As I did with the previous season of Dexter, I’ve decided to write about season four in three chunks, one blog post to follow each fourth episode — thematically an appropriate place as a season of Dexter generally follows a three act structure. Which means, of course, each fourth episode is going to offer some big climax or revelation that makes for perfect blog fodder.

And big time spoilers — you have been warned.

Big time warned.

So, last night’s episode ‘Dex Takes a Holiday,’ didn’t disappoint in the climax department — we had both the culmination of the whole ‘Dexter needs his space’ theme that has been building since the first episode, and a big banging surprise in the Lundy-Trinity plot-line — namely Lundy and Deb getting gunned down by an unseen assailant (who probably looks a whole lot like John Lithgow).

I’d say episode 4 was the best so far, and hopefully marks the season hitting its stride. I thought the first few episodes laid the ‘new father is sleepy’ thing on with all the subtly of a spackle knife — pushing Dex past the point of reasonable exhaustion and painting his wife as some sort of oblivious and unreasonable task master. Yes, it made for a bit of cuteness as New Dad Dex yo-yoed between late nights with the kid, long days at the office, and extra curricular activities involving yards of saran wrap and surgical saws. But, as annoying as Rita can be as a character, it felt like a stretch to suggest that someone with her experience raising children — and obvious concern for her husband — would cheerfully let him shoulder so much of the load and even have the gall to suggest Dexter hadn’t been as ‘together’ with the family as he should be. The writers could have done this a bit better — didn’t he just get into an accident because of sleep deprivation and she’s haranguing him the next episode about not doing enough?

Speaking of which, great little mini-arc with Dex potentially losing a body. I’ve always thought he was rather vulnerable when transporting his kills — just one serious car accident away from getting caught. Having it happen at the end of the first episode was a nice touch, and got the whole season rolling with some immediate suspense of the season 2 variety. Further points awarded to episode 1’s ‘tonight’s the night’ shtick at the beginning, and the skewed credit sequence of missed mosquitoes, broken laces, and stained shirts that shows just how off his game Dex was at the start of the season.

Trinity has proven an interesting presence, and Lithgow doesn’t disappoint — managing to exude creepy menace without any sort of haminess. Trinity’s MO is interesting and suitably dark, but I hope the writers are smart enough not to spin out the mystery of it for too long. It seems rather obvious that the Trinity killer is reenacting his family history — sister either a suicide or killed by Trinity or their father (my bet is on Dad), mother jumping to her death, and finally Trinity killing his father . Last night’s episode with Trinity picking a fight from a random stranger, and letting himself get punched around, only reinforces that his third victim is a stand-in for an abusive father (who is surely to whom he offers a whiskey ablution in episode three). Trinity is reenacting his early life, and stuck repeating it.

Dexter in suburbia offers some more fish-out-of-water fun for a guy that just doesn’t get how us mundanes navigate the weird rituals of social interaction that vex our every step. Dex’s new environment has everything from swimming pools to car pools — and nosy neighbors willing to set up high-powered halogens and organize a militia whenever something threatens the suburban status quo. Episode three’s vandal shared a bit of Dexter’s fish-out-of-water nature — a damaged man having seen past the veneer of civility that governs the manicured and picket-fenced world — but in the end Dex comes down on him like a hammer to protect himself and, by extension now, his family.

But what is really interesting about Dexter’s confronting the vandal is of course the parallel with the Trinity killer’s threats to kill his second victim’s children in the same episode — Dexter, who understands all too well that ‘fear is a powerful motivator’ uses the same tactic, sending a bit of a reminder to an audience that has been no doubt vicariously enjoying his handling of the situation thus far that, yes Virginia, Dex is a monster.

I will admit that I saw Frank Lundy’s death coming, if not from miles away, than at least by a good few football field’s lengths — but it worked well and still registered as something of a surprise when it happened. The surprise was more Deb getting shot than anything — poor Lundy just had martyr written all over him from the beginning. A good motivator for Dex and Deb to crack the Trinity case, and at least superstar FBI agent Lundy goes out having been right about the hunt and, by virtue of being attacked, proving he was close to his quarry. He got the girl, too — bravo Frank, you’re way cooler than Anton.

