There's No Future For You. Try And Be More Like Me.

God save the Queen
A fascist regime
They made you a moron
Potential H-Bomb

God save the Queen
She ain’t no human being
There is no future
In England’s dreaming.
-Johnny Rotten et al, "God Save The Queen"

Quoting the Sex Pistols on a Monday afternoon. What could be better?

The focus of this month's theme was of course the end of times. The end of the world, by one way or another, has fascinated man by its potential alone for thousands of years. There are so many versions of the end that we are afforded the great luxury of being able to choose one that fits our lifestyle.

Long-haired gym rat? The grand contest at Ragnarok is for you. Just pop on Kill'em All and let the axe swing.

Pious Christian? Keep going about your routinely faithful days and wait for the twinkling of Jesus' eyes.

Non-Pious Christian? See long-haired gym rat above.

Environmentalist or Michael Pollan devotee? Keep buying locally and tending your vegetable garden until the greasy cannibals inhabiting your resource-depleted world show up with guns and eat you and your vegetables.

Neo-Nazi or right wing Militia member? No sweat. Keep doing push-ups and maintain that thousand-yard-stare. You're ready for any of this.

Except for it to continue. That's the worst thing. The status quo wins again.

The key feature to the majority of literature's renderings of the end times is man's preparedness to meet the end. Very few books portray a desperate last stand in which the last man breathes the last time and the curtain drops on humanity.

Nevil Shute's tale of a nuclear apocalypse, On The Beach, is perhaps the best example of book rendering the end in totality. Man has no hope. His actions have created unavoidably destructive reactions. The outcome of a world encompassing nuclear war is that there is no longer man in the world.

This makes Nevil Shute's novel cautionary and therefore potentially useful. It isn't an issue of life after the end because there is no life after a nuclear holocaust. Instead, if we cherish life, it becomes an issue of prevention. However unsexy that might be.

So environmentalists, buy local enough and grow enough veggies and maybe those greasy cannibals don't show up. Just don't secretly harbor a desire to see some consequences for those that do not. Because those consequences will be put upon you too.

I Am Legend, which I mentioned earlier this month, ends in a similarly grim manner. Man is no longer the norm. Man has become the dragon, the mythical beast and once slain will become mere mythology. This makes it fantasy and therefore different despite it's totality of ending.

One thing surely you noted in many of the stories this month is the role of the last person, or persons, being left to a very competent person. It could be the perfect colonist like Robinson Crusoe or Mary Shelley's enlightened, sensitive but physically capable youth, Lionel. Or it could be Richard Matheson's quintessential American man in I Am Legend. A virile, conflicted yet moral man of rugged determination.

The last man is always potent. Never is it a guy who can't fix a car or pull a trigger. Rarer still is it a woman. The reasons are simple and none of them involve realism. Authors have relished the fact that they have the excuse to construct a super hero, even if they want to aim for realism.

In Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a book that is advertised as being gritty and realistic, we find a more moral version of Matheson's Robert Neville. An American man, a father leading his son through the wastes of a dangerously predatory world, with a cache of basic knowledge so large that he becomes an extraordinary force.

He can hot-wire a car. He is handy with a gun, being able to clean and disassemble several different weapons. He is knowledgeable about canning and other food preservation methods. He is neutrally tolerant to the world's situation, implying either extreme stoicism or latent faith. Whatever the case, this man is capable of nearly everything. He is, in a word, convenient.

Which brings me to my overall point. Meandering as it might be this rainy afternoon. The end is convenient. Desirable even. The end, like its final combatants, is a collection of convenient aspects justifying, irony of ironies, a status quo.

In Christianity the Apocalypse (meaning lifting of the veil or revelation) is a supreme moment of justification. A life of faithful devotion is meaningful when confronted with the rewards of eternal life. Those that did not live life in the proper manner are not just uninvited to the curtain call, they are forever trapped in an increasingly terrible theater.

The same was the case for a Viking warrior. Live right and die well or endure an eternity of undeathly dishonor.

In the case of McCarthy's Midwestern Superman the antiquated daily habits still present in rural life are paraded in front of the lazy and suddenly unimportant abilities of city life. McCarthy's father character is old fashioned and therefore equipped to survive the end of days. Simpler times contain more useful knowledge than complex times.

Even Lionel, Shelley's purebred Romantic hero in The Last Man is a justification for her and her movement's work. Lionel is a bucolic demi-god. His body has been made strong from physical labor, out of doors, in the beautiful hillsides of England. His native intelligence is tremendous and has been honed to precision with poetry, progressive politics and books. He is in essence strong enough to survive and intelligent enough to make a worthy observer of the end. His sensitivity and strength combine tragically into a great unrealized potential, rendered unfortunately perfect for his ultimate task.

