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Ordinary Horrors

Best Holiday Movies and a Story

12/18/2020

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I was seeing someone on Twitter arguing again that Die Hard is a Christmas movie and I was struck by the boring flatness of the argument, after all these years. I mean—okay, it takes place at Christmastime, so, okay, sure. Why not? And if you enjoy it watching it at xmas, even better! Go watch your movie and be happy! But I was and am fed up with people trying to build up their edgy irony rep by making this argument. Enjoy your xmas movie in solitude and if you can’t keep from gabbing about it on Twitter, block me.
​
So, since no one asked—what are my go-to holiday movies?

I have one top fave xmas, one second place, and an honorable mention. And three New Year’s movies.  And a story.
 
Top Xmas Fave: TAXI DRIVER
I first saw this movie in 1976 when it was showing in theaters. I got back from my father’s funeral on a Sunday evening and was sitting around the house, and some friends came by, and no one had much to say—talking about death at age 18 and whatnot is difficult—and someone suggested a movie, and we went to Taxi Driver. Because it was 1976 and we were all 18 or 19-year old guys, we didn’t want to sit next to each other in the theatre lest people think we were gay, and so we all sat on aisle seats on different rows.  The movie itself was a fucking revelation. It immediately became one of my two or three favorite movies of all time. Years and years later, c. 1990 or so, Chris Itchkowski came by one December evening, and I was watching Taxi Driver, and he said “Ha! A classic Christmas movie!” and I thought—Yeah, exactly. And so Taxi Driver has become a Christmas tradition in this household.
Hmm. The trailer is age-restricted, forsooth. Someday a strong rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets...!!

​
Second Xmas Fave: THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER
This actually is a legit Christmas movie—Bette Davis in a comedy! Monte Wooley is terrific as the asshole guy who takes over the house. I want to be like him some day. (One of my students said I looked like him—I’ll take it). There are sad penguins. And Jimmy Durante is creepy as a sexual harasser (this might be triggering for some people) who was probably seen as comedic in 1942. I really love this movie. 


Honorable Mention Xmas Fave: IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE
Because of course I like the darkness overcome with sentiment. And why not be like everyone else who likes this movie? Though in truth I’d rather live in Pottersville….
A new year is conductive to movies, too….

New Year’s Movie Number One: MAD MAX FURY ROAD
I used to watch Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome on New Year’s Eve—I was/am always touched the sadness and determination of those people trying to make new homes in the desolation, and also I have a crush on Tina Turner.  But I lost my dvd of it in some move or other, so I watch Fury Road instead now, and it’s actually a better movie. Get the year-end adrenalin up! 
Another video link age restriction! (Who killed the Earth?) This may give you some insight into how I see the holidays....

New Year’s Movie Number Two: A NIGHT AT THE OPERA
Because I need to laugh at the end of a dreadful year. (All years are dreadful, each one closer to the inevitable). The fourth-best comedy of all time.
I always sympathize with the exasperated manicurist. Apparently no one knows the name of the actress who played her! A comedy mystery. She looks happier in this still from the movie....
Picture
​

New Year’s Movie Number Three: THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES
I usually watch this New Year’s Day. Again, darkness and sentiment. Just like Pottersville, Boone City looks rocking....
A Holiday Story

A few weeks ago, a student asked if I’d ever written a Christmas story. And—I have! It’s in BURNT HOUSE and is pretty dark. Though maybe also…funny…?
​
Here’s a pdf: Love Puzzle

​Enjoy!
love_puzzle.pdf
File Size: 121 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File
You know my entire oeuvre makes a great present, right?

So get over to my Amazon page and order some books.  Your life will be better for it!

The kindle editions are at a special pandemic/holiday price!
No sure which book to get? That's understandable--it's easy to be confused by an abundance of excellence. So here's a seasonal reminder: THAT DEMON LIFE is the official community read of Pottersville!

