkness simmering just below its suburban smiles and passive-aggressive invasions, with characters whose emotions, actions and consequences are thoroughly explored and shown─without becoming tiresome. While murder and crime are not the immediate vibe of this deft tale of family and community relations, religiosity, hypocrisy, and eventual sociopathy, People, although lighter in subject matter, sits well with Highsmith’s often darker works, and is worth reading. I would suggest that those with religious inclinations avoid this novel, as the “Christians” in People are not shown in a sympathetic light─not that they deserve to be. 

The Mad Robot by William P. McGivern

(pb; 1944, 2013: novella)

From the inside flap

“It seemed like a fairly simple mission. Make a routine supply run to Jupiter and plant yourself in the Earth-Mars robot experimental station. Then hang around for awhile and see if you can figure out what problems they’re having with the robot development program out there. Just don’t let anybody know that you’re spying on them.

“But when Rick Weston arrived on Jupiter, he soon found himself in a maze of hatred and intrigue. Robots were going beserk on occasion─and sometimes taking human lives! With the help of a friendly Martian scientist and a beautiful girl, it didn’t take Weston long to figure out the problems with the robots weren’t just mechanical.”

Review

Robot is a sixty-five-page blast of science fiction fun and action, with deftly sketched characters and zero lag in the smart, tightly written storyline. The betrayals and mini- twists are by-the-numbers but that did not ruin the read. It is simply McGivern, an excellent writer, thrilling within a familiar genre structure. 

The 2013 “Deluxe Paperback Edition” I read was by Armchair Fiction as a two-novellas-in-one-paperbook work. Its companion novella is J. Hunter Holly’s 1963 The Running Man.

Gilded Needles by Michael McDowell

(pb; 1980)

From the back cover

“Welcome to the Black Triangle, New York’s decadent district of opium dens, gambling casinos, drunken sailors, gaudy hookers, and back room abortions. The queen of this unsavory neighborhood is Black Lena Shanks, whose family leads a ring of female criminals─women skilled in the art of cruelty.

“Only a few blocks away, amdist the elegant mansions and lily-white reputations of Gramercy Park and Washington Square, lives Judge James Stallworth. On a crusade to crush Lena’s evil empire, the judge has sentenced three of her family members to death. And now she wants revenge.

“One Sunday, all the Stallworths receive invitations─to their own funerals. Can even the wealth and power of the Stallworth family protect them from Lena’s lust for vengeance?”

Review

Gilded is one of the best books I’ve read this year. It is an intense, cinematic-vivid, character-rich, slow burn of a period piece thriller, one that was near-impossible to set down from its first page to its last. It is worth not only worth reading and owning.

The Running Man by J. Hunter Holly (a.k.a. Joan Hunter Holly)

(pb; 1963)

From the inside flap

“NO ONE WAS SAFE FROM THE POWERFUL FORCE!

“‘I can’t tell you my name,’ the trembling man stammered out. ‘I’m simply  a man, Mr. Munro─a man running for his life! But whether or not I’m able to stay alive or not, someone else must know. . .’

“And what the running man knew was incredible and horrifying. But before the night was over, the running man was dead, and with that, Jeff Munro had to believe the horrifying truth. And he had to find a way to destroy the evil power that was loose upon the world. It had come from outer space, reaching into our Solar System from a faraway star. It was a power that could invade men’s minds. It was a power capable of ruling the entire universe.”

Review

Running is a fun, fast-paced and action-oriented science fiction/alien cult-conspiracy novel. The usual twists, turns and occasional betrayals keep this novella interesting, making it worth your time.
 

The 2013 “Deluxe Paperback Edition” I read was republished by Armchair Fiction as a two-novellas-one-paperback work. Its companion novella is William P. McGivern’s The Mad Robot (it was originally published in the January 1944 issue of Amazing Stories).