That is essentially the great irony and the reason I decided to use such supposedly grim theme for this month. As guys like Harold Kamping preach brimstone on the radio and Hollywood churns out disaster movie after disaster movie I am constantly humored by the the unflinching light of human nature. A greenish glinting light, like the spark of intelligence in Iago's Machiavellian brain.

It is ego. Robust, life affirming ego. That is what we find in each and every tale of the end.

God save the Queen. She ain't no human being. Indeed.

Housekeeping

Oh yes. Over the next few weeks I am writing a "gift guide" for the Phoenix.

I can't get my hands clean enough after writing the above.

And lucky for you it didn't get published this week, namely because of a mistake on my part (though uninformed of it) to get the piece in before Thanksgiving, as the Thursday deadline had of course changed.

So you have that to look forward to next weekend.

In the meantime here's what you can expect over the next month.

I am going to try (try is the operative word) to do a book a day for the month of December. Outlining the best books of 2009 in the humble opinion of your friendly Devil's Accountant.

That of course will start on Tuesday. Tomorrow I will wrap-up our lovely month of apocalyptic celebration by talking about Harold Kamping and the neo-prophets of doom. Neo. Harold probably hates having neo anything attached to his sonorous gavel maw.

Carry on.

Sunday Review: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

I must be crazy.

Every week I try to use the venue of a small paper to introduce new & noteworthy literature to an audience that probably just wants to read on the progress the Community Development Commission is making on replacing the downtown sidewalks. Or how the food drive is going at the high school.


So it is with a greater measurement of insanity that I paraded Lydia Davis' Collected Stories out to the good people of Phoenixville. Describing the literary accomplishments of a writer like Davis in quotidian terms is not easy or fun. It's like observing that the red paint on a Ferrari is "bright." Or observing the red paint at all.

It's not that I doubt the audiences ability to follow a discussion of the mechanism her writing, which is as direct a descendant of Hemingway as you'll find. It's that I want to explain Davis (of the other books I've reviewed in the Phoenix) in a manner that does not seem literary.

As someone who has owned a bookstore and worked with books for over a decade, and who is also an autodidact, I want to believe that all books are approachable. I honestly believe that James Joyce's Ulysses has suffered most from English professors cloaking it in the mystique of their doctoral papers. Sometimes a straight read of something is the best way to do it.

To paraphrase and augment Hemingway: Read one true thing and the rest will fall in place.

So before you hop over to the Phoenix and read my review of the brilliant short stories of Lydia Davis I'd like to leave you with one lone clue as to what to expect in Lydia Davis' writing.

"Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm (mis-spelled). The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."

-Ernest Hemingway to Bernard Berenson, Selected Letters, p. 780

Okay. Now enjoy the tepid article.

Playing at Prevention: A Catastrophic Game by Peter Christian Hall

Woodcut of Krakatoa, a legendarily destructive volcano.

As promised, Peter Christian Hall (author of American Fever) has come aboard today to join in our most somber of subjects: The End of Times. Peter writes today about the concept of preventable and unpreventable disasters and why we, as mere humans, possess much audacity (and foolishness) to think we can control or prevent certain disasters. He argues that we love to apply controls after the fact, enjoying a postmortem (CSI New York et al style) and accosting those we perceive as responsible. No wonder there is so much crime related TV programing. We are a nation of wannabe lawyers.

Here, I'll let Peter do the talking. I highly recommend you check out his novel, American Fever. He's doing some very innovative things with it.

Playing at Prevention: A Catastrophic Game
by
Peter Christian Hall

There used to be times when things just went terribly wrong. The mountain towering over your city blew to pieces. A titanic storm drowned your village. Shaggy invaders swept the kids off to slavery. Survivors didn’t sit around suggesting that someone ought to have taken practical measures to prevent Vesuvius, a century monsoon, or the Huns. They gnashed their teeth, rent their garments, and looked for someone to condemn for bringing on catastrophe by annoying the gods.

Provocation—not prevention—was the issue.

Nowadays we worry about both. It seems as if everything that goes wrong must have been preventable. A disaster occurred through someone’s fault, if not their agency. Then we pursue a kind of grand social entertainment in which alleged perpetrators are denounced and defended along the political spectrum. This applies to all kinds of issues.

A lot of people still think the CIA cooked up HIV/AIDS. A killer retrovirus that’s spent decades killing people must have been created by…one of us. Since we can‘t even find a vaccine for it, this amounts to hubris on an Olympian scale.

A lack of respect for nature’s power similarly greets a case of cancer, which is popularly perceived as stemming from that old devil, bad behavior. But whose? Fault is thought to lie in something the victim did—perhaps a vice. Unless it was caused by a polluting entity. Or might it have been the inaction of a government regulator? Soon genetic testing will enable people to curse their ancestors for having bequeathed so many diseases. That’s medical progress.

When we don’t like something, we try to ensure that someone is punished, or at least sanctioned pointlessly. In the 1990s, irresponsible play with Super Soakers inspired some angry, armed targets to shoot children. Pro-gun legislators responded by trying to criminalize squirt guns.

