My Favorite Things with Albert Wendland

They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with Albert Wendland, whose Temporary Planets for Transitory Days comes out from Dog Star Books on June 20th!

What does Albert love when he’s not writing about murder mysteries that lead to interstellar treasure hunts? Spoiler alert: a return to a fan-favorite that will frustrate and fascinate, a deep-dive into Lovecraft’s world that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, and spending generation upon generation learning how to survive the universe. Intrigued? Read on to learn more!

Prepare for a strange and far-out brew. I don’t know if these are my “favorites” or not (especially when they sound so drastic), but they’re utterly impressive with their force and creativity — a television series, a set of graphic novels, and a trilogy of books.

When I was writing my last novel, In a Suspect Universe (2018), I also was watching the so-called third season of Twin Peaks on Showtime, called formally Twin Peaks: The Return. The experience put me in such a peculiar mood that I included a riddle-speaking coyote in my own book, and I was influenced in subtle ways I’m still discerning (as in my protagonist’s feelings of dislocation, otherness, and existence beyond the ordinary).

I loved the first series back in the 90s, with its darkly forested Northwest town of quirky inhabitants, telepathic logs, efficient if hilarious FBI investigator (Kyle MacLachlan), donuts with bird-blood dripping onto them (too hard to explain), unsolved plastic-bagged murders, mysterious other-world hallucinations, and really good coffee. The moody music by Angelo Badalamenti was also a big plus.

So when David Lynch decided to do a sequel series, all of 25 years later, I was ready and waiting. And when I saw it . . . wow!

Over those 25 years David Lynch has become darker and more obscure than he was when making the entertaining, surprisingly funny, and yet disturbing two seasons of the first series (it focused on the unsolved murder of a local prom queen who had a secret pornographic past). Even when a certain grisliness hid in the community, I was haunted by the slippage into unreality — the log lady, the pool of oil in the woods that provided a doorway to another world (the red room in the Black Lodge where everyone talked backwards — one reviewer thought it was Swedish), the disembodied demon Bob, and the owls that are “not what they seem.”

But many critics warned viewers not to expect the same eccentric humorous fare (relatively speaking) in this new series that picked up the story 25 years later. The director now specialized in such heavy surrealistic films as Blue Velvet, Lost Highways, Inland Empire, and Mulholland Drive. Indeed, it became obvious that the series might be closer to the bizarre film Lynch made after the first series, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which was peculiar indeed (David Bowie walks on briefly but seems to be visiting from another universe).

Yet, though the 18 episodes of the new series could frustrate even the most loyal fans (for the obscurity, graphic horror, and teeth-grinding avoidance of getting-to-the-point), I fell in love with its haunting moods (Badalamenti returns), its inspiring creativity (the twisting stories and strange excursions into different worlds), its jaw-dropping shifts from comedy to tragedy and then back (which makes your giggling feel guilty), its emphatic weirdness (people who can be both threatening and silly at the same time, like two Las Vegas hoodlum brothers who discuss their next murder while eating kids’ breakfast cereal). I was hooked from the opening scenes of a college kid paid to stare into a huge glass box to record the appearance of an expected intruder, which finally turns out to be a monster that kills him. You have no idea where the series is going. You’re led to an edge with no reassurance you will be saved from falling into an abyss. And don’t expect many answers at the end — you mainly get just more questions.

So I don’t recommend this for everyone. You have to be prepared for frustration, real horror (like squeezing someone’s face off — after which, Lynch in the role of a stuffy-funny FBI investigator, with a high squeaky deadpan voice, says, so unnecessarily, “He’s dead” — well, yeah! half his head is gone!). Some actions are very upsetting (abuse and beatings come more than once), but, if you can stand it, you’ll have an experience that no television series has given you before, leaving with you images that are odd, scary, repulsive, and yet beautiful. The series is both annoying and profound, self-indulgent and magnificent. And just when you’re getting too impatient, your heart’s suddenly assaulted, you can’t turn away, and you know the meaning of a very lost highway.

And — one last point — whatever you do, watch until you get to episode 8, which one reviewer said was unprecedented for television, like nothing anyone had seen before. I won’t try to describe what occurs, but after the first 15 minutes (which are standard — for Twin Peaks) and then a truly depressing song by Nine Inch Nails (there just to warn you what’s coming), we go into about 40 minutes of sheer mind-numbing “spectacle” that includes streams of cosmic dust, evil procreation, a weird Deco castle above a purple sea, undefined “gods” (?), a steampunk theater, demons falling into a desert, random killings, a haunting chant, 50s music, and a final scene that is so utterly grisly you will cringe — you will cringe.

So, come on . . . take the dare.

And the next work might be just as difficult.

It’s Alan Moore’s Providence. (I’m not picking these to be intentionally disturbing. They’re just the works I’ve found most impressive lately.) I confess I’m a fan of H. P. Lovecraft. I adore how his style can suck you gradually, and then very deeply, into a sense of brooding suspenseful slowly-coming-at-you horror. And his horror is my favorite kind — cosmic. The standard vampires, werewolves, and zombies have been overused and are now almost predictable, too domestic, too human. But galactic horror can go anywhere, come from anywhere. And such evils — that we don’t understand, or can’t even articulate — just seem more likely now to cause a real scare.