Speaking of Anton — there’s his sort of buddy Quinn, last year’s red herring, trying to puzzle-out how to handle Dexter’s witnessing of his cash grab. Quinn, a man with good taste in women and horrible taste in music, is surprisingly amusing as he tries to curry favor with Dex, and his ‘this is how it is’ refutation of the ‘crooked cop’ label worked for me. He’s certainly not in the same category of moral failing as, say, a serial murderer. And speaking of serial murderers — poor old Quinn apparently can’t remember not to mention the hush-hush and unofficial Trinity killer investigation going on when there is a gorgeous topless reporter on his back. Actually, I guess I can’t really blame him for that.

And then there is Batista and LaGuerta — seeing the two of them embrace is like watching Grover hook-up with Oscar the Grouch. Which isn’t a good thing, if you were wondering. Doing the obvious ploy of throwing these two together (hey, they both speak spanish and neither of them has anything to do this season!) and giving them a cutesy little ‘hidden’ affair feels forced, lazy, and pretty much undermines what little respect the audience has for them. Everybody likes Batista, because he’s a Teddy-Bear with a hat affectation, and everybody hates LaGuerta, for reasons too numerous to mention (at least she stopped hitting on Dexter — aye carumba!), but putting the two together makes them both . . . pathetic. Really, them both asking Dex for advice in last night’s episode felt like High School all over again, only with smaller stakes.

But what last night’s episode really delivered on was a thematic climax. With the annoying family gone and Dexter breathing a sigh of relief, he goes off to hunt a cop who killed her own family in cold blood — all to be free. Can he, or can’t he, relate? The cat-and-mouse between the two was handled nicely, and Dexter’s provocation of their final confrontation exhibited the kind of lateral thinking that makes for so many interesting twists in the show. But finally it was the revelation — spoken at the ‘moment of truth’ when Dexter is his most alive and honest — that Dexter would rather risk getting caught than be without his family that is the true climax of the first act of season 4. He does love them, inconvenient and perplexing as they may be, and this shows how his character has changed subtly since the ‘little wooden boy’ was introduced to us in season 1.

A final word should be said about a big character missing from the last two seasons of Dexter — Miami. Now, sometimes Long Beach kind of works — I mean, it has palm trees and water, just like Miami, right? — and sometimes it really doesn’t. Go back and look at those first seasons of Dexter to see what I mean — you can feel the heat of the place, and smell the Cuban food wafting over from the yard next door. There was much more of a sense of place and style in earlier seasons, and the absence of that does lend these later seasons a somewhat less authentic feel. I don’t think that’s a deal breaker — but it does mean that these seasons are less than they could (and should) be.

And another thing — how about some continuity references for us long-time fans? I understand the need for a clean slate with each season — but has anyone even so much as uttered the words ‘Bay Harbor Butcher’ since season 2? Shouldn’t Prado have suspected Dex as being the butcher? Shouldn’t Prado himself be mentioned or name dropped at least once? Or Rita hint at Dex’s supposed substance abuse problems, or the kids once being kidnapped by a crazy British firebug? Stuff like that reinforces the illusion of reality, and it’s a shame there isn’t more of it in evidence in subsequent seasons of Dexter.

Oh, and Harry. The actor is consistently great, and I liked the premise of his ‘visitations’ in moderation, but Harry having a chat with Dex three times an episode has become a bit formula at this point — and half the time it isn’t anything that couldn’t be handled with a Dex voice-over. What this does is kill the dramatic potential of the exchange — so when the big climax comes later in this season as it did in the last and Harry talks Dex through some dilemma we, the audience, will be saying ‘ho hum, there’s dead Harry talking his kid’s ear off again.’ Flashbacks to young Dexter were much, much better, and something I miss. I mean, Michael C. Hall spent less time talking to dead people when he ran a funeral home!

And, purely as a thought exercise and proof that producers should at least occasionally consult me for ideas, you know what would show some real innovation? How about making Doakes Dexter’s invisible conscience for a season? Don’t tell me the premise wouldn’t automatically make the show twice as interesting.

