The best-written thriller of the year
Read the opening pages of our pick below ^ Plus Part 25 of The Demon Inside David Lynch
Photos by Sasha Kargaltsev, Gage Skidmore, and Charlie Llewellin
In today’s issue:
—’The worst smell in the world is dead badger’: the best-written book on the shortlist for this year’s Dagger Award for best novel. The winner will be announced on the 4th of July. In a couple of days we’ll post our pick from the Dagger shortlist for best translated novel of the year.
—‘We had H2O’: How to understand Donald Trump’s appeal through the prowrestling concept of kayfabe: Club Gevurah, Part 25 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco.
The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com. Thanks for the support Auraist readers have continued to show this series.
You can also browse our author masterclasses on prose style, picks from the best-written recent releases, from prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.
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THE DAGGER AWARDS 2024
Shortlist for best novel
Over My Dead Body Maz Evans
The Secret Hours Mick Herron
Small Mercies Dennis Lehane
Tell Me What I Am Una Mannion
Black River Nilanjana Roy
Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers Jesse Sutanto
The best-written of these is
PART ONE:
DEVON, SOON
The worst smell in the world is dead badger. He’d encountered it on his morning walk down a green lane; had caught the odour without seeing the corpse, but had guessed what it was before returning later with a shovel. Whether they all smelled that bad or whether this one had expired of noxious causes he didn’t know. As it turned out, he couldn’t do anything about it either—the creature had crawled into a tangled nest of roots to die, and it would require heavy machinery and a strong stomach to recover it. Lacking the former, and not wanting to put the latter to the test, Max opted for a third way: he’d walk a different route for a while, and see if one of the local farmers shifted it in the meantime. Which was why he wasn’t sure the badger would still be there a couple of nights later, when he was running for his life.
The first of the intruders entered through the kitchen window. Max hadn’t been asleep, though anyone watching the cottage would have been forgiven for thinking otherwise: the lights were out, the curtains drawn. He’d been lying in bed, not so much struggling with insomnia as letting it do its worst, when he’d heard the window latch being finessed open: a piece of wire sliding through the draughty gap he’d been meaning to repair, lifting the metal hook from its eye. Quieter than taking out the glass, but a long way short of silent. He’d pulled on jogging pants and a sweatshirt, slipped into a pair of trainers, then froze in place, caught between two lives, trying to remember where he’d stashed his flight kit . . . You could worry you were losing your mind. That they were coming too late, and you’d long ago turned into whoever you were pretending to be.
(Max Janáček. Retired (early) academic; still footling around with a history book, but mostly just passing the days—taking long walks, cooking slow meals, losing himself in Dickens.)
The stairs were an out-of-tune orchestra of squeaks and whistles, every tread announcing that Peter or the wolf were on their way, unless you’d practised descending, and knew where to put your feet. So almost noiselessly he reached the sitting room, whose doorway was catty-corner to the kitchen, and plucked the poker from its stand by the wood-burning stove. Not a great weapon, for all its iconic status in fiction. You needed high ceilings to accommodate your swing. Max Janáček understood a good swing: he was the man you saw walking the lanes, beheading dandelions with a stick. Who lived in a five-hundred-year-old cottage in North Devon, and could be counted on to do the neighbourly thing: keep an eye out for the old folk, whose company he was on the threshold of joining; litter-pick after the bank holiday rush; sign the petition resisting the makeshift industrial estate down the lane—numbering seventeen cabins now. This and more he’d been for more than twenty years, and whether the locals took him at face value or gave less than a tuppenny damn had become irrelevant, or had done until someone slipped the latch on his kitchen window and climbed inside more or less gracefully, breaking no crockery, dislodging no pans, and moving across the flagged floor in careful silence, intent—it would seem—on unlocking the back door and allowing his comrades ingress. Or her comrades, as it turned out. Whether Max would have jabbed her so hard at the base of the skull with the poker, then slammed her head on the floor when she fell had he known it was a woman beneath the break-in gear was something he could ponder at leisure, if he survived the night. Meanwhile, he checked her for weapons. She was carrying a Taser, which put her outside the range of opportunist burglars, but no ID, and nothing to indicate what she was up to. But he had to work on the assumption that she wasn’t alone, an assumption confirmed when he picked up the landline to hear the deep silence of a well on a windless night. Inside the cottage—anywhere down this lane—his mobile made for a useful paperweight. So sitting tight and calling the cavalry wasn’t an option, and wouldn’t necessarily have been a sensible move anyway. Sometimes, it was the cavalry you had to watch out for.
