The last of Halloween Reading
Nov. 6th, 2019 04:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhMy Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix. A horror novel set – very specifically, with many pop culture references – in 1988. Abby and Gretchen, high school sophomores, have been best friends for years and years, the sort of best friends that have secret codes and personal rituals and phone calls every night to dissect that day at school, despite Abby being from the poor side of town and Gretchen's parents being extremely wealthy and WASP-y. Until one summer night, when Abby and Gretchen experiment with LSD and Gretchen ends up alone and lost in the nearby woods for hours. Or... maybe not alone, because the next day she begins to act differently. Subtly, at first – not showering, not sleeping, claiming she hears voices. Then she begins to lash out violently, actively destroying her friendship with Abby and sabotaging the other girls in their class. Was she raped that night, and this is all some form of PTSD? Is she being abused by her parents? Or did she encounter a secret group of Satanists and is now possessed by the devil?
As you might guess from a plot that involves both Satanic conspiracies and the dangers of trying drugs, My Best Friend’s Exorcism is extremely enamoured of its 80's setting. (Look at that cover! This was published in 2016, but someone clearly knows their stuff.) However, what the novel's really about, more than anything else, is the friendship between Abby and Gretchen. I was shocked when I realized that the author is a man, because it's such a perceptive, kind, respectful depiction of teen girls and their bonds. It's honestly hard to believe Hendrix was never himself a sixteen year old girl! There is horror (warning for a dead dog) and humor (the exorcist Abby eventually turns to is a bodybuilder who lifts weights for Christ and who, as becomes increasingly obvious, has never actually led an exorcism before), but every element – including a climax that is equally scary, hilarious, and emotional – is a celebration of their friendship. An excellent book for anyone who has the slightest affection for lifelong friendships and their importance.
The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation by Rich Cohen. God, I had so many problems with this book. Let's start with the title. The Last Pirate of New York is the nonfiction account of Albert Hicks, who murdered three men in 1860 in a crime that set off a media frenzy, making him hugely famous. Hicks was hung on Liberty Island (before the statute was installed, of course) with a watching crowd of between ten and twenty thousand people, the last man to be publicly executed in New York. This is enough to base a book on! This is an interesting story in and of itself! This is not remotely the story of either a pirate or a gangster!
Okay, fine. Hicks technically was tried for piracy, but only because – no one having found the bodies of his victims, which presumably were at the bottom of New York Harbor – the state was afraid he'd escape a murder charge. He did commit the murders on board a boat, but a boat that never made it to the open ocean, staying within the harbor for the entirety of this doomed voyage. Not really what I think of when I see a book with "pirate" on the cover. Especially because NYC did have real pirates of the stereotypical sort, most famously but not limited to Captain Kidd! Secondly, if we're going to count killing people in a bay as piracy, Hicks is not the last; Cohen several times mentions other river pirates operating around the same time.
Thirdly, Hicks is even less of a gangster than he is a pirate. Cohen is obviously very enthused about New York's history with gangsters and spends a lot of time discussing them, bragging about his interactions with their still surviving relics. (I mean all of this is in regards to gangsters of The Godfather and Boardwalk Empire sort, not gangsters of Boyz n the Hood or The Wire sort, which I feel is an obvious point of confusion but one which Cohen never deigns to acknowledge.) Hicks worked alone, and had no followers, accomplices, or any sort of larger organization that one might call... you know... a gang. You can't be a gangster by yourself. Cohen does argue that Hicks became a legendary figure in the NYC underworld after his death, his story told and retold for generations. But this theory, which could have been fascinating and a major focus of the book, is relegated to a few pages in an afterword and we're never shown evidence that it actually happened.
