J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and 'The Fellowship' of fantasy writers

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (Haywood Magee / Getty Images)

In a pub in Oxford there lived some writers. Not nasty, dirty decadent writers, whose books were filled with intimations of sex and an oozy smell, nor yet dry, bare Modernists with a horror of heroics or fantastical things: These Oxford writers were Inklings, and that means heterosexual white male Christians who created some of the most enduring works of 20th century fantasy.

The pub was the Eagle and Child. In the decades since the Inklings first met inside its wood-paneled rooms, their faerie landscapes have become a pop cultural theme park on a global scale, encompassing Westeros, “World of Warcraft,” Dungeons & Dragons, “Star Wars,” Renaissance fairs and goth emporia. The most famous Inklings were J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, but over the years the group included, among others, the anthroposophist poet-philosopher Owen Barfield, fantasist Charles Williams, Lewis’ older brother Warren, known as Warnie, and, eventually, Tolkien’s youngest son, Christopher.

The story of these literary soul mates has been told before, but Philip and Carol Zaleski weave their story into a highly readable group biography called “The Fellowship: Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams.” Authors and editors of books on spirituality and prayer, they keep their focus on the Christian elements in the Inklings’ lives and work. They also make ample room at the high table for Williams and Barfield, minor writers who nonetheless had considerable influence on their friends, especially Lewis, a literary magpie who made liberal use of images and ideas from the other Inklings in his work.

Tolkien, Lewis and Barfield all studied at Oxford. The three also served in World War I, an experience that was especially pivotal to Tolkien in his creation of a Middle-earth ravaged by war and its aftermath. Poor eyesight kept Charles Williams out of the military, and his family’s genteel poverty meant he could afford only two years at University College London. Yet all four ended up closely associated with Oxford, where their weekly gatherings at the Eagle and Child or a member’s university rooms served as a movable feast for this “group of Christians who like to write.”

“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out,” C.S Lewis remarked in 1960, long after the Inklings had dissolved.

Tolkien was the philologist and Anglo-Saxon scholar, Lewis the Christian apologist who wrote on medieval allegory before earning fame with a science fiction trilogy, wartime BBC broadcasts on Christian faith, and later “The Screwtape Letters” and Narnia books. Owen Barfield loved English folk dance and wrote the influential “Poetic Diction,” developing a theory of language that anticipated later developments in the study of consciousness, as well as what became known as New Age thought. The disarmingly fey Williams had no problems reconciling his Anglicanism with a belief in magic and the tarot, participating in esoteric rites such as the “Ceremony of Consecration on the Threshold of Sacred Mystery.” He invented the supernatural thriller in novels like “The Place of the Lion” and “The Greater Trumps,” books that created a genre we now call urban fantasy.

Williams came to Oxford after joining the Inklings. He soon became a ixture there, drawing crowds to hear him lecture on Milton, Shakespeare, romantic love, the Arthurian mythos. His eccentric views exasperated and sometimes infuriated the far more conservative Tolkien. Williams viewed his own wife as “his Beatrice, muse and model of perfection,” none of which prevented him from developing passionate, if mostly platonic, relationships with younger women. At least one of these involved ritual sadomasochism, of which Williams wrote in a letter to his paramour: “I am sadistic towards you, but … I wouldn’t hurt a fly unless it made it perfectly clear that it liked it. And then only a little. And then only for the conversation.”

The Zaleskis do an impressive job of compressing a huge amount of material into a smooth if occasionally dense narrative. Still, in our own multicultural landscape, it’s difficult to muster much enthusiasm for the Inklings’ countless heated arguments on Catholicism versus Anglicanism or the critical head-butting with F.R. Leavis. Their scholarly machismo made it possible for Lewis to do a very public volte-face from heartfelt atheism back to Christianity but never entertain the thought of a female Inkling.

But during World War II, Lewis generously opened his household to schoolgirl evacuees. He helped them with their homework, told them to buy books on his account at Blackwell’s and paid the Oxford tuition of one young woman, “on the condition that the gift remain a secret.” All this time, Lewis maintained a strange, decades-long relationship with the much older mother of a childhood friend. After her death, he made a blissful late-life marriage to the American writer Joy Davidman, whose death inspired Lewis’ powerful “A Grief Observed.”

