Review: "Jennifer the Damned"

When my mother sat me down at the kitchen table one night, about a month before my 

class was scheduled to receive Holy Communion, I had no idea she was about to tear my world apart. My mind could not conceive of anything worse than that she was going to have to work a double shift again.

‘Jennifer, you won’t be receiving Communion with the rest of your class.’

Tiny shards of pink crystal hope exploded inside my heart, lacerating my dreams. ‘Why?’

‘Communion is not meant for us.’

‘Sister Joan says it’s meant for everyone, to save our souls from the devil.’

My mother smiled her crooked, perverse smile. ‘Jennifer, you and I … we don’t have souls.’

—Karen Ullo, Jennifer the Damned

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So not only is Catholic vampire fiction its whole own subgenre, we have a Facebook page now! We are: Karen Ullo (Jennifer the Damned), Eleanor Bourg Nicholson (A Bloody Habit), J. B. Toner (Whisper Music), and myself (Death’s Dream Kingdom). I’ll be reviewing my three compatriots’ novels, beginning here with Mrs Ullo’s book, which I got last week and whose nigh-400-pages I devoured in just a few days. (All four novels, I believe, can be purchased on Amazon; I have included direct-from-publisher links for each, both because the books are sometimes cheaper that way and because screw Amazon.)

Jennifer the Damned is set in contemporary Louisiana and California. The titular Jennifer was stolen from her birth mother by the lovely, heartless, and masterful Helen Carshaw, a vampire centuries old, who chose Jennifer as her protégé. She raises Jennifer as her own daughter—feeding her only the raw or rare meat that she can digest—and places her in Catholic school, in order to nurture her in both knowledge of God’s love for humanity and hatred that that love is withheld from the likes of them.

As the novel opens, Helen has disappeared, and Jennifer Carshaw has been in the care of a small convent of teaching nuns for a few years. She has been receiving a robustly Catholic education, and even a fairly normal high-school-misfit social experience—save that she alone is excluded from the sacraments, and especially from the Communion, that she so badly yearns for and envies her classmates for being able to access.

But Jennifer is experiencing her transfiguration into a full-fledged vampire, and the insatiable bloodlust that goes with it. The very smell of the Precious Blood at Mass drives her close to blind frenzy. Left to navigate undeath on her own, Jennifer decides to attempt a balance between her secret life as a vampire and the life she wants as a human being.

Here Be Spoilers

(Jump to Next Section to Skip Them)

The attempt, though valiant, fails. Jennifer learns a degree of self-control and develops the cunning to dispose of her kills without leaving any incriminating evidence behind, but she cannot truly balance the demands of the human life she has led till now with the new urges of the vampire: after a handful of anonymous disappearances, she loses control and kills the boy she has been dating. Around the same time, Helen’s bizarre plans, which involved turning a classmate of Jennifer’s named Jeremy into a vampire as her ‘brother,’ gradually become clearer: Jennifer despairs of ever managing a semblance of human life at home, and, as the FBI zero in on her, finding more and more evidence of her murders, she deserts the nuns and her school, adopting a false identity and telling Jeremy how to reach her later.

A few years later, while she is living in Los Angeles and working as a makeup artist, she meets someone new, a young actor named Conner who takes a shine to her. She begins toying once again with the idea of leading a human life, at least part of the time. But Jeremy, who is now experiencing his own growth into full vampire-hood, comes to find her: abandoned by their pseudo-mother, they have only each other to rely on as fellow undead. Nevertheless Jennifer opens herself up, little by little, to Conner’s increasing affection and seriousness about their relationship. Against all her prior experience, Jennifer even begins to see signs of mortality returning to her body—until her false identity is exposed and, like a pantomime demon out of a trap-door, Helen emerges. Helen informs them that she, Jennifer, has become the most pathetic of creatures, a mortal vampire, and demands that her two pseudo-children kill Conner and come with her; driven by rebellion and revenge for the humanity she took from them, they instead destroy her.