But, overall, Dexter continues to deliver what audiences have come to love from the show — dark thrills, wow-worthy surprises, and explorations of a first-rate character in Dexter himself. The writers have never been afraid to really advance the plot, and they keep Dexter evolving right along with it, which is a rare and wonderful thing in television. The new family, the child, and the new nemesis-slash-role-model — a man who does what Dexter does and has done it more successfully than anyone else — has created a whole new slew of possibilities and complications, something the writers have done well to capitalize on. I have to say the new season has me hooked and, at the end of the day, that is how I know whether Dexter is doing what it’s supposed to do — when I can’t wait to see the next episode.

• Dexter Season 4: Road Kill, or The Jumping of the Snark
• Getaway: Dexter Season 4 Finale and Recap

It’s been a few years now since the premiere of Dexter, and I’ve yet to rewatch any episodes. Given the popularity of my Dexter Season 3 posts, and with the fourth season on the horizon, I thought it would be a nice idea to revisit the first and second seasons and give my impressions of them in light of the overall Dexter experience.

This post will contain big spoilers of the first three seasons of Dexter — you have been warned.

“Tonight’s the night,” Dexter’s first words to us. The scene is a Miami street at night lit by the familiar electric warmth of busy bars and restaurants. But the darkness clings to Dexter as he slides by in his car, a sleek modern predator in a silver Ford Taurus.

A memorable opener — and one I remember feeling vaguely hostile to when I first saw it. I was on board for Dexter since its debut, but I had my doubts as I sat down to watch the first episode. I’m as sickly fascinated with serial killers as the next citizen of the modern world — after all they are our trolls and bogeymen, the monsters of our collective psyche. But, let’s not forget, they are also very real. My concern with Dexter, initially, was that in an effort to make a serial killer sympathetic, the heinousness of his occupation would be glossed-over or ignored. What I really didn’t want was to feel manipulated as a viewer.

So, when Dexter hunts, terrifies, and kills that vilest of all modern monsters — the child-killing pedophile — in the opening of the first episode, I rolled my eyes a bit. Of course no one could really object to Dexter killing the lowest form of life there is, how very manipulative of the writers. But how also very smart, I acknowledged, because let’s face it, if he’d gone after any one more sympathetic the average viewer might just decide the show wasn’t for them after ten minutes. And Dexter is a show that really, really needs more than just ten minutes to get across everything it’s brilliant at.

The first episode introduces Dex and his favorite pastime rather efficiently, and moves quickly to present us with the rest of the major players in the drama and the season’s overarching confrontation — namely, the quest for the Ice Truck Killer. Seasons 2 and 3 are likewise set-up in the same way and, watching these episodes a second time and often in large chunks, I am impressed at how well paced this show is. Every episode of Dexter advances the A and B plot threads, and generally does so in unexpected ways. Dexter is never, ever boring, nor is it predictable.

What’s more, this is a show that does not insult the reader’s intelligence. A perfect example would be in season 1, episode 8 when the Ice Truck Killer’s identity is finally revealed. Most attentive viewers will have guessed his identity at that point, or have been fairly certain, and a lesser show would have handled the whole thing badly by taking it past the point where it began to insult the viewer’s intelligence. But when we first see Rudy as Ice Truck, the scene isn’t played for surprise because it should no longer be a surprise, rather it is played for dramatic effect. Questions of the killer’s identity were the subject of earlier episodes, especially those with the red herring (what will become a Dexter staple) Neil Perry. What Dexter does is move from the whodunit stage to a higher level of drama and peril, and link that ultimate conflict intimately with the protagonist’s own motives, history, and inner turmoil.

It’s damn good writing on every level imaginable. Fast-paced, insightful, funny, dark, and absolutely compelling stuff. Whatever objections I entered season 1 with were blown away after the first episode and, like a lot of people, I was hooked hard. Dexter himself is a sympathetic demon, one could almost term him a vigilante if he wasn’t always and uppermost a predatory animal with a taste for blood. Blood is a primary image in season 1, and Dexter’s outsider status a theme brilliantly highlighted by the choices he has to make. It’s blood that Dexter knows better than anything else, as a blood-spatter expert for the Miami Police Department it’s the art and science of blood that link his daytime world of social responsibility to his nocturnal passions. It’s the lack of blood in the drained bodies of the Ice Truck Killer that set him up as a kind of anti-Dexter, a fellow traveler with his own eccentric orbit. It’s a room full of blood, left by the Ice Truck Killer, that triggers Dexter’s repressed memories of his own childhood, and eventually leads to the discovery of his buried past.