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How the Characters in My Novels Voted in 2020

11/2/2020

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I created these people but I can’t control their votes!
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THAT DEMON LIFE

  • Linda—Biden (though she voted for Trump in 2016)
  • Paige—Biden
  • Raul—Trump
  • Gilbert—Biden (he  didn't vote in 2016)
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PROFESSED
​
  • Tom—Biden
  • Camille—Biden
  • Clayton—Trump
  • Nelda—Trump
  • Travis—Libertarian nonentity
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BURNT HOUSE
 
  • Jackie—Biden
  • Everybody else—Trump (true to life, sadly)
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NORMAL SCHOOL
 
  • Tom—Biden
  • Lynnie—Biden
  • Sally—Biden
  • Courtney—Biden
  • Nancy—Trump
  • Ted—Trump
  • Devon—Biden
  • Tee—Trump
Stop the doomscrolling for a little bit and go out and buy my books!
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Writings and Editings XXIII

7/4/2019

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I've been doing stuff, but there is always the creeping neverending fear that I'm not doing enough....
Normal School, Lowell Mick White, academia, higher education, reading, novel, noir, Walther, Kansas, execution, body-disposal
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Writings and Editings XXII

1/26/2019

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I've obviously been spending more time on the NORMAL SCHOOL novel/blog/website than I have on this--my rightful and beloved blog. But I've been doing regular writings and editings--I've started a new book--and I've been crazy busy with teaching. Go check out NORMAL SCHOOL, if you have the time. And then buy some books...and then come back and see what else I'm up to....
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Writings and Editings XIX

7/15/2018

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It's summer and--as usual--I'm working on about ten projects at once, and thinking about five or six others. But--I'm getting things done!
A couple of suggestions that will benefit me but will benefit you more:

Go buy a copy of BURNT HOUSE

Then go check out NORMAL SCHOOL
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Out of Context Excerpt 13

6/24/2018

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From Burnt House--just out!
Burnt House, West Virginia, Appalachia, fiction, novel, gothic
“Your granddad is the most impatient man I ever knew,” she said.

I said, “Well….”

“It’s true! I’ve known him almost sixty years!”

“Yeah?” I sat back, waiting for a story. That was always the best part of being home, waiting for a story. “Kline—well, your grandma, Alma.” Bess was still talking out the service window, bent over a table in the back room looking at me. “You remember how hard she worked, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “She was always doing something.”

“Okay, well, they used to keep chickens—everybody did, then, a long time ago. And Kline, he’s greedy as well as he’s impatient, and he always wanted more—more chickens, more eggs. Of course, it was Alma had to do most of the work, or the girls when they got big enough. But Kline would do one thing with those chickens by himself, and he didn’t trust anyone else to do it. He’d go out there to the hen house with an awl or a nail or a pocketknife and chip away at those eggs, pick the shells off so the baby chicks would be born a day or two early and start growing quicker. He didn’t trust nature. He couldn’t ever wait for nature.”

“Wow!”

“Oh, he’d go out in the garden and flick dirt off the bean sprouts when they were coming up, so they’d grow faster.”

I laughed at that one.

“You laugh, now, but that man can be terrible,” Bess said. “He did the same thing when your Aunt Irene was born.”

“No way!”

Bess stepped back from the window and went around and came out into the waiting room.

“It’s true,” she said. “Alma went into labor, or thought she did, and old Kline got in his truck and drove to Alum Bridge—that’s where the paved road from Weston ended in those days, at Alum Bridge, it was just mud between here and there. And Kline got his car out of the garage he kept it in and drove on into Weston on the paved road and he got the doctor.” Bess caught her breath, a gasp. “And so then he drove the doctor back to Alum Bridge, and they got in his truck and they drove back through the mud to Burnt House. And when they got here, Alma wasn’t in labor anymore.” Bess looked at me and nodded. So there!

After a moment, I asked, “And….”

“And so Kline told that doctor, he said, I’m not bringing you all the way out here a second time. He said, you need to get in there and get me that baby right now. Right now. And the doctor did it—brought out that baby two or three days early, a week early, I don’t know.”

“Wow.”