Jennifer leaves Conner, hospitalized after their confrontation with Helen, with a note expressing her regret and her love for him, and returns to Louisiana and the nuns. She confesses what she has been and done, including all her murders, and agrees to face justice, asking only to receive the Eucharist first, now that she at long last is sure she has a soul. The priest consents, she drinks the Precious Blood, and there the novel ends.

(Spoilers End)

Here Be Lit-Crit

Jennifer the Damned is comparable to Twilight in premise, yet with the superior craftsmanship of Anne Rice. It takes the psychological and spiritual gravity of being a vampire seriously, in a way that many of its rivals fail to do, even Dracula, whose vampires are indeed evil but merely evil, without the depth of a human sinner or even of a fallen angel like the possessed Weston of Perelandra. Feeling cut off from humanity not merely in a social way, but in an urgently sacramental sense, is something I’ve rarely come across outside of Rice’s work. I wonder whether the choice of Louisiana, such an important location in Interview With the Vampire, may itself be a tribute to Rice. (Louisiana has become virtually the Transylvania of Southern Gothic, also popping up in Vampire: The Requiem and the stories of Jacques St Germain).

Structurally, the novel works well enough; stylistically, though it has a few sags into cliché, it’s generally very good—better than Dracula. But where Jennifer the Damned really shines is its pacing. This is itself a cliché, I know, but I couldn’t put it down! I always needed to know what was going to happen next: I cared what happened to Jennifer and the people around her.

If the novel has weaknesses, they are two: audience grasp of the mechanics of vampirism, and the ending. Now, it is appropriate that we don’t fully understand how being a vampire works at the beginning, partly because we the readers are learning with Jennifer as the story progresses. However, a major mechanical shift away from what we had been led to think, one that’s highly plot-relevant, takes place fairly close to the end without really being foreshadowed. This leaves us feeling more like the mechanics have been fiddled with to convenience the plot, than that we are continuing to learn with Jennifer and that if we’d been a little cannier with the facts we had we might have seen this twist coming. It’s not a fatal flaw but it’s the worse of the two, in my opinion.

The other flaw is that the closing feels kind of rushed. Jennifer’s love interest in the last third of the book falls for her so quickly that I was inclined to put it down to vampire charm, but then that explanation seemed to be repudiated, which resulted in the romance coming across as over-idealized—though, to be fair, not cloying or problematic like Stephenie Meyer’s; the characters’ behavior and dialogue stays convincing. The one truly important death of the book happens with little fanfare, which was a real disappointment. And while I can’t quite bring myself to call this a problem—because if I’m truthful, it’s kind of the point of the book—I am furious over the openness of the very end! I want there to be sequels so I can find out, even indirectly, what happened.

Should You Read It?

If you are a fan of vampire literature or coming-of-age stories, definitely! All in all I give Jennifer the Damned a B+, with the note that it could’ve gotten an A- if Ullo had stuck the landing just a little better (and if there are sequels I am optimistic that she will). Go forth and buy.

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Review: "Velvet Buzzsaw"

‘But why … you’ve said Lestat shouldn't have made you start with people … Did you mean … Do you mean for you it was an æsthetic choice, not a moral one?’

‘Had you asked me then, I would have told you it was æsthetic, that I wished to understand death in stages. [...] But it was moral. Because all æsthetic decisions are moral, really.’ 

—Anne Rice, Interview With the Vampire

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A couple weeks ago, partly on a whim and partly because of its star-studded cast—including Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, John Malkovich, and Toni Collette (who in my opinion can do no wrong even in bad stuff)—I gave Velvet Buzzsaw a try. And I gotta say, while uneven in its execution, it is a delightful, clever, seriously weird-ass movie.

The premise and plot are straightforward enough. It is set in the elite art world of Los Angeles, where inter-gallery rivalries, reviewers that can canonize or damn at will, and above all, whatever is the hot new thing, act as god-emperors. Josephina, a Haze Gallery employee, discovers that a recluse named Vetril Dease who lived in an apartment neighboring hers has died, and left behind him a massive trove of paintings—his own work. She quietly steals them and shows them to her gallery’s owner, Rhodora, and a professional art critic and new flame, Morf Vandewalt. Both immediately declare Dease a master, and the Haze Gallery begins to sell the paintings for tens of thousands of dollars, while carefully controlling the number of paintings available in order to inflate their market value.