Now, as we bumble our way through this century’s first influenza pandemic, blame is spreading faster than swine flu. You’d think people would agree that a global wave of unfamiliar influenza constitutes an unpreventable natural phenomenon. Nope. The pandemic’s early chapters have generated anger against giant pig farms, pharmaceutical companies, the Centers for Disease Control, nurses who don’t wish to get vaccinated, governments that advocate vaccination, the World Health Organization, and of course, the Illuminati.

Rather than fight the disease, enormous numbers of people are fighting the vaccine. It’s preventable.

Having written an illustrated, linked online novel about a far worse flu pandemic, I think our predilection for preventability reflects an irrational need to establish that we are in control.

In American Fever: A Tale of Romance & Pestilence, I present an H5N1 bird flu that has merged with traces of swine flu to turn American civilization and law on its head. Amid riots, blackouts, water shortages, near-famine, and the burial of loved ones in local parks, the authorities ultimately seize control. They raid dissidents, draft flu survivors, and effectively throttle free speech on the Internet.

Engulfed in a national Katrina that won’t stop raining troubles, Americans in my novel do what human beings tend to do during monumental catastrophes. Like the Europeans who sacked Jewish communities during the Black Death, they seek scapegoats, among immigrants.

American Fever’s blogger-narrator takes the high road. Fascinated by the nature of viruses—and stunned to discover how poorly science comprehends influenza—he writes: “Looking back, I marvel at our hubris in attempting to contain a planetary process that’s more like continental drift than the common cold. Try soothing El Nino with a shot and a few pills.”

Does he accept that the bird flu pandemic is unpreventable? Up to a point. Weaving together a lot of research, he points his own finger at man’s ecological recklessness, global chicken factories that help cook up so many flu strains, and the greed and fear that keep people from responding nobly to crisis. (He also takes swipes at our penchants for religious and ecological apocalypse on the pandemic’s 24th and 27th days, with a hand from Homer Simpson.)

In recounting the U.S. Army’s brutal suppression of an unauthorized demonstration in Times Square, my blogger notes a band of marchers who contend that the government plotted and executed the 9/11 attacks, which removed a dominant presence from New York’s skyline more neatly than any volcano ever dislodged a totemic mountain:

"I’ve never been drawn into the mystery over 9/11, an unlikely event by anyone’s standard. I am as prepared to believe that a bunch of fanatics did it as that the US government could pull off such a neat and complex set of activities. I think people prefer to think that a president whom they might conceivably control (though they never did) was responsible. By personally sorting out the lines of a mega-plot, they feel that they are battling the forces behind 9/11. How do you fight the idea that some nondescript guys with box cutters can wreck your life?"

Behind everything in American Fever lurks the shadow of Hurricane Katrina, an event that helped inspire me to write the novel. Humanity has yet to think it can prevent a hurricane, but Katrina nevertheless illustrates a lot about our approach to problems. First, Americans shun expensive solutions to threats that may not materialize (unless they involve military preparedness), so proposals to construct Dutch-style storm-surge barriers in Lake Pontchartrain were dropped in the 1990s.

Far uglier is what came after Katrina’s destruction—everything but a commitment to prevent further flooding. The city isn’t much better prepared to handle a big storm now. According to General Robert Van Antwerp, chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it never will be. “We cannot keep levees from being overtopped and the city flooded,” he told The Guardian last month. When asked if New Orleans should be abandoned or relocated, he replied: “That is outside my brief.”

This was reported in a British newspaper, with no follow-up here. Americans still don’t seem to care about saving New Orleans. That could be achieved, but it would entail vast expense and effort. Where’s the fun in that? Ivor van Heerden, the renowned engineer who warned for years that cataclysm loomed, has been fired without stated cause from his job at Louisiana State University. The guy just wouldn’t shut up.

Prevention, it seems, is dull. If nothing bad happened, what would we talk about? Prevention may best be served up in lectures, election attack ads, rumbles among talking heads. Americans prefer a good catastrophe.

A World Ends - The Last Man by Mary Shelley

The Old Man and Death, 1773, by Joseph Wright.

Getting here kind of late, this Tuesday evening. Tardiness does not excuse itself, and so instead of punctuality I offer you a great and ofttimes overlooked novel by the genius of Mary Shelley.


The Last Man by Mary Shelley. Oxford University Press. Fiction. Trade Paperback. ISBN 978019283865. 470 pp. Click on the picture above to purchase the book from Powell's Books and support the Devil's Accountant.

"The last man! Yes, I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me."
-Mary Shelley, Journal, May 1824

This book is not for everyone. Let me start with that. It doesn't merely drip with romanticism, it is soaked through. With good reason too. Percy Bysshe Shelley was dead. Lord Byron was dead. Given the romantics propensity for melodrama, how could Mary Shelley not help but feel like the last authentic being of a tragically beautiful race. If you think that sounds sappy, then you probably won't make it through all 470 pages and should stop reading now.

