Secrets Buried in the World’s Darkest Corners

T. Kingfisher, What Feasts at Night

A wandering soldier returns to the ancestral hunting lodge deep within the Balkan mountains, finding it fallen into disrepair. Alex Easton, a haunted veteran who sacrificed ancestry, home, and even gender to fight for their country, has lost everything except their name and this house. But with no caretaker keeping the house’s dark spirits at bay, something stirs deep within the walls. A shameful past is now walking abroad.

This second novella in Kingfisher’s “Sworn Soldier” series is definitely a bridge volume. The first novella focused on Easton’s struggle to understand what happened at the Usher estate—if you missed it, Volume One retold Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” This one, which doesn’t appear to be based on existing literature, is more driven by character, and by Easton’s inability to grapple with their wartime past.

The village of Wolf’s Ear, at the base of the mountain which Easton’s lodge bestrides, wants to traffic with Easton or the lodge, but nobody will say why. The superstitious, but largely anonymous, population, resembles the massed villagers in Young Frankenstein, terrified of an ancestral curse they can’t actually describe anymore. Easton struggles for explanations, even as a terrifying woman begins stalking the old soldier’s waking dreams.

Though Kingfisher mentioned Easton’s wartime history in the previous volume, she didn’t much go into it. This time, Easton, our first-person narrator, describes more of their autobiography, which mixes trauma and boredom in equal measure. The war left Easton with persistent nightmares and a lingering paranoia, but Easton’s batman, Angus, repeatedly reminds Easton that it isn’t paranoia if monsters really are chasing you.

Kingfisher also delves more into the history and culture of her fictional nation of Gallacia. She depicts a country which has been slowly, persistently sapped of joy, not only by its ancestral enemies, but by its own loaded history. Easton, with their ungendered name, has chosen a life of sexless gallantry, but found themself sucked into old grudges and ancient wounds. Those old metaphors become literal in the events of this story.

T. Kingfisher (a known and public
pseudonym for Ursula Vernon)

We witness a marked tonal shift from the first volume. In that book, the monster Easton confronts has physical mass, and can be defeated through strength and intellect. This story leaves the scientific elements in favor of folk horror and the supernatural. Easton, Angus, and their supporting cast have to confront the lingering shadows of a medieval past that their ancestors already killed, but which can never die.

This results in a looser, more introspective story than the previous one. Where Easton found themself carried along by Poe’s plot before, this time, Easton must dig into their own trauma and their people’s collective guilt. This means much longer passages of autobiographical rumination than before, passages that feel slow early on because they’re setting readers up for a more substantive reveal later on.

Perhaps most notably, this second volume isn’t freestanding. In contemporary genre fiction, many authors use one of two patterns in series fiction. Either the story is actually a single narrative broken into separate volumes, or each story is independent and individually articulated, letting readers jump into the story already in progress. Kingfisher doesn’t do that. Instead, this is a separate story, but relies upon exposition she provided in the previous volume.

Readers might notice that I’ve said little about the story’s plot, or the monster Easton confronts. Indeed, Kingfisher herself withholds the monster fairly late too (comparatively speaking: the story runs under 150 loosely-spaced pages). In essence, this isn’t a story about a definable monster, like the previous volume was; it’s about Easton’s inability to confront their own demons, and those of their country, until forced into a corner.

Maybe this sounds like damning with feint praise. I’ll acknowledge, readers shouldn’t dive into this one cold; Easton’s introspective ruminations will probably feel long, maudlin, and rootless to anyone who didn’t see their previous accomplishments. But for those who have, this novella will provide the backstory and culture that Kingfisher elided in the prior, plot-centric volume. This is a book for readers who enjoyed Volume One, not intended for newcomers.

Again, this is clearly a bridge narrative, building into another story—Volume Three dropped while I was reading this one. Kingfisher presumably intends to establish Easton’s character for another, perhaps more substantial, confrontation in a pending story. Because I read and enjoyed Volume One, I also found plenty to love here, but only because I’m already invested in Kingfisher’s character and setting. This is a book for fans, not beginners.