A Killer is Loose by Gil Brewer

(pb; 1954: novella)

From the inside flap

“Ex-cop Steve Logan is down on his luck. With a baby on the way, Logan decides to pawn his last pistol to a bartender friend. On his way, he rescues a stranger, Ralph Angers, from being hit by an oncoming bus. Angers is an eye surgeon and a Korean War vet, and he has plans to build a hospital in town. Unfortunately, he is also prepared to kill anyone and everyone who gets in the way of his plans. So when Angers manages to get a hold of Logan’s Luger, he also drags his rescuer into a nightmare of murder and insanity. Logan becomes a hostage to Angers’s plans, and there will be no mercy to anyone who gets in his way.”

Review

Killer is an excellent, immediate-action-and-desperation tale, where its protagonist is thrust into bad-to-worse situations, with a delusional psycho who’s flick-of-the-switch wild. The body count is high in Brewer’s hard-to-set-down pulpy read, each killing horrific in its casual, fast-shot execution. Killer delivers the goods on all counts, even with its lapses into sexist attitudes and pat-happy ending (remember this was written in the late 1950s, not 2019). Worth owning, this.

#

The resulting film, La machine à découdre, was release in France on May 7, 1986. It was directed by Jean-Pierre Mocky, who also wrote the screenplay and played the character of Ralph Enger.

Patricia Barzyk played Lilane. Piere Semmler, billed as Peter Semmler, played Steff Muller. François Michaud, billed as François Michaux, played Betty.

The Shape Shifter by Tony Hillerman

(pb; 2006: eighteenth book in the Navajo Tribal Police/Leaphorn and Chee series)

From the back cover

“Retirement has never sat well with former Navajo Tribal Policeman Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. Now the ghosts of a still-unsolved case are returning to haunt him, reawakened by a photograph in a magazine spread of a one-of-a-kind Navajo rug, a priceless work of woven art that was supposedly destroyed in a suspicious fire many years earlier. The rug, commemorating one of the darkest and most terrible chapters in American history, was always said to be cursed, and now the friend who brought to Leaphorn’s attention has mysteriously gone missing.

“With newly wedded officers Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito just back fromt heir honeymoon, the legendary ex-lawman is one his own to pick up the threads of a crime he’d once thought impossible to untangle. And they’re leading him back into a world of lethal greed, shifting truths, and changing faces, where a cold-blooded killer still resides.”

Review

Steeped in Native American myths and legends, Shape is a good, steady-pace cop procedural with interesting multicultural characters, myth- and legend-infused action and characterization and a suspenseful climax. The identity of the villain is easy to figure out but in Shape it is not a criticism because Leaphorn’s journey and the multicultural stories he hears and tells are more important than the mystery aspect of the novel. This is worth reading and owning, if the above back cover description and this review interest you.

Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster

(hb; 1994)

From the inside flap

“It is 1927, the year of Babe Ruth and Charle Lindbergh─and of Walter Claireborne Rawley, a streetwise orphan from Saint Louis who becomes ‘Walt the Wonder Boy,’ a diminutive showman famous for stunning audiences across the country with his feats of levitation.

“Walt’s teacher is Master Yehudi, a mysterious iconoclast who rescues him from poverty and instills in him the faith, fearlessness, and devotion to hard work essential to such a magnificent venture. Inevitably, Master Yehudi and Walt fall prey to the sinners, thieves, and villains in America in its pre-depression heyday, from the Kansas Klu Klux Klan to the Chicago mob, and Walt’s resilience, like that of his young nation, is over and again challenged.”

Review

Vertigo is an excellent, immediately immersive novel. Its mix of “magic,” American history, colorful characters and its from-high-to-low-situations storyline made Vertigo hard to set down, one that will likely stick in this reader’s memory for a long while. Worth owning, this.

Star Wars: Thrawn─Treason by Timothy Zahn

(hb; 2019: sequel to Star Wars: Thrawn─Alliance)

From the inside flap

“‘If I were to serve the Empire, you would command my allegiance.’

“Such was the promise Grand Admiral Thrawn made to Emperor Palpatine at their fist meeting. Since then, Thrawn has been one of the Empire’s most effective instruments, pursuing its enemies to the very edges of the known galaxy. But as keen a weapon Thrawn has become, the emperor dreams of something far more destructive.

