From Bad to Worse

Sara Gran's The Book of the Most Precious Substance

When you read this, I’ll be securely ensconced in San Diego Superior Court, surrounded by cops and lawyers.

No, I haven’t been arrested. I’ve been summoned for Jury Duty—although I know many of you assumed the worst. Go ahead. I expect the worst, so I’m a step ahead of you.

Since this is a short week—I sent the last Message from the Underworld on Friday—I’ll try to keep this brief. That’s what I always think as I write these but this time I mean it.

But first, last week I included a video in the newsletter. I learned that it works better if the words support the video rather than the other way around, but what do I know? My question is this: would you like more video? Like of me speaking to you with words made from my human mouth? Would that be weird? I think it probably would be. If not, I can make it so. Weird, I mean. But weird or not would you like it? Maybe you shouldn’t answer that…

Yesterday, was a day of rejoicing for readers of weirdly compelling suspense fiction that’s loaded with sex, drugs, violence, and the occult. Yes, Sara Gran’s new novel, The Book of the Most Precious Substance is out. You should now do two things: 1) order the book and 2) read my profile in the Los Angeles Times.

I got to know Gran’s work through the Claire DeWitt series. The first book, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, is a missing person story set in New Orleans after Katrina. But Claire DeWitt is no ordinary detective. She is, in fact, the best detective in the world. This seems like a cheeky throwback to children’s literature, but Claire DeWitt is not for kids. Oh no. Claire DeWitt likes drugs and a good time and doesn’t take shit from anyone. She owes her offbeat worldview and unusual methods to a strange book by Jacques Silette called Détection. More than a detective manual, it is a philosophy for living that only the most obsessed sort of seeker would find appealing.

Todd Taylor (hi Todd!) turned me on to this book and lent me his copy and it sat on my shelf for months before I devoured it. A long time ago I wrote a story called “The Hitman’s Handbook” and it tells the story of a mobbed up hitman who whacks somebody in the pine forest surrounding Flagstaff, Arizona, where I lived with Todd at the time, which makes sense. My story owed a great deal to Barry Gifford’s Perdita Durango, book two of the Sailor and Lula saga, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about what on earth have you been doing with your life?

Anyway, the Hitman’s Handbook is a fictional manual of murder that I added to the story but it has a kind of strange power over the characters, not unlike Silette’s Détection. That might not come through on the page, but the handbook was hibernating in my imagination until I encountered Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead and it took the top of my head off. If you’re interested “The Hitman’s Handbook” is part of my short story collection, Big Lonesome.  

The second book in the series, Clair DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway concerns a dead musician that the police believe is the victim of a break-in gone bad, but Claire DeWitt suspects otherwise. This novel, which came out two years after City of the Dead, is largely set in California, but Gran takes us back to Claire DeWitt’s unusual childhood in New York. Largely unsupervised she and her two friends explore the seedy side of the city until one of them disappears on the subway. This disappearance haunts Claire DeWitt. How can she be the world’s greatest detective if she can’t even find her childhood best friend?

Fans had to wait five years for the most recent installment of the series, Claire DeWitt and the Infinite Blacktop, which focuses on the disappearance of a… well, it almost doesn’t matter because the Claire DeWitt’s back story moves to the front when she uncovers a clue that a short-run series of comic books featuring a girl detective named Cynthia Silverton, which Claire deWitt was obsessed with as a child, may hold the secret to her friend’s disappearance. One of the things I love about the Claire DeWitt novels is they go to some very dark places, and Infinite Blacktop may be the darkest.

This noirish tendency is by no means unique to the Claire DeWitt novels. Next, I listened to the audio book for Come Closer, a scary as shit story of demonic possession, which Sara Gran told me is her most popular book. Then I ordered Gran’s first two novels, both published by Soho Press. The first, Saturn’s Return to New York, concerns a young woman who is struggling to come to terms with her mother’s imminent death as she succumbs to a terminal illness. It’s her most literary book but it has the kernels of the Clair DeWitt series. When I asked her about it, here’s what she told me:

I never thought about that. But I think you're right. I like that book. I don't want to say I don't like it or I’m not proud of it. I am proud of it. I do like it but something about the way I put all those elements together was not quite my preferred way of doing it. I was scared, I think, when I wrote that book, to lean too far into the things that really interest me, going deeper into the occult, going deeper into the violence of life, going deeper into questions of sex and human bodies and how we deal with them.

Before I could get to her second novel Dope, Gran released another horror tale, this time in the haunted house category as an Audible Original Podcast. It’s called Marigold. Longtime readers will recall I listened to it last year while I was walking around Martha’s Vineyard and it thoroughly unnerved me. Finally, I read Dope, which tells the story of a woman thrust into the role of a reluctant detective. She’s a recovering heroin addict with a deadbeat ex-husband who takes the job to make some extra scratch but puts herself and her sobriety in peril by descending into the junkie underworld that she worked so hard to escape. It’s a hard and heartbreaking book. I thought the ending hit heavier than any of her other books—until I read The Book of the Most Precious Substance.

What makes the new book even more remarkable is it’s the first release by Gran’s own publishing company, Dreamland Books, which added to the usual stress and strain of releasing a new book into the world. As I alluded in a previous newsletter, the interview was supposed to take place in person but I was too sick to travel to LA and also Gran broke her ankle while walking in the park, which prompted something of a wake-up call:

The day before I had been overwhelmed with self-pity and feeling too busy and behind on my deadlines, and I'm like, Oh, that was actually the better day. That was the day, Wednesday was the day, I should have appreciated. I should have been in a really fucking great mood that day because I could walk. Now I cannot. I have to use a fucking walker for the next month or so. No matter how bad things are they can always get worse.

The Book of the Most Precious Substance concerns a demonic book of spells that grants the user unimaginable power—but there’s a catch (there’s always a catch). I asked Gran if she ever considered toning down an aspect of a story that a publisher, editor or reader might find off-putting. Her answer did not disappoint:

Never. I'm trying to think of I've ever done backed off on something. No, the only thing I backed off from in deference to a reader is a reference that they might not get. Not that I'm particularly highbrow but that I might have some weird reference. And I'm like, if no one gets it, it's a lost cause. If you can work it in so the people who get it get it and the people who don't don't then do it, but if it's gonna kill the point you're trying to make then don’t. But I've never backed off from a character being off putting. Nah. You just sort of have to make that decision when you reach a certain point in your career. Am I doing this to sell books? Or am I doing this for other reasons? I'm doing it for other reasons.

Take care, be safe, and if you don’t hear from me by next week please come bail me out.