Sodden as the book might be with nostalgia and romantic excess, the plot and visionary scope of the book is strong enough to easily keep it together. The "O my tragic love(s)" and "Ah! The point is now at hand(s)" are numerous and the heartfelt tears of joy and anguish are legion. Even more prolific still are the proclamations of eternal and undying love. It is enough at times to make even the most star-fated of readers nauseous.

I'm not doing a very good job of selling you on this book. I can tell.

Well, then to that plot I mentioned.

The setting is England in the twenty-first century. England has become (in this future world) an aristocracy, vaguely republican in its construction, and given to nepotism. That is essentially England as it has been since the Magna Carta. Her imagination also reigns in short when she envisions such radical technological shifts as steam powered boats and locomotives. Steam power had existed in theory for hundreds of years before the novel's proposed century. Thousands of years if you count Archimedes, which you should. Steam locomotives and ships were well into (or beyond) experimentation at the time of the novel's publication in 1826.

Not exactly Jules Verne's brand of amazing. So again, not so much... I am failing this book rapidly.

To the point: Mary Shelley foresees the causal outcome of an increasingly connected world. Though her vision of steamships is somewhat comically short-sighted, her vision of the outcome of rapid transportation (these are very powerful steamships, mind you that travel at high speeds) and its effect on commerce, politics and human interaction is one that is chillingly similar to our world today.

This future world's geopolitics involve increasingly more and smaller wars. Imperialism is cloaked behind republican (note the lower case "r" - I'm not party bashing) ideals and driven mostly by mercantile forces. The small, manageable wars are quieter than the vast Napoleonic contests that Shelley's England was getting over in her day. In a strange way, Mary Shelley foresees the advent of modern warfare. Impressively she sees it as a political and economic necessity as much as a military-strategic one.

Additionally and central to the novel's plot is the other outcome of increased human connectedness. Disease. As steamships travel at faster and faster rates so does a seemingly unstoppable plague that has emerged on the world scene. In a still very pastoral England, the novel's chief characters take note, even concern in some cases, over this new disease but are powerless to control its spread.

The novel is also a roman-a-clef in the sense that two or more characters represent both the persons and ideals of Shelley's lifelong friends, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. Percy Shelley manifests most clearly in the character of a young political idealist named Adrian. Byron appears in the noble bombast of Adrian's patron, the stalwart Lord Raymond. Add to this duo the young and greatly talented shepherd's son, Lionel, a man who Adrian admires and pushes to greater and greater heights and you complete the triangle.

It is not strange in the least that Mary Shelley should equate her status as woman with one of economic and social inferiority, requiring assistance from those of higher status to bring talents to bear. Certainly someone often called "the author of Frankenstein," as her pen-name often read, would be aware of lesser social status.

Despite the romantic excesses and tepid science fiction the reality of a quickly spreading disease and private interest fueled political collapse begins to sober the reader of the heady melodrama. Lionel emerges the protagonist, watching with great intelligence as his friends perish amidst the world's turmoil. Standing among the ruins of mankind, Lionel arrives at that most fated position in any end times story: the station of the last man. In a moment of reflection he dwells on a kindred soul.

For a moment I compared myself to that monarch of the waste - Robinson Crusoe. We had been both thrown companionless - he on the shore of a desolate island: I on that of a desolate world. I was rich in the so-called goods of life. If I turned my steps from the near barren scene, and entered any of the earth's million cities, I should find their wealth stored up for my accommodation - clothes, food, books, and a choice of dwelling beyond the comand of the princes of former times.

For all its prescience, The Last Man is yet also a quiet requiem for an era. The failed political ideals of the characters of Adrian (Percy Bysshe Shelley) and the impotence of Lord Raymond's (Lord Byron) bombastic energy are rendered painfully honest before the patient reader. Mary Shelley crafts a dirge for her people, the romantics, and in order to assure the funereal completeness to the requiem she must not only kill off her beloved friends and colleagues but also destroy the ideas they stood for.

The hyperbolic prose suddenly seems justified, does it not?

Sunday Review (Monday Edition) - Last Night In Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel

Sorry for the day-late posting, but the Accountant was in south Florida over the weekend, goofing off in the Florida Keys and catching a Miami Dolphins game. I want to thank all parties that participated.

Today I am excited to send you over to the Phoenix to read my review of Emily St. John Mandel's very engrossing, fast-paced and above all enjoyable debut novel, Last Night In Montreal.

Last Night in Montreal
by Emily Mandel

Here's the link. The review will explain everything about how this literary novel is plotted like a thriller but tender like a romance novel.

Tomorrow we will have Monday on Tuesday, with the theme being "The World Ending." For the Third Thursday post the DA will welcome Peter Christian Hall, author of American Fever to write on preventable and unpreventable disaster.

