What's Wrong with Dorfman? [book report]

I put off reading What's Wrong with Dorfman as long as I could. Not because I was afraid it wouldn't be good. I knew it would be terrific, which is why I finally gave in and read it. I read it despite knowing that whatever was wrong with Dorfman would soon be wrong with me. I was right, of course. This is precisely what happened.

Dorfman wakes up disoriented, dizzy, nauseous, depressed, and has diarrhea. As I followed his symptoms in the book it became grotesquely clear to me I had them, too—except for the depression. The saving grace was John Blumenthal's devious comic sensibility. Every time I started feeling depressed along with Dorfman, I came to something that made me laugh. If only poor Dorfman could have read What's Wrong with Dorfman whenever he started sliding into depression maybe he would have laughed like I did, and felt better. But let's get real.

Dorfman's dad was a doctor, a medical doctor. He was such a conscientious doctor he took the blood pressures of Dorfman, Dorfman's sister and their mother several times a day. He admonished the three of them repeatedly, whenever they were in his presence, even as adults, before meals and, in fact, whenever it occurred to him, to wash their hands and to make sure they worked up a good lather with the soap. This reminded me of my own father, who constantly harped about washing hands. The only difference was my father never mentioned the lather part. But then my father wasn't a physician. He never took our blood pressure.

It seemed fairly evident to me, as it's probably seeming evident to you, that Dorfman's father--who did other nutty things, as well, such as following everyone around in his house turning out the lights behind them—that Dorfman's father was the reason for Dorfman's symptoms. That he was neurotic, just as my father was neurotic.

Living with such nuttiness it would be expected of Dorfman to be neurotic, too. Unless the experts have re-defined neurosis, or if in fact there even is such a disorder anymore. For the sake of coherence here, let us say there is indeed such a thing as neurosis. Let us say further it's pretty damned clear Dorfman and his doctor dad were both neurotic nightmares.

I'm not going to give anything away here and confirm or deny that what was wrong with Dorfman was caused by neuroses caused by his nutty father. That would be too easy. Dorfman himself would—and did--scoff at such a suggestion. He spent tens of thousands of dollars seeing specialists and undergoing every test known to medical science. He sought treatments not recognized by medical science, such as a Chinese “herbal treatment” that might well have been based on dried “cow turds,” and torture prescribed by a chiropractic allergist.

It should come as no huge surprise that Dorfman is a hypochondriac. This means he is ambivalent with test results that turn up nothing frightening, such as cancer or an aneurysm that could kill instantly without a wisp of warning. He's relieved as well as disappointed. His recreational reading consists of “The Big Red Book” of diseases. He commiserates and talks of suicide with a down-on-her-luck actress named Delilah, whom he met in his doctor's waiting room and who suffers symptoms identical to his.

Dorfman, by the way, is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter. While he suffers with the uncertainty of his intermittent symptoms—that's another thing, they come and go unpredictably—his screenplay, a comic cop story, is undergoing the horrendous Hollywood sausage grinder committee process that could ruin him for good if it fails, or save his career if it ever becomes a movie.

Yikes, my own neuroses (yes, me too), which I've pretty much maneuvered into dormancy over the years, are giving me flashback pains in the abdomen by my merely recounting what's wrong with Dorfman's life. I must go now before I contract sympathetic diarrhea.

Okay, I can tell you this: What's Wrong with Dorfman has what I would call a happy ending. If it didn't I would not be sitting here writing this report. I'd be reading an outdated magazine in the waiting room at my doctor's office. In other words no matter what is wrong with you, you will find What's Wrong with Dorfman not only safe to read but rather a hoot—so long as you read the whole thing straight through to the end.

An added benefit for me is that I now diligently work up a good lather with the soap when washing my hands. You should, too.

I'm Interviewing Muses [book report]

I and most likely every human male since the species first appeared in the cosmos have been tormented by what has seemed the ultimate unanswerable question, “What do women want?”

Having read the above sentence you might be thinking something along the lines of, “Aha, at last I am about to know the answer.” Forget it, pal. The only “answer” you will find in Laura Stinchcomb's amusing little book, I'm Interviewing Muses, is another question: “What say we just forget about that other question?”

Stinchcomb's writing, which can be described as evoking an unthinkable collaboration between Erma Bombeck and Prof. Irwin Corey, has persuaded me that even women, no matter what they might say or think they want, haven't the slightest clue as to what they really want.