Despite writing a well-regarded children’s book, “The Silver Trumpet,” Barfield never succeeded as a novelist. His interests grew increasingly esoteric: After reading Rudolf Steiner, he became an anthroposophist, then for decades languished as a London solicitor. The Zaleskis poignantly depict his near-total eclipse by the success of his friends, to whom he remained touchingly devoted.

So one delights in Barfield’s late-life success. Invited to teach in the U.S., he becomes an instrumental figure in the counterculture movement, his work on language, consciousness and Samuel Taylor Coleridge admired by Theodore Roszak, David Bohm — and Saul Bellow, who, somewhat bizarrely, became fascinated by anthroposophy.

Christian faith was indisputably one strand of the Inklings’ creative DNA, but what then to make of all those elves and heraldic creatures and otherworldly voyages, the underlying obsessive strangeness of so much of their fiction? More than “mere Christianity,” what stands out today, 83 years after the Inklings first met, is their shared passion and abiding love for the British Isles, a haunted landscape irradiated with meaning, from its ancient languages to its folklore to its trees and pubs and villages and footpaths and prehistoric barrows. One is left with the impression that within each of those hearty, laughing, church-going writers, there beat a pagan heart.

Hand’s short novel “Wylding Hall” will be published this summer.

The Fellowship
The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams

Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 615 pp, $30

Originally posted on LATimes.com.

Book World: ‘Finders Keepers’ by Stephen King

Stephen King’s superb new stay-up-all-night thriller, “Finders Keepers,” is a sly, often poignant tale of literary obsession that recalls the themes of his classic 1987 novel “Misery.”

At the center of this story is John Rothstein, a novelist whom Time magazine once crowned “America’s Reclusive Genius.” His best-selling trilogy — “The Runner,” “The Runner Sees Action” and “The Runner Slows Down,” is considered “the Iliad of postwar America.”

When the teenage Morris Bellamy reads the first two books, he falls in love with their antihero, Jimmy Gold, “an American icon of despair in a land of plenty.” But Morris finds the third novel, in which the protagonist settles down and takes a job in advertising, a sell-out and an unforgivable betrayal. A smart, deeply troubled kid who’s already done time in juvie, Morris hatches a plan to break into Rothstein’s New Hampshire farmhouse. His hope is to find the new Jimmy Gold novel that Rothstein is rumored to have written since retiring from public view. But when Morris’s plan goes disastrously wrong, he ends up, at age 23, sentenced to life in prison.

That’s where the fun begins — for the reader, if not for Morris Bellamy.

More than three decades later, another teenage boy, Pete Saubers, is living with his family in the same house that had once been Morris’s childhood home. Like Morris, Pete is in thrall of the Jimmy Gold novels, though he has other things on his mind. His family is struggling to get by after his father was injured when a madman plowed a Mercedes though a crowd waiting in line for a job fair. King fans will recognize that tragedy as the seminal event in his novel “Mr. Mercedes” (a much less enjoyable book than this one). They’ll also recognize several characters from that novel, including retired police detective Bill Hodges, now a private investigator. After Pete discovers the trunk with Rothstein’s stolen notes, King begins to weave this web of characters, coincidence and connections with dizzying speed and dazzling facility.

“Finders Keepers” — the second in a planned trilogy — may be a twisted love story, but it’s also a love letter to the joys of reading and to American literature. Rothstein’s books evoke Updike’s Rabbit novels, as well as works by J.D. Salinger, John Cheever and Richard Yates . Pete reads D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and realizes too late its lesson that “money from nowhere almost always spells trouble.” And Pete’s favorite English teacher mentions Theodore Roethke’s sublime “The Waking.” That poem’s most famous line — “I learn by going where I have to go” — could serve as a mantra for Pete, who at every step must make life-altering decisions about Rothstein’s literary legacy, his family’s financial well-being and his own survival. In one sense, sweet-natured Pete is not so different from vicious Morris: Both, “although at opposite ends of the age-spectrum, are very much alike when it comes to the Rothstein notebooks. They lust for what is inside them.”Near the end, one of Rothstein’s many fans muses, “I was going to say his work changed my life, but that’s not right. . . . I guess what I mean is his work changed my heart.”