But as Dease’s work is traded, and as a network of shallow, faithless, and constantly changing relationships swirls around the characters’ successes, some people begin to notice strange things: one man insists that the painted figures slowly move, Vandewalt discovers Dease’s horror-stricken past, and a scientist discovers that part of the paintings’ curious appearance comes from Dease mixing his own blood and flesh with the paint. And then, one by one, the people who have profited from selling Dease’s work begin to die in mysterious, theatrical ways …

Some minor perks: it was nice to see a little bisexual representation in this, with Gyllenhaal playing a bisexual man for the second time (yes Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain is bi, I will fight you on this). Also, the names in this are a preposterous delight. Vetril Dease? Morf Vandewalt? Rhodora Haze? Jon Dondon? HA! There may be significance in some of the names: Morf and Haze suggest a certain surreality, and Vetril Dease is an anagram of 'devil satire,' though apparently Gilroy found that name in a census record.

Hereafter Be Film Criticism/Spoilers

(skip to the closing paragraph if you hate either)

Dease’s spirit is the culprit; or, if you prefer, the paintings are, imbued through his flesh and blood with his own determination that they should be destroyed, and murdering those who work to thwart this purpose along the way. Dondon, a gallery owner, is throttled with his own scarf by a hand emerging from a display; Gretchen, a gossipy, manipulative curator, loses an arm in a malfunctioning interactive sculpture and bleeds to death, and is mistaken the next morning for a part of the piece; Josephina is lured into a mysterious display of graffiti-style paintings whose colors leak out of their frames and consume her, trapping her as a streetside mural; Morf, increasingly guilty over his harsh reviews and recognizing the peril of Dease’s work too late, is trapped by an animated sculpture and killed. Dan Gilroy, the creator and director of the film, embraces the campiness of his narrative machine, citing films like The Ring and Final Destination as inspirations. And the silliness of the violence (and occasionally of the special effects, as with Gretchen’s dismemberment) forms a counterpoint to the frivolity of the victims’ effete, insincere world.

Like many horror films, Velvet Buzzsaw is a pronouncedly moralistic film. Six deaths are shown in total. Two—Josephina, who made the initial discovery and enacted the initial theft, and Gretchen, a greedy Machiavellian of gallery politics—are both represented as having effectively become works of art, and these two are the victims least invested in actually appreciating art for its own sake: on finding out that her lover is abandoning the Haze Gallery to return to his lower-class art collective, Josephina tells him icily, and unwittingly mere minutes before her death, ‘What’s the point of art if no one sees it?’

Josephina’s decline in character is interestingly marked out toward its beginning, by her chance encounter with a man from Parlack (the company that owns the building, he explains); the name evokes the ‘person from Porlock’ who ruined Coleridge’s attempt to recollect his dreamt poem Kubla Khan. In this case, the disturbance is superficially opposite, since it is thanks to the man from Parlack that Josephina finds Dease’s work, yet Parlack and Porlock effect the same thing at a deeper level, namely the separation of their ‘targets’ from immersion in art; for it is, paradoxically, the discovery of Dease that seals Josephina’s fate as a woman who can no longer see art as something to be made for the mere pleasure of creation, and appreciated in those terms, but only as something to be profited from, whether the profit be in money or in prestige.

A slightly different Æsop is represented in the deaths of Morf and Rhodora. Morf, always a rather cruel, flippant critic, consents to Josephina’s request (while the two are romantically involved) to give a bad review to an artist that he actually does like. Rhodora is revealed early on in the film to have been one half of an anarchistic punk band, the eponymous Velvet Buzzsaw, in her younger days; yet when we meet her she is the queen of LA’s most snobbish elite. Both, Morf especially, get some handle on what is going on as the bodies and bizarre occurrences pile up; Morf is genre savvy enough not only to notice that his own haunting by Dease began from the point where he corrupted his integrity as an art critic to satisfy his lover, but to try to deal with the problem by locking away his own pieces by Dease and begging Rhodora to do the same with all the remaining collection. Too little, too late: the sculpture that kills him is one he had given a withering review to at the beginning of the film (before Dease’s work had been discovered by anybody), which he had criticized not for being poor in technique or a fundamentally bad idea, but basically for being something he had seen done before.