I thought of poor Grammaw Talbot. Back in one of those bedrooms, pregnant, sick and miserable. Alone, I guessed. Full of a baby. And how did that doctor get Irene out? Some drug? Did he cut the baby out of her? Pull it? Did he hook the baby to a chain and winch it out not really ready to live and leave poor Grammaw all ripped apart and bloody? Ah, wow. Disgusting. I almost felt a cramp myself. I never wanted kids. I touched my belly. Sick.

​I said, “Jeeze.”

Buy BURNT HOUSE

Burnt House, West Virginia, Appalachia, fiction, best novel, gothic, Lowell Mick White
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Twelve Things I Remember About Home

6/16/2018

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Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, memory, history
1. The Mispunctuated Town
Cox’s Mills is a tiny place, even for West Virginia, with a population of maybe 75, two stores, a post office, a closed schoolhouse, and a church that holds services one Sunday a month.  It lies stretched out along Rt. 47, following Pike Fork between Horn Creek and Hog Run.  Cox’s Mills is “five miles from everywhere,” my grandfather used to say, if everywhere is defined as the surrounding communities of Burnt House, Auburn, Troy, and Alice.  Alice is a ghost town anymore, but Cox’s Mills is not too different from the surviving other three, a small community, insulated and static, growing gently shabbier as the years pass.

On the map and in the postal directory the town’s name is spelled Coxs Mills, no apostrophe, apparently because map makers and zip code cipherers don’t like apostrophes.  I’ve always spelled it Cox’s Mills, anyway, because I do like apostrophes and I like things to make sense.  I’ve never heard anyone else offer an opinion about the spelling of the town’s name, and since I go there now only in memory I probably never will.
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, memory, history
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, history, memory

​2. Millstones and the Bridge Pool
My mother told me that the millstones for Cox’s mills had been just upstream from the bridge where Rt. 47 crossed Horn Creek and I tried several times over the years to find them, wading up the shallow part of the creek under a dark canopy of sycamores and willows, under a water gap and on up.  I never found the millstones, and my guess is that they must have been buried under the silt and fine gravel washing off the hills, buried and lost like so much else.  Below the bridge there was a large, deep pool where Pike Fork flowed into Horn Creek, and I did my first fishing there, catching smallmouth bass and bluegills.  Sometimes I would fish off the bridge abutment, cringing when log trucks or well service trucks from Dowell or Halliburton raced by.  In the lot next to the pool was an olive-painted corrugated metal building, an old gauging station for Eureka Pipeline that my grandfather had worked in.  One damp December day a truck came and loaded up the building and hauled it off somewhere.  In later years weeds grew around the old concrete foundation and multiflora rose snaked around a rusted old steam engine whose original purpose no one could tell me.
 
3. Hunting under the Hickories
I have been told that before the chestnut blight hit the eastern hardwood forests, chestnut trees were where you went to look for squirrels.  It wasn’t unusual to see as many as thirty squirrels working in one tree.  But the chestnuts are long gone, the remaining dead hulks chopped down and used for fence posts, long enough ago now that even the fence posts are gone, even though chestnut made the best and longest-lasting fence posts.  Now the squirrels in our part of the country gather mostly around hickory trees.  The leaves of the hickories turn bright yellow in the fall and stand out between the reds and browns of maples and oaks, and when I went hunting I would sit beneath the trees, quietly, beneath the soft falling leaves and hard falling green nuts.  Squirrel season was the best time of year: the days were cool and usually sunny, and the woods were silent but for the falling leaves and the rustlings of small animals.  One time I heard fallen leaves crackling—something moving—and instead of a squirrel a grey fox came over the edge of the hill.  He trotted right toward me until, when he was six or seven feet away, I said, “Hello, little fox.”  The fox stopped and regarded me for a few moments before angling off, circling around my hickory tree but still heading to wherever he was heading.  I told my grandfather about the fox and he said, “I’d a-shot the son-of-a-bitch.”
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, memory, history
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, memory, history