Alan Moore, undoubtedly the greatest comic writer of our age, has written a series of powerful and innovative works: From Hell, V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and especially Watchmen, still the best example of how effective the graphic-novel medium really can be. But he’s also interested in Lovecraft. And his Providence (Lovecraft’s hometown) is both a creative analysis and an extension of Lovecraft’s own stories. In this limited series comic (12 issues), tensely and beautifully illustrated by Jacen Burrows, we get a world in which Lovecraft is met and interviewed by a gay reporter in 1919, a world (not quite ours but close) where Lovecraft’s stories function as a kind of incantation for the figures inside the tales to come into existence and create a strange alternate reality.

Thus, in the series, as history develops, Lovecraft does as much reporting as creating, and we actually get to meet the offspring of “The Dunwich Horror,” the many effects of the meteor from “The Colour Out of Space,” the fish creatures from “The Shadow Over Innsbruck” (who, when riding a public bus, look longingly out to the sea), the sinister cult from the “Horror at Red Hook,” the undead of the “Thing on the Doorstep,” and even, ultimately, the dread god Cthulhu itself. It’s a heady set of stories, and it deals quite frankly with the social, racial, and sexual undertones that lurked in Lovecraft’s tales but that he was too repressed, and too prejudiced, to pay much attention to. Moore is famous for doing extensive historical research, and the number of social, biographical, and literary events that get referred to in his stories is staggering. I recommend, while reading the books, that you go to the various fan websites that explain all of Moore’s references to Lovecraft’s works, his life, and his time period. For, as the story proceeds and the alternate realities grow, the events become labyrinthine in how they develop and bifurcate — and you wonder which reality is real, and what creatures now encroach upon the drear edges of the world. It’s a dark and menacing set of stories, like many of Moore’s works, but at the same time it’s brilliant for its complexity, depth, and unrelenting look into the void — into the many voids.

It’s odd that I’m talking so much about horror when it’s really not my genre at all. Yet there’s a vaguely Lovecraftian theme in my books that started with The Man Who Loved Alien Landscapes (2014), which I frankly hadn’t realized until a reviewer pointed it out. A part of the plot involves aliens from the deep past who might be manipulating current human civilization through the artifacts they’ve left behind. And I also admire Moore’s ability to tell a story that has multiple self-reflecting layers. My poetry book, Temporary Planets for Transitory Days (June 2020), does something similar in cross-referencing different poems, and referring tangentially to incidents in the two other novels.

But my interest still is primarily SF, and though both of the selections I’ve given here can be defined as science-fictional stories (they each dabble with multiple universes, a classic SF concept), let me end with an example that is pure SF, but one that’s just as creative and impressive as the two previous works — Cixin Liu’s three-volume Remembrance of Earth’s Pasts, more familiarly known as the trilogy that starts with The Three-Body Problem (the other two volumes are The Dark Forest and Death’s End).

It’s a translation of a famous Chinese SF bestseller, and the author is recognized as China’s greatest SF author today. The trilogy has a centuries-and-light-years spanning plot along with very distinct characters (an invasion of the Earth is brought about by the sufferings of one specific person who believes, suddenly, and who has the sudden chance to decide, that humanity just might be better off under alien conquerors and leaders). But the work is most famous for its ideas: a proton that nearly destroys the Earth, the background radiation of the sky “flickering,” the ways to keep secrets from tiny quantum-bundle spies that are recording everything said by every person on our planet, cities like trees, “seeing” in a 4-dimensional world, huge battles where inertia-free battering rams destroy spaceships, and the most dangerous object in the Solar System being something no larger — and yet a lot thinner — than a playing card. And these are just a few. You have over a thousand pages of mind-blowing and wholly cosmic ideas and concepts.

But be aware that the first volume is a challenge. Though the entire trilogy goes all the way to the end of the universe (I’m not exaggerating), it begins fully grounded in the political realities of 20th century China. A third of the first volume deals with the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, material usually unfamiliar to an American audience. But from there . . . oh, how things get bigger, more threatening, more staggering, and it just keeps going further and further. The central plot is how to survive in the “dark forest” of the galaxy, where any sign of intelligent life is immediately snuffed out by other intelligence. And there are predators in that forest, so you don’t want to make a noise (or advertise your presence with radio waves), for they might come to defeat your space navy, explode your sun, or literally squash you into a very thin pancake. The trilogy takes you yet more deeply into outer space and the far future, to dangers that ultimately do lead to the fall of the universe.

So, the three works described here, by David Lynch, Alan Moore, and Cixin Liu, all reach for a very high realm, and yet they reach them. They admittedly have little to cuddle up with and to feel cozy about. No kitties on Facebook purring here. The first work drives you out of your reality, the second out of your personal reassurance, and the third far away from present Earth to show just how fragile time and space really are.

It’s hard to ask for things more dramatic than that.

Albert Wendland has made a career out of his life-long interests in science fiction — and photography, art, film, and travel. He teaches writing and popular fiction at Seton Hill University, where he was director of its MFA in Writing Popular Fiction (the program famous for its exclusive attention to genre writing). His SF “space-noir” novel, The Man Who Loved Alien Landscapes, was a starred pick-of-the-week by Publisher’s Weekly, and a prequel, In a Suspect Universe, came out in 2018. A collection of poems, Temporary Planets for Transitory Days, supposedly written by the protagonist of both novels, will be released on June 20 of this year. He’s currently working on another “Mykol Ranglen” SF book, and another sequel is planned after that. He’s also published a study of science fiction, several articles on SF, and a chapter in the writing anthology Many Genres, One Craft. He’s interested in astronomy, geology, film, graphic novels, landscape photography, and “the sublime.”

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