One might expect a man reading such revelations from the mind of an intelligent, articulate, good-humored and admittedly snarky New Jersey mother and wife to scream in self-righteous frustration. I can be as self-righteously frustrated as the next guy, but I did not scream thusly while reading I'm Interviewing Muses. Not even once. I laughed my ass off, is what I did.

An underlying theme is Stinchcomb's obsession—she's reaching that stage in life when women refer to each other as being “of a certain age”--with becoming “a sex symbol.” We learn about her experiments with collagen injections to puff up her lips, and what happens at a party when, wearing breast tape, she bends over too far and reveals too much, and how she claims to have saved her flagging marriage by, on a whim, deciding to have sex with her husband every day. It works brilliantly for over a year, she says, until he pooped out.

On another, admittedly less connubial whim, she cuts down on her trips to the drycleaners because “I have decided that I like to hear my husband ask me in an almost begging way to drop off and pick up his shirts.”

She fantasizes what it would have been like having sex with George Washington. The George Washington, with all the 18^th century body stenches including that of fecal traces, a permanent sinus infection and rotting teeth.

She loves potbellies on men.

Are we getting the picture here? Is it just Stinchcomb having a little snarky fun? Or is she ratting out an entire gender?

Can we ever know for sure?

Do we really want to?

The Autumn Dead [book report]

No doubt serious scholars of Ed Gorman's extensive literary oeuvre would sniff, or even snicker, were I to suggest that Sam McCain was conceived at least twelve years before The Day the Music Died. I hate being subjected to academic scorn. This is why I would never suggest that arguably Gorman's most popular character became a gleam in its creator's mind's eye sometime during the writing of The Autumn Dead.

It is irrelevant, I would contend, that The Autumn Dead is only the penultimate Jack Dwyer novel in Gorman's debut mystery series. The Cry of Shadows comes out two years later, in 1990. But it's in The Autumn Dead that the Dwyer of the series' first three novels begins to reveal an evolving persona. One that will emerge a dozen years down the road to launch a ten-book run as lawyer/PI Sam McCain.

Additional evidence is the setting of The Autumn Dead, more defined than in the earlier novels: a small Midwestern town, unnamed, but with features strikingly similar to McCain's Black River Falls, Iowa.

There are finer details that would fit neatly into a comparison were that my aim here. I'll mention only one, the one that brings The Autumn Dead closest to the McCain novels in its effect on me. The one that left my heart aching with bittersweet memories long after I finished reading. The one that took me back to my own youth when dreams held real promise and disappointments seemed mere bumps along the Yellow Brick Road to a magical future.

Jack Dwyer trips back to those days from a vantage filled with reminders there is no magic behind the curtain in youthful dreams. A former high school flame prompts his journey in time when she appears out of the blue needing his help. She dies in his arms while dancing at their twenty-fifth class reunion. He soon learns she likely was murdered and that others of their former schoolmates could be involved. An ex-policeman, Dwyer sets out to learn what happened.

The Autumn Dead is the darkest and most violent of the four Dwyer books I have read (The Cry of Shadows is inexplicably out of print), and its violence exceeds any of the McCain novels. In fact it's the most violent of anything I've read by Gorman.

The writing is superb, as always, with the first-person narrator's signature self-deprecating humor and compassionate outlook. Dwyer's approach in confrontations is carrot/stick, with the stick always a last resort.

Gorman's characters are never uninteresting. While some appear initially as caricatures all reveal complexities enough that any one of them is plausibly capable of virtually anything. Not unlike real life.

Murder in the Wings [book report]

Were I Police Detective Edelman and I had the faded TV star Stephen Wade in my custody I'd lock him up, close the case and take a long, well-deserved vacation. This is one murder rap not even my buddy Jack Dwyer--former cop, now private eye and sometime actor—is going to upend, believe me.

I mean, look. Let's be realistic here. Wade's fingerprints are all over the knife that's buried in Michael Reeves's back. Okay? Need more? Opportunity: A reliable witness sees Wade enter Reeves's apartment around the time of the murder. Motive? Hours earlier Reeves had shoved, slapped and humiliated Wade in front of the rest of the cast of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night following Wade's drunken bumbling, stumbling, mumbling performance. Reeves directed the production and is the local theater's resident director.