Readers of the wonderful, scary, moving “Finders Keepers” will feel the same way.

Hand’s short novel “Wylding Hall” will be published this summer.

For more books coverage, go to washingtonpost.com/books.

Originally posted on WashingtonPost.com.

Laura van den Berg's 'Find Me' captures a memorable apocalypse

Author Laura Van den Berg (Paul Yoon, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux)

Ninety-five years ago T.S. Eliot published "The Wasteland," one of the first and bleakest visions of a shattered modern world. Nearly a century later, we're awash in fictional dystopias. Science fiction writers tilled this stony ground for decades before the current vogue for grim variants of the Way We Live Now made bestsellers out of "The Road" and "Station Eleven" and created a vast marketing category for publishers of YA books such as "The Hunger Games" and "Divergent."

But if the dystopia bubble bursts, as the horror market did in the early 1990s, we may see an entirely new wasteland emerge. What dystopic novels might survive a literary apocalypse?

Laura van den Berg's "Find Me" has a good shot. The award-winning author of two acclaimed story collections, Van den Berg now uses her gift for capturing the disturbingly elegiac qualities of 21st century life to heartbreaking effect in this, her first novel.

Set in a near-future U.S. blighted by disastrous climate change and a baffling, incurable new disease, the book is narrated by Joy, a young woman abandoned as an infant by her mother. Joy spends her first 18 years in a series of grim group and foster homes around Boston. It's a life shaped by isolation, loss and yearning for an unrecoverable past: excellent preparation for the catastrophic events that overtake the country in the wake of a "memory-destroying epidemic."

Within a few months, hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from a mysterious and highly contagious disease that appeared suddenly in Bakersfield. The disease's primary symptoms are silver blisters on the skin, and abrupt memory loss that ends in total amnesia. Nineteen-year-old Joy is seemingly immune. She and others who appear to be immune are brought to a creepy hospital in a desolate part of Kansas, where their health is monitored by a skeleton staff overseen by the ominous Dr. Bek.

The patients aren't allowed to leave the building. They're permitted only two supervised Internet sessions a week, when they catch up with the bad news in the outside world, and check government websites like WeAreSorryForYourLoss.com, which keeps a list of those who've died in the epidemic.

Joy's confinement is elegantly rendered by Van den Berg in the first half of "Find Me." The claustrophobic atmosphere and emphasis on maintaining a normal facade under extraordinarily abnormal and dangerous circumstances evoke novels like Chris Adrian's "The Children's Hospital" and Victor Lavalle's "The Devil in Silver," set in surreal, disintegrating medical institutions. Like those books, "Find Me" teeters between realistic depictions of a fragmenting social order, and a more visionary style.

In an interview last year, Van den Berg spoke of her desire to capture the apocalyptic mood of contemporary life in a novel. "I really wanted to take that weather, that atmosphere, and ask: what might be the tipping point?" Yet the apocalyptic mood here feels more dreamlike and fuzzily rendered than that of other near-future novels. It's unclear why the staff members remain at the hospital, how or if they're paid, or why such a place escapes any federal or local oversight. And the catastrophic breakdown of American society, while well described, happens with somewhat unconvincing swiftness, in service of the plot.

But Van den Berg seems less concerned with creating a believable near-future than she is with depicting a psyche surviving, and perhaps ultimately thriving, despite incalculable trauma. In the hospital one day, Joy watches the Discovery Channel and inadvertently learns the identity of her mother, who is alive in Key West, Fla. "How strange it is to watch her past become animated, to no longer wonder where and how her life was unfolding, but to know."

The latter part of "Find Me" chronicles Joy's search for her mother. As the last inhabitants of the hospital succumb to the virus, Joy alone remains immune and makes her escape. Somewhat improbably, she meets up with someone from her early life who becomes a fellow sojourner across the ruined American landscape. If these scenes lack the visceral power of the novel's first part, that may be because we've grown inured to images of devastation, both fictional and real.

Where Van den Berg excels is in her radiant prose and delicate descriptions of small, strange moments of being. Dozens of children nestled in the treetops; a young man wearing a plastic fur rabbit mask on a bus; a friend's death from the memory sickness.