Carry on, work-week warriors.

Guest Post by Peter Christian Hall

Lucky us, because Peter Christian Hall is writing a post for the Devil's Accountant. I reviewed Peter's innovative and engrossing live novel American Fever back in September.

Peter's writing on the spread of neo-influenza for the Huffington Post as well as in his novel makes him tailor-made to join in the discussion of all things disastrous, which is of course the theme for the month.

Peter will write about the differences between, or perhaps rather the desire for differences between preventable and unpreventable disasters.

So please stay tuned.

Living In The Aftermath

Incidentally, the Ubaldo Ragono adaptation of Peter Matheson's classic horror novel, I Am Legend, is the best film version. The film, titled The Last Man On Earth stars non other than Vincent Price. With minimal overacting too. It can be watched in its entirety online, though I'd rather you just read the book.

The time has come. You gauge the length of shadows as you stand at your door watching the last light recede into the west. It is time to take stock of your day. Generator refueled? Check. Ammunition replenished? Check. You've eaten what is every night a potential last meal. In less than thirty minutes you will be under siege yet again. A bandoleer of wooden stakes and a pair of .45s on your hips give you all the confidence you'll be able to muster tonight. The end is nigh. Gird yourself well. It's you or them.

The most consistent feature to the end story is the notion of a survivor of the cataclysm finding a role in the aftermath. Whether resisting alien subjugation, surviving a zombie apocalypse or merely making it day to day amidst a resource depleted Earth's final years, it is the survivor we are most interested in.

Typically this role is reserved for a form of ubermench. Usually it is either a scientist or soldier, or perhaps a hybrid of the two vocations. Hollywood has particularly latched on to this latter formula. The notion is a sexy one. A man of intelligence and physical potency standing as the final testament to mankind's ingenuity and rugged drive to persist no matter the odds.

Today I have three books that somewhat diverge from that theme. There are many great books I could have chosen from. Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle are two that stand at the top of my list of books not reviewed here. Everyone in the world has read Cormac McCarthy's The Road and so I will not deign to inform people of its well-written but utterly paranoid and messianic vision of the end. If you haven't read it, you may want to. There will plenty of discussion and reading of the book since the film adaptation starring Viggo Mortenson (and apparently a lot more people than I though the plot would bear) is set to release on November 25th.

So that aside, let's get to the yarns I chose instead.


This Is The Way The World Ends by James Morrow. Harcourt Brace & Company. Fiction. Trade Paperback. 319 pp. ISBN: 0156002086. Click on the picture above to purchase the book from Powells Books and support the Devil's Accountant (the book, I believe, is currently out of print and only available via second hand copies).

With a title like that how could I not put this one on the list. This Is The Way The World Ends is a work of fiction that compares instantly to the best writing of Kurt Vonnegut and yet is written with something resembling more sobriety and concision of prose. James Morrow, to risk cliche, is extremely underrated. That being said, he has a very loyal following of serious readers, mostly philosophy or theology majors, and they will tell you that he is their favorite writer.

The plot is convoluted at best but in that wonderful science fiction satirical sort of way. George Paxton is a very ordinary man whose life is seemingly perfect. His wife is attractive and spontaneous and is always wearing a smirk that looks as though "she has just done something midly dangerous or lewd." His beautiful daughter is the light of his life and together the three of them have wonderful family time together. Add to this the fact that George delights in the smallest of things (a favorite movie on TV that evening will carry him through an entire day) and you have a nearly invincible American of the late 20th century. Nothing phases him. Onward and upward for George.

So it is with great excitement but some reservation that he is able to score a high end "SCOPAS" environmental survival suit for his daughter at an incredibly cheap price. The arms race is in full swing and while George Paxton has always believed in humanity's better nature he is yet willing to take advantage of providing this safety suit for his beloved daughter. The cost is low and all he needs to do is sign on the dotted line.

Then the world ends and poor George Paxton and a handful of military elites are the lone survivors.

Morrow is above all a moralist. His tales are nearly always cautionary satires that seek to question conventional theological or secular notions. Mainly test secular concepts and disparage theological ones.

Thus it is without anything like shock that the reader finds George Paxton being put on trial for crimes against mankind's future. Paxton and the military scientists find themselves before a strange race calling themselves "the Unadmitted", which is a hint as to their actual origin. Seemingly alien, the Unadmitted hold Paxton as responsible as those who pressed the buttons because his agreeing to the terms of the purchase of the environmental suit are the same as acceptance of the nuclear holocaust the suit is representative of.

Add in Nostradamus as a character and you have a bizarrely wonderful satire of humanity's greatest failing: complacence.


I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. Orb. Fiction. Trade Paperback. ISBN: 031286504x. 317 pp. Click on the picture above to purchase the book from Powells Books and support the Devil's Accountant.