The friendly game of cat-and-mouse between Dexter and his counterpart reveals a great deal about Dexter’s past in a way that makes it of immediate concern to the present — again, that’s fine writing. The flashbacks to a young Dex and Harry that introduce Dexter’s code and expose us to his raw, unfinished self in a way that illuminates his psychology are an important feature of seasons 1 and 2, and in this season are used not only for characterization and ‘backstory,’ but to reinforce the current plot. Examples include young Dex’s need for a blood donor proving his connection to the man thought to be his biological father (and also, in point of fact, that Harry lied to him), and the Ice Truck Killer’s gruesome messages that correspond to Morgan family photographs.

All of this serves to erode Harry’s grip on Dexter. What seems a strong ethos of behavior early in the season –  after all in the series’ first murder Dexter disdainfully tells his pedophile victim that he has standards, and he even goes out of his way to help a young man he suspects of sharing his homicidal tendencies in a pair of earlier episodes — is undermined by the Ice Truck Killer’s machinations. When we get to the final confrontation, we perceive that Dexter does indeed have to make a real choice.

And choice is at the heart of drama. The Code of Harry seemed a bit of autopilot for Dex, the unvarying thing at the center of his worldview he didn’t have to question. His faith, in other words. The Ice Truck Killer works to unravel it, showing Harry as a liar, appealing to Dex’s ‘true’ nature. Offering him acceptance, brotherhood, and a relationship based on a unsentimental look at his life as a Morgan. The contrasting relationship is with Debra, someone he has lied to and hidden from his entire life, and throughout the season we see how poorly Dex understands her and fails to live up to her emotional expectations. This sets up the big question of the whole season nicely — can Dexter feel anything?

He doesn’t think he can, but he’s wrong. And that is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Dexter’s characterization and Michael C. Hall’s performance. The “little wooden boy” who only felt alive when dismembering a deer or standing at the edge of a rooftop somehow internalized enough of those lessons in normal behavior that he gained some sort of humanity. Ultimately, he may not know if he is acting or really feeling when he makes his choice to save Deb from his brother — for one could perhaps argue that it’s the reassertion of the will of Harry that stops the Ice Truck Killer’s knife, and not Dexter’s own choice at all –  but I think most viewers will have to agree that in this case the acting and the feeling are indistinguishable. Dexter makes his choice at great sacrifice to his more selfish needs, and shows himself to be neither monster or hero, but human being.

The look of season 1 differs a bit from the others, especially the third season where the show unfortunately is no longer filmed in Miami. But the Miami of season 1 feels tropical and cloying in a way that doesn’t come across much in later seasons. Exterior scenes are often washed out by sun glare and have a grainy quality, and the actors sweat through their clothing. We see a larger variety of interiors as well, and everything conspires to create the illusion of realness. Perhaps understandably things have streamlined in later seasons to some extent, but the Miami of season 1 comes across as every bit as important a character as Dexter himself. I don’t really get that sense from later seasons.

In a finale that combines the poignant with the gruesome Dexter kills his own brother, and kills an idea of himself as he does so. It’s a reaffirmation of the Code of Harry, and of Dexter’s choice to remain fundamentally alone to protect those around him. In a season that wrestled with questions of identity throughout, Dexter chooses for himself how he will be defined.

The last image we are left with is Dexter walking away from the crime scene and the brother he has murdered. He imagines the gathered crowd cheering him, his sister and co-workers looking upon him with approval and adoration and all of Miami hailing him as a hero. A powerful and darkly humorous closing scene, where a smiling Dexter’s fantasy isn’t a longing for fame or glory, but for acceptance. That we the viewer inevitably smile back indicates he has gotten his wish.