One might think even Jack Dwyer would let this one go, especially considering the victim was not a likable guy. Somewhat of a loathsome guy, actually. The kind of guy who probably had it coming anyway. But, then, Jack Dwyer's not the kind of guy who gives up easily. Not the kind, either, to rush to judgment, no matter how loathsome it might be to keep an open mind.

One suspects Ed Gorman is a Dwyer kind of guy. He created Jack Dwyer and used this quote by the late British author Gerald Kersh to introduce Murder in the Wings, our currently discussed Dwyer mystery: ". . . there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armor, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment."

In Murder in the Wings, Jack Dwyer neither hates the man charged with murder nor has to look for any chinks in his armor. There is no armor. Stephen Wade is himself writhing in torment, destroying his career and his life with drink. He is also Dwyer's friend. Dwyer was one of the cast members in this disastrous performance of O'Neill's classic play. He restrained the actor after a fight broke out between the two enraged men. It was Dwyer whom Wade called, in a drunken stupor, from Reeves's apartment where he said he found his tormentor lying face down in bed with a knife protruding between his shoulder blades.

Nope. No way Jack Dwyer is going to let this one go. Not even after Wade admits he isn't positive he didn't stab the loathsome director to death. Not even after he waves a .45 at Dwyer and flees sobbing into the night. Dwyer couldn't let this one go if he wanted to, if only because his lovably flaky girlfriend, Donna Harris, has decided that “sweet” Stephen Wade did not—could not—murder anyone, not even someone as loathsome as Michael Reeves.

Besides, taking a closer look one sees there are plenty of folks, in the theater group alone, with motive, opportunity and means to have done the dirty deed.

Ed Gorman's at the top of his game with this novel. His writing is crisp and insightful, with moments of pure poetic joy. His characters are so real you feel you know them, or would like to. His plotting is intricate and daring. He keeps you guessing right up to the eminently satisfying denouement.

And the humor. Oh, mercy. It sneaks up and gooses you when you least expect it. There seems always to be a scene or two in every Gorman novel that sets me to laughing so hard I worry I will not be able to stop. Or that the neighbors will call 911. This time, about halfway through Murder in the Wings, I grabbed my cell phone thinking I might need to make the call myself.

Turns out I didn't. But I was ready.

Murder Straight Up [book report]

Reading an Ed Gorman mystery is like sipping beer in a quiet bar with a good buddy while he tells you about his latest adventure.

Thus far I've enjoyed the adventures of three such Gorman buddies. My wife introduced me to Ed Gorman's writing with the Father's Day gift of a Sam McCain novel in 2005. The title, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, turned out to be ironic, as she and I, despite her inscription answering Carole King's musical question in the affirmative, are no longer together.

But my relationship with Gorman is still going strong. I've read all ten Sam McCain nostalgia mysteries and all five Dev Conrad political mysteries. I've read his debut novel, Rough Cut, which one publisher mistakenly says is the first Jack Dwyer mystery. It's not, technically, although the narrator's voice does sound awfully familiar. First of the four official Jack Dwyers is New Improved Murder. I'm here to talk about the second, Murder Straight Up.

This adventure starts off on the wrong foot. Dwyer is working the night shift as a security guard at KLRD-TV, Channel 3. He's on the second floor making his rounds when his flashlight dies. Suddenly he's groping blindly and bumping his knees in a room that's “slightly darker...than in Richard Nixon’s mind.” I include the quote as a sample of Gorman's humor and political proclivity—a fair warning for Trump chumps to jump off now or strap in for the ride. There are more bumps ahead.

It's not a bump that sends Dwyer's heart a'thumping, however, but a scrape against an uncarpeted section of flooring “somewhere to my right.”

Several heavy heartbeats later the chase is on. In the dark. The perp gets away, down a fire escape into the rainy fog. Dwyer curses, notifies the police, notifies the security agency that employs him, and notifies the TV station's building manager. Then he takes a break.

He's in the station's coffee room eating a Ho-Ho, drinking a Pepsi and flirting with Kelly Ford, Channel 3's news consultant, when suddenly Ford says, “Straight up.” This means it's ten o'clock. The night news show is about to begin. The two of them turn to the monitor to watch it live. It is then, immediately following the opening sequence as the number two camera fixes on news anchor David Curtis, that Dwyer and Ford see the anchor get an odd look on his face. He grabs at his throat, mouth foaming, stands up, and then collapses face down across his desk. Dead.