The East Wing and America’s Disposable Economy

An NBC News photo shows the East Wing demolition in process this week

Although a majority of Americans reportedly disapprove of this week’s demolition of the East Wing, exact disapproval follows largely partisan lines. The White House extension, first built in 1902, stood between the president and his long-sought “ballroom,” and approval of the new replacement largely tracks with personal support for the president. Less interesting than exact details to me, though, is the underlying beliefs exposed by the demolition.

I cannot help perceiving the president’s actions through my seven years in the construction industry. Unlike the president, who comes from the moneyed, white-collar end of property development, I worked the jobsites, cordless impact driver in hand, tape measure hanging off my belt. The president works with schematic drawings, models, and CAD renderings. For each of us, the other’s perspective is an abstraction, separate from our particular job.

To architects, contractors, and project managers, only the finished product matters. The process is as ephemeral as pixie dust. Management wants to complete construction on time and under budget; everything else serves that goal. Existing structures, built with outdated technology and, probably, with hand tools, are an impediment. To the property developer, historic preservation is a costly nuisance that impedes progress, while demolition is cost-efficient.

Historic preservation is, ultimately, an expression of sentimentality. The Democratic-aligned objection to the East Wing demolition has focused heavily on historic photographs taken among the picturesque colonnade, or memories of the officials—especially First Ladies—who conducted White House business in those offices. They revere the now-lost East Wing for the same reason you’d rather see the church where your parents were married be restored than razed.

But American economics doesn’t place dollar values on sentiment. The president ran all three of his campaigns on rhetoric of cost efficiency, profitability, and business acumen. The philosophy of shareholder value, which has dominated American economics since at least the 1970s, sees ordinary people not as moral agents, but as arbiters of price. Historic buildings are worth exactly as much as one can outbid the developer who’d rather flatten it.

The president with one of the hand-sized architectural models of his grandiose
monuments, which he loves waving around for journalists

My first construction industry job involved building a new city high school to replace the nearly seventy-year-old existing building. The city’s cost-benefit analysis deemed the existing building too expensive to save. This decision distressed many people who’d lived in town their entire lives, and had deep-seated formative memories associated with the existing building. But their feelings weren’t sufficient to absorb the tax bill necessary for costly restorations.

Many public and municipal buildings, including schools, government offices, and universities, still have exterior facades built from slab marble, sandstone, and other valuable materials worth preserving. But those are merely cosmetic. The rise of steel-frame architecture means that a small number of girders carry the building’s weight. Interiors are built from tin studs, gypsum drywall, and poured concrete, materials with a maximum life expectancy of about fifty years.

Commercial buildings and houses are even worse. Most such buildings constructed after the Eisenhower Administration need significant restoration after around thirty years, because cinder block masonry, OSB underfloors, and aluminum HVAC systems, will just rot. Several American suburbs, once desirable and exclusive, are now saddled with the blight of abandoned malls and big-box retail stores: too decrepit to use, too expensive to restore, and too dangerous to demolish.

Nor is this accidental. Since the Levittown building boom of the 1950s, architecture’s core principles, as a field, have shifted away from durability, onto cost reduction. The White House’s facade hasn’t been much amended since George Washington laid the cornerstone in 1793. My city’s former high school, by contrast, decayed so spectacularly that I broke pieces off the seventy-year-old face by kicking them with a steel-toed boot.

Our president claims the East Wing demolition became necessary after discussion with architects, but I don’t believe that. After seven years in the industry, I know that, to the bean counters who control modern design and construction, demolition is always the first choice. Unless government agencies or private conservationists step in to prevent it, contractors regard old buildings as a private cost, not a community asset.

To America’s capitalist class, everything is as disposable as an aluminum soda-pop can. People like our president measure buildings’ value not by their historic legacy, but by their cost efficiency. The East Wing was worth less, to him, than whatever supposed value he can extract from his extravagant “ballroom.” The same will apply, eventually, to your historic downtown, your local schools, or your house.

Nothing, anywhere, is safe from the bulldozers and grandiosity of America’s ruling class.

