Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2017 January 13 • Friday

Here's the second A. E. Van Vogt book I've ever read, The House That Stood Still.

The other one was Slan, which I read mostly because John Zorn, Elliott Sharp and Ted Epstein used to have a band of that name.

I don't remember much about either of these books but at least Slan I read twenty years ago. The House That Stood Still I just finished a little while ago, though to be fair I read it in tiny bits, sporadically over a fairly long period of time, while also dipping into two other books and trying to diminish a pile of Times Literary Supplements.

So all of that was going on. The House That Stood Still is about a house in California that's been there for a really long time. Thousands of years? And something about the house makes people who live in it immortal. So there's this group of immortals who keep it for themselves but they're fighting amongst themselves about whether to take the house and go to another planet with it, to avoid an imminent nuclear war on Earth, or stay and try to prevent the aforementioned nuclear war.

The story and its events have distinct pulp appeal, namely sex and violence and a typical male American hero. Vogt keeps things moving, ending almost every chapter on a cliffhanger.

The first line is, "His first awareness was of a man saying quietly from the darkness: 'I've heard of such wounds, doctor, but this is the only one I've seen.'".

There are several reasons to read books like this but one of the most compelling is the admirable and attractive efficiency of the writing. This short paragraph is a representative example of what impressed me.

With a feeling of urgency he walked the two blocks to the nearest taxi stand. And then it was another two blocks to the cemetery gate from where he paid off the cabman. He jogged most of the way. The stamp of his shoes on the hard road merely transformed his impatience into sound. He slowed finally, puzzled.

Vogt uses the literary equivalent of a jump cut to take his protagonist walking, driving and then jogging, with a minimum of words and fuss. It's part jump cut, part brush stroke. And then, after this textual legerdemain, her magically produces a remarkable poetic flourish: "The stamp of his shoes on the hard road merely transformed his impatience into sound".

All this in a single paragraph that contains only one comma. And it's all functional and necessary to the story.