"I reach for his chest through the plastic. He looks down at my hand like it's a foreign thing. He's breathing again, quick and grasping. His eyes are the color of a bleached winter sky. He can no longer speak, he can only listen, so I will have to invent for him something beautiful."

From this memorable novel's eerie first paragraph to its enigmatic ending, Laura van den Berg has invented something beautiful indeed.

Hand's forthcoming novels are "Wylding Hall" and "Hard Light."

Find Me: A Novel
Laura van den Berg
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 288 pp, $26

Originally posted on LaTimes.com.

‘The Last American Vampire,’ by Seth Grahame-Smith

History buffs with a sense of humor and an unslaked thirst for the macabre will find much to savor in “The Last American Vampire,” Seth Grahame-Smith’s latest, delightfully loopy riff on our nation’s past. The novel takes up where its predecessor, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” (2010 ), left off, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Confederacy and Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth .

Only now, Honest Abe isn’t dead. He has been brought back to life by Henry Sturges, the same vampire who enlisted Lincoln in the ongoing battle between the forces of good (human and vampire) and those evil bloodsuckers in the South who used slavery as part of their food chain. By making Abe immortal, the 300-year-old Sturges has violated one of the prime directives of the Union of Vampires, whose aim is to protect and respect the dominion of humans.

“The world had quite enough vampires already, thank you very much. Too many, in fact. And when too many vampires settled in one place, bad things happened, as recent American history had proven. . . . Vampires possessed of such cruelty could never be allowed to concentrate such power again.”

Horrified by his old friend’s betrayal of the union’s cause, Abe promptly jumps out the window into broad daylight and self-immolates. Grief-stricken Sturges spends the next two decades maintaining a low profile, until 1888 when he receives a summons to the union’s headquarters in New York City. There, the union’s unofficial leader, Adam Plantagenet (born in 1305), shows him five ornately carved wooden boxes. Each contains the mutilated head of one of the union’s overseas emissaries, along with an identical handwritten note.

“No more Americans, Regards, A. Grander VIII”

Plantagenet dispatches Sturges to Europe to track down and destroy the mysterious Grander. And the fun begins.

“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” was a sloppy, turgid mess, gruesome and unappealing as fresh roadkill. “The Last American Vampire” is far superior and is a surprisingly funny, antic sequel that’s like a delirious mash-up of the Web series “Drunk History” and the gothic 1960s soap opera “Dark Shadows.” The novel’s basic premise is clever and efficient. As we learn in a dramatic flashback, the young and then-mortal Henry Sturges arrived on North American soil in 1587, part of the group of English colonists who settled at Roanoke Island more than 30 years before the Mayflower arrived. Not long after, he’s made into a vampire against his will, though he quickly sees the advantages of his fate:

“Imagine experiencing color for the first time. Crystal clarity and three-dimensional sight and sounds for the first time. Imagine having your senses expanded beyond what you ever considered possible. The curtains pulled back on a world you never could have imagined in the static of your little black-and-white mind. That’s what it is to be a vampire.”

The transformation allows Sturges to function as an undead Zelig for the next few centuries — a witness to, and often a participant in, just about every crucial (and usually catastrophic) event in U.S. and European history, from the fate of Roanoke’s lost colony to the fall of the Twin Towers. Along the way, he encounters John Smith and Pocahontas;Victorian author Henry Irving and his manager, Bram Stoker; Abraham Lincoln, of course; Mark Twain; Nikola Tesla; Rasputin; and Jack the Ripper.

As the 20th century dawns, Sturges meets with President Teddy Roosevelt, who has recently taken office after the assassination of President William McKinley. The blustering Roosevelt calls out Sturges and his kind for shirking their patriotic duty:

“ ‘Either you’re an American and nothing else, from your boots to your hat, or you’re not an American at all!’

“ ‘What you ask is too much for one man.’

“ ‘That’s why I didn’t ask a man to do it.’

“A fair point, thought Henry.”

Sturges becomes an undercover U.S. agent, his work dovetailing handily with his quest to stop the elusive A. Grander, who is still slaughtering vampires. He swiftly earns the respect of his boss, as Grahame-Smith recounts in one of myriad deadpan asides: “When Teddy Roosevelt uttered his immortal line, ‘Speak softly, and carry a big stick,’ he was talking about Henry Sturges.”

