The
"beach book" is one of those marketing myths that help
the publishing industry make what little money it does. It goes
like this: during those long, lazy summer months, people love to
do nothing more than lie back on a lounge chair, sip a daiquiri,
and crack open the latest modern literature about dysfunctional,
neurotic women finding eternal happiness by catching themselves
Mr. Right. Of course, the actual reality is that most of us are
imprisoned in office towers during the hot, crappy summer months,
and we're more likely to spend our free time doing something a little
more active. Books are for the winter, when it's too cold to go
outside, and when you can actually concentrate on a book during
your morning commute because you haven't been trapped in a 95-degree
subway car between Mr. Fecal Odor and Ms. Curried Armpit for the
past six hours.
Still,
in keeping with tradition, we've decided to present our own take
on the summer reading list. Screw the Times book review:
we're going to take you down the primrose path where any hope of
quality, or even sense, is left by the wayside. Sometimes, my water-brothers,
a book is so bad that you have to either laugh at it, or else base
a religion around it. Quite by accident, I happened across one magazine
devoted to bad literature, Book
Happy, while doing research for this article. Believe
it or not, there are actually people devoted to collecting and reading
these Plan
Nines From Outer Spaces of the publishing world.
Yet,
there would seem to be one untapped mother lode of poor writing,
a great artery of bad taste leading directly into the darkness that
is at the heart of America. Like an archaeologist sifting through
layer after layer of prehistoric crap on the floor of some cave
to find out what people ate in the Paleolithic, dutiful attention
paid to this debris will no doubt give great insight into the psyche
of our great land. I speak, of course, of the great world of vanity
publishing.
Before
we embark on our journey of discovery, a brief explanation of what
a vanity press actually is would be in order. Before the World Wide
Web enabled any idiot to broadcast their thoughts through the ether,
the last hope of the great aspiring unwashed was what is euphemistically
termed a "subsidy publisher." The principle is pay-to-play:
Instead of the publishing house assuming the financial risk of producing
a book, the burden is shifted onto the author, who forks over approximately
the price of a car to see their words edited, printed, and bound
into a completed product. Marketing, publicity, and distribution
are, for the most part, in the hands of the author, though some
vanity houses contribute a little to this process.
Vanity
publishing is more widespread than you might think. One hundred
and fifty years ago, it was pretty much par for the course for a
well-off gentleman to pay for his own book's production. Several
more recent well-known writers, such as Margaret Mitchell and Pat
Conroy, have actually used subsidy publishers to get their careers
off the ground. The downside is, of course, that, unlike publishers
who survive by selling quality books to the public, there is a little
to no editorial review process to weed out the books that have little
audience, are poorly written, or the works of raving lunatics. Perhaps
the subsidy press syndrome is why Conroy has been able to publish
the same damn book about his dysfunctional Southern family about
eighty times under various titles.
My
first job in publishing, I'm sorry to say, was working for the nation's
oldest and most established subsidy press. "Working" is
perhaps not the right word. "Allowing myself to be tortured
for a minimal salary" would be a better description. Our workspace,
which hadn't been refurbished since approximately 1948, was an intellectual
Dickensian sweatshop. Chained to a desk eight hours a day, with
every motion, including lunch breaks, precisely monitored by a malodorous
supervisor, I was buried under an avalanche of the worst manuscripts
every conceived by the subhuman mind. It felt like a literary Mystery
Science Theater 3000. The office was the beach where
every rejected, half-assed, semi-literate manuscript in this great
country of ours finally washed up to rot in the sun. I could actually
feel the insanity leaping off the pages and into my brain.
Most
of the books-and I use the term loosely-that crossed my desk dealt
with one of several major themes. The most common genre was the
memoir written by some old lady from Duluth spending her children's
inheritance to publish her recollections of the Depression. Most
of these, while not scintillating reading, tended to be fairly lucid,
though there were also some that seemed to be catalogues of every
wrong ever suffered over 80 years of so-called life. As a history
buff, the ones I found most fascinating were memoirs of World War
II or other historical events. Of course, though most veterans had
the heroic task of typing up requisitions for blankets and jeep
parts, and that people who have actually been in combat don't usually
like to talk about it, every so often I'd happen across a first-hand
account of the landing at Guadalcanal or battles against the Nazis
in central Italy.
The
second great category was attempts at novel-writing, ranging from
the bad to the friggin' awful. The most common genres, to no one's
surprise, were romance, mystery, and sci-fi. Most read like an attempt
to write a screenplay for a very bad movie. Some were no worse than
the usual Danielle Steele claptrap. The sci-fi were the worst, usually
written by oversized fanboys whose understanding of the universe
had been gleaned from Heinlein novels. These were often unintentionally
hysterical.