No doubt it's murder. Some at the station hold Dwyer responsible. A plumber had left the rear door unlocked, but Dwyer should have caught it. Knowing his job is at stake he turns detective. His digging turns up the prowler's identity, a troubled teen with a possible motive. Police arrest and charge the teen, but Dwyer believes he didn't do it. There are too many other plausible suspects, most of them Curtis's colleagues at Channel 3.

Dwyer's not your typical rent-a-cop with delusions of grandeur. He was a cop, for real, a job he left to try his hand as an actor. His night job buys groceries and pays the rent. The acting? Well, let's just say our boy is still preparing for his breakout role. He auditions days and lands the occasional commercial job.

He's the most human of any detective I've seen in crime fiction. He talks like I do, using language assuredly inappropriate here, but fine for a novel. I would have to use a lot of ***s and @#$%&%$#@s to give you excerpts from Murder Straight Up. During a car chase, for example, Dwyer complains that his bladder is causing him a certain anxiety.

Here's a partial from that scene I can give you without the euphemistic symbols: I had the terrible uncomfortable feeling that I was going to wet my pants, and I was shaking so bad from nerves that even the soles of my feet were wet. Human.

Here he is consoling a burly truck driver upset over a fatal accident he believes was his fault: “Goddammit, he’s f**kin’ dead!” the driver said. He was obviously a good man, and this was all bullshit he didn’t deserve. “It’ll be all right. You weren’t responsible in any way. All right?” “He’s f**kin’ dead?” This is not an uncommon reaction at traffic accidents. Shock and guilt. We’re a lot more fragile than the macho boys let on. I patted him on the shoulder again. I didn’t know what else to do. The siren was drawing nearer.

There is some fine humor in Murder Straight Up, as there is in most of Gorman's stuff I have read. I laughed so hard reading one scene I worried the neighbors might call 911. A couple of killers attack Dwyer on the rooftop balcony of a building where he has an “acting” job reading promotional hype at a gun show. A team of survivalists from the show arrives to “rescue” him. Shots are fired. Many shots. Eventually many police arrive. The ensuing conversation between the police commander and the gun show manager...well, I don't want to give anything away here. But if it doesn't make you laugh you sure as hell could use another beer.

New Improved Murder [book report]

Hey there! Those midsummer blahs got you feeling...well, sorta blah? Yeah? They did for me, too, until I discovered a secret: Jack Dwyer, the remedy that never fails to do the trick. [cue up tinkling ice cubes over a Jimmy Buffett background]

Pretty good line, no? Above? Didn't it make you just itch to dash out and bring home a fifth of Jack Dwyer? Not if you knew your booze it didn't. But if you knew your mystery writers—well, now that's another story. A good one at that.

Concrete Angel [book report]

I haven't read any other reviews of Patricia Abbott's fine debut noir novel, Concrete Angel, but I can't imagine any of them—up to and including the likes of Michiko Kakutani, the dragon queen of New York literary reviewers—starting out any other way than something like this: Concrete Angel begins with a bang, quite literally. Six of them in fact.

There. I didn't put it in quotes because for all I know I'm the first, and I intend to post this without checking for others.

So the chief villain in this story, a gorgeous, highly talented woman the narrator calls Mother, pumps six bullets into a soda-pop salesman in her apartment. She had picked him up at a shoe-repair shop only hours earlier and enjoyed a romp with him in her bed before dispatching him with a revolver. He'd caught her taking bills from his wallet and had grabbed the phone to call the police. “Mother” couldn't allow this, as she already had something of a record and had an aversion to jail. Thus, relying on the time-tested felon's credo that dead men tell no tales, she silenced him before he could make the call.

On second thought, it occurred to her the killing might cause her more trouble than the theft of a few dollars. She needed an alibi, a fall guy...something. Mother was not about to take the rap for murder. Maybe, just maybe, she could pin it on...why, this story's narrator, of course! Twelve-year-old Christine, her daughter, asleep in the next room.