The action unfolds at a breakneck pace, and if the novel is more picaresque than tightly plotted thriller, that just adds to the gleeful, “can you top this?” tone and the sense that the author is very much in on the joke. This time, Grahame-Smith wisely withholds most of the gore until the final pages, when it’s doled out generously and in service of truth, justice and the American way. Grahame-Smith’s legion of fans will revel in the proceedings.

And new readers will swiftly find themselves learning things they never learned in civics class, chief among them the basics of vampire hunting: “(1) Don’t get near the head, and (2) when in doubt, run away.”

Originally posted on WashingtonPost.com.

'American Grotesque' resurrects William Mortensen's photos

It's hard to imagine two 20th century American photographers more diametrically opposed than the macabre visionary William Mortensen and Ansel Adams, poster boy for so-called straight photography. Google Ansel Adams and you get a Sierra Club Calendar-ready black-and-white photo of the Grand Tetons. Do the same for William Mortensen and you get what appears to be an etching of a naked nubile witch perched provocatively on a broomstick.

Odds are that Adams rings a bell but that you've never heard of Mortensen, subject of a splendid new book, "American Grotesque: The Life and Art of William Mortensen," the most extensive work on one of the strangest and most compelling artists of the 20th century.

Yet at the height of his fame in the 1930s, Mortensen was perhaps the best-known practitioner of his craft: the first photographer-as-celebrity. Born in Utah in 1897, he studied at the Art Students League in New York, traveled briefly to Greece before returning to Park City, where he dated a young woman named Willow Fay. In 1921, he loaded his motorcycle's sidecar with photographic equipment and drove to Hollywood, where he acted as chaperone to Willow Fay's 14-year-old sister, Vina, one of his first photographic models.

Determined to find work as an actress, Vina soon changed her name to Fay Wray. She sent her mother copies of the photos Mortensen had taken of her, artfully draped in crepe de chine. Wray mére subsequently hot-tailed it to Hollywood. There she confronted Mortensen and, in an eerie foreshadowing of his work's later disappearance from the public eye, destroyed the glass negatives he'd taken of her daughter.

In Hollywood, Mortensen worked with Cecil B. DeMille — he was the first photographer to shoot still photos on set rather than posed in a studio. He went on to photograph Jean Harlow, Lon Chaney Sr., John Barrymore, Rudolf Valentino and Norma Shearer, and he created a series of disturbing masks for Chaney's star turn as a wheelchair-bound stage magician in "West of Zanzibar," a lurid film directed by Tod Browning, later notorious for "Freaks."

From the outset, Mortensen's subject matter was unabashedly theatrical, bizarre and often louche. He was an ardent admirer of Goya and Daumier, and with his Hollywood access to costumes, sets, makeup and masks, would create elaborate tableaux vivants in his studio. He mastered the bromoil process early on and later developed and refined his own techniques for lighting, multiple exposures and the like. He was most famous (and later infamous) for retouching prints (though seldom negatives) with the abrasion control process, which used razor blades, carbon pencil, ink, powder tone, sable brush, eraser, pumice. The resulting images are almost indistinguishable from etchings or paintings.

As the years passed, his work increasingly tended toward the gothic, a trend enhanced after he met occultist Manly P. Hall in 1926. This is when Mortensen began to produce his best and strangest work, the "Pictorial History of Witchcraft and Demonology." Many of these photos are gorgeously reproduced in "American Grotesque" for the first time, along with equally strange and compelling images that first appeared in Mortensen's two masterworks, "Monsters and Madonnas: A Book of Methods" and "The Command to Look: A Master Photographer's Method for Controlling the Human Gaze."

"The Command to Look" developed a (literal) cult following after Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, name-checked Mortensen's work as influential in "The Satanic Bible" [1969]. Feral House has reprinted Mortensen's long out-of-print book in a handsome new edition with an excellent intro by Larry Lytle and an amusing afterword by Michael Moynihan on Mortensen's influence on modern Satanism.

In the 1930s, Mortensen left Hollywood and founded his own school of photography in Laguna Beach, where his students included Hollywood cinematographers and silent film stars. His photos appeared in Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times and Theater Magazine, among many others. His how-to books, written with his friend George Dunham, went into multiple printings, and his name was used to sell photographic equipment: "Made for Mortensen — Available To You!"