“Now, as Thrawn’s TIE-defender program is halted in favor of Director Krennic’s secret Death Star project, he rewalizes that the balance of power in the Empire is meausured by more than just military acumen or tactical efficiency. Even the greatest intellect can hardly compete with the power to annihilate emnitre planets.

“As Thrawn works to secure his place in the Imperial hierarchy, his former protégé, Eli Vanto, returns with a dire warning about Thrawn’s homeworld. Thrawn’s mastery of strategy must guide him through an impossible choice: duty to the Chiss Ascendancy or fealty to the Empire he has sworn to serve. Even if the right choice means committing treason.”

Review

Treason is a good, fun and often-thrilling science fiction read, like one of its prequels, Star Wars: Thrawn. Thrawn, clever─and lucky─strategist, deftly navigates his path through a battery of conflicting elements, situations and personalities, trying to unite his dual allegiances together in a way that is ultimately faithful to both. It is a fast-burn, intriguing entry in the Star Wars franchise, worth your time.

The Sentinel by Jeffrey Konvitz

(hb; 1974: prequel to The Guardian)

From the inside flap

“When Allison Parker found the old brownstone apartment it was to be a new beginning─a place where she cold forge the agony of her father’s illness and death, a place where she could quietly recover from that long ordeal. But slowly a sense of mounting terror began to take over. The neighbors─the old man and his cat, the two strange women, the blind priest─seemed to be something other than what they appeared.

“Then the headaches began. They had plagued her as she watched her father die; now they returned with an intensity that left her numb and shaken, threatening her tenuous grip on reality. And then she realized that here on  this quiet street an epic battle was being waged, a battle ordained from the beginning of time; and she was the prize.”

Review

Sentinel is an excellent, often-unnerving horror novel, with some terrifying images and action, and a pervasive sense of dread throughout its run. Its characters range from religious-iconic shallow and evil to fully realized (especially Christina and her boyfriend, Michael)─most of them work in the story. I write “most” because of the way two next-door lesbians are presented: the outsized horror and derision that is shown toward them may raise the hackles of modern-day LGBT+ supporters (Christina, in general, is horrified by them; Michael dismisses them as “vicious”).

I was initially alarmed at the venom Christina verbally and physically displays towards them (she does not just condemn them for being publicly lascivious, she condemns them for being lesbians). Then I checked myself, remembered Christina─victimized by her family and Catholic─is repressed, so any enthusiastic lustful displays are bound to offend her, especially those expressed by a group that most religions have demonized for thousands of years. Not only that, the 1970s, while progressing women’s rights (up to a point), were a period─like now─when aggressive, necessary feminism was getting a lot of scary, verbal and physical pushback not only from men, but gender-traitorous hausfrau women.

I normally would not give this much “airtime” to an issue that should be dismissed with an understanding of presentism (judge a work by the society and time period that produced it) and its protagonist’s paranoid bias. Unfortunately, a lot of knee-jerk social warriors may not take the time to check their biases while reading this hard-to-set-down, no-words-wasted suspense/horror novel, which may be a milestone for many, including myself, in the 1970s.

This vivid-enough-to be-called-cinematic book is worth owning, if you can get past its dated, egregious attitudinal flaws regarding women and LGBT+ issues. Followed by The Guardian.

#

The resulting film was released stateside on January 7, 1977. Michael Winner directed and co-wrote the film. His co-screenwriter was book-source author Jeffrey Konvitz.

Christina Raines played Allison Parker. Chris Sarandon play Michael Lerman. Jeff Goldblum played Jack. Deborah Raffin played Jennifer.

Ava Gardner played Miss Logan. Eli Wallach played Detective Gatz. Christopher Walken played Detective Rizzo. 

Burgess Meredith played Charles Chazen. Sylvia Miles played Gerde. Beverly D’Angelo played Sandra. Kate Harrington played Mrs. Clark.

Martin Balsam played Professor Ruzinsky. Hank Garrett played Brenner. William Hickey played Perry.

Arthur Kennedy played Monsignor Franchino. John Carradine played Father Halliran. José Ferrer played “Robed Figure.” Jerry Orbach played “Film Director.” Tom Berrenger played “Man at end.” Nana Visitor, billed as Nana Tucker, played "Girl at end."