Not exactly a lost book, but certainly one that may be a little misunderstood. If you have seen any of the movie adaptations of Matheson's brilliant horror story and never read the book then you have no idea what you're missing. The dark sarcasm and dripping cynicism of I Am Legend is improved upon only by the terse clarity of the writer's handiwork.

Robert Neville is the last man on earth and, as the tag line goes, he is not alone. The concept is a study in how implication creates tension. The finest example of this sort of situation via implication dates back to 1870 when Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote possibly the shortest horror story ever.

"A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the whole world; every other living thing is dead. The doorbell rings."

Matheson, unlike the scriptwriters who adapted his book, was careful to maintain tension in non action oriented ways. The book is a clever stew of humor, tension and social criticism. It has it's share of things desirable to Hollywood, namely violence and sexual content, but they are delivered with a patience and nuance that Hollywood has never been able to attain.

There are several differences between the novel and the movies worth noting. The creatures are not zombies as portrayed in the Will Smith version. They are vampires or at least creatures that resemble vampires and suffer from the weaknesses that typically plague the bloodsucking race. They are also not as anonymous as the white-faced creatures of the Charlton Heston move, "The Omega Man" or again, as the ravenous zombies in the Smith movie. Instead Matheson carefully bestows upon them enough humanity to add complexity to the plot.

Neville is the last man on Earth, and as the last man he is starved of companionship. Thus a shapely vampire vixen dancing half-clothed on his lawn at night is always a temptation he is finds hard to resist. Darker still are the moments when he hunts the vampires and comes upon an attractive female sleeping in the catatonic manner they do during the day. Neville is a clever but brutish sort of man and his lust often grows too strong for his mind to dismiss. He wrestles with questions of rape. Is it rape? Is it wrong? Are they human? It is unnerving to read these portions to say the least.

Then there is the humorous device of Ben Cortman, Neville's neighbor and former coworker. Cortman leads the charge to his doorstep every night, for it is there at his fortress like house that the horde of vampires gather every evening, and monotonously calls to Robert, "Come out, Neville!" It drives Neville to fits of laughter and insanity, sometimes at the same time.


(cover art to the Doubleday bookclub edition.)

The cleverness of this book lies in the fact that Robert Neville is an ordinary man. His being so allows the author to make his most dramatic point, which is thoroughly lost in the supermen Hollywood has paraded in the role. The essential point of Matheson's book is not that Neville is great or good but instead fearfully potent. Mankind has transformed into something new and Neville is the remainder of some other time. He violently hunts them by day, teeming with barely contained lust and unbridled hatred. In a world populated by inhuman creatures it is Robert Neville that has become the monster.

The edition published by Orb contains a selection of other tales by Matheson and all are worth reading. I Am Legend itself is only 150 pages or so and is a quick and essential read. There are few books that will make you feel as uncomfortably mirthful as this cruel tale of man's last stand.


After London by Richard Jefferies. Out-Of-Print (a few reprint publishers are maintaining this book in print - see above). Published originally in 1885 by Casell & Company Ltd., London. Click on the picture above to purchase the book from Powells Books and support the Devil's Accountant.

Far ahead of its time this slender novel contains many observations that might seem amazingly prescient to the modern reader. Jefferies was a naturalist and near-Luddite activist for English rural life. In After London he depicts a somewhat conflicted view of an England living in the aftermath of technological calamity.

I say conflicted because the fall of industrial society sets up a return to feudal society and a low-tech, roughly Middle Ages type economy and technological outlook. Swords and spears have replaced rifles and cannons. This would have been much to Jefferies delight, or so I suppose from the zeal in which he writes of a rural barony in the low tech future.

On the inverse there is the way in which this situation is arrived at. While no one knows for sure, the lore all hints at some sort of technologically based, possibly oil related disaster that some have equated with a sort of nascent peak theory. While I won't grant Jefferies that kind of foresight, I will praise his inventive story.

The middle of England has been replaced by a giant lake. The old metropolises like London are now dangerous havens of gypsies and toxic remainders of the old times. Jefferies takes careful and classically British care codifying the species of flora and fauna that exist in this new world, particularly the types of wild dogs that inhabit the wilderness.

In classic storybook fashion the novel itself concerns young Sir Felix Aquilas. Felix is a bookish knight who is better with the bow and arrow than with the sword and better still with the tomb of forgotten lore. His family is impoverished nobility and in a dangerous state of decline.

There is of course a love interest, who deeply cares for Felix despite the young bookish knight's lack of self-confidence and belief that he is not worthy of her love. Naturally they have been friends and casual kissing partners since childhood and naturally he resolves to become worthy of her love via adventure.

A quick and naive read, After London is a pleasant story fit for young adults. The writing is not incredible and the plot is often seemingly schizophrenic, but the place of this curious little book in the literary tradition of apocalyptic tales is worth noting.

Thus we have.

