Patrick Ness: A Monster Calls.

Conceived by Siobhan Dowd before her cancer took her, and reimagined by Patrick Ness four years later, 'A Monster Calls' is a children's novel of the indelible sort. The story begins  just after midnight. Conor O'Malley, a thirteen year old insomniac, is already awake, reliving the nightmare, "the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming." He hears a voice, a monstrous, untamed, wild sort of voice. He hears a billowing wind and groaning floorboards. Through his window he sees a graveyard, a church tower, and the steel lines of a railway track glowing in the moonlight. From the centre of the graveyard there rises an old yew tree, its branches twisting and creaking, forming a terrible face, a colossal spine and torso, a moving, breathing skin of woven needle-like leaves.

These opening pages are foreboding. Children's stories do not usually begin quite like this. There is an uneasy restlessness behind the words, and the same restlessness twitches at the margins too. Here, in the white spaces, Jim Kay's distressed inky doodles scratch, sprawl and smudge the edges of the pages, closing in on the text as Conor's nightmare closes in on him. Kay's obsessive monochrome details border the story throughout, sometimes bursting into beautiful full page or double page illustrations. They are midnight landscapes, bristling, sinewy and moonlit. They are of the same material as the text, inseparable from it in any meaningful sense.

Setting its black knotted hands on either side of the bedroom window, the monster glares in at a sleepless Conor. It roars and screams and pounds its fists against the house. It smashes a fist through the window, shattering glass and wood and brick across the floor, filling the room with its warm breath and its angry bellows. The white space of the page collapses into shadows and splinters.

"Shout all you want," Conor says, "I've seen worse."

In the author's note to the book Ness confesses to only one self-imposed guideline: "to write a book I think Siobhan would have liked." This seems like a sensible way to have gone about things. Ness and Dowd never met. He was handed her beginning, premise and characters by her publishers, Walker Books, and asked to, or felt like he had been asked to, in his words, "Go. Run with it. Make trouble." And that's what he has done.

Ness tells a story about stories, and not one of them, the frame story or the others, is ordinary or familiar. Each one troubles. Each one runs into the other. Each is a kind of inverted fairy-tale, populated with the familiar stock-characters, but without the stock morality. In one, for instance, we follow a noble Prince and a beautiful Princess into exile, fleeing hand in hand from an evil Queen, and from a kingdom rightfully theirs. They stop one night in a wood and rest beneath a tree. In the morning the Prince is distraught to find his love dead by his side, murdered in her sleep. Heart-broken and vengeful, he returns to the kingdom with the Princess' body, raises an army and overthrows the wicked Queen. In the name of his love he liberates the people of the kingdom from the Queen's despotic rule, and so, it seems, all is well. But then the monster, as the book's omniscient, omnipresent story-teller, takes us back to the dark of the night beneath the tree, and from the darkness he teases a different story, one which disfigures, or exposes the first. And this is what Ness does too. He teases out unseen, unfamiliar strands of stories from the dark, shadowy parts of the seen, familiar ones, and so the stories and their meanings become relative, shifting and contorting to accommodate the shifts and contortions of their neighbours. Each story is also, in and of itself, a commentary on the act of story-telling, challenging and toying with our intuitive responses to seemingly familiar stories.

'A Monster Calls' might have been another didactic children's book, a poe-faced message with a story attached as an afterthought. But instead it is a fully-formed, evolving story, a thing born of a dying breath with its own breathing musculature, and its own hulking shadow. It broods and bruises like Ted Hughes' Iron Man. It is beautiful and dark, restless but unwavering.

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

To say that Pulphead comes recommended would be a bit of an understatement. On Amazon, pretty much the only negative review of the book is a rant about the decline of the essay form written by a man who only ever gives one-star reviews and claims to be a Pulitzer Prize winning short story writer. A quick Internet search reveals that the closest this individual has come to the winning the attention of the Pulitzer Prize committee is a rabid comment he once posted on their official website. So let's regard Amazon as a forum of unanimous praise. In more established outlets, the book has drawn favourable comparisons with David Foster Wallace's essay collections. In fact, someone writing for The New York Times Book Review stated that Pulphead was the "most important collection of magazine writing since A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

As with anything that comes with so much positive hype, it's initially difficult to enjoy Pulphead. The first piece in the book is an account of a Christian Rock festival, most of which Sullivan dedicates to recounting his experiences with the enormous vehicle he is forced to hire for transport, and a group of 20-something mega-Christian woodsmen who he ends up befriending onsite. There's a flashback to his younger days as a believer, and a brief discussion of the possibility that Christian-rock is the only genre of music to have effectively excellence-proofed itself, but mostly the piece is a portrait of the author, his wheels and a group of guys he once met. The autobiographical nature of the writing, combined with the way Sullivan mixes slang, Christian jargon, straight magazine prose and arcane vocabulary might remind some readers of an eloquent blogger, or summon the spectre of Hunter S. Thompson.