Christine had slept through the murder, all six bangs of it. But her mother shook her awake and the two had a tearful chat. The girl was smart for her age but would do anything for her mother's approval. She went along with a concocted version of how the killing went down. She pled guilty to shooting the salesman after she saw him “trying to strangle” her mother. The court gave her probation and ordered counseling.

Concrete Angel is Christine's story, but she keeps the spotlight throughout on Mother, who comes across as a sort of amalgam of the Joan Crawford of Mommie Dearest and Mame of Auntie Mame. I should note I've read neither of the aforementioned accounts by relatives of the title characters. The stars in each are larger-than-life dominant women, and the sense I have of them from popular accounts seems to fit Mother quite well: a narcissistic, compulsively acquisitive sociopath brilliantly adept at manipulating others.

We follow Christine's incremental awakening to the reality of her mother and their relationship, which, while seeming at first to Christine an enviable mother-daughter intimacy gradually shows itself to be a dangerous illusion. Ultimately Christine has serious urges to kill her mother in order to rescue her much younger brother from falling into the same trap that threatened to smother her.

Christine's voice is chillingly authentic as she reveals to us her growing awareness of a nightmare from which escape begins to look impossible. The climax of Concrete Angel matches the stunning opening in gaping suspense.

While Concrete Angel is Patricia Abbott's first published novel, she's an award-winning crime fiction writer with more than 100 published stories including two ebooks: Monkey Justice and Home Invasion. Um, yeah, I guess you could say I'm a fan.

Glory Hobble

It was my moment. The phrase flashed on and off in my head like the blue neon Pabst in the window down at Morey's. A tombstone then floated into view and there it was again, engraved beneath my name: "Hobbled to glory."

Clearly this was it.  All my days' dreaming, scheming, writing, blogging, pouting, propagating, proclaiming, pretending and any other "p" you can imagine had come down to this one huge life-defining Portentous Pretend. I was to limp with stunned, growing horror, as I navigated through the swirling smoke and maze of human corpses while the cameras rolled around me and probably above me and, for all I knew, under me. 

I was an extra, or, as we're called nowadays, "background." This insider's term I learned from my daughter, who'd landed a background job for another remake of the old swashbuckling romance To Have and To Hold. It was being filmed at various locations. Our set was within an hour's drive.

The Hummingbird's Cage, by Tamara Dietrich [book report]

Had you asked me a week ago if I believed in magic, I'm not sure how I might have answered. I probably would have asked for clarification, such as your definition of "magic" or even your definition of "belief"--a stalling tactic, pretty much, to give me time to think.

Since then I've read The Hummingbird's Cage. I am now ready to answer.

For me a good novel is a ticket to ride. To journey to someplace unexpected. Reading a good novel is by no means a passive experience. But for me this does not involve reading with a critical eye. Before I can expect to enjoy a novel I must close that eye, open my mind and let the author's imagination in to play awhile with mine. And if our imaginations get along, they can take me to a world I'd never dreamed of.

And when that happens...magic.

 The Hummingbird's Cage opens amid a nightmare, or, more accurately, a nightmarish reality:

My husband tells me I look washed up. Ill favored, he says, like old bathwater circling the drain. If my clothes weren’t there to hold me together, he says, I’d flush all away. He tells me these things and worse as often as he can, till there are times I start to believe him and I can feel my mind start to dissolve into empty air.

Reading that paragraph—the very first one—started a sorrowful anger building in me that by the time I'd come to the end of it I already wanted justice to be done to that cruel, heartless bastard. The violence in word and deed he heaps upon his wife, Joanna, builds in tandem with my rage as Joanna narrates her heartwrenching story. She had me trembling with fury. I turned page after page as the evil grew.

The physical abuse and the crushing of her spirit oppressed me, as well. My feeling of helplessness merged with hers, with no relief in sight. And then...

With the encouragement of a wild and wily biker chick--her husband's former girlfriend--Joanna and her young daughter make their escape. Or so it seems.

I'm reluctant to tell you much more than I have, as I would hate to spoil the adventure your imagination can share in league with the author's. I can safely say this story has no modern comparison, for me anyway. I'm no professional critic with experience in any particular canon of fashionable modern literature. The Hummingbird's Cage has been mentioned in association with "new age." I've only a vague idea what that might be, and have no interest in venturing there. I don't do literary analysis, nor am I keen on what's in and what's not.