Sunday Review: The Chill by Romano Bilenchi

The Accountant is kind of in a rush this morning, but wants to pause to say a few things here about Europa Editions, the publisher of The Chill by Romano Bilenchi.

At Wolfgang Books in Phoenixville you will find a display of all the Europa titles together on one shelf. As you look at the quality production of the bindings and the intriguing Pan-World names of the diverse selection of author's in translation you will be at first impressed, second curious and third dismayed.

Chances are you will not recognize the names on the books nor their titles. This might dissuade you from taking a gamble on picking up a volume and giving it a go.

Don't let it. The Chill is one of the best books I've read this year, including titles for the DA's thematic monthly installments. After reading it I decided to read another Europa Editions title, Between Two Seas by the Calabrian author, Carmine Abate. So far so great.

Basically I am saying to just pick a title at random and thoroughly enjoy.

Here is the link to the Phoenix article on The Chill. Enjoy.

See you all tomorrow for another installment in this end times themed month.

The Chill
by Romano Bilenchi

Good Books To Read BEFORE The World Ends

When the world is ending you'd better be ready to bring it like MacGyver.

The scenario really doesn't matter, but if you're planning on outlasting the decline and fall of civilization you're going to need to know a few things. Can you tan a hide? Make a bow and arrow? How about flint knapping? Can you do that? No. Well, let's fix that.

If we take Cormac McCarthy's word for it (The Road), mankind will devolve into a race of filthy flesh-eating monsters within mere months of the world's demise. So as water, food and ammunition begins to grow scarce you will need to be able to make things, catch things, find things and generally wax John Rambo in order to survive.

So start doing some push-ups, don a tattered red head band and tie a jade Buddha around your neck. It's time to get self-reliant.


When Technology Fails: A Manual For Self-Reliance & Planetary Survival by Matthew Stein. Chelsea Green Publishing. White River Junction, Vermont. Folio Paperback. ISBN: 9781933392837. $30. Click the book cover above to purchase a copy and support the Devil's Accountant.

To say Stein's book is impressive is to describe Niagra Falls as misty. A mechanical engineer with a degree from MIT, Stein has written the book on self-sufficiency. The book is unbelievable packed with information, so much so, that I am certain that owning a copy of it places you on a FBI list of some sort.

Contents

I. An Introduction To Self-Reliance
II. Present Trends, Possible Futures
III. Supplies & Preparation
IV. Emergency Measures For Survival
V. Water
VI. Food: Growing, Foraging, Hunting & Storing
VII. Shelter & Buildings
VIII. First Aid
IX. Low-Tech Medicine & Healing
X. Clothing & Textiles
XI. Energy, Heat & Power
XII. Metalworking
XIII. Utensils & Storage
XIV. Better Living Through Low-Tech Chemistry
XV. Engineering, Machines & Materials

Seriously. From fletchery to canning, with the production of a solar-power device capping it off, Stein's book is singularly full. Every section begins with an introduction and finishes with suggested further reading and a list of resources for project completion. It could be a company that makes inexpensive collapsible homes or a book that outlines additional sturctures that can be raised from natural goods. The book is simply amazing.

I am not a paranoid, let that be said. I am not someone who even believes that food and oil issues will unwind society. I am also curious enough to want to investigate questions of our modern lack of self-reliance. As a society we are thoroughly dependent on finished products and this is so much so that we often have no idea what goes into the making of these products. Whether the genetic foodstuffs of Monsanto or the components of a flashlight, we are embarrassingly unaware.

Stein's book isn't just a manual of production techniques and useful knowledge. In his sections on cataclysmic possibilities and environmental responsibility we find a comment on what can be done more so than what hasn't been done.

Too much of this sort of writing is composed of a grizzled environmentalist crowing "I told you so" and generally longing for some catastrophe to prove their life's work worth while.

In any case, if you want to become a person capable of transforming yourself into a hybrid hero combining MacGyver and Daniel Boone, well, this is your book.


Food In History by Reay Tannahill. Three Rivers Press. New York. History. Trade Paperback. ISBN: 0517884046. $16.95. Click the book cover above to purchase a copy and support the Devil's Accountant.

It's amazing when a lay person writes the book that redefines how a historical view is formed. Reay Tannahill's Food In History is perhaps the most singular example of such a work. First published in 1973 and revised in 1988, the book is both well-researched and creative.

When living in the later stages of the end times we have surely arrived at a total return to subsistence culture. Perhaps all semblances of high society are gone. In its place we find ourselves roving tribes, hunting and gathering just like the first humans. You however are the keeper of the light, as you've read Stein's book as well as Tannahill.

Instantly you recognize the germinating seeds of meals past sprouting out of last season's trash. You tell the ragged others to dig these plants up and plant them in cleaner areas, with more space and light. Soon you are eating squash, corn or whatever the local flora might be. Naturally you are the leader or your tribe and on a wind-swept heath you look out over the plains full of hoofed mammals and formulate plans on rebuilding society. Good thing you read the Devil's Accountant.

