It’s never lost on me that I stand on the shoulders of giants, especially when one is working in genres as well-traversed and dissected as noir or Westerns. In adapting Barry Gifford’s twisted American tale, Night People, for Oni Press, I was working directly with one of those giants. Barry’s work is monumental, as I’m sure every reader here knows, so to be tasked with adapting him was simultaneously daunting and thrilling. It’s a difficult thing to take a work from one medium and try to fit it into another. You have to file pieces down, cut edges off here and there, and discard moments you’d love to have kept. In that way, I felt akin to some of the characters in Barry’s novel, adrift on the Lost Highway with a hatchet in one hand and the other on the wheel. Night People is a dark tale of the decaying corpse of the American Dream at the end of the 20th century so it seemed only fitting that in selecting five works to discuss, I choose five tales that are wholly American and truly twisted.
POP. 1280 – To me, Jim Thompson screams Americana. Not the bullshit Americana of Capra or Spielberg, none of the sugary, pop-saturated Hollywood fluff that sells Freedom by the bucket for $9.99. No, I’m talking about the Americana born on lies and delusion, murder and mayhem. That’s the world in which Thompson’s Pop. 1280 exists. It’s a twisted tale of a sociopathic Texas sheriff playing dumb with an ending that can’t help but put a dark smile on my face.
THE KILLER INSIDE ME – Again, Jim Thompson, and again, Texas, and yes, again, a sociopathic sheriff playing dumb. He’s playing with the same toys in the same sandbox, yet it is a wholly unique tale that twists and turns and churns the stomach. This is a story not for the faint of heart. It’s written from the perspective of a psychopathic killer as Thompson is wont to do and, no, it does not hold back. One of the great works of American literature, if you ask me.
FOUL PLAY – “Foul Play” first appeared in the nineteenth issue of Haunt of Fear, one of the EC Comics that Frederic Wertham accused of generating juvenile delinquency in 1950s America. In my opinion, that accusation just makes the sick twisted heart of this story all the better. If you’re unfamiliar with this history, Wertham’s assault on comics ended with EC Comics cutting its line of horror books and forcing its publisher, William Gaines, to focus on a new project: Mad Magazine. Anyway, “Foul Play” tells a tale of revenge in classic EC-style. It features a vengeful baseball team taking revenge on an opposing team’s player who poisoned the spikes on his shoes, killing their star player. Just how does this team get their revenge? Well, by dismembering the player’s body and using it to play a macabre game of baseball–intestines to line the diamond, body parts for bases, a leg for a bat, and head for a ball. They used it all. Yes, it’s pretty gruesome, but it’s also so damn good. A twisted American tale if ever there was one.
‘TAINT THE MEAT…IT’S HUMANITY! – Well, if you thought the last one was twisted, just wait for “‘Taint The Meat…IT’S HUMANITY!.”I guess it’s two and two at this point, two Jim Thompsons and two EC stories, and I do apologize for the lack of diversity in my answers but…when something is this good and twisted, you just have to include it. A butcher sells tainted meat to his customers, knowing it will likely make them ill. They get their revenge by butchering him and selling his tainted meat–his flesh and bones–in his own butcher shop window. A slice of Americana, as I see it, anyway.
GEEK LOVE – There were, of course, many choices for what could have wound up in the fifth spot here. But I dove back into my high school reading years for a twisted tale by Katherine Dunn called Geek Love. I’d argue that it fits the bill, seeing as all of the stories I picked have been laced with crime to one extent or another. This novel, published in 1989, is about a great many things but one of its main concerns is the great scam of self-help gurus and their quasi-religious cults. In the novel, Arturo, the seal boy with flippers for arms and legs, creates a cult who convinces his followers to participate in ‘Arturism’–in other words, his followers emulate his malady by amputating their arms and legs. Surreal, bizarre, and yet completely believable. Remember when people were drinking bleach during the pandemic? Ah, yes. America, the beautiful.
Chris Condon is the writer of the ongoing Image Comics series THAT TEXAS BLOOD with artist Jacob Phillips along with its Wild West spinoff, THE ENFIELD GANG MASSACRE, which was selected as one of the best comics of 2023 by The Hollywood Reporter, The Comics Journal, CBR, and the Comics Beat. He has also written for DC, Marvel, Z2, AfterShock, Mad Cave, Dark Horse, 3W/3M, and has just finished adapting acclaimed writer Barry Gifford’s NIGHT PEOPLE for Oni Press, which inspired the 1997 film Lost Highway written by Gifford and filmmaker David Lynch.