Another problem I had with The Last Pirate of New York is that the majority of the pages are spent on the police investigation and subsequent trial, which is fine in and of itself; many a true crime book has chosen that focus. But Cohen gives us a detailed description of Hicks's actions during the murder at the beginning of the book, which means the subsequent 120 pages have no tension or suspense. We know he did it. There's no question of if they're following the right guy, or if maybe the suspect is really innocent, or if he did it but won't be found guilty. All of that is obvious from the very beginning, leaving nowhere new for the book to go. Bizarrely, Cohen details the step-by-step of the murder at the beginning of the book, then does so again near the end, when Hicks confesses. Not only is it the same scene told twice, Cohen uses many of the exact same phrases. And it's not a particularly long book, so wasting pages on this retelling really stands out.
Cohen also spends a lot of time on Hicks's confession, which he sold in book-form to a publisher immediately before his execution. Personally, I was extremely skeptical that anything in this confession actually happened; not only did Hicks supposedly participate in every single important event of mid-1800s America (he visited the California gold rush! He was in the Mexican-American war! He lived in Hawaii, Tahiti, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, New Orleans!) but it hits every trope of the standard penny dreadful (he was the only survivor of a shipwreck – twice! He killed hundreds of men but was too good to rape women! He protected mistreated cabin boys! He buried $200,000 in Mexico and the treasure is still out there for you to find! All of these crimes attributed to a famous bandit were actually committed by Hicks!). Cohen doesn't seem to have made an effort to verify any of the stories that happened outside of NYC. And I get it, the historical records for rural Mexico on crimes that were never tried are not going to be a great source of information, but that's not an excuse to spend dozens of pages uncritically recounting this story.
Cohen uses a lot of photographs to illustrate his story, but they were mostly taken much later than the events in question, sometimes up to sixty years later. And again, I understand the choice – there's not a lot of useful photographs from the 1850s; a building won't have changed that much in appearance – but the fact that he never explicitly acknowledges this discrepancy bothered me.
So, is there anything good about The Last Pirate of New York? Cohen's writing isn't terrible... at least, not all of the time. His descriptions of Old New York can be quite well-written: The little party followed State Street across Bowling Green, then walked up Broadway, which had once been an Indian trail. Before the Civil War, you could still see evidence of that, in the hard-packed dirt, in the way it rambled, and in the smells, which were the smells of America old and new, smells of horse manure and leather and human sweat, but also the stench of factories; of putrid meat from the slaughter yards and tanneries, of oil from the gasworks and refineries.
Unfortunately it's also not always accurate, since south Broadway was absolutely not a dirt road in 1860. Alas, such an intriguing title, such an annoyingly deficient book.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
As you might guess from a plot that involves both Satanic conspiracies and the dangers of trying drugs, My Best Friend’s Exorcism is extremely enamoured of its 80's setting. (Look at that cover! This was published in 2016, but someone clearly knows their stuff.) However, what the novel's really about, more than anything else, is the friendship between Abby and Gretchen. I was shocked when I realized that the author is a man, because it's such a perceptive, kind, respectful depiction of teen girls and their bonds. It's honestly hard to believe Hendrix was never himself a sixteen year old girl! There is horror (warning for a dead dog) and humor (the exorcist Abby eventually turns to is a bodybuilder who lifts weights for Christ and who, as becomes increasingly obvious, has never actually led an exorcism before), but every element – including a climax that is equally scary, hilarious, and emotional – is a celebration of their friendship. An excellent book for anyone who has the slightest affection for lifelong friendships and their importance.
The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation by Rich Cohen. God, I had so many problems with this book. Let's start with the title. The Last Pirate of New York is the nonfiction account of Albert Hicks, who murdered three men in 1860 in a crime that set off a media frenzy, making him hugely famous. Hicks was hung on Liberty Island (before the statute was installed, of course) with a watching crowd of between ten and twenty thousand people, the last man to be publicly executed in New York. This is enough to base a book on! This is an interesting story in and of itself! This is not remotely the story of either a pirate or a gangster!
