I was dying to see this museum made out of an old World War II bunker when I found out there was a tableau of a Middle Ages amputation complete with a screaming soundtrack. If ever a perfect museum had been created for me, Gruselkabinett was it. My friend Chris and I went on a rainy Tuesday, and from a block off, we could hear the long, drawn-out screams of kids--not screams of terror, but screaming because they could. We ended up at the closed gate to the Gruselkabinett, where a pack of seven- to nine-year-old boys were screaming with delight because of the echo factor in the courtyard to the bunker. They politely told me in German that the Gruselkabinett was closed today, but it would be open tomorrow. Then they asked me for a cigarette. I said, "Nein, nein."



Chris and I returned the following day and found the bunker open. I was a little confused by the signs for admission--there was one price that was inclusive of everything and one for just the museum. I wanted the inclusive ticket, though I did not know at that time what "everything" meant.

We tried to go in the regular entrance to the museum but were told to begin our tour on the top floor. We climbed two flights of stairs and opened the door to a completely black room with a dim light shining in the distance. I could see the white, spidery fluff of fake cobwebs that had decorated my elementary school classroom at Halloween and had a feeling I was in trouble. Immediately I clamped onto Chris's shoulder. She probably still has bruises from my fingers.




Slowly we shuffled to that far-off, dim lightbulb, and then a ghost floated in front of us--just a looming white mask with the person's body covered by a black robe that blended in with the dark--and growled at us before ducking into the dark again. I screamed and screamed. We went from dark room to dark room, where cheesy wax tableaux were set up of Dracula biting a 1970s-style femme fatale or fake, moving plastic hands that were buried in sand. The exhibits reminded me of the wax museum in New Orleans, where I found the historical figures scary and creepy, but not nearly as scary as this visit--an unexpected haunted house experience. The ghost kept darting out from hidden places and corners and growling at us, accompanied by a goblin (also wearing a black robe so he or she could blend into the bunker's darkness). These were two people who were really dedicated to their jobs.

Finally we ran into a group of Germans, who were thrilled to find "normal people," and we formed a conga line to find our way out of the haunted house. Of course, nobody wanted to be in the back, and I must say there's nothing like screaming together to break the language barrier. After we were in the regular bunker exhibit, we all exchanged sheepish looks with one another when we met in the different exhibit areas.




Almost all of the exhibits had to do with the end of the war in Berlin in 1945. The citizens who had not yet evacuated Berlin were forced down into the bunkers, where it's dark and you cannot feel the passage of time. Each family was assigned one bench or step to sit on, which was so uncomfortable that sleep became impossible.

I listened to one woman's story on headphones; she had been six when her family was forced down into the bunkers at the end of April 1945. She sat on the bench with her mother, and she said that nobody talked. She went to find the bathroom and found the first one locked. The second door she opened to find a man who had committed suicide, and she said she couldn't touch door handles for a long time after that experience. Eventually she found a common area that everybody was using for a bathroom, some trying to discreetly cover up their mess with handkerchiefs or newspaper. Touring some of these tiny, claustrophobic rooms of the bunker, I thought I could still smell the strong scent of urine.

For some time after the war, people didn't know what to do with these bunkers, and they still don't know where all of the underground tunnels lead. One bunker is used as the monkey house at the zoo, and then there is Gruselkabinett, which combines a haunted house experience along with the history of the bunkers--a pretty innovative way to capture the horror of those days in April 1945, I think.

I haunted the library’s one-week express bookshelf, looking for Stephen King’s latest four novellas titled Full Dark, No Stars. I visited the shelf three different times at the Mid-Manhattan Library, hoping the supply would be replenished, but each time there would be no King—only Laurell K. Hamilton and Dean Koontz. I had finally picked up Peter Straub’s latest collection of short stories and resigned myself to that when I made one last pass near the One-Week Book Express and found a library cart nearby with King’s new book on it. So happy, I cracked it right open on the subway trip home to read the first story of the collection, “1922.”



This story ended up being my favorite in the book, dealing with a farmer right before the Great Depression who has a contrary wife. She has inherited land from her father that’s worth a lot of money and wants to sell it and move to the city where she can open a shop. Her husband wants to add the land to his and farm it. Since he can’t talk his wife into what he wants, he decides to kill her, enlisting the help of his fourteen-year-old son, and that of course is just the beginning of their problems.