Kidding aside, the story of man's relationship with food is fascinating. Luck, skill and random observations about food prove to be the fulcrum for man's lifting of society from nomadic subsistence to cultured order. Tannahill poses many theories about the transition, many of them founded in primary research and others coaxed forward by clever hypothesis.

Food In History is more than a end of days book, of course. Foodies and history buggs will delight in reading about the transition of subsistence gathering to celebratory feasts. Food, like the cultures it fueled, became something to relish, season and enjoy.

One interesting aspect to this book is how it relates to different people with varying levels of interest in food. For the average American it will call to attention how perverse fast food gluttony is. It will also force health conscious food activists to realize that the vegetable driven world of settled culture both diminished and created man. With the advent of farming we grew smaller and weaker. Not necessarily because of some retardation of Darwinian principles but because of the rise of lower protein diets. Bread and butter a strong man does not make.

At the same time, the rise of agrarian culture allowed man to have something we did not have as hunter gatherers. Time. Art, religion, science and nearly every other "knowledge" that we define ourselves by today was born of the free time that farming allowed. Populations grew. With fences and better tools we once and for all rose above the beasts.


The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Oxford's World Classics. Fiction. Trade paperback. ISBN: 9780199553976. $7.95. Click the book cover above to purchase a copy and support the Devil's Accountant.

Undoubtedly you are going to need to understand the mindset of survivalism. Coupled with the notion that you might end up being the last person on earth, which is often the case, you will also need to understand the burden of solitude.

Enter plucky British reserve and can-do-it attitude. Spending nearly thirty years on a desert island, the majority of which alone, Robinson Crusoe not only maintains his sanity but creates a sort of society of one.

Robinson Crusoe is of course a classic. Published in 1719 it is one of the first English novels and in many ways one of the earliest pieces of fictional long prose. While there may be much to glean from its pages from a standpoint of survival skills, the book's clear didactic moment is found in its treatment of the psychology of survivalism. Or, as James Joyce observed, it's psychology of conquest. Survival and conquest are closely related, and the perfect mindset for either is not one you're going to find agreeable.

"He is the true prototype of the British colonist. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity."
-James Joyce, Daniel Defoe

The apathy may be your only way to stave off insanity. It is a grim existence, the role of last person on Earth. You will have to become an asexual god-being, capable of lording over the land and beasts with cruel efficiency. If you should encounter another you will need to either subjugate or ally with great expedience.

You laugh. But when it's you versus me in a fight to the death over the last chicken wing, you had better have your head on straight because I'm bringing the heat.

This is going to be a fun month. Next week's post will be on different conceptions of life after the flood, so to speak. Zombies and bombs included.

November 2009 - The End Of Times

Mayan prediction for the world's demise? Don't count on it, folks.

I will term it obsession. How else can you describe man's need to codify and describe the way in which the world ends? Whether we're talking about the recent craze over the Mayan calendar, the Revelation of St. John or the misguided statistics of Sir Thomas Malthus' The Principle Of Population, we as a people have always been drawn by thoughts of a collective end.

Some have been more fanciful than others. The Greek and Norse myths have a wonderful final battle of sorts, none more dramatic than the Norse Ragnarok. I mean, what is more dramatic than a giant wolf, whose slavering maw touches both the heavens and dredges the bottom of the sea, devouring Odin in a single vengeful gulp? Nothing, I say.

The last century certainly had no shortage of end stories, some of them founded in political realities. The nuclear bomb is a doomsday device. From Bertrand Russel to Nevil Shute, the reality of a nuclear holocaust is one end scenario that should in fact terrify.

The twentieth century is not innocent of ridiculousness though. Enter the Zombie. A legion of undeath is not a new story, in fact Babylonian myths defining the first Hell involve the goddess of the under world threatening the world with a ravenous legion of the flesh-eating dead.

I won't deign to call this precedence.

Instead we expanded this storyline to include genetic mutations, born of nuclear waste or unstoppable viruses. Lions, tigers and bears: Oh my!

I would be remiss to fail in mentioning that quintessential of modern myths, the alien invasion. Whether of the 1940's communication breakdown type or the more current bloodthirsty Michael Bay variety. There, I mentioned them.

So what does this all mean? Why am I writing this? Because we have a honest to goodness full month of the Devil's Accountant on tap. The subject for the month is the end of times.

Enjoy.

Sunday Review: The nook, The Kindle and The Big Book Swindle

Major hangover in effect today folks. I try and elevate my drinking game every Halloween.

So less talk more linking. In this week's Off The Shelf I take on Barnes & Noble's late entry to the e-book market and manage to fit in a few jabs at Amazon's Kindle. Not so much the Kindle as technology really, more so the business practices of Amazon and B&N.

Enjoy. Back to vaguely watching the World Series.