• Dexter Season 1 at Amazon
• Official Dexter site

My title poses a question wisely skirted by the makers of the 2005 release, The Call of Cthulhu, which I’ve just reviewed over at Black Gate. This is a no-budget film made with a lot of ingenuity and passion, and it’s by far the most loyal adaptation of a Lovecraft story I’ve even seen on film.

It is also, in addition to being black and white, a silent film.

That’s right, the makes of The Call of Cthulhu have  avoided weighing in on the proper pronunciation of ‘Cthulhu fhtagn,’ in creating a film in the style of the 1920s, when Lovecraft’s story was originally published in Weird Tales. They also cleverly get around many of the limitations of their budget, and create the most effective evocation of a Lovecraftian mood yet seen on film.

The choice to make this a silent film was a smart one. Firstly, it does help evoke the period of Lovecraft in a way no film before it ever has (all of the ones I’ve ever seen where contemporary pieces, for a start), and also makes it feel like a world apart from our own. In leaving some things unseen and unsaid, and in creating an at times stylized environment, this film activates the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks — and speeches or effects which would seem silly or dreadful when laid bare in a modern film are instead left in the shadows. In surmounting the very limited budget for this project, the choice could not have been better.

I highly recommend this film to Lovecraft fans — but maybe not to the rest of you. In all honesty, I feel like you’d have to read the stories to appreciate this adaptation. But, for those of you that have, this little movie is an extraordinary example of what passion and persistence can create.

I am slowly getting caught up with my reading — not only the stuff that I’m supposed to be reviewing, but also those projects of which I am fortunate enough to be a part. Northern Haunts is one such — an anthology of 100 flash fiction stories released back in the beginning of the year. The book has an interesting theme — not only is it set specifically in New England, but each story is intended to be the sort of thing one could tell around the campfire. Indeed, you could use Northern Haunts exactly in that way, just picking it up to read a piece or two to give your friends the willies.

Like The Best of Every Day Fiction, I find that Northern Haunts and other flash fiction anthologies are best read a few stories at a time, rather than in one big gulp. And, although I have yet to finish it, I’ve been very impressed by the quality of the fiction so far — everything from ghost stories to gross-outs, mysterious strangers, monsters, and haunted environs of all kinds. There’s even a story about a pirate named William Ward!

My own tale, “The Thing in the Woods,” is about a hunting expedition that discovers a . . . well, a thing in the woods. But it is just one of 100 creepy and clever bite-sized horrors that make for great snack food reading or read-aloud storytelling.

All proceeds from Northern Haunts go to benefit the American Cancer Society. It is available in both paperback and hardback from Shroud Publishing.

I am a big admirer of Joe R. Lansdale, two-fisted fictioneer and badass bard of the horrific, and especially of his series of thriller/horror/crime novels chronicling the (mis)adventurers of Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. The last installment, Captains Outrageous, came out a long eight years ago and fans of the series have been hoping for book seven ever since.

Good news is book seven, Vanilla Ride, is due out at the end of this month. From the synopsis:

In this Texas-sized thriller, Hap Collins and Leonard Pine—best friends, freelance troublemakers, and tough guys with good intentions—find themselves in the crosshairs of the Dixie Mafia.

Hap is an East Texas smart mouth with a weakness for southern women. Leonard is a gay, black veteran pining for a lost love. They’re not the makings of your typical dynamic duo, but never underestimate the power of a shared affinity for stirring up trouble and causing mayhem. When an old friend asks Leonard to rescue his daughter from an abusive, no-good drug dealer, he gladly agrees and, of course, invites Hap along for the fun. Even though the dealer may be lowly, he is on the bottom rung of the Dixie Mafia, and when Hap and Leonard come calling, the Mafia feels a little payback is in order. Cars crash, shotguns blast, and people die, but Hap and Leonard come out on top. Unfortunately for them, now they’re facing not only jail time but also the legendary—and lethal—Vanilla Ride, who is still out to claim the price on their heads. Full of twists and turns, gunfire and gaffes, this hilarious, rip-roaring novel will have readers turning the pages faster than a Texas tornado.

Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard are great characters, larger-than-life yet always human, and their stories run the gamut from hardboiled crime, mystery, action adventure, horror, texas tall tale, and dirty joke. If you haven’t yet read the series it looks like some reprints are on the horizon, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to track down a copy of Savage Season or Mucho Mojo and give it a go.

