Web by John Wyndham

John Wyndham is one of those authors that I would expect to like but don't. British and dour, hopeful and initially optimistic, are qualities in the right direction, but a classic like The Day of the Triffids left me cold. The reason?  Because Wyndham underplayed the interesting overarching plot and centered on a small boring group of survivalists. I've been tempted for years to read his final novel, Web, which went unpublished until a decade after his death in 1969. In the mid-1960s he had tried to get a co-author for it, but when he would explain that it was about "giant spiders" it turned off potential collaborators like Brian Aldiss. I started the novel but saw Wyndham's typical dullnesses quickly begin to emerge. Instead of abandoning it completely, I found another option. In 1991 it was retold by Jocelyn Potter and Andy Hopkins in a much truncated version designed for "upper intermediate" young readers. Thus in about fifty small pages I could get the plot and feeling of the novel of some 180+ pages, with much less suffering.  I'm glad I did this, for it satisfied my curiosity about the book in one sitting and I didn't have to slog through extended passages of Wyndham's weaknesses. In this small form it's kind of like a Twilight Zone episode--dated, with dull characters on a serious mission, who encounter malevolent spiders on a remote south seas isle, and with the expected stinger in the tail. Good for a short entertainment, but not for anything more.

The Sluts by Dennis Cooper

I recently saw two films that were co-written and co-directed by Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley:  Like Cattle Towards Glow (2015) and  Permanent Green Light (2018), and I realized that I've never read anything by Cooper, who is primarily known as a fiction writer. So I looked around a bit, and thought I'd try The Sluts (2004). After reading the book, I was surprised by how accurate the blurb on the rear cover is as regards the set-up of the book: "Set largely on the pages of a Web site where gay male escorts are reviewed by their clients, and told through the postings, e-mails, and conversations of several dozen unreliable narrators, The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth." What this doesn't hint at is how violent much of the book is. S&M is mild compared to the extended discussions of snuff films and the extreme torture played out on the supposedly willing underage street prostitutes. The book is basically torture-porn, with a bit of a plot. Neither the subject matter nor the technique of this book interests me, so I think I'm done with Dennis Cooper.