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Anthony Bourdain’s Hungry Ghosts by Anthony Bourdain and Joel Rose, illustrated by Alberto Ponticelli, Vanesa Del Rey, Leonardo Manco, Mateus Santolouco, Sebastian Cabrol, Paul Pope, Irene Koh, and Francesco Francavilla


Anthony Bourdain’s Hungry Ghosts by Anthony Bourdain and Joel Rose; illustrated by Alberto Ponticelli, Vanesa Del Rey, Leonardo Manco, Mateus Santoloucuo, Sebastian Cabrol, Paul Pope, Irene Koh, and Francesco Francavilla

Dark Horse Comics, 2018

ISBN-13: 9781506706696

Available: Hardcover, Kindle, comiXology

Hungry Ghosts, by the late Anthony Bourdain with Joel Rose, brings us the stories of a group of international chefs who are challenged to play 100 Candles by a Russian crime lord. The game is based on the Japanese Edo period game of Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai where samurai were challenged to tell ghost stories, each more terrifying than the last. After each tale, the storyteller then blew out a candle, making the atmosphere darker with each story. They also had to gaze into a mirror to ensure their fellow storytellers did not become possessed by the entities they could summon while telling their stories. The chefs participating in this game each tell a different cautionary tale all with the same theme: food.

I loved all of the stories in this graphic novel, but a few stood out over the others. In “The Starving Skeleton,” a cautionary tale about ignoring those in need, a homeless man enters a small restaurant in search of a meal. The chef turns him away, refusing to serve him, but soon discovers what happens when the spirits of those who starved to death are refused alms. In “The Pirates”, a voluptuous red-haired woman is rescued from drowning at sea by a ship of lusty pirates. What ensues is a feast of a different kind.

An apprentice chef who finds himself alone after his master dies unexpectedly is taken in by a group of chefs who each have a sad story to tell in “The Heads”. The masterless apprentice decides to stay with them, but discovers a disturbing scene in the middle of the night when he sees the bodies of his new friends in the kitchen missing their heads. It’s a far more disturbing sight when he sees what has happened to their heads.

A father and son are trapped in a blizzard in “The Snow Woman”. They find shelter, but in the middle of the night the son wakes up to find a mysterious woman over his father. She spares the son’s life, but tells him he must never tell anyone of what happened that night. Later, he finds the woman of his dreams. They wed, and have children. His fortune changes when he tells his wife the story of what happened that night in the snowstorm. The artwork for this story is particularly beautiful.

Included in the book are an afterword by Joel Rose, recipes, descriptions and artwork of the ghosts, demons, and entities in the stories, a cover gallery, and author biographies.

Rose and Bourdain, as well as the illustrators, did not pull any punches with content in some of these stories. They deal with disturbing content and imagery. If you are not a fan of body horror, gore, and/or disturbing themes, you should probably avoid this book. However, if you appreciate these horror elements like I do, consider picking up this title. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some new recipes to try. Highly recommended.

Contains: body horror, disturbing imagery, nudity, sexual assault

 

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

 

Posted on March 7, 2019 by , Reply

Women In Horror Month: Supernatural Tales, Hidden No More

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Looking back at American supernatural tales of the 19th and 20th century, we can see that often the themes that they focused on revolved around women and children and the traditional roles they were expected to fill. On the surface, it may seem like that reinforces a conservative, patriarchal view of the world, but women who wrote these stories often used them to explore questions about sexuality, marriage, the domestic sphere, and the horror of confinement to the narrow expectations faced by women and girls.

Shirley Jackson’s “Afternoon in Linen”, is a textbook example of this (literally– it appears in my daughter’s language arts textbook). While it has no supernatural elements, we see a lot of tension between adult expectations of  our protagonist Harriet, her own desires, and the boy there who also happens to be her classmate. In the story, Harriet’s grandmother and mother expect her to perform on the piano and recite her original poetry to visitors. Harriet does not want to either play the piano or share her personal thoughts with the visitors and insists she doesn’t know how. She can tell that the boy who arrived with the visitors, who is also a classmate, will mock her poetry to her peers. Pushed to the limit by her grandmother, Harriet claims she lied about writing the poem herself. She would rather disappoint the expectations of the adults wanting to show off her feminine talents than perform for them; and she would rather be seen as a liar than teased by her peers. Harriet’s self-determination and how the conflicting expectations of the people around her affect her behavior leave the reader unsettled, even though the story doesn’t hold the horror of  The Haunting of Hill House.

It’s interesting that actually, many of the women who wrote supernatural stories are seen as “regional” or “realistic” authors, with their ghost and supernatural stories disregarded in favor of their better-known works. Edith Wharton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, all of whom either appeared in my American lit textbook or were recommended reading, were never identified as writers of supernatural fiction there.

