Secret murders and cackling poets

Enriquez, Zambra, Bazterrica & Labatut

First off I want to thank all of you for subscribing to Message from the Underworld. I’m grateful for your attention and support. Your notes of encouragement mean a lot to me. They are like rainbows: magical and unexpected. They keep me going.

Also, thanks for checking in with me this week. Here in San Diego we had some wild flooding on Monday. A lot of rain came down and we’re just not equipped for that here. In some low-lying areas storm drains quickly clogged with debris, causing back-ups that flooded streets and intersections. A lot of people are dealing with major damage to their homes, businesses, and automobiles. It’s a big mess.

We live in Paradise Hills, which, true to its name, is made up of several hills. When I walk up the street parallel to mine at night I can see the lights of Tijuana twinkling in the not-too-distant distance. Father up the road and I can see all of southern San Diego, the Coronado Bay Bridge and the high-rises downtown. It’s a nice view. The stoners like to park their cars here and take it in. Nuvia calls it “Stoner Hill.”

We’re not as high as Stoner Hill but we’re high enough not to worry about flooding and I spent parts of my morning standing at the door in my bathrobe, watching the water race down the street. I received a flood warning on my phone but by that time it was too late for those who were already on the road and headed to areas that were filling up with water. There’s some pretty dramatic video online if you’re inclined to look for it.

The view from Paradise Hills this morning

Today I want to talk about some of the books I’ve read since returning from Chile. As you may have heard, there have been a lot of layoffs across the media landscape that are going to shake-up the way the arts are covered with the end result being less coverage for books and music. I don’t know what to do about this, what I can do, but if writing about books and music is going to be pushed further underground than it already is, then maybe I should make that a bigger part of what I did here in Message from the Underworld.

You’ll still get my unfiltered fanzine approach, meaning it won’t be marketing-in-disguise, my least favorite kind of books coverage, but hopefully you’ll find the following a bit more substantial and informative. If you do, please like and share. If you don’t, I hope you’ll let me know.

Latin American Crime & Horror

Before I left for Santiago, I ordered McSweeney’s #46: an anthology of Latin American crime fiction. All thirteen stories were originally written in Spanish and translated into English. Many of the writers were already familiar to me, including Marina Enriquez, Juan Pablo Villalobos, and Alejandro Zambra.

Enriquez’s story “The Dirty Kid,” is classic Enriquez: a big spooky house in a chaotic neighborhood and the story pulls no punches. Here’s what she had to say about it:

I don’t usually write crime stories—but I write dark fiction, so my stories sometimes involve crime. I guess I started from a very obvious point: the crime itself. The crime in my story is inspired partially by a crime that really happened about five years ago, in the province of Corrientes. The dead boy, in that case, was named Ramoncito, and he lived on the street. It was a crime that didn’t get much media attention—not as much as it deserved, at least—given the political implications it had and the horrific details that emerged. It was strange—it seemed like some kind of secret murder. There’s a true-crime investigation book about it called La misa del diablo (The Devil’s Mass by Miguel Prenz) that wasn’t commercially successful, although it’s very good. I got the basic information for my story’s crime from there. And then I just let everything expand and grow, like I do with all my stories. I decided it wasn’t going to be as plot-driven as other works of crime fiction. Instead, I went for a weird, almost hallucinatory feel.

You can read “The Dirty Kid” for free here. I’d never read Zambra before but the acclaimed Chilean writer has been compared to Bolaño, which is enough for me. “Artist Rendering” is a mindfucky bit of meta fiction that made me very excited to read more of Zambra’s work and his accompanying interview is utterly charming. I’ll be reading his novel Chilean Poet soon, but I might wait until after I’ve read the new edition of My Documents: Stories, a collection with five new stories and an introduction by his translator, Megan McDowell. that’s coming out in February.

I liked all but one of the stories in the anthology and the book itself, like most McSweeney’s publications, is beautiful. Highly recommended.

Tender Is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica

A new acquaintance from Santiago recommended two more writers, Layla Martinez from Spain who has a book coming out in May from Two Rivers Press called Woodworm and Augustina Bazterrica from Argentina who wrote the novel Tender Is the Flesh, which I immediately started listening to on Audible.

It’s a grim story that takes place in a future where a virus wipes out all animals—cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats, birds—everything except humans. Instead of turning to a plant-based diet, the government authorizes the slaughtering of humans for consumption. Bazterrica goes to great lengths to make this conceit as convincing as possible, which was a bit of a turn-off at first because the world building is pretty grisly, but the second half of the book really cooks—no pun intended.