Shortly after the man murders his wife, rats begin to plague him, but these aren’t normal rats—they’re supernatural rats the size of house cats, which seem to equal the amount of guilt that he carries around with him. That’s what got me the most in this story—the crippling guilt that the farmer and his son carry around with them after doing the deed. It’s like a palpable mass that is much more frightening, I think, than the rats could ever be. I read this story in broad daylight on the subway and it terrified me, yet was so engrossing that I almost missed my stop. That almost never happens.



All of the novellas are related by characters with two selves—the light, good public face that most of the world sees and then the dark, evil face or self that comes out during the worst times. In “A Good Marriage,” the good wife “Darcy supposed that if she had been able to tell her mother what she was looking for, if she had explained about the Darker Girl who wasn’t quite her, she might have passed some time with a child psychiatrist. But it wasn’t the girl who interested her, it had never been the girl. What interested her was the idea that there was a whole other world behind the mirrors, and if you could walk through that other house (the Darker House) and out the door, the rest of that world would be waiting.”

Poor Darcy gets to see beyond her husband’s public face, and then finds herself immersed in that Darker House, and a darker world.

Full Dark, No Stars ended up being a satisfying read, and I finished it before the week was up. I’ll be thinking about identity and duality in a dark way for a while after the way King has tilted them in his novellas.

Joyce Carol Oates got some great reviews for her most recent short story collection Sourland and was only doing one event to promote the book (as far as I could tell). Luckily, for me, the Sourland reading took place in New York, so I'm almost able to graduate to two hands when counting the times I've seen Joyce Carol Oates live. (I don't count the time I passed by her at Bryant Park.) Since the last time I've seen her, her husband has died, and in Sourland, it seems that Oates is coming to terms with his unexpected death by mining the experience over and over again, covering aspects in her different short stories.



Many of the stories' protagonists are widowed women who have unexpectedly lost their partners and are trying to figure out how to live, and most of the stories are about lost love. A couple of the widowed characters have to deal with the experience of probate court, which appears to be humiliating, justifying who you are and what you are entitled to based on how your relationship is documented on paper--marriage certificate, death certificate, etc. Another widow finds herself restricted to two rooms that she cannot avoid: the kitchen and the bedroom. The rest of her house has become ghost rooms because she can't be in them without being haunted by memories of her husband. Love comes up again and again in these stories, especially how one in a relationship loves more and the other less.




My favorite story in the collection, though, stars a young woman who's twenty-six years old and sports a pair of prosthetic legs. The best part about the character is how she flaunts her disability. Jane dreaded people's stares as a child after the accident, but now she invites them, dressing up to show off her prostheses in short-short skirts and patterned tights. She wears these clothes like armor, announcing, "Here I am!":

"On this windy April day I was wearing a pleated skirt made of cream-colored wool flannel, that resembled a high school cheerleader's skirt, & I was wearing a crimson satin blouse with a V-neckline glittering with thin gold chains & small crystal beads, & if you dared to lean over, to peer at my legs, or what was meant to represent my "legs," you would see the twin prostheses, shiny plastic artificial legs & steel pins & on my (small) feet eyelet stockings & black patent leather "ballerina slippers."

"Amputee" reminds me so much of my favorite Flannery O'Connor story "Good Country People," but Joyce Carol Oates goes much further than Flannery was able to. What Flannery hinted at--well, Oates fills in with lurid detail. And it's ugly and beautiful.

I came out of the theater feeling rejuvenated after seeing Splice (directed and written by Vincenzo Natali). It's been awhile since I've seen anything fresh and creative on the American horror front, and Splice hit the spot--a combination of The Bride of the Frankenstein crossed with Philadelphia's Mütter Museum.

Splice stars the talented Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody as a pair of rock-star scientists, Elsa and Clive, who create a few genetically mutated monsters named Fred and Ginger that only a mother and father could love. Elsa and Clive are also romantically involved, and fortunately they do love their creations.



The scientific team's primary responsibility is to mine Fred and Ginger for a synthetically produced protein that will aid humanity, but Elsa and Clive (especially Elsa) are champing at the bit to use human DNA in one of their creations. They eventually do, unknown to anybody else in their lab, and create a "child" with a rapidly accelerated growth rate who's part supermodel, part dinosaur.