Okay, fine. Hicks technically was tried for piracy, but only because – no one having found the bodies of his victims, which presumably were at the bottom of New York Harbor – the state was afraid he'd escape a murder charge. He did commit the murders on board a boat, but a boat that never made it to the open ocean, staying within the harbor for the entirety of this doomed voyage. Not really what I think of when I see a book with "pirate" on the cover. Especially because NYC did have real pirates of the stereotypical sort, most famously but not limited to Captain Kidd! Secondly, if we're going to count killing people in a bay as piracy, Hicks is not the last; Cohen several times mentions other river pirates operating around the same time.
Thirdly, Hicks is even less of a gangster than he is a pirate. Cohen is obviously very enthused about New York's history with gangsters and spends a lot of time discussing them, bragging about his interactions with their still surviving relics. (I mean all of this is in regards to gangsters of The Godfather and Boardwalk Empire sort, not gangsters of Boyz n the Hood or The Wire sort, which I feel is an obvious point of confusion but one which Cohen never deigns to acknowledge.) Hicks worked alone, and had no followers, accomplices, or any sort of larger organization that one might call... you know... a gang. You can't be a gangster by yourself. Cohen does argue that Hicks became a legendary figure in the NYC underworld after his death, his story told and retold for generations. But this theory, which could have been fascinating and a major focus of the book, is relegated to a few pages in an afterword and we're never shown evidence that it actually happened.
Another problem I had with The Last Pirate of New York is that the majority of the pages are spent on the police investigation and subsequent trial, which is fine in and of itself; many a true crime book has chosen that focus. But Cohen gives us a detailed description of Hicks's actions during the murder at the beginning of the book, which means the subsequent 120 pages have no tension or suspense. We know he did it. There's no question of if they're following the right guy, or if maybe the suspect is really innocent, or if he did it but won't be found guilty. All of that is obvious from the very beginning, leaving nowhere new for the book to go. Bizarrely, Cohen details the step-by-step of the murder at the beginning of the book, then does so again near the end, when Hicks confesses. Not only is it the same scene told twice, Cohen uses many of the exact same phrases. And it's not a particularly long book, so wasting pages on this retelling really stands out.
Cohen also spends a lot of time on Hicks's confession, which he sold in book-form to a publisher immediately before his execution. Personally, I was extremely skeptical that anything in this confession actually happened; not only did Hicks supposedly participate in every single important event of mid-1800s America (he visited the California gold rush! He was in the Mexican-American war! He lived in Hawaii, Tahiti, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, New Orleans!) but it hits every trope of the standard penny dreadful (he was the only survivor of a shipwreck – twice! He killed hundreds of men but was too good to rape women! He protected mistreated cabin boys! He buried $200,000 in Mexico and the treasure is still out there for you to find! All of these crimes attributed to a famous bandit were actually committed by Hicks!). Cohen doesn't seem to have made an effort to verify any of the stories that happened outside of NYC. And I get it, the historical records for rural Mexico on crimes that were never tried are not going to be a great source of information, but that's not an excuse to spend dozens of pages uncritically recounting this story.
Cohen uses a lot of photographs to illustrate his story, but they were mostly taken much later than the events in question, sometimes up to sixty years later. And again, I understand the choice – there's not a lot of useful photographs from the 1850s; a building won't have changed that much in appearance – but the fact that he never explicitly acknowledges this discrepancy bothered me.
So, is there anything good about The Last Pirate of New York? Cohen's writing isn't terrible... at least, not all of the time. His descriptions of Old New York can be quite well-written: The little party followed State Street across Bowling Green, then walked up Broadway, which had once been an Indian trail. Before the Civil War, you could still see evidence of that, in the hard-packed dirt, in the way it rambled, and in the smells, which were the smells of America old and new, smells of horse manure and leather and human sweat, but also the stench of factories; of putrid meat from the slaughter yards and tanneries, of oil from the gasworks and refineries.
Unfortunately it's also not always accurate, since south Broadway was absolutely not a dirt road in 1860. Alas, such an intriguing title, such an annoyingly deficient book.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