The only novel I've read that came to mind while I was immersed in The Hummingbird's Cage is James Hilton's Lost Horizon. And that's too old to be "new age."

I love fascinating characters, seductive writing and stories I can get lost in. When these three loves come together for me, it's magic. There are dreams one is glad to awaken from and others one resents having to leave behind. I found both in The Hummingbird's Cage.

You'd probably like for me to tell you what the title means. I was prepared to do just that when I started writing this report. I've since decided to let you find out for yourself. It's a humdinger of a title.

Magic.

A House Made of Stars [book report]

"Grandma" is the hero of A House Made of Stars, a stunning debut novel by Tawnysha Greene. Grandma is also my new hero. A truly wonderful character, well beyond, I am sure, her depiction through the sensibility of a desperate, intelligent child. She's a literary marvel.

And the child! Her voice is perfect as we watch her reluctantly catching on to the horror around her—the cruel insanity of her father, the Old Testament submissiveness of an otherwise loving mother--hungrily embracing the hopeful glimpses she sees in others of a better life. The strength and savvy of her sister, another, subtly surprising grace that keeps us hopeful along with the narrator through their nearly unbearable awakening. 

Now we come to the narration itself, which is ingeniously artful in its apparent simplicity. The limitations of the children's view augmented by their aural disability gives us a gentle vantage of irony that obviates the precociousness too often appearing in such voices, when the clever adult can be seen behind the narrative curtain. The author's hand is occasionally glimpsed in House, but not awkwardly, and only near the end, quite in step with the girl's awakened consciousness.

This story feels so real I cannot but wonder at its source. Greene mentions “journals” in her acknowledgments, and so, along with the especially heart-wrenching authenticity of a scene in which the children are beaten, I am fairly confident this is based on true events, and this saddens me to the core. But if it is purely fictitious, Greene's imagination is unquestioningly a celestial gift.

Either way, if the fifty shades of fickle in the contemporary world of publishing allows room for justice, A House Made of Stars will become the standout success it fully deserves to be.

When the Songbirds Went Silent in Cheerytown

The only person who felt bad about the death of Menuhin was Bobby Bayly. It was Bobby who killed Menuhin with a single copper BB from his Red Ryder air rifle.

Bobby felt good at first about shooting Menuhin. He shot the bird to keep it from diving at his cat, Bandit, who had only one eye. Bobby was terribly worried that Menuhin would peck out the other eye, leaving Bandit blind.

When he first saw it happen, the bird diving, screaming at Bandit again and again, smacking her on the head from behind, the poor cat wondering what was happening, he ran across the yard shouting and waving his arms, but managed to scare only Bandit. Menuhin paid him no mind.

He decided then and there to get the air rifle from his closet and keep it on the porch.

Elimination (book report)

When I was in high school my dad ran in the Democratic primary for a state senate seat. I was his campaign manager. We didn't have any money and I didn't know what the hell I was doing, and we got the crap kicked out of us. If we'd had enough money we could have hired someone like Dev Conrad. I'd have been out of a job but my dad would have had a fighting chance--even if someone had tried to murder him.

Dev Conrad's the kind of consultant you want running your campaign especially if the race is so hot people try to kill your candidate. He's an ex-Army investigator and a second-generation political op and, unfortunately, only a fictional character. But his creator, novelist Ed Gorman, himself a former political speechwriter and TV producer, knows the game and the milieu so well his main character could step straight out of the novel pages and take a seat opposite Hardball interviewer Chris Matthews.

SEVEN ARCHANGELS: ANNIHILATION -- Jane Lebak

All is not heavenly in Heaven. Demons have abducted the Archangel Gabriel and have him chained in a dungeon in Hell. In Heaven the angels are debating whether to invade Hell and try to rescue their number one hornblower. They bicker and squabble. I was surprised to learn that even angels can't just get along. They do manage to agree on allowing one angel to slip into Hell undercover to do some reconnaissance.

As one might expect, it's worse in Hell. Mephistopheles, who ranks next under Lucifer, is supposed to be best buddies with Beelzebub. According to celestial gossip, the two are plotting a junta against their boss. Yet--no surprise really, considering they've chosen evil over good--they don't get along so well, either. At one point Beelzebub even rapes Mephistopheles. The scene is graphic, although Jane Lebak's artful writing manages to keep its skirts a smidgeon above the mud.

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