While supernatural tales often were written with women as the victims, sometimes they were also written with powerful women with agency in them. Women authors used the supernatural to explore anxieties about marriage, home, power, and the fragility of love and relationships. Under cover of the fantastic and unreal. they were able to strike deep into the emotional and psychological truths of women’s lives, while delivering a terrifying tale that those simply looking for entertainment could appreciate.

So many women wrote for newspapers and periodicals that have now crumbled to pieces that we may never know how many talented writers’ works were lost forever. Of those that remain, some are only available in out-of-print limited editions. Others, however, are available either free or cheap as ebooks (The Wind in the Rose-bush by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Tales of Men and Ghosts by Edith Wharton, for instance) You kind of have to know who you’re looking for to find the hidden supernatural tales that haven’t made it into textbooks or onto lists of recommended or required reading. I’ve written about some of them in the past, but there’s much to do to bring women writers of supernatural fiction to light.

Luckily, today, women don’t have to fight quite as hard to be recognized for their outstanding work in the horror genre. Today on Facebook, author Christopher Golden asked writers to name the people who had been supportive to them on their creative journey, and there were many women writers who responded, and even more who were named as mentors and friends.  Of course there is still a long way to go in terms of representation, but that’s why we have Women in Horror Month– to bring attention to all the great creative women in the horror genre who make it come alive. I challenge you to pick out a book by a woman writer of horror this month that you haven’t read before, and read it. There’s so much good stuff out there that there’s really no reasonable excuse not to.

Note: This post owes much to Alfred Bendixen’s Haunted Women: The Best Supernatural Tales by American Women Writers. It is out of print but is available new and used at Amazon. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in sampling the supernatural stories of many of the women mentioned above.

Posted on February 2, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Random House, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-0812985405

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Lincoln in the Bardo can be described as an American ghost story, but there is much more to it than ghosts in a graveyard. It’s not a book to zip through once and put down with the confidence that you have completely absorbed what it has to offer. Trying to describe it, and review it, has been difficult, but it is worth it. George Saunders won the Man Booker prize for literary fiction for this novel, but don’t let that influence whether you try it for yourself.

At the center of the story is the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie, and Lincoln’s grieving alone at night in the cemetery where Willie was laid to rest, although “laid to rest” isn’t really the best description for its residents. I didn’t know this, but a “bardo” is a Buddhist term for a kind of in-between or transitional state. The cemetery’s residents, who tell the majority of the story, are stuck in that transitional state, no longer alive but unable and unwilling to move on or even recognize that they are dead. When Willie arrives in the bardo, the other residents, based on their previous experience, expect that he will quickly move on, but when Lincoln returns to grieve, he promises to visit again, and Willie stays to make sure he is there when his father returns. Of course, as a ghost, he is unable to physically interact with his environment or with living people, and it isn’t as easy as it might seem for him to stay, especially without the help of the other ghosts of the cemetery. In fact, if he doesn’t move on, he may be taken by damned souls.

The narrative structure of the book is challenging. It alternates between sections that take place in the cemetery, with a variety of ghosts attempting to move the story forward, or include their own story, or push their way in, interrupting each other and editorializing on events and each other, and collections of multiple historical eyewitness accounts of the same events, mostly descriptions and opinions of the night Willie died and of Lincoln himself.

The parts in the cemetery can be very confusing, as the speakers (and there are many) are only named after they have spoken, so it’s not always clear who is telling the story. The reader certainly does get to see the democracy of death in America, though–  cemeteries include all kinds of people, from the repellent and hateful to decent and caring(and sometimes all of it in one person), but in this time, at the beginning of the Civil War, African-Americans are buried outside the fence and their ghosts have to rush the fence and fight off hateful racists to get in. Once they are in, many of them do speak up, and they remain some of the most powerful and lasting voices in the story.

The alternating sections of compiled contemporary eyewitness accounts are probably what was most fascinating to me. Many of them contradict each other: some are sympathetic, complimentary, or admiring, while others condemn him in the strongest terms. To see history, and Lincoln, through so many different eyes, is fascinating, and connects with Lincoln’s interior dialogue and terrible grief for both his own son, and for all of the sons he will be sending onto bloody battlefields, as imagined by Saunders. Even if the cemetery story is too much for you, I recommend at least looking through the book to see these accounts. About two-thirds of the way through you will find absolutely scathing comments and letters as bad as anything you can find about our president on the Internet.

While Lincoln in the Bardo can be read as a novel of historical fiction, or a portrait of grief, it can be funny, foul, and sometimes gross (I was not expecting a poop joke four pages in). There are many moments of tenderness, and, despite the grief, horror, denial, and anger that emerge in the cemetery, it is also hopeful for those in the bardo, and for freedom in America.

If you like your narratives to be straightforward, this is probably not the book for you. But if you are willing to try out this unusual narrative structure, and do some rereading for better understanding, this is a ghost story you won’t soon forget.

Contains: racial slurs, suicide, references to rape and child molestation.

Posted on November 27, 2018 by , Reply
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