He was the first photographer to become a name brand, as Lytle writes in "American Grotesque": a precursor to Warhol, Mortensen's influence can be seen today in the work of Cindy Sherman, Joel-Peter Witkin and fashion photographer Steven Klein, to name only a few.

So if Mortensen's name and work still don't ring a bell, you might blame Ansel Adams.

The photographers sparred publicly in serialized essays that ran in the pages of Camera Craft magazine in 1934. Adams' contribution was "An Exposition of My Photographic Technique," in which the relatively unknown photographer laid out the tenets of the San Francisco-based f/64 Group he'd organized two years earlier with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, among others.

In his essay, Adams stated: "Photography is an objective expression; a record of actuality." Mortensen's essay, "Venus and Vulcan: An Essay on Creative Pictorialism," countered that "the ideal they [Group f/64] have set up of complete literal recording is a very primitive one — a good beginning but not an end in itself."

Tragically, Mortensen was on the losing side of this particular artistic skirmish. According to critic A.D. Coleman, the artists and critics associated with Group f/64, especially Adams and his friends Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, "loathed Mortensen with a passion bordering on religious crusading. By the time Mortensen died [in 1965], they'd seemingly won the war between their camp and his, and had long since adopted a scorched-earth policy."

Mortensen's work soon disappeared from critical discourse, and even his photographic archive (somewhat mysteriously) all but vanished. In a letter published in the World Journal of Post-Factory Photography [August 2000], Coleman "lays the blame for that squarely on the doorstep of Newhall, Adams, and the others whose active hostility to Mortensen's work virtually ensured that, at his death in 1965, no respectable repository would have considered acquiring and preserving his materials."

"American Grotesque" recounts this conflict, and much more, in a long-overdue assessment of Mortensen's work and aesthetic philosophy. The book includes a thoughtful biography by Lytle; the complete text of "Venus and Vulcan"; and A.D. Coleman's influential, caustic essay "Conspicuous by His Absence: Concerning the Mysterious Disappearance of William Mortensen," along with a stunningly reproduced gallery of Mortensen's images, many of them published here for the first time.

Group f/64 abhorred Mortensen's manipulation of "reality," his unabashedly Romantic stance. The Newhalls found his photos and philosophy "perverse" and in bad taste.

This is often true. Mortensen's work embraced the gothic, the occult and the trappings of sexual fetishism (especially bondage). Some of the photos reproduced in "American Grotesque," like "Untitled (abduction by monks)," are unintentionally hilarious. Others are merely camp. He had a legendary predilection for shooting female nudes and as his career declined produced way too many of the cheesecake photos he himself had once deplored.

Yet much of Mortensen's work retains its power to haunt, if not shock, viewers whose sensibilities have been numbed by a 24/7 news cycle reliant on disturbing imagery. He believed that "the Grotesque becomes important. … It is recognizably our world that Romance deals with, but somehow transfigured by mystery and surprise, and illuminated with strange lights."

And his writings, especially on the uses of propagandist images and the limits of straight photography — "a good beginning but not an end in itself" — have proved to be amazingly prescient in our post-Photoshop, Instagram world. He recognized early on that visionary photographers could "push their optical equipment to strange extremes, not to reveal unimportant detail, nor as a mere technical stunt, but because the result is beautiful. … [They] represent a phase of pictorial photography whose very existence is barely glimpsed, and whose potentialities are at this time unpredictable."

Adams and Group f/64 may have won a battle over photography's future, but nearly 50 years after his death and decades of obscurity, Mortensen appears to have won the war. His archive now resides in the collection of the Center for Creative Photography, along with those of Adams (one of CCP's founders), Weston, Cunningham and Van Dyke.

Hand's forthcoming novels are "Hard Light" and "Wylding Hall."

American Grotesque: The Life and Art of William Mortensen
Edited by Larry Lytle and Michael Moynihan
Feral House, 287 pp, $45

The Command to Look: A Master Photographer's Method for Controlling the Human Gaze
By William Mortensen & George Dunham
Feral House, 232 pp, $20 paper

Originally posted on LATimes.com.