While trying to find out more info about Woodworm, I learned that Two Rivers Press is putting out an anthology of Latin American Horror in March called Through the Night Like a Snake, and it looks amazing:

A boy explores the abandoned house of a dead fascist…
A leaked sex tape pushes a woman to the brink…
A sex worker discovers a mystifying secret in the pampas…
The mountain fog is not what it seems…
Kermit the Frog dreams of murder…

Frankly, I would have lead with Kermit. Two Lines Press has a cool pre-order campaign you might want to check out. The galley just arrived in the mail and I’ll be digging into it shortly.

I returned from Chile with a ton of recommendations, but before going on a book-buying spree I promised myself I’d read the books I already had on the shelf, namely…

The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut

If you were to ask an AI-assisted program to generate a novel, how many would it have to “write” before it spat out something like The MANIAC?

A long-ass time. Here’s why. Even though Labatut has written a compelling, thought-provoking, and at times altogether arresting work of fiction, it’s not a novel. It’s a triptych of sorts, profiles of three men who laid the foundations for computing that paved the way for an “intelligence” that exists beyond the brains of humankind, i.e. our current moment.

Some caveats. These are actual people but “profile” is a bit misleading. They are characters in a greater narrative but the narrator remains hidden like the writer of a certain kind of magazine article. However, the writing flirts with melodrama in a way no editor would let you get away with. It’s a lot of fun to read, or would be, if one didn’t have the sense that it was all leading up to something terrible, which it does, but perhaps not the way a reader of novels might expect.

Confused? I found an interview Labatut did a little less than a year ago and although it’s ostensibly about his previous book, When We Cease to Understand the World, which most readers feel is superior to The MANIAC, you can tell he’s talking about this one in this odd dismissal of poetry:

“What I dislike about poetry is the author’s voice, which is usually far too present. That exhausts me. I’m attracted by the impersonal. I prefer the rare beauty one can find in a good Wikipedia entry to the cries and cackles of a poet who feels like they must always relay what lies deep in their heart.”

That’s a horrifying quote. I once heard from a reader who compared one of my books to a series of Wikipedia entries and, trust me, it wasn’t a compliment. Not surprisingly, Labatut doesn’t read modern fiction and, one assumes, is not a big reader of Substack. Maybe I’m a philistine but I’ll take the cackles of a poet over a Wikipedia entry any day.

I hate it when publishing intentionally mislabels a product for the purpose of moving units, like calling a story collection—even a linked collection of stories—a novel. Or when a high profile magazine publishes “a new short story” by a hot writer and it’s clearly a novel excerpt that does none of the things one expects from a short story. That doesn’t seem to be the case here. I can’t find the word “novel” anywhere on the book jacket, which feels intentional, but the critics all refer to it as such, which I don’t understand.

The MANIAC was obviously influenced by writers like Sebald and Bolaño—two of Labatut’s favorite writers. He has a thing for scientists and mathematicians just like Bolaño had a thing for poets and critics. You can see the same squabbles, the same commitment to acquiring knowledge, and the same epic arguments about what it all means. They both love hierarchies of men with big brains. It’s inspiring and tedious, but where Bolaño and Sebald humanize their characters, Labatut never quite completes the portrait. They’re like tattoos by Sailor Jerry who famously always left one line broken. You always know you’re looking at a copy of the real thing, or in this case, a really long and inspired Wikipedia entry.   

Labatut puts his entries alongside each other so that one acts on the next like commands in lines of code. But isn’t that what collections of short stories do? Or poetry collections? They make a larger point by exploring variations on a theme. The relationships in the stories that Labatut tells are causal. This begat that, etc. That’s not quite the same thing, but they’re still stories, so why not call them that?

It certainly helped that The MANIAC came out while Oppenheimer was in theaters, which dramatizes portions of the narrative that don’t interest Labatut, which is relationships between people, i.e. the thing that writers have been writing about for thousands of years.

Which brings us to my opening quiztune. I’d say the AI-assisted tool would have to spit out at least 10,000 novels before it generated one that approximates Labatut in terms of subject, style, and tone, but the number is probably much higher.

Chaos W Mojej Glowie

Do you speak Polish? You’re in luck! My interview with the Polish punk zine Chaos W Mojej Glowie is out and I received my hard copy in the mail today — all the way from Poland. Why Poland you ask?

Do What You Want was published in Polish and I’m in talks with a couple of Polish publishers to produce a Polish edition of Corporate Rock Sucks. It’s still a ways off, but I’m looking forward to collaborating with some new friends on a future musical project, and a visit to Poland is in the cards this April.

Starlite Pulp Podcast

Many of the writers with work in Starlite Pulp #3 got together on Zoom for an epic, two-hour discussion of the stories in the new issue. We also talked about the books that inspire us and what we’re currently working on. Check it out. Or don’t. It’s still a free country.

If you’re new-ish here and you liked this newsletter you might also like my new novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get Orca Alert! every Sunday. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, and science you may have missed while trying to avoid the shitty news of the day.