Rhodora seems to be within inches of escape. She has every piece of art, by Dease and everyone else, removed from her home and securely stored. But there are two pieces of art that she cannot divest herself of, a pair of tattoos. One is seen briefly on her arm, early in the film, and reads ‘No Death No Art’; but her downfall is the other, which is appropriately on the back of her shoulder, just out of sight. It is her band name, surrounded by a buzzsaw, and when she accidentally recreates a Dease composition, her tattoo becomes animated and tears her apart.

Three characters who are intimately involved with the Dease plot do escape with their lives: Coco (played by Natalia Dyer of Stranger Things fame), Piers, and Damrish. Coco is a young office assistant who is trying to learn the game of rivalry and manipulation that helped make the other characters successful—in practice, angling to be the next Gretchen. But, after being taken on as a personal assistant by three of the victims and finding each of them dead the next morning, she releases a perfectly timed scream of ‘FUCK ME!’ and gives up on LA entirely. The only thing of Dease’s that she takes with her, perhaps unwittingly, is his cat, and as far as we know from the film she is spared: not profiting from his art directly at any point, and generous enough to care for his cat, we might even read it as Dease’s ghost driving her away out of kindness.

Piers and Damrish, two professional artists, escape Dease’s wrath in a different way. They admire his art as art, and in fact it helps inspire Damrish to reject the elite art world and return to the salt-of-the-earth collective that he had been part of before. Piers, who is presented through most of the film as feeling that he’s lost his creativity after getting sober, is captivated by Dease’s paintings, and works hard to rediscover his own artistic passion; and the credits play over Piers on the beach, alone, drawing sweeping curves and loops and shapes with a piece of driftwood, once again creating simply to create and not for some ostensible profit.

The flaw that makes Velvet Buzzsaw good rather than great is closely linked to one of its finest virtues. The script, acting, and cinematography are all exquisite; but because the film is attempting a certain campiness in its horror, it leaves the viewer with a bizarre clash of tones. Ideally the craftsmanship should have contributed to the atmosphere of the striking, yet essentially superficial art world. But the expert execution makes these characters and their concerns feel more profound than they have any right to, and in consequence, the deaths come of as an uneasy mixture of tragic with tragicomic. I think the correct solution here would have been to make the more apparently dignified characters (e.g. Josephina and Gretchen) just a little more over-the-top than they are, to draw the film into the campiness that was Gilroy’s stated aim. The unevenness of tone in the movie as it stands is a serious problem—it either gives the audience whiplash or, more likely, produces a vague sense of distaste that can’t be definitely pinned on any one thing (unless it were the truly goofy special effects used for Gretchen’s dismemberment).

Should You Watch It?

I give Velvet Buzzsaw a firm B+, and it would’ve scraped an A if it had fixed its tone problem. So I’d say that if you have a particular taste for satire, horror, or modern art, you’ll likely enjoy this film. If you’re neutral toward those things, I wouldn’t avoid this movie by any means, but I wouldn’t make a point of seeing it. And finally, if you dislike any of the three but you’re trying to be open-minded, this is not the film by which to give them a second chance: go with a horror-satire like Tucker and Dale vs Evil or a genuine horror classic like The Babadook instead.

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2018 Year in Revue

It’s time for my annual New Year’s Eve arts review. Music was (for me) a little thin this year, except that Florence + the Machine released High as Hope, from which the singles ‘Big God’ and especially ‘Hunger’ were remarkable. The imagery of the music video for ‘Hunger’ is intensely eucharistic—a statue that seems to provoke religious rapture in multiple people, with holes in its hand and its chest (one person puts his finger into the latter, like St Thomas), from which plants are shown growing; a man whispering into another man’s ear in a wide, church-like building, irresistibly evocative of both confession and the intimacy of lovers; the use of arches, stained glass, and light falling from above; a kneeling man surrounded by men who have laid their hands on his shoulders, as if consecrating him; the very title of the song (originally rooted in her confession of an eating disorder, and then reworked as a reference to desire in general); and the overpowering line You make a fool of death with your beauty. Every time I watch it I am reduced to tears.