​4. Apple Trees
Below the house, along the creek, we had two immense apple trees.  In a good year the trees would be utterly loaded, groaning under the weight of the apples.  My grandmother would literally spend all day in the kitchen during apple time, canning apples, making applesauce or apple butter, the kitchen windows dripping with steam.  The ground beneath the trees was pocked with holes and tunnels of ground squirrels that ate fallen apples, and beyond the fence, under the rocks, there were snakes, copperheads and blacksnakes, that ate the squirrels.  At night deer would come down off the hill and eat apples, and we could sit in the porch and hear them chewing and sometimes choking.  In the summer of 1988 the trees finally died, and the people who were renting the house cut them down, leaving the stumps standing high enough to run a clothesline from one to the other.  After the trees died I lost interest in the place.
 
5. Farming the Hills
The hills there in that part of West Virginia are hills, not mountains, but they rise so steeply away from the road, away from the creek, that they hem in the sky and induce a sense of confinement if not claustrophobia.  I remember my mother telling about her first trip away from home, to Iowa to visit relatives, and how sick the prairie landscape made her: All that space!  There was nothing around to hold up the sky!  No doubt flatlanders would get sick in Cox’s Mills, and feel trapped and nervous.  In the days of my grandfather’s youth, the hills were still covered in virgin timber.  His family—and the other pioneer families over along Rocky Fork and Old Field Fork—would work their way through the woods, uphill and down, cutting down the trees, selling the solid old timber, burning the rest, rooting up the stumps with mules, planting wheat the first year, corn the second, then grass for cattle, working on and on through the woods.  He said the hills were so steep they had to plant the seed corn with shotguns—just stand back and fire it into the hillsides.  But all that ended.  Farming was difficult at any time in that country, a crazy idea, really, and impossible after the topsoil washed away, and so the farms died out and the trees came back, slowly, thin young forests that have grown more robust over the years.  Still, my grandfather would say, “By God, when the Russians take over, they’ll have people out working on those hills again.”
 
6. My Palm Prints in Concrete
Sometime in late 1962 my grandfather poured concrete for a new walkway that led around the front of the house, from the front door to the East Porch.  We were down that weekend and he had me put my hands in the cement to make a mark.  I remember the icky texture of the cement—it was cold, and sticky, and I didn’t like it.  My father took a nail and wrote my name and the date beneath the palm prints, and I guess it’s all still there.  At least, it was when I finally sold the house.  The concrete had buckled, bulged up by the roots of a maple tree, but my prints endured, faint and shallow but legible.
 
7. Our Hill
When I was very young my grandfather ran cattle on the front of the hill, the side that faced the house, and the cattle grazed the hillside down to short grass, dirt and a few blackberry vines.  After he got rid of the cattle the hill began to regrow.  Brush—filth, we called it—took over, mostly thorny multiflora rose and more blackberries, then a few trees began to poke through, sycamores at first and then maples and oaks.  The top of the hill had been left wooded and was very dark and shady, and you would pass through those first woods and come out on a flat, more or less open area that had once been a planted field.  Rocks had been pulled out to let the plow through, and were piled at the upper end.  We had peach trees up there (peaches down below by the creek would not bear fruit), short lived trees that were all but dead by the time I began exploring the woods.  The dead trees stood for years like skeletons until they began to rot and collapse into the brush.  From the top of the hill you could see miles of land that was empty, used very hard in the past and now all but unsettled.
 
