'Darkroom:' Mary Maddox's Best Thriller Yet

By Dan Hagen

Mary Maddox writes in the margins of 21^st century America.

The central Illinois novelist’s thrillers often feature females economically and emotionally on the fraying edges of society, marginal people whose meager access to resources heightens their peril when something wicked their way goes. They haven’t got much with which to fight back, except wits.

In Darkroom, Kelly Durrell’s friend, Day, is benighted, a fact we can hear and smell even before we see her. Maddox’s deft description clues us in even as Kelly returns to her home with groceries. “Manic whoops and a whiff of cannabis seeped into the garage. Daffy Duck was getting high… A teenaged girl lived inside the body of a thirty-eight-year-old woman.”

Maddox sketches character in clear, economical lines: “He raised the empty mug and wiggled it; ‘Hannah.’ The server gave Alan a brisk nod and went on taking the order of a couple nearby. ‘Hannah likes girls.’ His tone insinuated that straight women fetched him beers at once.”

With one friend drugged-up and bipolar, and another who is cheating on her powerful and vengeful husband, Kelly is dropped into tension on page one of the novel, and Maddox weaves those threads around her swiftly. With several novels’ worth of experience, her sense of suspense is sure-footed.

Day is trouble, but she also has potential — specifically, the discernment of the professional photographer. “She studied (the photos), so caught up in Day’s experiments with contrast and nuance that she forgot she was looking at herself. It came as a shock when she remembered. The faces weren’t the familiar one in her bathroom mirror, the woman who dabbed her smudged mascara with a tissue and dreaded going to work. The photographs showed a woman with amazement shadowing her eye, a woman caught in the world’s strangeness.”

Caught indeed.

Tracing her vanished friend Day, Kelly finds evidence of another disappearance, and knows she’s getting too close to somebody who makes people go away for good.

But Kelly, who is credibly heroic without bravado, keeps searching as the shadows around her grow longer, until she finds herself on the radar of a Blackwater-like corporate police force that doesn’t mind murdering people for a client’s convenience.

Maddox sets aside the supernatural elements featured in her earlier suspense novels, and they are not missed here. She’s written a page-turner with realistic perils and motivations and palpable tension, one that builds momentum like a rockslide. It’s her best suspense novel to date.

Maddox’s novels are available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble Booksellers on line.

How to Fog Up a Smoke Monster

An unintended consequence of overreliance on your physical strength can be intellectual weakness. In other words, bullies aren’t too bright.

Homer knew it. Who survived the Trojan War — the vainglorious tough guy Achilles or the canny Odysseus? And Stan Lee and Jack Kirby knew it, too, in their seemingly endless series of giant monster stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

These planet-shaking wonders could typically be conned by a clever human who cut some pictures out of a comic book, or threatened them with a cigarette lighter.

That’s what happened to poor Diablo, the lead monster in Tales of Suspense 9 (Dec. 1959). Despite his gigantic size, telepathic powers and Dr. Doom-like habit of shouting “Silence!,” the alien smoke monster was chased back off into interstellar space by some guy who terrified him by puffing out the smoke from a lighter.

The story, a favorite of mine, illustrates one of the tricks Kirby used to jazz up his monster invasion and early Marvel superhero stories. As the alien invader or supernatural threat indulges himself by describing the horrors to which he plans to subject we poor human weaklings, Kirby goes to town illustrating his thoughts, thereby bringing in more spectacular action scenes and making the tale less static.

Diablo reappeared in Marvel’s first 25-cent giant comic, the excellent Strange Tales Annual 1 from 1962, and later returned to make the mistake of threatening the Incredible Hulk. The Hulk is unimpressed by smoke monsters. 

Hail to the Creep

a meme by my friend Bruce Kanin

President Lincoln: “...that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

President Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you.”

President Trump: “Grab ‘em by the p*ssy!”

The Channel That Killed American Journalism

The channel that killed journalism turns 20. American ignorance and stupidity in the 21st century, so carefully cultivated by Fox News, is like quicksand. There’s no bottom there anymore.

The Marvel Universe Grows as the FF Shrinks

I must have reread Fantastic Four 16 (July 1963) more often than any other issue, and now I think I know why. For me, this was the issue that really cemented the crowd-pleasing concept of what we would come to call the “Marvel universe.”

Two years into their run, the now-familiar and well-loved title characters were joined by another favorite superhero, the Astonishing Ant-Man, to oppose that prince among super villains, Dr. Doom. The Fantastic Four had already met and skirmished with the Hulk and Spider-Man, but this time, confronted by the peril of miniaturization, they called on Ant-Man for help.