Van Hansis and Kit Williamson as Thom and Cal in EastSiders

Film and television were stronger. I actually went to theaters to see two different movies this year: Love, Simon and A Quiet Place, both of which I reviewed; Netflix’s Alex Strangelove was a fun, forgettable knockoff of the former. There were a number of excellent TV shows I discovered, though I was often late to the game. Kit Williamson’s EastSiders, a dark gay comedy set in LA which I think wrapped up its final season this year, has some of the best acting I’ve ever seen and a very biting humor; Ken Arpino’s The Queens Project on YouTube (a show I admit I only started watching for B. J. Gruber’s pecs), a light gay comedy set in New York, is a witty, endearing, ludicrous delight, and they had better make a fourth seasons or I will be extremely angry. Big Mouth is an animated surrealist comedy about adolescence, the brainchild of Nick Kroll and featuring John Mulaney among others: it released a mostly-disappointing and frequently disgusting (but not in a funny way) second season this year, but the first season was golden and I retain the hope that the third season will be a return to form.

Finally, the second and fifth seasons of American Horror Story (Asylum and Hotel) were quite engaging, and the seventh, Cult, was an outright masterpiece that proves that Evan Peters and Sarah Paulson between them should have all of the academy awards forever. Asylum, set principally in a Catholic institute for the insane in the 1960s, got rather squirrely and didn’t really seem clear on what arc it wanted for the monsignor’s character; on the other hand, Frances Conroy’s performance as the Angel of Death was beautiful, and Jessica Lange as Sister Jude was by turns infuriating, tragic, and winsome, a masterful execution of an exceptionally complex character. Hotel, which famously featured Lady Gaga in a leading role, was more cohesive, and showcased the wider talent of Peters and Paulson, as well as Mare Winningham and Kathy Bates; it combines vampires on the one hand with serial killers and ghosts on the other, with the rewarding effect of keeping both properly horrifying, striking the balance that Anne Rice successfully did (and that her successors have cheapened) between humanity and monstrosity which makes such creatures artistically interesting in the first place.

But Cult is head and shoulders above its predecessors. I can think of one plot problem; that is the sole charge I have to lay against it. Set during and after the 2016 election, it follows both a quasi-political cult centered on the charismatic but unbalanced Kai Anderson (played by Peters), and the terrorizing of Ally Mayfair-Richards (Paulson) by possibly hallucinatory clowns: partly as a nod to the unbelievably creepy real life clown sightings of 2016, and partly because come on, clowns are that disturbing. I won’t spoil it—unless you are a Patreon sponsor, in which case I’ve posted a spoileriffic review of the thematic links between AHS: Cult and the fairy-tale The Snow Queen, many of them revolving around the often-forgotten plot element of the evil mirror that lies behind the latter story: the mirror shows only the ugliness of the world, and has been broken into countless shards that are scattered through the world. The acting, writing, pace, and costumes in Cult are all extraordinary, which, given the complexity of the plot (much of which is rooted in 60s and 70s despite the contemporary setting) and of some of the principal roles (especially Peters’ and Paulson’s), is a laudable accomplishment. I recommend it to anyone who has any taste for horror.

The Snow Queen by Elena Ringo, 1998

And last of all, to my ten chief readerships the world over:

Happy New Year

С Новым Годом

Bonne Année

Щасливого Нового Року

Frohes Neues Jar

Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku

Bhliain Nua Sásta

سنه جديده سعيده

শুভ ণববষ

Feliz Ano Novo

See you all in 2019!

The Banquet

The Pope has laid a princely feast

Upon the Church’s board:

In files each cardinal, bishop, priest—

The chosen of the Lord.

No expense spared, each place is set

With cups of gold and gem,

Napkins of silk as black as jet,

White plates of porcelain.