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire. But the descriptions of The Return’s content are not fiction, no matter how much you come to believe or wish otherwise.
Club Gevurah
By 1am Les and Stanley were away off home and Ella off to sleep cuddling Chica, so I went out for a walk. Near the Egyptian temple in the Parque de la Montana I sat on a bench and on Ella’s phone watched more YouTube. The next suggestion was Hang Weights From Your Nipples and You’ll See The Return and Morrissey in a Blinding White New Light.
The suggestions beside it turned out to have nothing to do with BDSM and were instead just US Manbams, militiamen, Mozheads, and their enemies discussing Mr Lynch or Mr Trump, or due to the mysteries of Ella’s search history sometimes Mr Morrissey too, three extremely wealthy white boomers with legendary hair who their fans believed took no nonsense from no one, the chat accompanied at times by supporting clips and screenshots and that thrash rock many Americans still have such a weakness for.
I began to take notes and check out and contribute to the recommended sites and groups and forums, learning as I went along unpleasant facts about Mr Morrissey and the hermit who was now my former higher power. By 5am I who still believed he’d made Season 3 had an inventory of how these three so-bad-it’s-good idols and their respective cult followings resembled one another. They became the rules for admission to what Ella would later, much later, name Club Gevurah^^.
The three men of Club Gevurah weren’t exactly progressives. Mr Morrissey on Chinese people: ‘a sub-species’; on Adolf Hitler: ‘left-wing’. Mr Lynch on Travellers: ‘This country’s in pretty bad shape when human scum can walk across your lawn, and they put you in jail if you shoot them.’
The three of them appeared to have a questionable attitude, to say the least, towards women.
This trinity had each apparently viewed themselves as among the few decent sorts in a world overrun by human scum, and had frequently exhibited other kinds of Where’s-my-Great-Pyramid? self-regard. Their over-confidence was so extreme it verged on the monstrous.
They had all ended up cheesy to the core of their being.
They appeared to be awed and fascinated to an almost impossible degree by their own thoughts. It’s necessary to appreciate in particular the volume of Mr Trump’s. He was swamped by his amphetaminised thoughts, drowning in them, and this was why he was so rambling, distracted, and berserk. As with the rest of Club Gevurah he gave the impression he’d hardly any distance from his compulsive cheesy thinking. It was his Almighty God because it was his everything, and like every plectoid with zero humility, he believed the world and his thinking about it were the same thing. He believed that the territory and the map, or his map, were the same.
They sometimes failed to weigh their words, to say the least, before they spoke in public.
The three titans shunned corporate liberal culture and politics, supposedly, but were in fact just the glorification and magnification of many of the culture’s lower tendencies. That is, they were garish love-them-or-hate-them trollish grotesques.
That is, they were like characters out of pro-wrestling: Mr Lynch with his hammy act as a hermit-bumpkin-guru, and his gimmicky overactive fingers; Mr Morrissey with his ridiculous Union Jack-waving, For Britain-touting struts and huffs and puffs, and buttock-rubs in the faces of opponents and the ringside crowd; Mr Trump the first US president to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, in recognition of his decades of dealings with the corporate wrestling world.
And compulsive watching of Mr Trump or The Return or reading List of the Lost often felt not unlike hours sat in front of pro-wrestling. It didn’t do you much good—‘Feels as though your soul’s gorging on Cheetos,’ admitted one reluctant Return addict—but you couldn’t pull yourself away from the travesty of the human condition on your screen.
As well as Mr Trump and his advisers crafting performances to mould reactions in audiences, in politics the equivalents of wrestling’s promoters were commentators within the media. These smarts focused on winners and losers and matters of strategy, rather than on substantive issues, e.g. Mr Trump’s plea for cash to fund broadcasts of The Return on giant screens along his Wall resulted in op-ed pages that considered the message he was trying to send tactically, who it was intended for, and especially the likelihood of tactical success, not on the damage these broadcasts might do to actual Mexicans.