Calling in the expert would have been a natural move in the real world, but was still a relatively rare one in comics, where — despite the existence of the Justice League and the World’s Finest teams — superheroes often seemed to pretend that other superheroes didn’t exist. In her own title, for example, Wonder Woman would fend off an alien invasion by herself, with never a thought for the heroes who might help.

With an eye on the insiderish fanboy thrill that crossovers gave readers, Stan Lee was also certainly aware that bringing newer characters into contact with the company’s most popular heroes would be a great way to provide them with wider exposure.

“And there is a lot to tell in this issue — from contacting Ant-Man, to discovering a hidden world, to helping the royal family which Doom has imprisoned to take back their throne,” comics historian Don Alsafi observed. “And yet, as we’ve come to expect, there are wonderful little details as well. For instance, before they embark on their micro-journey, Reed tracks down Ben at his girlfriend Alicia’s apartment to test out a new serum, one that he hopes will be instrumental in someday changing the Thing back to human, permanently.

"Meanwhile, Sue is grappling with the problem that while she can turn invisible, she can still be identified by creatures with a strong sense of smell, such as dogs, and so is seen experimenting with different kinds of perfumes in an effort to ‘deaden’ her own scent. Even Johnny gets a bit of attention when Pearla, the princess they save from Doom's clutches, sends a few flirtations his way before the FF leave their realm. Any hopes that this could be a potential love interest for the Torch are for naught, however, as Pearla’s next Marvel appearance would take 19 years to occur.”

Frank Lloyd Wright on American Wrongs

Frank Lloyd Wright’s sumac window, 1902,
Dana-Thomas House, Springfield, Illinois. 

By the dawn of the 20^th century, architect Frank Lloyd Wright had discovered something I didn’t learn until the 21^st century — that kleptocapitalism must finally and necessarily destroy the standards of every profession with which it comes in contact.

In his 1900 speech to the Architectural League of America in Chicago, titled The Architect, Wright “…reminded his colleagues that in this country commerce had triumphed over art,” wrote Robert C. Twombly in his book Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture. “The lust for money had reduced the architect to a servant of the business community.”

Wright charged that the American architect “…panders to silly women his silly artistic sweets,” trading experimentation and individuality for financial security.

“(The architect) now modeled commercial buildings after Greek temples and luxury homes after Louis XIV palaces, all because the businessman and his wife ‘knew what they wanted,’” Twombly wrote. “No longer an independent spirit, the architect had become a salesman, peddling prepackaged ‘styles’ from the files of huge ‘plan-factories.’

“At the height of the industrial revolution in America, Wright was painfully aware that the new corporate elite had usurped the status of the professional, reducing him to an employee at its beck and call.”

In 21^st century capitalism-gone-wild America, that sad state of professional degradation applies not just to architects but to physicians, educators, military officers, police officers, attorneys, journalists, you name it.

For pity’s sake, judges have been caught framing innocent American children because they’ve been bribed by private prison corporations to provide warm bodies in order to increase the corporation’s lucrative taxpayer subsidy.

The Weird Appeal of the Winged Wonder

Assets for the 1940s Hawkman: a uniquely memorable and coolly weird costume with a hawk’s head mask and dramatic wings. Why the medieval maces and flails? Why the bare chest? The character always caught the eye, which is probably why he was cover-featured in every other issue of Flash Comics.

Liabilities for the 1940s Hawkman: his un-unique power of flight, which was initially an asset. Remember, not even Superman and Captain Marvel could actually fly at first. But flight quickly became Standard Operating Procedure for comic book superheroes, virtually the ante to get in the game. Characters like the Human Torch and the Submariner got flight as part of a package deal with other impressive abilities. Even superheroes who don’t actually fly often simulate the freedom of personal flight — think Batman, Spider-Man and Daredevil.

Successful superheroes require unique angles, and Hawkman lost one of his early on.

Hawkman also somehow developed the power to talk to, though not command, birds. While interesting, it’s nothing that Cinderella couldn’t also do.

Created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Dennis Neville in 1940, Carter Hall, the Winged Wonder, developed his own mythology, which included enduringly intriguing archenemies like the Gentleman Ghost (who was later to clash with Batman and Superman). Hawkman appeared in every adventure of the Justice Society, not being sidelined like the Flash and Green Lantern because he was never awarded his own exclusive comic book title.

The Winged Wonder also made a contribution for gender equality when his reincarnated girlfriend, Shiera Saunders, also became his sidekick and crime-fighting partner, Hawkgirl.

Introduced in Hawkman’s initial adventure, Shiera first spread her own wings in All Star Comics 5 (July 1941), inaugurating a theme we’d see echoed in Mary Marvel, Bullet girl, Fly Girl, Batwoman and so forth.

I always like to observe how popular culture provides a funhouse mirror reflection of social reality. I find it telling that Hawkgirl now appears more often than Hawkman, and often alone.