I recently finished reading John O’Hara’s APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA - a novel I had admittedly tried to read a few times previously before giving up after a chapter or two. Well, don’t give up on your dreams, folks, because - now that I’ve finally finished it, I can confidently state that O’Hara’s novel is one of the best things I’ve read in some time.
APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA is a 1934 novel about a married couple in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania. Julian and Caroline English are moderately wealthy socialites who enjoy the things all wealthy white folks in their community appreciate - Christmas-morning sex, fancy dress parties, and gossiping about the Jewish neighbors who aren’t allowed at said parties. Their shallow life of ill-earned luxury comes to a screeching halt when Julian, in a moment of drunken self-pity, throws a drink in the face of a man even more wealthy and well-connected than himself. This sets off a domino chain of social faux pas and, within the next 36 hours, Julian and Carloine’s social lives will have crumbled to dust.
O’Hara’s novel might be nearly 100 years old but it reads very contemporary and not just because Julian, Caroline and their friends’ drunken debauchery would not be out of place in a modern millennial milieu. Their social anxieties about wealth, marriage, love and loss are all things that elder millennials are grappling with today. Being a person in your thirties in the ‘30s was just as hard, in some ways, as it is today. Harder, of course, when you consider World Wars were fought openly back then - instead of on Twitter (er, X, I mean) and Facebook like today.
APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA is funny and sad and insightful in all the ways I like my literature to be, but the real reason I was drawn to it was for the anthropological manner in which it captures small-town life in the ‘30s. O’Hara’s prose is so specifically obsessed with all the details - all of them. What kind of cigarettes folks smoked, what kind of cars they drove, what records they listened to, and what drinks they smuggled through the not-so-tight reigns of Prohobition-era American law - O’Hara shares it all. In a lot of ways, APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA reminded me of Bret Easton Ellis’ AMERICAN PSYCHO - just long passages of descriptive character details. And I eat that shit up. I love learning about people and how their lives are constructed. I love it in real life - I people-watch like Garfield eats lasagna - and I love it in my fiction. Give me all the character-defining flashbacks and internal monologues and materialistic manifestos an author can provide. People are their environment and O’Hara knows this.
Gibbsville is just as big a character in APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA as the English couple is. Side characters are given entire chapters to share their story and the book begins and ends with the perspective of the English neighbors.
Everybody has a story and O’Hara wants to share it. And I want to read it.
On the other spectrum of literature is DO A POWERBOMB! - a great graphic novel written and illustrated by Daniel Warren Johnson. I binged the comic series over the weekend and fell head over heels - despite having zero emotional connection to wrestling.
I came of age in the ‘90s when WWE wrestlers like The Rock, The Undertaker and Jake “The Echidna” Rangoo reigned supreme. Or did they? I have no idea. I probably made up the name of one of those wrestlers - probably - because I didn’t watch any of it. Despite being in love with superheroes and comic books as a kid, nothing about wrestling appealed to me. It was like all the spandex and muscles but with none of the heart or emotion (at least from my outside perspective). Definitely none of the symbiotic costumes and dope AF adamantium claws More so, I couldn’t get past the fact that it was all fake. I mean, it was fake, right? At least that’s what I kept gleefully pointing out to my friends who were fans.
DO A POWERBOMB! is the story of a young female wrestler grappling with the death of her mother - an in-the-ring accident she witnessed as a child. Now, as an adult, Lona Steelrose attempts to break into the wrestling scene but before that, she’s going to have to exercise some personal demons. Luckily, a real-life demon comes calling when an intergalactic necromancer offers Lona the chance to compete in a multiversal tournament where the winner will be given the chance to resurrect the person of their choosing. Lona teams up with the luchador who was responsible for her mother’s death to tag-team their way into victory and resurrect the fallen wrestling warrior, aka Mom.
DO A POWERBOMB! is all emotion - big, heavy soap opera shit that tears up the heart while the spandex-clad monsters in the ring are tearing up their opponent’s ligaments. The book features gorgeously illustrated action - men and women of impossible physiques pulling off daring damage to their opponents through suplexes and, um, other wrestling moves. But it’s the emotion that drew me in like a man-moth to the fleshlight - Johnson’s book is a big open heart of feelings, raw and oozing and so tender you can’t help but want to put a bandaid on it. Lona, as she tangles with SUV-sized orangutangs and cyborg man-knights, is learning how to make peace with her mother’s death. And, in the end, the book even answers that question that eluded me through my youth - why do you even watch wrestling when you know the whole story is choreographed in advance? I’m not going to ruin the answer here, but you should find out yourself in this really, really, really good funny book.
Finally, there’s a smaller movie opening this weekend in theaters called JULES. I had the chance to see it recently and I really dug it.
Ben Kingsley plays an older man who has a UFO crash land in his backyard. His attempts to report the disturbance go nowhere because folks just think he's senile. The movie may not be for the cynics in the peanut gallery, but I found the movie - and the way it deals with the inherent and inescapable loneliness that comes as you get older - very touching. The movie also has some genuine WTF moments that will catch audiences by surprise. Seriously, this movie goes into some dark and unexpected places. It’s directed by Marc Turtletaub, who produced LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE and SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED, two films that give you a pretty good idea of the tone of JULES. I liked this movie a lot - it’s a good one and you should go see it!
In WHERE WOLF news, I don’t have any tour stops or events happening this week but I’ve been hard at work on THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, the forthcoming sequel. I just got back the lettered pages from Jack Morelli for the third chapter in the new book. I really wish I could show off some of these pages - they’re gorgeous - but the whole concept of WHERE WOLF 2 is a spoiler for WHERE WOLF 1.
Eventually, I will show off some of what I’m working on - but you better get to reading WHERE WOLF if you want to remain spoiler free.
In the meantime, here are the covers for the first three chapters of THE CURSE OF THE WHERE WOLF.
And here’s your weekly reminder to rate or review WHERE WOLF on Goodreads or Amazon if you’ve read the book. It helps. A lot.
More next week!