In the world of Return fandom the role of promoter was played not only by Mr Lynch and Mark Frost and Showtime’s publicists, but also by critics in corporate media. And just as wrestling and political commentators focused mainly on who would win a particular contest, so these critics declared that The Return was ‘the best television series of the year’, ‘guaranteed to clear up at the Emmys’, ‘the TV drama to end all TV dramas’, or, inevitably, ‘genius’, but said nothing regarding what it’s trying to communicate overall and ignored its obvious defects. Fans meanwhile spent more time typing extra e’s into genius than saying anything about the series’ Trumpish attitude to rape.
None of the three appeared to be the greatest of listeners.
In public at least, they seldom really laughed or smiled in response to anyone else. The most they could manage, it seemed, was to force a smirk, or a pursing of the lips that was nearer to a wince. But a genuine smile sent out to the world in response to it? Hardly ever. Their self-amusement appeared unlimited, however, resulting in tiresome amounts of archness and trollish games about whether or not they were joking.
In public they were often surrounded by subspace hangers-on who laughed too loudly at what they misconstrued as their idol’s jokes. These hangers-on told everyone else ‘Don’t take him so literally. He’s just kidding on, just playing around.’ But veins throbbed in their temples if you doubted their hero’s authenticity. They’d now insist that ‘He tells it like it is.’
The cultists were more liable to be men than women, and were mostly white boomers and gen xers with heads wasted by lifelong infantilism, cheesiness and other so-bad-it’s-good. They sometimes admitted they hadn’t a clue what their great man was on about, but they still felt qualified to bluff everyone else when it came to words or actions we could see with our own eyes, and as with the rest of their fanaticism were egged on in this by fellow marks within el zumbido’s bubbles of plecto.
They engaged in many other forms of mental contortion to defend the indefensible and exonerate their idol at any cost. They defended his every word or act with vein-throbbing earnestness but if they discovered he was in fact only kidding pretended they knew this all along. But don’t you dare say he’s inauthentic.
If you were lucky they’d give you a shrug and Well, I just know he’s great and that’s the end of it. Some can just see it and others can’t, i.e. the relative serenity and innocence of kayfabe 1. Less lucky and it would be denial that angry it shot past demeaning and shocking to funny then back around again to demeaning. They slapped and punched and spat at people who criticised their idol, and in some cases sent them death threats or bombs, turned off their walkie-talkie, or stole hundreds of euro from them. Like many cultists they threw fits of denial when called cultists. This fury implied an awareness in some of them, however subtle or temporary, that they’d been conned. In other words it was kayfabe 2.
But it was also kayfabe 3. This desire to shrug off the stale smirking knowingness of postmodern kayfabe 2 and to once more play the clueless mark was at the heart of these three cults and a good deal of the rest of modern entertainment and politics. The cults devoted to Ex on the Beach, The Crown, and Boris Johnson were kayfabe 2, of course, but for many admirers they were also kayfabe 3, as were those devoted to UK Unionism and Gove. It doesn’t get much more kayfabe 3 than the George Square riot after the independence referendum, or roaring your delight at Gove’s prances around the ring and sneery buttock/face rubs.
The complex relationship between wrestling’s fans and TV coverage was mirrored by that between these politicians’ supporters and their campaigns. Both exhibited kayfabe 2 refusal of suspension of disbelief, and at the same time generation of belief, of marking out. These supporters knew that backstage there was a team of speechwriters, brand consultants and stylists, and like wrestling fans they analysed these influences, not to distinguish between what was real and what merely performed, but to find the purpose behind each specific fake performance.
When Mr Gove said of his post-Brexit leadership bid ‘I compare it to a group of people standing outside a collapsing building, wondering who is going to rescue a child inside. I thought: well, I don’t think I’ve got either the strength or the speed for this, but as I looked around, I thought, God, I’m at least as strong and at least as fast as the others. I’ve got to try to save the child’, did he want people to forget he himself campaigned for Brexit and so helped collapse the building, or was it cynically funnier all round, so-bad-it’s-good funny, if they knew this perfectly well but like him didn’t care?
Or who chose the Village People’s ‘Macho Man’ for this rally entrance, the obese orator with the byzantine dyed-blond hair and veteran-pornstar complexion and teeth, or someone else? If someone else, how sincere a choice was this? If insincere, if it was in fact supposed to mock the orator, was he aware of this, and if so did he even care?