The joint is carved, the wine is poured

(But the fish would not fry);

Bishop with bishop firm concord

Holds, over roasted thigh.

Their charities have got them fame,

As promised in the Law.

A Virgin in a silvered frame

Smiles blind at their foie gras.

They their vexatious Church affairs

Delicately discuss:

How laws oppress, tithes are impaired,

And how the laymen fuss.

Their programs they accept and bless,

Their institutes exalt,

Sitting serene as stone grotesques

Or statues made of salt.

The Pope rises, and calls a toast:

‘The Body and the Blood.’

The college nods. The white-clad ghost

Imbibes the scarlet flood.

The tipsiest are talkative,

The sober ones are mute:

All eye each other, secretive,

While the maid serves the fruit.

Little is left of their repast

Below the Mother mild:

They licked the rib-cage bright as brass,

The rib-cage of a child.

Review: "A Quiet Place"

✠ ✠ ✠

Horror seems to be experiencing something of a renaissance. After a decade or three of mostly formulaic and forgettable movies, films like V/H/S, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Babadook, The VVitch, Hush, The Invitation, and IT are a cut above the jump-scare-bound slasher films and predictable monsters of the nineties. I don’t often see movies while they’re still in the theater, but I went to see A Quiet Place, and loved it.

The premise of the film is that a race of man-eating creatures (whose origin, wisely in my opinion, is never explained) that are blind and hunt by sound have taken over, and those who survive have done so by never making more noise than a whisper, even creating safe outdoor paths out of sand on which they walk barefoot. The story follows a family eking out an agricultural living in the countryside, raising a deaf daughter and a hearing son—and trying to construct a soundproof room in their home, due to the baby they’re expecting. But even before the birth, keeping silent isn’t easy.

The Strong Points

The acting is outstanding at every point, whether spoken or signed. The cinematography is beautiful, taking in great sweeping shots of upstate New York’s forested mountains; the clear autumn sunshine provides a creepy counterpoint to the terror stalking the characters. The use of silence, which so many movies are afraid of, is superb, varying enough with ambient and exceptional sounds to engage the viewer, while still being continuous enough to effectively communicate the sense of massive wariness that is a ceaseless aspect of these characters’ lives. Even small details, like substitute Monopoly pieces made from yarn, are incorporated.

Like Hush, A Quiet Place made innovative use of a deaf protagonist. Ironically enough for a medium that started without sound, there don’t seem to be many of these: The Miracle Worker, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and Children of a Lesser God are the only others I’m familiar with. The film doesn’t (as Lonely Hunter did) break with the not-wholly-satisfying tradition of having the character’s deafness be central to the movie, and perhaps it couldn’t, given its premise; but it does avoid the more blatant pitfall of representing deafness solely as something to be overcome, and gives the character in question opportunities to use it to her advantage in key ways.

The Weak Points

The script isn’t great. The acting and directing compensate considerably; but the dialogue tends to fall victim to cliché in the more emotional moments of the film, which in turn causes their artistry to lurch uncomfortably. The plot, likewise, has some flaws. A few of them are continuity problems (how’d that monster get there?), a few are plausibility problems (why would they have kept batteries in something they’d never use?), and a few are just rather stereotypical story decisions that I was hoping A Quiet Place would be clever enough to avoid.

The biggest flaw, to my mind, however, was the decision to eventually show the monsters not only clearly, but close up. Almost any monster is frightening in proportion to its aura of mystery; but filmmakers love showing off their special effects, and A Quiet Place failed to resist the temptation. The result is that, from being an eerie, unearthly presence that we barely glimpse save by their ravagings early on in the movie, close to the end we get something that sort of looks like a cross between an inside-out ear model and a wet cockroach. Gross, but not nearly as intrinsically scary. A more imaginative cinematography might have allowed the concluding scenes to avoid this.

Should You See It?

Totally. Flaws notwithstanding it is an excellent film, plus John Krasinski with a beard is pretty hot. I place it right on the cusp between B+ and A-, in the same territory as IT.

✠ ✠ ✠