Elsa takes on the role of the mad Dr. Frankenstein, crossing all sorts of boundaries that shouldn't be, while Clive serves as the conscience for the two scientists. What makes Splice especially twisted is how the mother-child relationship is bastardized. A mother's love is usually held up as a paradigm--an unselfish love that's supposed to transcend all others. The mother's expected to be calm, patient, and nurturing toward her child, even in the nine months before the infant appears. Nothing seems to make the public angrier than an unfit mother--smoking and drinking while pregnant or beating on her kid in the supermarket.

Polley's Elsa is the mother character toward her and Clive's creation named Dren, providing the nurturing side while Clive wants to take a more objective, scientific view of their experiment, knowing its nature. When Dren becomes willful and Clive starts to have feelings for their experiment, Elsa turns against her creation and this change of heart seems much more horrific because the audience has seen how much love Elsa has already shown Dren.



I've heard a lot of complaints about the ending of Splice, but I have no problems with it. The movie raises so many questions about what is ethical behavior and what is not, and I rather liked the open-ended, ambiguous ending, which just gave me more to think about after leaving the theater.

Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard is a fairy tale told by two pairs of sisters close in age. The first pair play the characters in the Charles Perrault story Bluebeard and are sent home from school after their father dies since there is no more money to pay for their education. The second pair of sisters locate a copy of Bluebeard in an out-of-the-way attic that they're not sure is forbidden, and they tell each other the story (with their own variations) in tandem with the first pair. Which set of sisters will come to a violent end? In a Catherine Breillat film, it's only a matter of time.



Sisters are a major theme in the Breillat films I've seen, Fat Girl and Bluebeard, with the younger sister playing the role of the put-upon child and the elder being the beautiful, arrogant one. With the two sets of sisters in Bluebeard, Breillat varies this arrangement somewhat, and it makes me think of sisters as they have appeared in fairy tales I've read or heard, where one is the most beautiful or the pluckiest or the most clever.

With the actual Bluebeard part of the movie, the contrasts are marked, which seems to be a crucial element of fairy tales. There is the family with two marriageable daughters shown dealing with mean poverty while the castle of Bluebeard and the feasts at his manor are displayed with grandeur and decadence. There is the child-aged and -sized bride contrasted with the much older, uglier, and mammoth groom. Her innocence with his experience, his kind, generous side with his unbending murderous side, and so on, and so on.




Bluebeard is an adult's fairy tale that focuses on the darker side of human nature rather than the picture-perfect marriage of a princess at the end of a Disney cartoon. Here, the movie ends with two images: One similar to Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes and the other like one of the terrible ends that happens to Edward Gorey's creations. It's a movie that I think of in terms of images and colors rather than a story line.

I'm a big fan of Joe Hill's work. I think my favorite is his collection of short stories 20th Century Ghosts, which is full of quirky twists on the horror genre. The story that sticks out the most deals with an editor going through his slush pile--a task that can be one of the circles of hell, I've heard--and finding that most elusive of things: a fresh short story by an unknown talent. Then the editor goes to court that talent and winds up in a scene similar to the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Bad move.



It's hard to sustain that type of story for a full-length novel, but I found Hill's novel Heart Shaped Box admirable, combining seemingly unreconcilable things from pop culture with a haunting and producing a delicious horror story.

I started Horns with a sense of anticipation, expecting that same kind of knockdown, and for most of the book, it was there. A scene involving the youthful protagonist Iggy Perrish, his older brother, a cherry bomb, and a turkey was brilliant, and Hill's ability to draw characters, both male and female, is spot-on. In the end, though, I found Horns too similar to Heart Shaped Box and my interest flagged while finishing the book.




In Heart Shaped Box, the protagonist is an aging musician with an interest in all things that are evil since it's good for his stage persona. In Horns, the protagonist is the son of a famous jazz musician and brother to another famous musician, a trumpet player with his own TV show. Both protagonists are dealing with the deaths of their recent romantic partners, licking their wounds while taking up with second-best girlfriends. In Horns, I did appreciate the more sympathetic portrayal of the second best, Glenna: "She looked good, a curvy girl in stonewashed gray jeans, a sleeveless black shirt, and a black studded belt. He could see the Playboy Bunny on her exposed hip, which was a trashy touch, but who hadn't made mistakes, done things to themselves they wished they could take back."