• My review of Vanilla Ride

With the sun kicked out and a gold doubloon moon rose in its place — a moon that shone down with a bright, almost unnatural hue on Mud Creek and the surrounding countryside — the nightwalkers began to walk.

• Title: Dead in the West
• Author: Joe R. Lansdale
• Genre: Weird Western/Horror
• Year: 2005 (1986)

When the Reverend Jebidiah Mercer rides into the shit town of Mud Creek, East Texas, he’s a man full of doubt, guilt, and whiskey. But he’s also pretty sure he’s the Lord’s Avenging Angel, and that he’s in Mud Creek for a reason. He finds it in the form of a possessed Indian shaman and a horde of living dead in Joe R. Lansdale’s Dead in the West — subtitled ‘A Zombie Western’ — a short book that’s one part Pale Rider, one part Night of the Living Dead, and one hundred percent Lansdale.

Dead in the West is a gory dime novel of a book, a celebration of the archetypes of the western that just so happens to take those archetypes and stick them in a blender along with the splattery thrills of zombie horror. The premise is straightforward — troubled loner and man-of-God drifts into town right as all hell breaks loose. The hell comes in the form of some black magic revenge from a wronged Indian shaman — a villain not without the reader’s sympathies — who curses the town after the townsfolk hang him and horribly kill his woman. The Reverend, more shootist than preacher, is the only man in town that has a chance of stopping the evil that threatens to overwhelm it.

Like anything by Lansdale, Dead in the West is a showcase for his unique style that blends the surprising, the vulgar, and the absurd into something that cannot be put down. Leaner and more pulpish than even Lansdale’s hardboiled thrillers, Dead in the West’s narrative pounds relentlessly forwards, spurs jangling, toward a bloody climax in the form of the classic zombie siege. Combined with this economy of language is Lansdale’s gift for the original metaphor, a gift that really shines when detailing the nauseating or terrible, and thus we have brains bursting from skulls like ‘puked oatmeal,’ dead bodies ‘piled up like dog turds,’ and a zombie attacking a man by ‘biting plugs out of his face like a chicken pecking grit.’ It’s wonderful stuff.

And, though it is short and taut and aswirl with archetypes, Lansdale manages to create interesting characters just the same. The Reverend in particular is a man haunted by sin, miserable with self-doubt. He finds love and purpose in Mud Creek, but also loss. Overall, Dead in the West is a short but sweet showcase for Lansdale’s talents, at turns creepy, nauseating, and just plain fun.

• Dead in the West at Amazon
• Joe R. Lansdale’s website

On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.

• Title: I Am Legend
• Author: Richard Matheson
• Genre: Horror/Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
• Year: 1954

Richard Matheson’s name should be better known. I’m not making that claim out of some sort of fan loyalty or sense that he hasn’t gotten his just recognition, but purely as an observation of just how hugely influential his work has been. Though he can’t be pigeonholed into any one genre, he did write horror before that genre even had a name, and his style of looking rationally at the supernatural was a tremendous influence on how future writers would approach horror’s traditional tropes. But Matheson’s ideas have truly permeated mainstream culture, not only from the numerous film adaptations of his stories and his own work in television and movies, but through the work of those he has influenced. His classic work of a vampire apocalypse, I Am Legend, is one of the most influential novels of the 20th century — go ahead and flip through cable on any given weekend and you’ll get a look at the novel’s many descendants in the form of vampire and zombie movies and series in endless abundance.

I Am Legend, of course, has also been made into a film — three times. The adaptations range from the well-intentioned to the completely misguided, but they do at least convey the main premise of the book. I Am Legend is a last man on earth story, the account of Robert Neville, the apparently sole survivor of an apocalypse that has left him alone in a world of monsters.

Neville’s monsters are vampires — night-dwelling, garlic-averse, blood suckers that were once his friends and neighbors. By day, Neville prowls his town and stakes whatever sleeping vamps he can find, and attends to more mundane chores like gathering supplies and maintaining his car. By night he sits barricaded in his home — once shared with a wife and young daughter — and has a drink or two and turns his stereo up to drown out the challenges of the creatures that besiege him each evening. His routine is the only thing that keeps him sane, but even then he teeters on the precipice of madness.

