It's hard to properly assess a book as a "new classic", mostly because it's new and therefore hasn't stood the test of time to make sure that it was really all that great to begin with. Being pushed out by a big publisher at the right time and with the right cover design can get a lot of critics to toss praise at it like flowers at an opera singer but that doesn't mean the book is actually good, just convenient for lots of people. However, every now and then a book comes along that deservedly becomes a new classic, and in my mind no single book has had such a profoundly instant impact on literature and the cultural psyche than Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. Originally published online in sections, the book became an underground phenomenon, eventually getting published in a lavish, expanded edition by Pantheon to overwhelming acclaim from all sides. Presented as a matryoshka doll of found documents - Pantheon's editors reprinting a manuscript that was an attempt to publish an academic dissertation analyzing a documentary film - the book chronicles the attempts to understand, and disastrous influence of, The Navidson Record, a home-movie doc of a family moving into a large country house in Virginia only to find that doors keep appearing in the walls and as such the house appears to be larger on the inside than the outside. The family's descent into horror is mirrored by the dissertation's author's own mental fracturing, as well as the guy who found his manuscript, creating multiple layers of postmodern insanity. It's a stunning book, one of my favorite novels ever, and it assured Danielewski a seat at the table for years to come. Each novel he's written after that works diligently to redefine how books can be written, such as Only Revolutions, a love story written in two halves for each romantic partner, presented as two halves on the page running in opposite directions from each end of the book. His most recent project is the massively ambitious The Familiar, a projected 27-volume serial novel whose three published volumes each run over 800 pages, and even the barest skimming reveals lively formatting trickery from flyleaf to flyleaf. Today, however, I want to shine a light on his third book, The Fifty Year Sword, as a finale to this month's Halloween Bookworming article series. Originally presented as a multimedia show only on Halloween, the novella was eventually published in the US in another lavish Pantheon edition with a strange, bumpy cover and bizarrely brilliant formatting, and in my mind it deserves every scrap of praise it can get as a new Halloween classic.
The story is told as intertwining flashbacks, narrated by five grown-up orphans who spent a fateful night together at an East Texas foster home when they were children. The occasion is the 50th birthday party of Belinda Kite, and for evening's entertainment a social worker has hired a storyteller for the kids. The storyteller arrives with few words and a long box with five latches, and his story concerns the contents of the box and how he got it.
That might not seem like much of a summary but trust me, you'll appreciate my leaving most of the detail for you to find. The impact of the piece lies not just in the content, which is as imaginative as it is creepy, but also the storytelling itself and the feel of being a kid, sitting on the floor and listening to that story. The art of scary storytelling stretches back as far as storytelling itself and for many children is their first exposure to horror fiction; one of my favorite book series as a kid (and now) was Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, assured-but-simple retellings of classic folk tales, literary stories and urban legends accompanied by incredible ink drawings by Stephen Gammell, one of the greatest illustrators of the latter half of the 20th century. In many ways the success of this format is the foundation of all horror literature, and in The Fifty Year Sword the success isn't just how amazing the story is but how effectively it simulates a classic oral tale.
Another effectivity (not a word but I'll take it) is the visual presentation of all this, one that is about as unique as any narrative book I've seen. The text is formatted to primarily be in a snaking column on the left side of two page spreads, appearing as a unified narrative strand but using color-coded quotation marks to signify which of the five orphans is speaking it. The "real" narrator is identified as a woman who was working at the foster home at the time but the actual telling is done by the orphans many years later, and the use of different voices to tell an identical story is a deft tool to show the psychological effect the experience has had on them. These quotations, as well as illustrations that show up later in the book (and sometimes completely overtake the spreads), are sewn rather than drawn, using thin thread in striking color combinations that gives a fantastic and grim story a strangely home-and-hearth feel. What this could mean I don't have a good answer for at the moment but I suspect that any answer, especially the most evocative one, is the right one.
By the time you're reading this it's pretty close to Halloween and you might not have the time to get this, but make the effort if you can - it's not hard to find and it'll take you less than an hour to read it if you're determined. It's a striking objet d'art as well as a novella and makes a great gift in any season, but more than anything it's an exemplary addition to the tradition of Halloween storytelling and I'm so happy that Danielewski has been given such publishing leeway that books like this can get made.
~PNK
The story is told as intertwining flashbacks, narrated by five grown-up orphans who spent a fateful night together at an East Texas foster home when they were children. The occasion is the 50th birthday party of Belinda Kite, and for evening's entertainment a social worker has hired a storyteller for the kids. The storyteller arrives with few words and a long box with five latches, and his story concerns the contents of the box and how he got it.
That might not seem like much of a summary but trust me, you'll appreciate my leaving most of the detail for you to find. The impact of the piece lies not just in the content, which is as imaginative as it is creepy, but also the storytelling itself and the feel of being a kid, sitting on the floor and listening to that story. The art of scary storytelling stretches back as far as storytelling itself and for many children is their first exposure to horror fiction; one of my favorite book series as a kid (and now) was Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, assured-but-simple retellings of classic folk tales, literary stories and urban legends accompanied by incredible ink drawings by Stephen Gammell, one of the greatest illustrators of the latter half of the 20th century. In many ways the success of this format is the foundation of all horror literature, and in The Fifty Year Sword the success isn't just how amazing the story is but how effectively it simulates a classic oral tale.
Another effectivity (not a word but I'll take it) is the visual presentation of all this, one that is about as unique as any narrative book I've seen. The text is formatted to primarily be in a snaking column on the left side of two page spreads, appearing as a unified narrative strand but using color-coded quotation marks to signify which of the five orphans is speaking it. The "real" narrator is identified as a woman who was working at the foster home at the time but the actual telling is done by the orphans many years later, and the use of different voices to tell an identical story is a deft tool to show the psychological effect the experience has had on them. These quotations, as well as illustrations that show up later in the book (and sometimes completely overtake the spreads), are sewn rather than drawn, using thin thread in striking color combinations that gives a fantastic and grim story a strangely home-and-hearth feel. What this could mean I don't have a good answer for at the moment but I suspect that any answer, especially the most evocative one, is the right one.
By the time you're reading this it's pretty close to Halloween and you might not have the time to get this, but make the effort if you can - it's not hard to find and it'll take you less than an hour to read it if you're determined. It's a striking objet d'art as well as a novella and makes a great gift in any season, but more than anything it's an exemplary addition to the tradition of Halloween storytelling and I'm so happy that Danielewski has been given such publishing leeway that books like this can get made.
~PNK
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