Horns starts with an interesting scenario. Iggy Perrish wakes up with a terrible hangover and discovers that overnight he's sprouted horns on his head. The horns appear to act as radio antennae, and people give Iggy their unedited thoughts when he speaks with them. If Iggy touches somebody, he can see what they've done, reading their deepest, darkest secrets.



After setting up this scary situation, Hill goes back to when Iggy was fifteen and met his best friend Lee and the love of his life, Merrin, filling in the backstory. Here, Iggy is shown as a kid full of high jinks and spirit, but he is also kind and compassionate, almost saintlike. I wonder if it's this section that makes the end of the novel not work for me. After seeing the heroic Iggy, I found it a stretch to jump back to Iggy as the devil, coming to avenge the murder of his girlfriend. The ending of Horns fell flat for me, and I really didn't want it too after loving the first two-thirds of the book.

I'm knee-deep in ballet autobiographies and biographies and needed a little light reading, so I picked through the graphic novel section at the Cortelyou branch of the Brooklyn Library and found a couple of likely candidates. In the Small by Michael Hague is a one-story-complete graphic novel about what happens one day when a mysterious blue light flashes and turns all human beings into miniatures of themselves at six inches tall or under.



Two siblings nicknamed Beat (she's formally named after Beatrix Potter) and Mouse (after Hieronymous Bosch) end up becoming leaders of the humans that remain in their areas--Mouse at his Manhattan office and Beat someplace in Westchester, I'm guessing. Mouse experiences visions and actually has one predicting the event just minutes before it actually happens. He gets feelings about things and uses these psychic powers to guide the pint-sized humans toward his house in Westchester, which is conveniently surrounded by a tall fence to keep out predators and has plenty of arable land to grow things with a stream running through it.

Many humans don't survive the moment of shrinking, which becomes known as The Fall, and the people that do find those they used to master, such as cats and dogs, are now predators. After reading In the Small, I spent about an hour staring at my cat and trying to figure out when and if she would eat me. I decided she would after three or four days of having no full-sized humans around to open the cans of Friskies. And my death would be vicious and so not quick. I've seen Ellie, my girl cat, take down a mouse and play with it for hours on end, tossing it from paw to paw like the Swedish Chef does with kitchen implements on The Muppet Show.

There are great ideas in the graphic novel In the Small and some terrifically gruesome pictures, also done by Michael Hague, which makes one wonder what it would be like to be devoured by ants. Overall, though, I found the story underdeveloped. There's so much more that could be done with this idea. Perhaps Hague will take up his pencil again and continue with the story one day.

I've always loved sharks. When I lived in Guam, I can remember my second-grade class going on a field trip to see sharks. A woman stood on the inside edge of a tank, holding up a giant hook with a bloody piece of meat, and one of my classmates made a fake move to push her in with the white tips that swarmed below. She didn't go in, but it was thrilling to think so for a minute. Though the white tips were enclosed in a dirty tank that was much too small for them, I could see their beauty and grace--perfectly proportioned, smooth, sleek ... streamlined. They were built to go, go, go, because a shark can never stop swimming, or ironically, they will drown.



In Rod Stewart's documentary Sharkwater, he, too, was bit by the shark bug early in his life and went on to become an underwater photographer so he could study the sharks up close, becoming familiar with their habits when they decided to go near him. Stewart portrays the sharks as wise creatures, not the ignorant water dinosaurs who will eat license plates if they come across them in the water, as shown in Jaws. He films schools of hammerheads from below near Cocos Island, a beautiful sequence that looks like nature's ballet as the hammerheads go through their mating rituals. The hammerheads are so sensitive to electromagnetic energy, he says, that he has to keep his heart rate down in order not to scare off these sharks.



Then Stewart surfaces from the dive, and the true purpose of the documentary is revealed. Stewart's boat comes across fishermen illegally line fishing, a process where up to sixty miles of fishing line is sunk into the sea, the line baited with thousands of hooks. The fishing boat flees the scene, and Stewart and his crew try to clean up the mess the best they can, releasing those fish and sharks that are still living. By the time Stewart finishes, he counts more than one hundred dead sharks.

The goal of line fishing is to catch as many sharks as possible, and any tuna or sea turtles that are captured by the lines--well, too bad for them. The sharks are brought up to the boat, where they are definned and then their corpses are thrown into the sea. The fins are a tasteless cartilage that's mixed with chicken or beef broth to make shark-fin soup, a dish that has grown in popularity because it is seen as a status symbol, billed as "food of the emperors." And shark fins bring in a lot of money, up to $200 a fin, so people can make a fortune very quickly. The sea shown here is an aquatic Wild West, and sharks are unfortunately the buffalo.