Then,
of course, there was the utter insanity, in which aliens, Jesus,
or both invariably played a big role. There were spiritual tracts,
sometimes written entirely in capital letters. There were author's
biographies that described how to cover your kitchen in aluminum
foil so that the CIA's mind-control satellites couldn't monitor
your thoughts. For some reason I shall never understand, mental
illness tends to involve either extraterrestrials or religion. Yet,
for some reason I can never discern, the publishing house would
never reject these poor souls' manuscripts so long as they could
be re-typed into a word processor and typeset in Quark.
The following
are actual quotes from books I've edited. To protect the guilty,
authors and titles have been omitted. However, they should give
you a good taste of what I had to endure:
From
an infamous born-again Christian biker novel:
The
nurse's face turned beet red. She aimed a vicious finger at Ally
and shouted, "You heathen whore! I visit our leaders to help
them share with God's chosen. You sleep with filthy heathen Eskimos!"
Later
on, the heathen whore, a doctor, explained her humanitarian reasons
for shtupping the Inuit:
"If
I fornicated with a hundred Eskimos so I could doctor their wives
and babies, I'm probably holding back on the estimate."
From
a book about aliens landing unobserved in an American city for the
purposes of world conquest and co-opting unwitting characters into
their breeding program. Like many of the books, it displays a third-grade
understanding of sex:
"Big
Doc waited for his wife to bring up the subject of acquiring a uterus
for her."
"She
stared at what was an artificial vulva where before had been her
navel and burst into tears."
From
an attempt at a horror novel, two characters, Elie and Don, are
lost on a back road. They decide to ask directions from some locals:
"
'I'm sure one of them would know if this so-called dirt road runs
into 243,' Elie suggested.
'I'm not sure if that's a good idea,' Don remarked. 'They're all
wearing the same kind of coveralls.' Elie looked at him as if
he was the crazy one.
'What in the hell does that have to do with anything?' "
"
'There is some kind of evil in our tank farm. Where it came from
or why, I couldn't tell you. Kevin was attacked by hungry skull
heads.' "
"He
shut his eyes, just to find them still there when he opened them
back up."
In this
(actually hilarious) comedy, we find out about the secret history
of la isla encantada in an argument between a Puerto Ricana named
Consuelita and a cowboy named Tennesse
"
'. . . the Puerto Rican armada ruled the seas and most of the civilized
world as it was known at that time. My God, man, don't you read
books?'
'I've heard of the Spanish armada,' said Tennessee, 'but'
'That's another story. They had one, too, but they were defeated
and subsequently destroyed by storms. The Puerto Rican armada have
never been defeated. They were invincibles and conquered all of
Europe and civilization as they know it at that time.'
'Why is it,' said Tennessee, 'that Puerto Rico is not a major power
today?'
'Oh, that is because the Puerto Rican peoples start to take the
religion to their heart, and they fell guilty about all the cruel
deeds they have done, and so they decide to be nice guys and let
the rest of the world do the bad things.' "
Later
in the book, when Tennessee and Consuelita run into some trouble:
"
'Why don't you call in the Royal Puerto Rican Air Force for an air
strike?' "
From
the autobiography of a woman who was actually in Plan 9 From
Outer Space, and then became a made-for-TV move producer:
"The
studio sent us off on a brief jaunt to Utah to try to convince Donny
Osmond to take the role. I doubted whether he had the acting skills
to play a retarded young man."
[In defense
of that passage, and my opinions of Donny Osmond aside, it takes
a consummate actor to play a character with Down's syndrome. It
just reads really funny. . .]
Then
there's just the random weirdness:
"The
girls smashed Buck's testicles, trying to flatten them. When they
found out they were not getting any flatter, they gave up."
"His
mother became very hot and Toddy actually forced her to go to
bed."
"Yes,
Steve never saw Ward Cleaver holding the Beav down while June
peed all over his face. He would have remembered that episode."
By now,
you're probably asking why we would advocate anyone reading this
stuff. Well, there are several reasons:
Firstly,
because there are real gems in the drek.
Secondly,
even though some of those books may have been hell to edit, sometimes
they're so bad, they're hysterically funny. In other words, they're
worth the purchase price for kitsch value alone. Plus, you'll have
a really witty topic of conversation if anyone asks you, "So,
read any good books lately?"
However,
there's a third reason to read vanity press books: This is the real
alternative press. Not subject to any editorial control, the writers
simply poured their hearts out on the page, mailed their checks,
and saw their words in print.
And,
I've found, if someone wants to say something that badly, it's usually
worthwhile to listen to them.