But this comparison with the King of Gonzo is not as negative as it might seem. Most writers who take influence from Hunter S. Thompson tend to ape his irreverence, wild metaphors and penchant for detailing his own substance abuse, while lacking his respect for language and forgetting that it was his originality which made him popular in the first place. What Sullivan has in common with The Good Doctor is his ability to make himself an asset to the story, revealing unexpected truths as a result. Everything Sullivan examines he can trace back to himself. As Henry David Thoreau said, "We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking." Sullivan leaves no such room for forgetting. Pulphead is gleefully subjective, and it ends up all the more convincing for it.

It also becomes apparent, as you read further, that Sullivan's use of language is extremely flexible. He adapts it greatly depending on his subject matter. When he writes about a Tea Party rally, he writes the best part of the piece in the first person plural, such that for a while I was almost fooled into believing he was a supporter. It's a clever move and one which highlights the writer's ability to sympathise with his subjects and their concerns.

His essay about the TV show, The Real World USA is probably the most extreme example of this linguistic empathy. The piece is full of "I was like..." and "He goes..." in place of the usual dialogue markers, and features Sullivan addressing his readers as "bros," and refusing to explain the concept of the show because, "Fuck it! You know how it works." These are all ticks that could be initially irritating if you don't find them amusing, but Sullivan adapts the argot of airhead reality TV stars in order to expound a thesis on the genre which was new to me and also very persuasive.  And I quote:

There was a time when people liked to point out that reality TV isn't really real. "They're just acting up for the cameras." "That's staged." "The producers are telling them what to do!" "I hate those motherfuckers!" and so forth. Then there was a sort of deuxieme naivete when people thought, Maybe there is something real about it. "Because, you know, we can be narcissistic like that." "It's our culture." "It gives us a window onto..." And such things. But I would argue that all these different straw people I've invented are missing the single most interesting thing about reality TV, which is the way it has successfully appropriated reality. 

He goes on to explain that reality TV casts are now made up of people who have spent years watching reality TV, and that being on a reality TV show is now simply a right of passage for many people. The casts of these shows now comprise of:

people whose very consciousness [has] been formed by the shows... Now, when you watch a reality show—when you follow The Real World, for instance—you're not watching a bunch of people hurled into some contrived scenario and getting filmed, you're watching people caught in the act of being on a reality show. That's the plot of all reality shows, no matter their cooked up themes.

This situation has meant that producers need to work harder and harder to find people who aren't "hip" to the game, and who will come into the programme and display some semblance of spontaneity. "Have you seen reality TV recently?" asks Sullivan. "From what can be gathered, they're essentially emptying group homes into the studio. It has all gotten very real."  

This short essay on the meaning of reality TV appears in the middle of a profile of a man called the Miz, who became a star on an early series of The Real World, and has since made a living being that guy off the real world, travelling from city to city to do meet-and-greets and spend several hours of heavy drinking and "straight wildin' wildin'" in sponsored nightclub appearances. (There is, apparently, a whole economy based around what people do once they've been on a show.) Embedding an editorial or historical essay into an otherwise narrative piece of writing or a portrait of an individual is one of Sullivan's key techniques. It's a technique that serves him well.

In fact, the book is probably at its strongest when it comes to profiles of musicians. Sullivan has a rare ability to write about music, but he also has deep sympathy for his subjects and he manages to write about both Axl Rose and Michael Jackson in a way that humanises both figures while dissecting American society at the same time. The piece about Michael Jackson, written after his death, is particularly moving. Sullivan places Jackson back in American history. He contrasts the way that Jackson interacted with the black press with the way he spoke to mainstream journalists, and points out that all the majority of us have ever seen of Jackson is a man defending himself against a hostile white media. It is so difficult for me to remember that Jackson was a black man that I had never even thought of this before. Sullivan also writes at length about the talent and drive Jackson had, at one point giving a description of Jackson's famous televised Billie Jean performance—the first time he publicly did the moonwalk—which is so well written that when I watched the video I saw at least two things I'm sure I otherwise would have missed.

Axl Rose, on the other hand, is shown to be a man best understood in relation to the fact that he escaped from a shit-kicking life of petty violence, drudgery and bigotry in central Indiana, a place Sullivan describes as "nowhere." And Sullivan is qualified to make the case. He's talking about the place where he grew up. He goes in search of Rose's old friends and manages to make Guns 'n' Roses lyrics seem to be the howl of a soul without a home.

I hope it is clear now that Sullivan is never just writing about the subject at hand, but always about a myriad of cultural concerns and connections. His pieces on lost Blues singers and hidden American Cave paintings are complex interventions into America's view of itself. And all the while, he is a very entertaining writer. Sometimes he is fucking hilarious. By the time it gets to the end of the book, where Sullivan discusses TV show One Tree Hill's use of his house as a set, or gives an account of a stoned trip to Disney land, he has won you over so much that you welcome these further dispatches from his life.

So I'm adding my voice to the chorus of approval for Pulphead, something which can only reduce the chances of your enjoying it when first you pick it up and begin to read. You should persevere though. It'll be worth it.