Stewart casts himself as the main character of this documentary, and he comes off as egotistical and overwrought at times, using a voice eerily similar to the Morpheus character from The Matrix, but with purple prose-like content. The section where he films himself in a hospital room, displaying his emotional anguish after catching the flesh-eating bacteria, is hard to stomach and hammers home the phrase conceited ape, which Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson uses in the film. I think Sharkwater would have resonated with me more if Stewart had stuck to giving the sharks first billing rather than himself.

I know Charlotte, Emily, and Anne's works and biographies, but I've always been curious about the Bronte that didn't turn out so well, Branwell, especially when all looked to him to be the success of the family. In this unusually close, literary family, Branwell seems to have suffered the most when it comes to output and that may be because he was watched the most. That's the conclusion I draw, anyway, from reading du Maurier's biography.



Branwell was the only boy in a family of six children, and his father Patrick Bronte decided to teach Branwell at home because he found the boy's temperament too nervous for boarding school. After the death of Patrick's wife Maria, the girls were farmed out one by one to boarding schools (not elite schools but very poor ones catering to clergymen's daughters). Patrick Bronte's two eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, both became terribly ill at school and were sent home to Haworth, where they died.

Branwell received a box of toy soldiers, which appear to be the inspiration for the make-believe worlds that the Brontes created: Gondal and Angria. The Bronte sisters were led in this game by Branwell, and they created large casts of characters to populate their imaginary lands, writing stories about them and drawing pictures and maps. This imaginary world was the training ground for Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, and du Maurier is able to trace back most of the Brontes' archetypes to Gondal and Angria. All of the Brontes shared their characters with one another, though each individual did have his or her favorites.



Branwell was never quite able to make the artistic jump that his sisters did, but he was not sent out into the world until late while his sisters were forced to go to school much earlier, mixing with outsiders. Also, Branwell had to contend with the male social world, where his peers gathered at pubs, drinking and talking of their exploits. This, according to du Maurier and other sources, was Branwell's undoing. Once introduced to alcohol and laudanum, he was unable to ever shake them. While his sisters hid behind fake names, Branwell had quite an elevated opinion of his talents. In letter after letter that du Maurier quotes, it seems as if Branwell is trying to piss people off with his bravado. For example, he writes to William Wordsworth about his poetic aspirations, "Surely, in this day, when there is not a writing poet worth a sixpence, the field must be open, if a better man can step forward."



The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte is an old book, so sometimes stereotypical claims pop up that I would be surprised to see in biographies nowadays: "Like most people with Irish blood, Branwell knew how to adapt himself to an audience of one person or a dozen." For the most part, I do think du Maurier's style is suited to telling the story. She has a dramatic flair that propels the story along, a difficult task, I think, when so much of the Brontes' world was internal.

I think George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins' staging of Firebird has to be the closest thing there is to a horror ballet, an idea I've been playing with lately. It has magic and witchcraft--Prince Ivan captures the Firebird, and she gives him a magic feather once he releases her. Later, Prince Ivan, his bride-to-be, and his court are cursed by a wizard and beset by monsters. All of this is danced by backdrops done by Marc Chagall, proving a mythical and somewhat ominous presence. And then, of course, there's the music by Igor Stravinsky.



Ashley Bouder played the Firebird with great energy (I could hear her pants from row D), but I found her pas de deux with Prince Ivan uneven, and I think that's because of her choice in partnering. As Prince Ivan, Jonathan Stafford had a moment where it looked as if he were dragging the Firebird across the stage like a sack of potatoes and then he nicked poor Ashley's knees on the stage at a different time. I don't think these were planned moments of the Firebird choreography.



Once the monsters come flying at Prince Ivan like leeches in their lime green leotards, Firebird becomes a very different ballet. I truly love the monsters in their misshapen foam costumes with strange bloatings and protuberances, yet moving with such grace (as there is a dancer or two beneath each of those Chagall-inspired costumes). The beautiful movement and ugliness tied together makes for a wonderful combination.




When the Firebird returns to save Prince Ivan and his court, all eyes were on Bouder, especially when she turned her back to the audience and displayed physique and movement that reminded me of heat lightning. For a moment, she really did look like a phoenix rising.