And here is where I Am Legend truly lifts itself above just being an interesting concept into the category of a classic, for it is an intense psychological study of loneliness and obsession. Neville, as we encounter him, is convincingly cracking up, undergoing maddening pangs of isolation and sexual frustration. He begins to do stupid, impulsive, dangerous things such as racing off to visit his wife’s grave and staying out in the streets too long, or flinging open his door to shoot the vampires that taunt him. He is a man alone, with no future, and only his personal vendettas and scientific curiosity in the vampire phenomenon provide his motive force.

Matheson takes great pains to present scientific reasons for the vampire epidemic, and for the nature and behavior of the vamps themselves. As far as I know, this is the first time the vampire legend was dissected in such a way that vampirism is presented as a disease like any other — albeit one with some rather extreme symptoms — and this idea has become the cornerstone of the modern take on vampires. But Matheson’s vamps are not the angsty goth teenagers of modern vampire lore, but debased monsters that retain but a shred of their humanity. Here, then, is the genesis of the modern zombie tale as well — the world-spanning apocalypse that transforms people into monsters, confronting the sole survivor barricaded in his home.

But that’s not all his vampires turn out to be, but to talk about that — and the final scene that illuminates just what the title I Am Legend alludes to, would be to spoil the book. Suffice it to say that Neville, imperfectly adjusted as he may be to the new dead world around him, finds himself swept up in yet another transformation. He is a relic of another time, and the book’s real power comes out of making us feel the enormity of the change taking place — in that respect, and for its adherence to realism in explaining the vampire plague, I Am Legend more closely resembles science fiction than horror.

This short book — almost a novella — packs a considerable punch in it’s depiction of isolation, obsession, and radical change and for that reason, and for its clear place at the birth of so many of our dominant myths, I Am Legend is without a doubt a modern classic.

• I Am Legend at Amazon
  

The dark came down on the world and world moved on. The gunslinger . . . dreamed his long dreams of the Dark Tower, to which he would some day come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle.

• Title: The Gunslinger
• Author: Stephen King
• Genre: Dark Fantasy
• Year: 1982

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed,” has to be among the immortal opening lines of speculative fiction, and with it Stephen King kicked off one of the longest epic quest stories of modern times, spanning some seven books and touching on many of King’s other novels. The Dark Tower series is King’s multiverse, a massive uber-narrative connecting many of the stories penned over his long career. But, like nearly anything of this scale, it was not an undertaking conceived and executed according to any master plan, rather it is the product of a lifetime of creative play, the accretion of stories and characters all commingling via the intuitive logic of the author’s craft.

Which is to say the whole thing must appear extremely daunting to any reader outside of Planet King, and even for those of us who have read the Dark Tower in its entirety, it can all get a bit confusing. However, it wasn’t always like that. When I first picked up The Gunslinger in my early teens, The Dark Tower series was still a mystery to the man writing it as much as it was to the rest of us. In those days the series only contained two books, and little did we suspect that it would only be until twenty years had passed, during which time King nearly died, that the whole enormous quest would reach its conclusion. But I don’t intend to talk about this slim, weird, stylish volume as some sort of gateway to all those 700 page monsters like Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla that follow it. Instead I want to suggest why you should read it on its own, and enjoy it for what it is, and not worry about whether or not you want to get tied into a massive series.

So what is it? Well, for a start, there are two different versions of The Gunslinger. The links in this review take you to the new one — the one that was partially rewritten and edited to bring it more in line with the Dark Tower series. Don’t buy that version. The one I’m reviewing, the one I fell in love with twenty years ago, is the one pictured at the top of this review. It’s a gorgeously illustrated trade paperback (all the Dark Tower books are — a format I wish more series would follow) from Plume, first published in 1982. It contains the stories as they were originally written, complete with inconsistencies that would later crop up in the series. Even if you are certain you want to read the whole series, I still recommend reading the original stories first and perhaps getting the newer version for a quick reread when you want a break between the doorstops sometime later in the saga.