Such multilevelled teases meant he could level with his rallygoers about his tactics ahead of the 2016 election, laughing at them and saying, ‘You people were vicious, violent, screaming, “Where’s the Wall? We want the Wall!” Screaming “Prison! Prison! Lock her up!” I mean you are going crazy!’ The chant, he told them, ‘plays great before the election. Now we don’t care.’ And his supporters, many of them dolled up in cheesy Village People-style leathers, military uniforms, hardhats, and cowboy boots and Stetsons, laughed along with the troll-in-chief. Only toothless hick dupes believed any of that garbage, they knew, even if they themselves had chanted along.
And this was the spirit in which many of its cultists enjoyed being mocked by The Return’s jokes about it being so uninteresting it resembles watching paint dry or watching an empty glass box, or the show naming Dougie Jones’ son after Jim Jones to mock the Manbams’ eager consumption of its Kool-Aid. And it was the spirit too in which they claimed to enjoy the series’ toying with the fourth wall. Just as a neo-fascist rally or a wrestling event needed its audience to perform their role as marks, the trainwreck needed Césars to behave like marks whose disbelief was suspended, even though it never was.
But what mattered wasn’t just the involvement of fans of Mr Trump, Mr Gove, The Return or List of the Lost—as they turned up to rallies, wore tee shirts featuring grateful rescued children, tuned in each week, ploughed through another paragraph—but also their enthusiasm. Even their idols’ kayfabe 2 cynicism and disdain couldn’t kill off their audiences’ fervour, because these fans were marking out.
A vital element of political support, the viewing of TV drama, and the reading of fiction was emotional engagement. And rallies for Mr Trump or Vox did or do engage supporters’ emotions, with their fellow supporters’ giddy enthusiasm for the style at the podium, inflammatory, faux-naive, and also genuinely childish, giving smarts the leeway in which to mark out. In a similar way, viewing The Return or group-reading Mr Morrissey’s novella alongside the enthralled yelps of fellow veteran boulevardiers gave fans the social cover in which they could mark out too.
In each case there was an atmosphere of faux-naivety, genuine reverence, loss of limits, loss of standards, loss of self, gleeful delirium, and forgiveness or even welcoming of one another’s degrading behaviour. Celebrants occupied a subspace in which it was acceptable to merge with the mass and screech, chant, bow, or whirl your chosen-idol-themed underwear like a lasso to communicate your submission before your hallowed orator, writer-director-producer-star or musician-litterateur, and to openly express contempt for political opponents or the series’ or novella’s doubters, both verbally (‘Jews will not replace us!’ or ‘Send those sceptics anthrax!’) and visually (tee shirts that said Make Aryans Genocidal Again, or Them Philistines Are Weak Sisters, Brothers), a kayfabe 3 in which even the most cynical could lose themselves in the moment and revel in the role of mark.
In Will Self’s Great Apes the main character Simon Dykes wakes up from a bender to find that all the people he knows have turned into apes. At first he refuses to believe this and keeps telling himself he’s lost his mind, but then something snaps within him and he capitulates to the new reality and accepts that everyone, himself included, really is an ape—if you can’t beat them join them.
This submission, the novel argues, shows that the mind always seeks homeostasis, that however good or bad or otherwise unusual things are we can’t view them that way forever. Think of how you get used to wearing a mask and hand-cleanser to go shopping, or to bedding a thermoplastic elastomer doll, or to the parasite class re-establishing full-spectrum dominance. Or of too-druggy parties where everyone’s speaking nonsense and you try not to and you try some more, but the drugs are in control and finally you just give in, submit, sick of the inner battle, submit to kayfabe 3, and now you’re well and truly speaking nonsense because of the relief it brings and how liberated you feel from the expectation to make any sense, and why can’t I do this all the time, you find yourself asking the empty room.
Kayfabes 2 and 3, the prevailing states for people in recovery, wrestling fans, Mozheads, Césars, supporters of Mr Trump and Vox, druggies who succumb to talking nonsense, people who screw sexdolls, and maybe even for most faux-naive smart-cum-marks enduring the perpetual con of pre-apocalyptic Total Capitalism: it’s a little odd that we just accept these kayfabes, is it not? That moment when you give in and speak a load of drivel, or tell yourself this plastic doll you’re forlornly spasming inside really loves you, it’s not a particularly proud moment in your life, is it? People who live under totalitarian regimes have similar problems, if even more onerous—exploitation, imminent environmental collapse, pervasive lies, no likely alternatives—but largely speaking their reaction hasn’t been the glazed-eyed half-drowsy half-hyper-aware self-loathing 4channish cheese of kayfabes 2 and 3.
