Monument 14: Sky on Fire

Monument 14: Sky on Fire
by Emmy Laybourne
New York: Feiwel and Friends
2013
217 pages



Well, if you read Monument 14 book and my earlier blog post, you will want to read this book which comes next. Compared to the first one, however, this one is more "fluff". That's not to say that it doesn't continue the horror. It just doesn't have as much substance in plot, character development, and descriptive passages as the first book. That's not necessarily a bad thing and I will explain further.

The action of the story has been divided into two viewpoints. We have Dean's, with Astrid, Chloe, Henry, and Caroline left in the Greenway. They are Blood Type O and, when exposed to the dangerous chemicals let loose in the atmosphere, they become raging monsters. With their concern for the smaller children, they have decided that it is better to stay and await rescue than endanger the others who left in the bus.

Dean's brother, Alex, travelling with Nico, Josie, Sahalia, Max, Ulysses, and Batiste, tells the story of the bus rescue crew. This is our first glimpse of the world outside the Greenway and it is scarier than we could have imagined. The bus doesn't haven't a clear windshield and seeing through the plexiglass makes the world look foggy. Someone has placed big, battery-powered floodlights along the highway, so it isn't completely dark. Despite the daytime hours, there is very little light coming from the sun which is obscured by dense clouds.  The roads are cracked, but a sort of path has been cleared for the bus to pass through. Cars are everywhere but there is something strange about them. A white fungus has eaten the tires and is spreading away from the cars. What is it?

Seeing the world so devastated makes it hard to remember that we are only on  Day 12 after the world ended as these kids knew it, less than two weeks.

Of course, we don't expect anything to be easy for either group of children. Back at the store, Dean and Astrid have new problems. Outsiders have seen the light from the opening when the bus went out and they try to get in. They take pity on some other strangers and throw food down to them from the roof, but this only leads to others coming and crashing into the store. The bus is taken over eventually by militant and paranoid older teens, who turn all of our small heroes out and leave them, first finding out where they came from. Of course, this spells further disaster for the Greenway kids and Alex and Nico know it. Somehow they have to walk the remaining 40 miles to Denver, all with masks and several layers of clothing, no food, blisters, and danger everywhere. And three of them are small children.

How do you eat in one of these things?

I said earlier that I felt like this was a "fluffier" book than the first one. Perhaps the main problem for me is that, because of the two story lines, we see more action rather than character development. I feel like I understand the main characters fairly well from the first book, but the new people they encounter just seem bad with no explanation or background behind them. We encounter only two kind helpers along the way to Denver: Max's Auntie Jean and an old man named Mario Scietto who takes the kids in for a couple of nights. I like more background and description in my stories, rather than so much dialogue, but since we are being told this story by the two brothers and they do not have the luxury of reflection time, I guess that could be too much to expect. The action is steady and tense, and I want to see these children come out okay.

Lucky for everyone, the bus kids make it to the Denver Airport and it really is a refuge and not just a rumor. The parents of some of the kids are found, and another parent helps with a daring rescue of the Greenway kids just in the nick of time. The book ends with the possibility of another book to come, since Josie is still separated from the rest. These kids have become a family, to themselves and to me, a fact reinforced by the change in Sahalia from a pouty girl who wants to prove how grown up she is, without really understanding what that means, into a big sister who cares for the others and wants to protect them. I want to see how things turn out for them. I will be watching for Book Three in this series.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ivan Albright, 1945
The Art Institute of Chicago

This past week I went to one of my favorite places, the Art Institute in Chicago, and saw this painting by Ivan Albright, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). It was painted for the movie based on Oscar Wilde's only novel with the same title, directed by Albert Lewin and starring George Sanders, Hurd Hatfield, Donna Reed, and Angela Lansbury. On its own, this painting portrays an unreal and disturbing monster of a person, his clothes are slashed, stained, and decayed. The colors of the painting are strangely muted, not as bright as one might think blood and gore should be, but they are also more organic looking as a result. And this is a painting that developed organically.

In the movie, filmed in black and white, there are a few moments of color. The first comes when we get to see the painting of Dorian that his friend, Basil Hallward, had just completed. It shows a young gentleman who is self-assured, talented, wealthy, upper-class, and flawless.

Portrait of Dorian Gray, painted by Henrique Medina
 for the movie The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

In the story, Dorian Gray meets and befriends another friend of Basil's, Lord Henry Wotton, whose world view is based on hedonism and the fulfillment of the senses. All experiences are worth having, good and bad, without considering  the consequences to others. I am not quite sure how this works into his other opinion that seeking Youth and Beauty are of the highest value in life, since I do not associate bad or evil experiences as a way  to finding Youth or Beauty. Dorian likes his portrait and wishes that he could always be young and beautiful while his portrait would change. Lucky for him (or unfortunate for him, as the case may be), there just happens to be a little statue of Bastet, the Egyptian cat-goddess nearby. She appears in the portrait to Dorian's right. Perhaps we are meant to think that Bastet is sympathetic to the search for Youth and Beauty and wishes to give Dorian what he wants, or perhaps she might feel that he is foolish to wish for something like this and wants to teach him a lesson.

Dorian's infatuation with Sibyl Vane is a good example of his incorporating Lord Henry's philosophy into his own life. His infatuation with Sibyl and then his rejection of her at the advice of Lord Henry, in the guise of a test, shows that Dorian doesn't comprehend, although he might still care at this point, what he represented to Sibyl. She is desperate for a way to leave her life of singing in the little club, and her mother seems to constantly tell her that she deserves better. When "better" finds her and Dorian offers her a way out, she snatches it eagerly despite the inequality of their situations. But Sibyl is not willing to go against her moral standards to be with Basil and certainly does not expect to be rejected so utterly.