Well, that’s quite a lot about series lore and rewrites and all the rest, but not a whole lot about why someone with no interest in the series, or in King himself, should read The Gunslinger. The first and best reason is the sheer evocation of the vast and the strange in King’s world; a kind of timeless, multi-planar post-apocalyptic western. It is a world of mutants and old machines and dark miracles and demons, a world that has ‘moved on,’ coming apart not so much because of comprehensible causes such as man-made disasters or wars, but for reasons cosmic and unknowable. It is a world related to our world, where references to Joseph Conrad and The Beatles are weird touches of the familiar in an alien landscape — so much so that we are uncertain if this world is a dying version of our own or, if as the gunslinger himself suspects at one point, it is some sort of afterlife.

This evocation of mood is a primary reason to get the original version of the story, as this ambiguous world, that King is himself still discovering as he writes, has a daring, improvisational quality unlike much of today’s fantasy fiction, with its carefully mapped worlds and minutely furnished cultures. The Gunslinger’s world is schizophrenic, at once our own and yet removed from it by some unbridgeable distance, a stark western landscape permeated by the dark logic of a dream.

Stalking across this landscape is Roland, the last gunslinger, a remnant of another age and place. He is a kind of knight of the sixgun, trained in its use to superhuman ability, once part of an order that echoed Arthur’s Camelot. But all that is gone, the world has moved on, and Roland is left pursuing the Man in Black across the alkaline wastes of a vast desert and reserving his motives for himself. He is an immediately compelling character, comfortable as we are with the archetype of the steel-eyed stranger from Westerns and even action films, and over the course of the stories in The Gunslinger we experience episodes from his past, and share in his uncertainties and sorrows. Which makes it all the more interesting when Roland does something ruthless — real ruthlessness, actions against his own emotional preference in the service of his goal — for we are forced to examine our own admiration for the qualities he exhibits. Roland is carefully drawn, a fine balance between accessible and unknowable, a perfect counterpoint to a setting that exhibits those same characteristics.

The chapters in The Gunslinger originally appeared as separate publications in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The opening chapter, a novella entitled “The Gunslinger,” is the earliest of the pieces, essentially King’s first foray into this world. The later chapters were written a few years later, all at the same time, and read more like a serial story than an episodic one, which makes the book more cohesive than it may appear at first glance. Each section features a nested narrative, in which events of the present are counter-pointed by flashbacks of Roland’s life. The quality of storytelling is languid and considered in places, investing the maximum in mood. When the action does happen it’s quick, brutal, and often unexpected.

Which is quite a bit like a Western film, actually. Calling The Gunslinger ‘Sergio Leone meets J. R. R. Tolkien’ is not a bad analogy, though I’d suggest the fantastic elements have more in common with someone like Zelazny than Tolkien. But the shadow of Leone is strong in this book, from the obvious inspiration for the protagonist to matters of scene setting and pacing — The Gunslinger makes excellent use of techniques borrowed from cinema to achieve a similar aesthetic to the films King was inspired by.

I have not mentioned the plot of The Gunslinger, or any of the events of the story. The plot can perhaps be summarized by the quotation in the first line of this review, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” As for the events — I’d rather not spoil anything. I could speak of the trap left by the Man in Black in Tull, or who it was that Roland met at The Way Station, or of oracles, slow mutants, visions, and prophecies. But I don’t see the point, as it isn’t what The Gunslinger is about that will hook the reader, but how the story is told.

In King’s On Writing he talks about his favorite moment as a writer — that moment when everything comes together, and the mind makes the intuitive leap that connects the various threads of a story, be they plot threads or thematic ones. In The Gunslinger the reader can follow this process, as King’s ambiguity grows more concrete, and details are added that become major plot points in the books that follow. Already in the successor volume to The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, King is following a much more certain path, but it is in this first book, a collection of mostly quiet incidents as Roland pursues his enemy across a bleak and mysterious world, that King is at his most visceral. Here is a document of imagination almost completely unfettered by design, a quest that is as much about the protagonist’s long walk through the waste as it is about the author’s voyage of discovery.

• The Gunslinger (new version) on Amazon
• Stephen King’s website