8.  The Hay Barn and the Meadow
Directly across the creek from the house was a small hay meadow and an old barn.  We used to get two cuttings a year off that land until people started running fewer and fewer cattle and no one bothered to come by and cut it.  The grass would grow and fall over, pushed down by rain or pulled down by gravity, and there would be wide trails through it where deer would pass to get to the apples.  The old barn where the hay was stored grew more and more decrepit over the years and became a home for yellow jackets and snakes.  When she was dying, my grandmother would look out the window at the meadow, the wasted hay, and one time she said, “It makes me sad looking out there at that. You know some old cow’ll be wanting that hay this winter.”
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, history, memory
Coxs Mills, Appalachia, West Virginia, history, memory
9. Pike Fork
On the maps the upper part of the creek is called Coxcamp Fork, but I never heard anyone call it that.  The local name was Pike Fork, but I never heard anyone use that, either, at least on regular basis.  It was just “the creek.”  It ran through our property, separating us from the hill.  As a child there in the summers I usually spent all day down in the creek looking for fossils, catching crayfish or trapping minnows.  It never occurred to me to be lonely.  I would be down at the creek all day, and then in the evenings I would go back up to the house.  At night fog would drift down from the hills, and I always sat out on the porch and listened to the creek run, and I could hear crickets and frogs and other animals, and I could hear owls hoot, and deer stomp around by the apple trees, I could hear all the thick dark night noises, and once I saw a snake crossing the road in the headlights of an oncoming car.
 
10. High Water
In high water people upstream would throw trash into the river, sometimes plain garbage but more often large chunks of wood that were too expensive or impractical to haul off, like rotten lumber or trimmed tree branches or brush.  As a very young child the junk in the high water always excited me—I imagined the old logs and boards as naval vessels, battleships—a fleet attacking the minnows!   In very high water the creek would stretch clear across the meadow to lap at the base of the apple trees, and though our house was high enough up on the hillside that it never got flooded we could feel the rumble of the muddy brown water as it pushed downstream. 
 
11.  The Langford House
The Langford house was across the road and down a bit.  The Langford family was long gone, died out or moved away, and the house was rented out occasionally to very poor families, until at last it grew too dilapidated and run down to rent to anyone.  One night, after it had been vacant for a several years, my grandmother claimed she saw the house all lit up—glowing in the dark.  My grandfather dismissed her, said she was probably dreaming, but I suspected ghosts.  By that time I was living away from Cox’s Mills, and I was familiar with ghosts—not just the ordinary spirits that might take over a property, but ghosts that got inside your head, ghosts not only of the dead, but of the living, too, ghosts of family and ghosts of place, ghosts that can follow a person around and bother them with guilt and shame and regret that cannot be exorcised.
 
12. The Tree that Didn’t Fall Until Later
It was late when I arrived home for Christmas in 1981, driving in from Texas, and I was very tired, and I was hungry, and I wanted to sit around and decompress, but my grandfather was all agitated and he was saying “Where’d you park?  Out by the barn?  Well, you get out there and move your goddamn truck, there’s a tree a-going to fall on it.”  He followed me out into the dark and pointed across the road into the night.  He said there was a big tree over there that had been struck by lightning and might fall any moment.  So I moved my pickup.  The next day I could see a big oak that been indeed struck by lightning—there was a pale vertical stripe running the length of the tree where the bark had split away.  But the tree didn’t fall—not then, at least.  Years later when I sold the house I came by to take one last look around, and the new owner was walking me out to where I was parked.  He was a nice man, retired and living alone, and he said he would take good care of the house.  “I know all your family’s memories are wrapped up here,” he said.  By that time everyone was dead and I didn’t really care, or thought I didn’t.  I didn’t say anything.  Then I looked up across the road—and the lightning struck tree wasn’t there!  It had finally fallen, not down the hill but across it—but, still, the damn tree had finally rotted and keeled over, and for some reason I just didn’t know what to make of it.  I stood there for a while, staring dumbly at the hillside, and then I got in my truck and drove on back to the new home I was trying to make in Texas.
 
(Originally published in You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, Summer 2008)
Coxs Mills, West Virginia, Appalachia, history, memory
NOTE: I decided to republish this little West Virginia essay as part of the run-up to the release of my West Virginia book, Burnt House.

​BUY IT NOW!
novel, Burnt House, Appalachia, West Virginia, family, gothic, reading, Lowell Mick White, best WV novel
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Things That Happen in Burnt House

5/30/2018

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best West Virginia novel, Appalachian fiction, gothic, Lowell Mick White

So--what happens in Burnt House, anyway?

