A Leak In The Safe

The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and The Invention of Murder – since I’m a well known Poe freak and afficionado of true crime, Stashower had me at the title, and I’m pleased to report that the rest of the book lived up to my expectations.

In her day Mary Rogers was a well known figure, a humbled member of the upper classes who was reduced to selling cigars in a New York tobacco emporium, the crafty store owner knowing that a fetching face and fine figure would attract male clientele. Her employment was a sign of a changing social environment in which a woman could have a casual social relationship with men without being a member of the demi-monde, and her fame an indication of the novelty of her position.

As a consequence of this notoriety, Mary’s subsequent unsolved murder was front page news , and the same relaxed mores that allowed her to wait on men also permitted the stuffiest newspapers to delve into the morbid details in ways that would have been unthinkable even a few years earlier.

Like Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, this vintage crime is presented alongside another narrative, in the case the short and tragic life of Edgar Allan Poe. The narratives intersect when Poe decides to follow up his seminal detective tale "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" with another in which his protagonist C. Auguste Dupin would use his fantastic powers of ratiocination (and by extension Poe’s own) to solve a lightly fictionalized version of an infamously unsolved crime. Poe called his story "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and in Stashower’s deft reportage, the subsequent collision of truth and fiction makes for unexpected twists and high drama.

Over the years the relative fame and reputations of Mary Rogers and Edgar Allan Poe have waxed and waned, but today it may safely be said that the latter is firmly established in the literary pantheon while the former has slipped into obscurity. With impressive scholarship and analysis Stashower manages to make both his threads strong and compelling, weaving a captivating fabric that highlights the almost forgotten victim and stitching a new perspective around the renowned writer.

Although I enjoyed Steven Sidor’s The Mirror’s Edge, it was almost despite the subject matter – Satanism is one of those subjects, like UFO’s or vast conspiracies, that I prefer to read about in nominal non-fiction. Somehow the paranoiac imagination works best when somewhat constrained by reality, and the mundane, you couldn’t make them up because they’re so stupid details of alien abductions or occult rituals are what bring them to life in print. Even if I don’t believe a word of it, it really adds to the experience when it feels like the author is completely convinced.
 
So when my noble friend and colleague Sheridan showed me Satan’s Underground: The Extraordinary Story of One Woman’s Escape by Lauren Stratford I had to snap it up and dive right it. Of course it does tend to wipe that ironic smirk off even UBU’s mug to think that some small child was perhaps abused in the awful ways described by Stratford, but even before the Satanist part, when her adoptive mother was pimping grade school Lauren to hobos in exchange for odd jobs around the house, her narrative seemed manifestly phoney. Even though anything verifiable was in short supply, I wondered if anyone had done any fact checking on Satan’s Underground, and I turned immediately to our old friend, the internet, and sure enough my b.s. detector once again proved accurate. Wikipedia even has an entry about her with a link to the Cornerstone magazine article that exposed her. Apparently her real name was Laurel Willson, and although she was adopted and her mother was a little high strung, all resemblance to the truth ends there. The real punch line is that after the controversy she dropped out of sight only to reemerge later under the name Lauren Grabowski, claiming to be a Holocaust survivor!
 
I should have waited, as that knowledge colored my reading of the rest of the book, from her forced pornography experiences to her eventual forced participation in Satanic sacrificial rites. None of it seemed remotely believable or even fully imagined, though there were a few good bits like her Satanic boyfriend putting her in a steel drum and then dropping sacrificed baby bodies in with her one by one. The actually bad experiences end about a third of the way when the Satanists inexplicably lose interest in her and she starts her process of evangelical rebirth. Here, entering actual autobiography, her writing becomes more enthusiastic and concrete – clearly having other people pay attention to her and take her seriously is what really turns her on. If Jesus and Satan are waging a relentless war for your soul, you must be important, and once Stratford’s unique suffering has been established her enormous narcissism and self-absorption can have free reign. She bullies people, taking advantage of their better Christian instincts to insinuate herself into their lives, which soon revolve around listening to and consoling poor Lauren. The circle of the sympathetic and duped becomes wider and wider until it includes the reader.
 
The last third of the book is a basically unreadable goulash of self-help bromides and "divine prescriptions" to those tempted by Satan. It’s funny that she has several pieces that include refrains such as her biggest concern Will someone listen to me? and even a hidden confession in a chapter where she repeats over and over again WATCH OUT…YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED! Indeed.
 
In the end the interesting thing to me is how the book struck such a sympathetic chord in the evangelical Christian world, where it was an acclaimed best seller and vaulted Stratford to celebrity. Among the adulatory blurbs is, ironically enough, one from Mike Warnke, author of The Satan Seller, a book about Mike’s experiences as a repentant former coven leader, another tome that was exposed as baloney. (An echo of this is found in Lauren’s next life of deception as a supposed Holocaust survivor when she claimed to remember Binjamin Wikomirski from the camps – and then he too was exposed as a fake, real name Bruno Grosjean. At least Warnke and Stratford never claimed to have met while kissing the devil’s patookie at a black mass.) In fact the two of them are now considered part of a late eighties sociological phenomena known as the Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic. The growing evangelical movement needed to validate their own sense of self-worth with an enemy that validated their religious beliefs in much the same way that Communism had validated their political ones. They really, really wanted to believe that a great force was out there opposing their great purpose and so were quite easily taken in by something that confirmed their paranoia. In fact, despite all the evidence that has been marshaled to discredit Satan’s Underground, there are still people out there who believe in its veracity.
 