In Praise(ish) of Dollar Stores

The Dollar General I've grown reliant on, in a Nebraska town of only 1000 people

We’ve all heard the ubiquitous complaints about Dollar General and similar “dollar stores,” though that name is increasingly anachronistic. They keep prices low by paying workers poorly, running perpetually short-staffed, and excluding local artisans. Their modular architecture is deaf to local culture and design. They distort our ideas of what commercial goods actually cost. Even John Oliver dedicated a block of valuable HBO time to disparaging how Dollar General hurts workers and the local community.

Like a good economic progressive, I internalized these arguments for years. I prided myself on avoiding dollar stores like plague pits. I aggressively disparaged when a treasured local business got flattened to build a Family Dollar store. Even on an extended Missouri holiday, fifteen minutes from the nearest grocery store, I finally gave in and entered the Dollar General, only two minutes away, I still rationalized myself by saying I remained dedicated to local businesses.

Through the last year, though, I’ve found my perspective shifting. I find dollar stores, and Dollar General specifically, more necessary than I previously realized. Dollar General is like audiobooks, or a Slanket. These products, invented to streamline disabled people’s lives, have gotten derided by able-bodied elites, who don’t realize how privileged their taunts really are. Likewise, Manhattan-based John Oliver, and writers in coastal California, might not realize how dollar stores improve life in rural America.

In the year I’ve spent caring for an aged relative in rural Nebraska, I’ve become deeply reliant on Dollar General. It keeps longer hours than the local grocery store, auto parts retailer, or pharmacy. This has made it absolutely essential for buying convenience foods, over-the-counter meds, and motor oil. That’s saying nothing of other products that nobody else sells locally, like home décor, kitchen supplies, and paperback books. Without Dollar General, these commodities would disappear.

Not that semi-luxury commodities don’t exist in rural areas. But without Dollar General, the nearest big-box retailer selling these products would be over an hour’s drive away, or else Amazon, which delivers to rural areas only sluggishly. The stereotyped image of rural America, with its drab houses, faded curtains, and faded clothes bespeaks the ways retailers don’t bother investing outside already-lucrative markets. Dollar General, by contrast, arguably creates lucrative markets in marginal or abandoned areas.

The small but diverse produce section in my local Dollar General

City slickers might not realize how inaccessible food is in rural areas. The term “food deserts” often describes urban cores, especially non-White neighborhoods, where Dr. King realized that fruits and vegetables were unaffordable, if available. But rural America is also heavily food desertified. Because economic forces, especially banks, force farmers to abandon diverse agriculture for industrial monocropping, farmers seldom eat their produce. In the northern Great Plains, farms mostly grow livestock feed, not human food.

These conditions didn’t just happen. Macroeconomics isn’t inevitable, like rain. Top-level American economic policy flooded America’s central corridor with population after the Civil War, via the Homestead Act. But into the Twentieth Century, that same economic policy largely abandoned the homesteader population in favor of urban industrialization. America still needs its rural agricultural population; it just doesn’t provide that population with meaningful support anymore, since they aren’t lucrative donors. Nobody ever got rich hoeing corn.

Dollar stores are the logical market-driven response to this abandonment. Rural communities have some money, and they want—and deserve—nice things, like attractive curtains, affordable art supplies, and small electronics. Dollar General recognized an unmet market, and met it. Sure, they manipulate wholesalers and use just-in-time restocking to keep prices artificially cheap, in ways unsupported local businesses just can’t. But they aren’t culpable for economic policies that made Pop’s old-timey general store fiscally unviable.

Even their notoriously impersonal architecture reflects America’s top-level economic policy. Sure, I’d love if dollar stores hired local architects to conform their buildings to regional aesthetics. But Walmart and Target already priced architects out of small markets, and America’s rural economic abandonment means the dominant design style is often “decay.” Dollar General’s warehouse-like design and modular construction let them move into marginal markets quickly without incurring high amortized overhead, which just makes good business sense.

Don’t misunderstand me: dollar chains’ low pay, homogenous product, and deafness to local industry aren’t sustainable. I’ve grown fond of Dollar General, but at best, they’re a transitional response to larger forces. But John Oliver’s implicit expectation of shoving a Whole Foods into every small market is equally unrealistic. If we use the market access which dollar stores provide to build toward something better, then these chains have helped America through its current economic malaise.

