What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently:
Reviewed: Max Dunbar on Patrick Ness’ Monsters of Men & John Ortved’s Simpsons Confidential
Interviewed: Ben Pleasants presents the John Fante Tapes, part four; Alan Kelly & Danny Hogan shoot the breeze
Poetry: In the eleventh of his Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Romanian poet Ruxandra Novac; ‘Two Poems’ by Ruxandra Novac
Non-fiction: Albert Cossery is 3:AM’s Cult Hero; Andrew Stevens spends ‘Saturday Night at the Movies’ with rock ‘n’ roll flicks; ‘The Minotaur & the Maze’, Darran Anderson on the pathology of night:
The “badness£ of night became old hat. We grew familiar and tired of it. Gothic literature is the literary genre traditionally most associated with night and it’s tempting to see it’s origins not just in the ruins of medieval architecture but in sullen villagers drinking in the local tavern, trying to incite each other with diabolical tales, to gather their pitchforks and burning torches and finally do away with the hated local aristocrat/landlord. What better spark to ignite the settling of debts, some mob justice and a healthy redistribution of wealth than to spread dark rumours of devil worship, Pit and Pendulum-style secret torture chambers, Nero-like excesses and tyrannical legends like droit de seigneur, all taking place on the castle on the hill? Sometimes the peasants were right. The early antics of the lovable Marquis De Sade may pale in comparison to his later fevered prison-musings of 120 Days of Sodom but he still enjoyed more than his fair share of debauchery at the expense of several poor servant-girls. He was one of many such “libertines,” as a well-to-do rapist was known then, in the decaying end days of nobility. The most notorious such case in history is that of the serial-killing Slovakian Countess Erzsébet Báthory who was walled up alive in her castle for torturing and butchering hundreds of young women. Given the corpses and still-living victims that were found on her property and the eye-witness accounts of her activities (cutting arteries with scissors and forcing victims to consume their own flesh) it seems highly likely that she was a genuine psychopath. The later myths that arose, that she was seen in sexual congress with Satan and that she bathed in virgin blood to keep her skin forever youthful were no doubt hearsay but they’ve proved remarkably durable (a Báthory-style murderess of the same name appearing in the horror film Hostel II). It’s seemingly not enough to be a serial killer, other myths grow up and most disturbingly they grow because people want them to. The more illogical, dramatic and bloodthirsty the better.
The problem with inflating myths is that drama soon turns into melodrama. Gothic fictions, initially thrilling and lucrative, were soon spun out by every literary hack who could conjure up mountain crags, demented overlords, bound maidens and crumbling castles. Gothic became passé and ripe for parody (Jane Austen did so as early as 1798 with Northanger Abbey). Characters like Volkert the Necromancer of the Black Forest or Count Wolfenbach (from the popular novels of the same name) seem in hindsight to be parodies of themselves and represent a dead-end (though sometimes a tweaking of the fomula could resurrect the genre’s original power as in Ridley Scott’s “haunted house movie in space” Alien).
First posted: Sunday, May 2nd, 2010.