It is fiction, of course, and almost self-evidently so, but had it been presented as such it would have been condemned as trash and filth. As a cautionary tale however, the righteous can revel in lurid details of porno and orgy while still pretending a higher purpose, believing Stratford when she says "Ultimately the book is not about pornography or Satan. It is about the overwhelming power and victory of the Lord Jesus Christ." Ultimately, maybe, but there’s a whole bunch of semi-scintillating stuff that a good bible thumper can wallow in on the way.
 
Certainly in recent years the general reading public has been bombarded with fake memoirs, if only because confession is the genre of the moment. But the devil’s advocate (so to speak) in me has to give Lauren credit for a work of imagination, an insane paranoiac-critical take on her own life. To pretend as she did can even be seen as a work of performance art, even if she seemed to emphasize the paranoiac over the critical. Unfortunately, the unintentional artlessness that can be somewhat excused in a memoir doesn’t cut it in a fake. Even considered as a work of fiction or even camp, Satan’s Underground is rather clumsy and not very compelling, with only a few savory chunks of ripe cheese. As in every work whose background is more interesting than the foreground, its value is mostly historical.
 
Here’s a few overheated excerpts:
 
However the front of the office was only a facade. Behind that was where the real world began for me and for countless nameless and faceless others who had come looking for fame and fortune. Little did they know that when they signed on the dotted line they were signing themselves into the same world as mine – HELL!
 
Do you listen to heavy-metal music that condones and even encourages suicide, the torture and murder of babies, and Satan worship because that kind of music is "where it’s at"? WATCH OUT…YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED!

Don’t they kind of drive you crazy, those chapters from an author’s "coming soon" book that the publishers stick at the end of the latest paperback? It’s such a tease – if it’s any good it will suck you in and then bang you realize that, not only does the story not continue, but there’s no way to find out what will happen because the book’s not even out yet.

I experienced a painful case of narrative interruptus when I read the first part of Steven Sidor’s The Mirror’s Edge (then entitled Cloven Print) at the end of his excellent second novel Bone Factory. It was an amazing excerpt, a premise that pulled me right in, about an haunted journalist whose brother had been abducted and killed during his childhood and who is now obsessively pursuing a similar case in which a pair of twins have gone missing. The whole thing proved to be even more frustrating because the book, rather than being available in hardcover as claimed in November 2006 won’t actually appear until April 1, 2008.

Luckily, Steve sent me an advance reader’s copy, and I’m finally able to tell you that the book by and large lives up to that impressive tease. Told in the first person present tense by the very jittery and cynical narrator, Jase Deering, The Mirror’s Edge quickly cast a dark spell reminiscent in tone if not in language to that great underappreciated master of modern gloom Thomas Cook. The first half is brilliant – there’s very little hard evidence in the mystery of the missing twins, but a persistent vein of innuendo and gossip seems to point to Graham Morick, an apparently mild mannered children’s book author who happens to be the son of the late, infamous Aubrey Hart Morick, a Aleister Crowley/Anton LeVey type occultist and the leader of a cult of Satanists fixated on using twins in a immortality producing blood sacrifice. All that sounds pretty crazy to Jase too, and the immediacy of the prose allows the reader to share his uncertainty and growing tension as he wonders if he really is as gullible and paranoid as the police accuse him of being, or if there really is an unholy conspiracy at work.

Once the ambiguity is cleared up The Mirror’s Edge loses a little of its buzz. Since the days of Dennis Wheatley, the prolific writer of The Devil Rides Out and many other mid-century potboilers, it’s been hard to write about the perils of Satanism without at least a small helping of cheese, and after the first finger is eaten some readers may want to put the book down. That would be a mistake however, as the narrative quickly regains its mojo to produce a stunning closing sequence and ending. As I enjoyed it I realized that Sidor didn’t intend to write a traditional whodunit, but rather to mine the noir territory where siblings horror and mystery intersect. He wants to provide not only the satisfactions of successful detection but the frisson of the supernatural as well, and in The Mirror’s Edge he succeeds admirably.

As so often happens, it all started with something I found at the library sale. It was a movie from the sixties English horror schlockmeisters Hammer Studios called Rasputin: The Mad Monk. Of course, its historical accuracy can be gauged by the fact that Rasputin was neither a monk nor mad, but the frequent Dracula and fine actor Christopher Lee made a very compelling lead character. Shot using the sets and cast of the just completed Dracula: Prince of Darkness, the film basically uses the idea of Rasputin as Dracula minus only the blood sucking. There’s plenty of Lugosi like close ups of hypnotic eyes as Rasputin uses his power over women to further his ambitions for power and to have a little fun. It’s a pretty dumb but enjoyable flick, and it made me wonder what the straight scoop is about the guy.