To Be Young Is To Know Solitude

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 121
S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

Ponyboy Curtis never wanted to join a street gang and fight with switchblades, but survival made it necessary. The streets are divided between the working-class Greasers, who pride themselves on their swagger and their lustrous hair, and the Socs, who drive flash cars and wear the slickest clothes money can buy. The groups fight, not because they have personal animosity, but because it’s what they do. Existential boredom leaves them with little besides the fight.

S.E. Hinton’s debut novel, written when she was still in high school, is sometimes credited as the beginning of the young adult genre. Other authors had written for teenaged readers before, but Hinton took an unprecedented tack. She wrote a teenager’s story of conflict and incipient adulthood, not for finger-wagging moralistic purposes, but simply because it’s his story. Hinton refuses to pass judgement, even when Ponyboy, her first-person narrator, spirals into self-recrimination.

The Greasers, by definition, have nothing. Ponyboy is an orphan, raised by his eldest brother, who’s forced to become a parent to teens at only twenty. His middle brother dropped out to get a job, basically because that’s what middle kids do. Other greasers dodge drunken parents, or practice fights in city parks, simply to pass the time. Ponyboy admits he doesn’t like most of them, but calls them his friends, because they can rely only upon one another.

Hinton putatively began writing this novel because a high school friend received a vicious beat-down, simply for walking unaccompanied. This event, and the trauma it caused not only him but everyone who loved him, becomes the inciting incident of the novel. Her feuding gangs hate one another without knowing one another, and fight because it gives their otherwise shapeless lives meaning. Hinton implies the battles would stop if participants simply spoke to one another.

One evening at the drive-in, Ponyboy and his friends encounter some well-scrubbed, middle-class girls. These girls rebuff the more aggressive Greasers, but one of them finds Ponyboy, with his big eyes and poetic soul, interesting. She wants to learn how the other half lives. But since Greasers and Socs never talk, this innocent encounter gets quickly misconstrued. An argument turns into a fight, turns into a knifing. Ponyboy flees a manslaughter accusation.

S.E. Hinton

Hinton never gives specific dates, and few places. Her gang of Greasers prefers Elvis, while the Socs favor the Beatles, which gives an approximate time. And her descriptions of dusty city streets, high-school rodeos, and rolling country hills locate the story in the southern Great Plains. Observant readers will recognize Hinton’s native Tulsa, Oklahoma. Which leads to an important question: is being rich in America’s despised hinterland any better than being poor?

The entire novel asks how an innocent, poetic teenager would handle everything that could go wrong in life, going wrong in quick succession. As the youngest Greaser, at only fourteen, Ponyboy is unprepared for battles against older, larger boys. When one battle leaves a Soc dead, he’s unprepared for the fugitive life. Isolation forces him into soul-searching that most boys don’t face until much later. Even soul-searching uncovers some conclusions he can’t yet handle.

Ponyboy and his friends find themselves in a no-win situation. If they flee their crimes, they’ll live as fugitives forever, with nothing to show for lives that have barely begun. But if they take accountability, they’ll face a criminal justice system that, they already understand, is slanted against poor, long-haired teenagers, and they’ll still lose everything. They find themselves forced into a world where choices lack the moral clarity of children’s stories and simple fables they learned in school.

Perhaps more than the story itself, Hinton’s narrative clarity differs from her contemporaries. Other youth narrators, like Scout Finch and Holden Caulfield, aren’t really children, they’re adults remembering childhood from their Olympus-like perch. Ponyboy is a real kid, struggling to come to grips with the adult responsibilities thrust upon him. He lacks mature guidance, only advice from other kids trapped in these circumstances with him. He survives, not because adults give him easy answers, but because he keeps moving when everything around him collapses.

At only 180 pages, written in a conversational tone, this book isn’t difficult reading. Its intended high-school audience will read it quickly, but they’ll also find themselves confronted with questions they can’t put aside nearly so easily. Adult readers will struggle with many of the novel’s themes of existentialism, purpose, and identity. The deep-seated social dislocation which Hinton identified in post-WWII America haven’t been resolved over sixty years later.