Book Review: Human Tenderloin by Craig Wallwork

I think I'm going to experiment with adding my book reviews to this space for the one person who comes here.

                                             

Craig Wallwork’s Human Tenderloin is a collection of 16 short stories.

The opening track is ‘Bird Girl,’ a bit of a body horror/grotesquerie playing over the background of an apocalypse. Bird Girl’s outer world is grim and dark but its inner life contains warm, bright notes of hope. Like a lot of Human Tenderloin, it’s ultimately a story of Love - in this case, parental Love.

I really appreciated that facet of these stories.

Love - Capital L Love.

There are plenty of horrors out there, and none I’ve read have trod so steadily the narrow path of real, loving notes that don’t stray into greeting card sentimentality.

***Editorial sidebar: Too much of my reading (and viewing) in the last year has featured remorseless horrors that sell humanity short in exchange for brutal & shocking violence or rely on a cheap supposition to prop up shoddy approximations of better stories.***

The second entry in Human Tenderloin is ‘Dollhouse’ - a creepy little cursed object story, pressed into its musty surroundings like a footprint in a swamp. The dread slowly pools like water leeching up through the earth. Odds are, you’ll see the end coming - as you will with other stories here - but it doesn’t lessen the effect.

Similarly, the title track, ‘Human Tenderloin’ has a hazily visible climax that doesn’t tarnish the tale in the least, as it relies on its own bizarre circumstances and almost slapstick level humor to carry it through a tale largely about sourcing long pork for butchering and eating among a close-knit group of ghoulish gourmands.

My favorite entry in Human Tenderloin is ‘Paradise Won.’ ‘Paradise Won’ is an almost funny meditation on love and loss, repentance and forgiveness from the perspective of a widower renting a cabin from the devil. I won’t say more than that because, even though ‘Paradise Won’ does nothing to hide its cards, it manages to be surprising and moving nonetheless.

There are some truly bizarre mindbender horrors in here as well. Most notably: ‘The Hole’ ‘Time’s Flies’ ‘Murder Song’ and ‘They Were Born Without Faces’

‘Nothing Short of Dying’ is brutal, bizarre, downright gross, perhaps - and yet, it is a love story. And that is what elevates this and so many other stories in Human Tenderloin beyond being beautifully written oddities.

If there’s a low note here, it’s the hidden track, ‘The Ballad of Windsong House’ - a longer tale than the rest whose introduction is a bit laborious but serves its own payoff well. It has the feel of a bloated short story or perhaps a truncated novella. In the end, ‘Windsong’ circles back around to the connective tissue that holds the entire collection together, Love. Capital L Love.

I’ve been truly disenchanted by a lot of my reading of late, feeling that storytelling had become a contest of grim ideas and horrible suffering visited upon rooms stuffed with poor approximations of humanity. Human Tenderloin is populated by people that feel real, often sympathetic - at the very least understandable - even in the most horrific and strange of circumstances.

My only complaint about human Tenderloin is also one of its greatest strengths. The language is consistently beautiful and inventive. It always feels fresh and lush and filled with the Love that suffuses the entire collection. For me, it felt at times just the thinnest layer too thick, which is really hardly any complaint at all.

TLDR: Horror built on a solid foundation of Love, weirdness, and prose sharp enough to carve a steak from your leg. The collection I’ve read that shares the most DNA with Human Tenderloin is Joe Hill’s Full throttle - one of my all-time favorite collections.

Logan Review

When you play Go Fish, you ask for a card. If your opponent doesn't have it, you have to 'go fish,' pulling a card from the deck. When I was a kid, there was always a certain excessive joy that accompanied drawing the card I asked for when I went fish. I would hold it up for all to see, proving my amazing luck, grinning like the fool that I now know myself to be. Then without trying to seem too prideful, I'd pair the jack of clubs with his diamond adorned brother and set them neatly next to my other collected trophies.

This is, near as I can figure, how I feel about James Mangold's Logan, rated R, 137 minutes.

I, like many of you, have seen more than my fair share of superhero movies in the last ... what? Twenty years? That sounds right. Two decades of CGI wizardry and phenomenal cosmic powers. There have been some excellent entries in the genre over that span of time. Just beneath the X-Men umbrella, X-Men, X2, and Days of Future Past were terrific flicks. That still leaves five movies - over half the current cannon - that were real clankers.

The Michael Keaton/Tim Burton Batmen were a breath of fresh air: strange and dark and visually new. I'm of the opinion that all of the caped crusaders since have sucked. Hard. Heath Ledger was an amazing Joker but that does not redeem the thoroughly shitty and incomprehensible Dark Knight trilogy.

I have seen a variety of swirling CGI menaces bent on the destruction of all life, or all human life, or all mutant life for various vague and terrifying reasons too many times. The first time I saw the realistic depiction of an entire city being leveled, I was amazed and mortified. But now that is the centerpiece to every movie. The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Ninja Turtles, Superman, Suicide Squad, X-Men, and - to a lesser extent - Batman. Did I miss anyone? Probably.

Q: How many times can THE ENTIRE RACE/PLANET/UNIVERSE face down imminent destruction?

A: Every. Fucking. Time.

Congratulations! You've made the killing of a half million people boring and cliche.

What Logan does that has been conspicuously absent from all these movies is it tells a human story. A story of small consequences; individual needs, fears, and desires. It is violent and profane and real. The movie leans heavily on the performances of Hugh Jackman, the always excellent Sir Patrick Stewart and newcomer Dafne Keene who perfectly fills the role of Logan's violent, confused, and lonely progeny.

In Logan, the stakes are not so very high. There is one life on the line and it is not an important one. Not important in the sense that the sun will go out if she is caught and killed, anyway. We have our heroes: Logan and Professor X, both dying.

Professor X seems to be suffering from dementia, which has turned his supermind into an unpredictable and dangerous weapon. The effects of his illness give us the best action set piece - not featuring Keanu Reeves - that I can recall. I'm not forgetting Quicksilver's antics in the kitchen.

In this movie, The Wolverine doesn't quite heal, needs reading glasses, and is reduced to driving a limo to save money for a boat to escape in. Logan's muscle tone is gone. His moobies jiggle when he runs. He's never not drunk.

There is a nice sidebar to the story, which works the comic books in as exaggerated and sanitized stories of the exploits a now extinct race of mutants. Logan is not sanitized - nor should it be. Another part of the power of the storytelling is that it neither ignores nor revels in its violence. It doesn't flinch from the violence and the price of it. There are no bloodless stabbings here. No dark bullet holes quickly healed. There are bloody amputations and violent murders. There is torture. There is regret. And when the innocent die here, we are made to look at them.

What there isn't is a good guy. Logan is no good guy. He's Han Solo, when Han Shot First. There are bad guys, but killing bad guys doesn't make you a good guy, does it?

Logan is imperfect, much like its characters. And similarly endearing. It takes its time telling its story, like many excellent films, and is rewarding and surprising while eschewing the BIG TWIST for somewhat familiar and predictable territory - if you think outside the superhero box.

Like pulling the jack of clubs, I got exactly what I wanted and I was unreasonably happy about it. This is easily a 3.5 star movie on a 4 star scale. 5 out of 4 on the superhero scale.