Of course at a previous library sale I’d picked up a bio of him, The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin by Alex De Jonge and I was even able to find it amongst my piles of printed matter. It’s a good book, absorbing and well written, done with even handedness and an open mind, and the whole time I was reading it I thought what a great movie the real story would make, preferably starring Daniel Day Lewis. At first I felt a little guilty from straying from my present reading path, which is an exploration of Decadent/Symbolist/Modernist fiction writers who are influenced by the occult and esoteric, but after a few pages I realized that Rasputin fit right in, particularly with the Russian Symbolists I’d been reading.

I have a past entry about Valerie Briusov’s bitchin’ The Fiery Angel and learning more about its context made me realize once again that historical novels are usually more about when they are written than when they are set. The Russia of the early twentieth century was somewhat like America in the sixties, a seething mass of broken orthodoxy, of sexual, religious and social experimentation, of revolution, repression and violence. In fact, the figure that Rasputin brought to my mind was Charles Manson, not just in the Jesus gone wrong appearance, but in the confused manner of speaking, the babbling of semi-profound phrases, the sexual magnetism to his primarily female followers, the will to power and the lower class origins which were seen as more “authentic” to the upper classes.

There are differences too, and all of them in Rasputin’s favor. Manson was basically a crook and a con man, and the bodies he buried are still being uncovered. His followers, their reliability undermined by all the acid being eaten, report a few extraordinary feats by him, but his main talent seemed to be in controlling others. Although “evil” is a word often used in describing Rasputin, the most heinous thing he did was apparently forcing himself on women. Otherwise, his sordidness was in his drinking and womanizing, more of a public relations problem for the Czar’s administration than anything else. There is a certainly an element of the power hungry con man in him, but there are also feats of healing and clairvoyance that are conceded by even his harshest critics. To me he seems like a faith healer, a man coming out of the pre-Christian folk tradition, a peasant tradition running back to Shamanic days, Siberia, of course being one of the hotbeds of the old ways. His beliefs, such as they were, seem to be grounded in the Russian “sectarian” movement, which, although nominally Christian, trafficked in pantheistic, ancient mysto-erotic ideas about fertility and the spiritual power of intoxication, sex, dance and ecstacy.

When criticized for offending orthodox concepts of purity and probity, Rasputin would say that one had to sin to be forgiven. Told that his love of dancing was un-Christian he replied “But one prays to God as well in dancing as in a monastery. One praises Him in the joy that, in His goodness, He has created. David danced before the Ark of the Lord.” And of course, many aristocrats were doing far worse things behind closed doors, including Rasputin’s assassin, Prince Felix Yusupov, a bisexual cross dresser who darkly hinted of committing indecencies on Rasputin’s corpse. Much of Rasputin’s “sin” seems to consist of being a peasant who didn’t know his place. He certainly had healing talent and at the very least eased Tsarevich Alexi’s pain many times, not really by hypnotism, as is often claimed, but more by the use of laying on of hands, as is still used by psychic healers today. His influence on the Czar via the Czarina was mostly self-serving but not really malign, and in fact much of his advice, particularly that about World War One, showed a peasant horse sense absent from more refined counselors.

I’m certainly not nominating Rasputin for sainthood, but he is certainly far from the “mad monk” of popular conception, not to mention the baleful figure of the animated movie Anastasia who, to quote a Christian reviewer, “…is a Satan-worshipping, hateful, undead dweller of hell filled with a lust for death and a minion of vaporous green demons at his bidding!” (Actually I have to admit he was my son’s favorite character in the film, and he cried when he was killed. A lady behind us said It’s O.K. dear, the bad man is gone now but she didn’t know he was upset because the bad man was gone. I don’t know what it is about little boys and villain – my friend’s son’s favorite stuffed animal was the evil Scar from Lion King and I sure loved my Frankenstein and Dracula.) It’s also easy for us to think that no occult figure could get close to America’s ruling family, but remember all the advice Czarina Nancy Reagan’s took from her astrologer and Bush’s anti-rational beliefs about evolution.

Here’s some excerpts from De Jonge’s book that I found memorable:

Although the religious circles of St. Petersburg may not have been engaged in the pursuit of strange gods, they were certainly not adverse to the cultivation of strange saints.

Nevertheless sexuality is an element in certain forms of Russian sectarianism to which Rasputin had been exposed. It also seems to have played an essential part in the way he addressed himself to his followers, one reason perhaps why he behaved so outrageously with potential adherents.

He clearly managed to persuade his lovers that they could achieve grace and purification through orgasm, an arrangement that appears to have been satisfactory to all parties.

Yet once again Rasputin proved incapable of self-restraint. When he called on Iliodor’s disciples he could not resist kissing the younger and prettier girls with remarkable enthusiasm, while thrusting older women impatiently away. He never seems to have had much time for older women, and would frequently observe to them, “Mother, your love is pleasing, but the spirit of the Lord does not come down to me,” implying that the spirit descended via his sexual organs.