This obscure episode in late-Victorian publishing history is intriguing for a number of reasons. It would be interesting to know, for instance, just how Raven-Hill and Girdlestone phrased their offer; perhaps they requested “more stuff in the ‘Pan’ line.” Writing in the 1920s, Machen speaks of “horror stories” and “tales of horror,” but it’s unlikely that these were the expressions used at the time (unlikely, too, that the editors asked the young Wells for more “scientific romances,” let alone the entirely anachronistic designation “science fiction”). This was, after all, precisely the period during which the still fluid conceptual boundaries of emergent genre categories like science fiction, fantasy, and horror were beginning to be negotiated, shaped, and defined. But a more tantalizing question is this: If The Unicorn, and its editors’ scheme, had been a success, would the trajectory of Machen’s reputation have more closely resembled that of Wells’s—triumph after triumph, as well as worldwide celebrity, in the years to come? Machen’s star, by contrast, sank slowly back toward the horizon line of relative obscurity, then followed an irregularly wavelike course throughout his later life (and afterlife), ascending and again declining at periodic intervals. For Wells, 1895 marked the beginning of fame; for Machen it meant something like the end of it, until the next century at any rate. But what if Machen had become, as it were, the H. G. Wells of horror?
Jessica Largey, now chef and co-owner of Los Angeles restaurant Simone, didn’t know she was allergic to seafood. She was rarely exposed to it at home and it wasn’t until culinary school that she began eating it in earnest for the first time. Largey recalls her mouth getting itchy and thought it was strange. “But I figured that’s just what eating seafood was like,” she says. It wasn’t until she took a job at Providence, the seafood-focused LA restaurant, that she realized seafood didn’t give everyone an itchy mouth or make them break out in a rash — it was an allergy. And Largey had just been put on the seafood line.
Largey worried that if she told anyone about her allergy, they’d likely keep her from working with the ingredient. “I didn’t want this to be a hindrance for my whole career,” she says. “I wanted to learn from the best.” In conversations with her coworkers, she alluded to the fact that she “didn’t like fish” and would joke about how funny it was that she — the lead seafood cook at Providence from 2005 to 2008 — hated eating the ingredient she cooked with all day. “I made that the story everyone knew,” she says.
When Providence chef and co-owner Michael Cimarusti brought her dishes to taste she’d either eat a small bite and take a Benadryl or spit it out without him seeing. She feared that if she told the truth, he would never have put her on the seafood line, much less let her be in charge of it. She didn’t admit her allergy to Cimarusti until years after she’d stopped working in his kitchen. Largey says she feels good about her decision to hide the truth for so many years because she was able to learn so much in the process.
Fear is one of Buddhism's oldest tools. In the early days, while wandering the wilderness of northern India, monks would often encounter elephants, snakes, and tigers, as well as ghosts and malevolent nature spirits, and then (somewhat paradoxically) use their fear to find a state of deep calm. This tradition continued through to the mid–twentieth century, when Thai forest monks were still prowling the mountainsides and sleeping under trees. As an old forest monk once told his nephew, "When we have mindfulness, the mind is at peace. It's not afraid of danger. Even if we're devoured by a tiger, we will not suffer."
The temple of Wat Pai Civilsai, located outside the town of Bang Mun Nak, has carried on these traditions, albeit in a slightly altered form. The temple was founded by a charismatic and mysterious monk called Phra Ajahn Jai Saifon. He is a tall man with a slight stoop and softened muscles, like an NBA player turned coach. His bright smile is stained black in the gaps. (Upon first meeting him, I thought that, if he were ever to decide to switch careers, he would make an excellent dictator.) He wears yellow-brown robes, with a special pocket sewed on the chest to hold his cell phone. When he is outdoors, he wears a conical hat like the ones farmers wear, and flip-flops. His feet have the gray, swollen, dusty appearance of unwashed yams.
The dystopian futures he brilliantly imagines here somehow seem more believable than the ones he writes about the hellish now, not because they are, but because we don’t want to believe that this is the reality of our burning little world. Friday Black is written with force, Ajdei-Brenyah’s language sharpened into tiny blades that cut deep and fast, down to the soft insides that, he urges us to remember, are still there.
This slender, beautifully written novel is probably best read in one atmospheric sitting. Mary Shelley – for she is one of the visitants – complains that her book has been continually misread. Like Frankenstein, The Monsters We Deserve is a dark fable about the responsibilities of creation. In the end, if a monster is to have any life at all, it must be set loose.
Jones believably explores what it feels like to be afflicted with strange or terminal conditions, as well as with anger and rage. These stories put you off, draw you in, show you states of mind that you may never have experienced. They are intensely lively and down to earth; adventurous, often harsh but subtly self-effacing; both a generational portrait and a self-portrait of one of the strangest writers of our times.