Hard to shake the sense that they’re yet another sign we’ve lost our way. Like handing nuclear weaponry to a man whose very essence is so-bad-it’s-good-no-it’s-actually-demonic, humans wandering around in kayfabes 2 and 3 about perpetual lies and environmental convulsions were not in the entities’ original plans for our world. (‘Meanwhile if you wanna see the entities shake up the Ultraverse with laughter, laugh so loud you think the Diamond might shatter,’ Ella used to say, ‘remind them that when it comes to what really matters, the entities’ scripted manipulations of this world of ours, almost every mark on earth is still lost in kayfabe 1’).
To finally spell it out, then: as with all cultists the relation of these followers to their idol was that of addiction. They’d long since lost the ability to choose whether or not to venerate the great man and his works. Seldom if ever did they entertain the fourth option, which we might call kayfabe 4. To walk away. To sober up.
And this is why our most pervasive form of defeat, the barely acknowledged submission to the overclass encouraged in us since childhood, matters in this context and many others, because incrementally it convinces you that existence means permanent heartsore frustration, irrelevance and defeat, that no escape or spine-straightening’s possible, which makes you forget there’s any such state as kayfabe 4, and therefore you believe the best you can ever hope for is 1, 2 or 3, to keep putting up with the contempt of Lynch, Trump, Johnson, Gove, Morrissey, Jorge and other bosses, fossil-fuel industries, and the like, or your boyfriend coming in your face, or most mothers and fathers putting no porn filter on their kids’ devices, since you’ve no other option since this is just the world we live in so if you can’t beat them join them.
And if this same civilisation continues to boast that it’s one of the greatest in history, this civilisation that destroyed the planet in our lifetimes, then why not get down on your knees and stick your tongue out yet again and join them across the Line in their sty of lies, capitulate to the giggling sociopathic cynical dissolution of it all, get those SSRIs in your synapses, that meth in your lungs, that rape porn on your phone, and declare your favourite moment in cinema a child-abuser’s comeuppance played for laughs?
Unsurprisingly, then, these three cults were also full of shit. Post-truth doesn’t come close to describing the indoctrination, brainfog, brain-damage. Future historians need to understand the slurry these people had flooding through their mouths and typing fingers.
And the final thing I learned was this: that no matter how hard you tried, how much your gut told you it must be, how much 3-FEA and 4-HO-MiPT you’d taken to argue the case now that Les isn’t around, it was not in the end plausible to put in the same league as these three titans Scotland’s very own Michael Gove. He seems cursed to always fall just short of glory, doesn’t he? So near and yet so far. Hitchcock at the Oscars, No Cigar Roth at WrestleMania, Scotland in the World Cup.
It’s shite being Scottish. We are so shite that even when we had those world-class footballers in the ‘70s we still couldn’t get over the Line to the latter stages of tournaments. And even when we put everything we have into it, a Manhattan Project of effort and national will, and produced an undeniably world-class diddy in Mr Gove, an A-bomb’s worth of diddiness, we’re so shite we still couldn’t quite get him up there among the big boys.
And the sad thing was that until that last-minute discovery of Mr Morrissey’s novella Gove would have been a certainty for a top-three finish. So far and yet so near. Virtually every rule for admission was passed with flying colours by our Michael. And some ebullience and devil-may-care and his hair might have been up there in renown with that of the big three, and even more offensive and he’d have inspired similar fervour in his followers. But there he was, patiently waiting for one of the trinity to drop dead or somehow come to their senses.
These are just the conclusions I can remember from that night. There were many more, now lost in the fog of all those chemicals. It was around 6am when it hit me that I was deep into the YouTube rabbithole down which so many people with good intentions, or so they believed, were sooner or later funnelled into falling for the politics of the hard right.
Of course I wasn’t yet all the way down the hole. If I reached up I could still grab a tuft of grass, I felt, and pull myself out. But I’d been shaken enough to wonder if this was why the reactionary loner made The Return and the reactionary singer-songwriter published his novella: with the secret co-operation of YouTube to send their fans and haters alike into the waiting arms of fascists.
Reworks material from David S. Moon’s ‘Kayfabe, Smartdom and Marking Out: Can ProWrestling Help Us Understand Donald Trump?’