Burnt House is the story of what Jackie Stalnaker learns about the town and her own reaction to her increasing knowledge, a loose narrative whose arc spans a decade and contains a cheating father, a snooping daughter, divorce, general family dysfunction, the knowing of things, an angry child, tire-stabbing, old-movie watching, a skewered rat, a car wreck, trauma, a perv bi-sexual peeper, a pecker on a string, unprotected gay sex, a resentful child, a clueless guilting mother, an open-air suicide, grave-digging, gossip, a forced birth, eggshell-cracking, guilt, old bones, a first funeral, a poisoned tree, a poisoned dog, a mysterious pregnancy, a non-growing bad baby, an angry old man, dropsy and heart trouble, familial cruelty, a fistfight, a Vietnam casualty, Johnny Carson-watching, a drugged old man, semi-protected hetero sex, more gossip, dead bear heads, dope-dealing, bad families, more dope-dealing, a submerged granny skull, a freakout, doped driving, poor self-image, a deliberately unplanned possible pregnancy, several ghosts, a long wait for death, the smell of cancer, centerfold arson, a child voyeur, church arson, tooth-selling, murder by mattock, grave-robbing, snake panic, bad manners, death by radio, bat-shooting, used-truck buying, beer-drinking, pool-playing, a one-armed ass-kicking, another car wreck, a heart attack, Type II diabetes, chicken-frying, a dark fond memory, many lies, another divorce, a clueless father, a sad son, senile dementia and the horror of aging, jigsaw puzzles, Christmas lights, divorce, family futility, granny cruelty, floating puppies, a deeply regretted non-abortion, some forgotten kin, unmarked baby graves, Psalm 111:3, feral jonquils, a dope-smoking baby, a dope-smoking poodle, another dope-smoking baby, a mysterious memory of snow—and more. Think of The House on Mango Street as if it were written by Flannery O’Connor.

Buy BURNT HOUSE now!
West Virginia, fiction, novel, secrets, gossip, gothic, best WV novel, Lowell Mick White
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Baseball at the Reunion c.1920

5/20/2018

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baseball, West Virginia, reunion, Rocky Fork, Lewis County, Mick, Burnt House
This was taken at the Mick Family Reunion on Rocky Fork in about 1920 or so. Got a bunch of kinfolk here! The narrator of Burnt House spends some time looking at similar photos....
​In another photo they are standing out in front of the house, and the house itself is surrounded by a throng—all the living children and grandchildren and greats and all their husbands and wives—a vast army of family. I thought, I share genes with all these dead people. These long-forgotten dead people.
Someday, I’ll be forgotten, too.
Damn.
 Some of these people I knew, some of them I know by reputation--by stories!--and some of them are unknown....When I die, almost all of them will be lost forever....

More or less. I'm using an image of the old Mick house on the cover of Burnt House. Literature is immortal....
Reunion, Rocky Fork, 1920, West Virginia, Lewis County, Lowell Mick White, Burnt House
Reunion, Rocky Fork, Lewis County, West Virginia, Lowell Mick White, Burnt House
Burnt House, novel, West Virginia, fiction, literature, Appalachian, Lowell Mick White
BURNT HOUSE is my novel of West Virginia. Buy it now!
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Writings and Editings XVIII

5/3/2018

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Busy closing out the semester and working on classes and grading and Normal School and Burnt House and about a jillion other important crucial worthwhile projects...and my students drew pictures of American Eagles....
Normal School draft revision epigraph academic noir murder mystery
Normal School classroom noir academic mystery
Normal School outline #amwriting
Passion Planner not enough rest working too much
Normal School outline scenes and changes
Disco ball ceiling sleep
Passion Planner I hate Trump too
Revision Burnt House make your writing better
Gatsby 1949 Eckleburg eyes noir
Writing prompt do not use the letter E
American eagle salute
Normal School an academic noir
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    Lowell Mick White

    Author of the novels Normal School and Burnt House and Professed and That Demon Life and the story collections  Long Time Ago Good and The Messes We Make of Our Lives.

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