The next shocking flash of color comes when we again see the portrait. Absorbing all of the vices of the model, the painting has become gross, decayed, and terrifying. We haven't seen Dorian commit many crimes during the story and movie; we only know that 18 years have passed since Sibyl's death. We can only imagine the atrocities he has committed over the years. Of course, the horror of his murdering his friend Basil on top of the seduction of young innocent Gladys Hallward, who naively things that just because Dorian is so good looking, the things people say about him can't be true, are only a small sample of Dorian's vices. But the ending of the story proves that there can be redemption after all but at what price? This painting has come to represent his soul, what he has become deep inside and hides from the world. Can anyone this ugly and horrifying inside be capable of caring for anyone but himself? Will Gladys end up like poor Sibyl?

I thought Hurd Hatfield was a good choice for Dorian. I was particularly struck by how mask-like his face is throughout the movie, so smooth and wrinkle-free. But to have a face like this, it would imply that this person also doesn't show any emotion. Smiles cause wrinkles, too, and Hurd as Dorian doesn't ever seem to smile or laugh. Does he enjoy his life? Perhaps he is not capable of it.

If you haven't seen this movie, I recommend it but not as a substitute for the novel by Oscar Wilde. That is a classic of literary horror and shouldn't be missed.

The Albright painting was painted with the Medina portrait as the base. I wish the Art Institute had both of them side by side to show the contrast. Without the other, Albright's painting is a ghoulish painting that exemplifies a life spent in evil pursuits, or maybe it is just another zombie picture. Nasty but interesting. We don't understand the message of the book without the "original" to compare to it.

The Man in the Picture

The Man in the Picture
by Susan Hill
Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press
2007
145 pages



Another book I read this summer was The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill. I had read Susan Hill's most famous book, The Woman in Black, and really enjoyed it as a deliciously satisfying ghost story. I was attracted to check out The Man in the Picture story because of the painting aspect. My son is an art major and we visit a lot of art museums. The concept of haunted paintings is also one I have seen before in other books.  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is a story about a decadent man who stays young but his picture deteriorates into a horrifying monster. Stephen King includes haunted paintings in two of his stories: "The Road Virus Heads North" in the Everything's Eventual collection in which the writer buys a painting of a car, but the background keeps changing; and Rose Madder, the story of a woman who finds a painting at a pawn shop that changes her life. And a painting in The Witches by Roald Dahl eats a little girl named Erica.

The painting in this book eats people, too.

Told as a frame, or box, story, our first narrator is a man, Oliver, who is visiting his old tutor at Cambridge, Theo Parmitter. It is a cold, winter evening, and the two have just enjoyed a good dinner, when Theo asks his friend if he would like to hear a strange, disturbing, yet true tale. Being comfortable and enjoying his friend's company, Oliver is eager to hear whatever Theo has to tell him. Oliver is directed to examine a painting, hanging in a dark corner. It depicts a night scene during Venice's carnival near the Grand Canal, crowded with entertainers and masked revellers in brightly colored costumes. It is a dark oil painting, rather "artificial" in subject matter, in Oliver's opinion, yet accomplished by an expert hand.

Francois Flameng (1856-1923): The Carnival, Venice

At this time, Theo begins the first installment of his story. He tells Oliver about his love of art, nurtured by his aunt, and his discovery of the Carnival painting at an auction. A mysterious buyer approached him after the auction, offering to pay more than Theo had for the painting, but Theo was enraptured with the painting and would not sell it. He took it home to his rooms at Cambridge and began to study it more closely. One day he noticed a man's figure in the foreground that he didn't remember from his previous examinations. The man was not wearing festival clothing, but ordinary clothing of the day, and he seemed to be looking out into the room with an expression of astonishment or fear, as two masked revellers held his wrists and seemed to be dragging him away. Did Theo just not notice this figure before? Or did it suddenly appear, and how?

I'm not going to give away any more of the plot. We learn more about the paintings history. Strange things happen to Theo and Oliver, and eventually there is a frightening ending, all of which are satisfying to the ghost story fan.

This story reminded me of older ghost stories I have read, such as those of Le Fanu, Nesbit, and Henry James. The writing style is satisfyingly descriptive and balanced nicely with the dialogue. Tension is built slowly and with skill. Spooky things happen but they are planned carefully by the author rather than coming too frequently, which I think tends to desensitize us too much to the frightening elements. The frame story works well here, too; we get the background from Theo Parmitter who needs to find relief in telling his story, and the entirety of the horror of the painting stuns us with Oliver's further experiences.

Pietro Longhi, The Ridotto in Venice, c1750s

I have found two paintings of the Venetian Carnival that remind me of this story. The top painting, by Francois Flameng, a Frenchman painting in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, depicts a similar scene to that of the mysterious painting of this book. It is an outdoor scene, on the quayside, with revellers, musicians, and gondoliers dancing and cavorting. This scene differs, however, in that it is a pleasant day, with fluffy clouds and blue sky visible above, rather than night. I get a feeling of joy and festivity and fun from this painting.

The second painting, by Venetian painter Pietro Longhi, suits the mood of the book much better. Longhi included masked figures in many of his paintings, and this painting has a darkness, mystery, and secrecy that is lacking in the Flameng painting, I think. The characters in this scene, rather than enjoying light-hearted and good-natured fun, seem to be relishing the anonymity the masks give them, freeing them to commit acts they would not dare to do without the masks.

The Man in the Picture is a quick read. The best time to hear this "strange, disturbing, yet true" tale is on a dark evening in front of the fire. You just might want to turn the paintings in the room to the wall first!