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All Alone, All Alone
All by myself
Christian A. Dumais
April 09, 2025
OPENING MONOLOGUE
Hello there from Poland.
I like action movies when the hero is about to do something terrible and the friend solemnly says, "There's no coming back from this."
I wish my friends would say this to me when I'm about to exact revenge. Or when I’m about to eat a dozen donuts.
Pop Culture Must Die is the official newsletter for Christian A. Dumais — an American writer and freelance editor living in Poland. His books include Smashed, Killing It, and Go West.
NPR said, "People get paid a LOT of money to write comedy who are not one-tenth as funny as [Christian]."
Your mileage may vary.
Let’s look at “The Batman Experiment” — an excerpt from my book Smashed — and Stephen King and Peter Straub’s Black House. Plus the usual diversions.
AT THE DESK
The Batman Experiment
Most people know about Drunk Hulk, but not every Twitter account worked out as I hoped. At my worst, I had over 30 different Twitter feeds running at one time. For every successful account, like @t_selleck (banned) and @failedpilot, there were about a dozen that crashed and burned.
This week, I want to focus on The Batman Experiment (@BatmanExp), which chronicled a group of scientists trying to create a real-life Batman. As the description says, “Our current subject is 10 years old. This is what science looks like.”
Here are some of the selections:
Day 1: Subject not receptive to martial arts training. Dr. Long suggests waiting longer than one hour after parents' death.
Day 2: Subject has no interest in revenge. Just "wants mommy and daddy!" Even actor playing Alfred is sick of his whining.
Day 3: Hired clowns to come out of closet at night to frighten subject. Effective. Next week: Penguins and crocodiles.
Day 4: Failed to consider the difficulty in getting a bat to fly through the library window. Bats, by the way, are expensive.
Day 7: One week since shot subject's parents. Still no interest in Bat costume. Subject cries often.
Day 72: Bought puppy. Named it "Parents." Subject thrilled and has bonded with puppy. Next week: we'll shoot Parents in front of Subject.
Day 91: I think we're going to need a new "Bruce." Again.
Day 101: This is starting to remind us of when we were trying to create a Superman by dropping babies in "rockets" from planes over Kansas.
Day 150: Scientists consider retconning this particular subject.
THE READING PILE
Side Road to the Tower I
After finishing The Wasteland, I decided to take a break and explore some of King’s Dark Tower-adjacent books. My plan was to approach these books in chronological order, but I’ve decided to my own path of the beam, starting with a re-read of Black House.
You could make the argument that every King story is a Dark Tower story. But for the purposes of this journey, I want to focus on these books (listed from most directly related to least):
The Little Sisters of Eluria
The Wind Through the Keyhole
Insomnia
‘Salem’s Lot
Hearts in Atlantis
Black House
The Eyes of the Dragon
The Stand
It
(The above list may change as I go forward.)
I’m going to confess something. The one book from King that I’ve always struggled with is The Talisman. As a kid, it’s the book that took me two to three times to finally push all the way through. I love the idea of the book, and there are parts of it that simply adore, but as a whole, it crumbles under the weight of its own ambitions.
(For a long time, I blamed The Talisman’s other writer, Peter Straub. But in the early 90s, I binged Straub’s work and I quickly learned how wrong I was to make this assumption. What can I say? I was young and stupid. Luckily, now I’m old and stupid.)
I remember not being incredibly excited about Black House when it was originally released in 2001, but I bought it just the same and read it in a day or two. While the book wasn’t great, I thought it was better than The Talisman. More importantly, the book had one of my favorite pages from any of “King’s work” (pages 200-201 from the original US hardcover edition).
(I had to put “King’s work” in quotes above because it’s hard to talk about The Talisman and Black House without knowing who wrote what. I think it’s easier to distinguish between the writers with The Talisman, but it’s trickier with the sequel.)
On this recent read, I appreciated the book even more. It’s a real banger that’s loaded with some wonderful characters, a few tremendous set pieces, and some chilling scenes — all put together by a clever narrative device that’s essentially a floating camera that dips and zooms around the small town.
The book is also aware of itself. There’s a lot winking. In fact, the book’s voice is one of the story’s biggest selling points. Take this scene, for instance, when the book introduces another police character near the book’s halfway point:
Ernie Therriault is another cop — sort of — but relax: he's the last one we'll have to meet (well, there is an FBI agent running around here someplace, but never mind him right now; he's in Madison, and he's a fool).
Black House is loaded with a lot of terrifying sequences, from the too-close-to-home variety (in a town being terrorized by a serial killer, a father waits for his son to come home and slowly realizes that something is wrong) to descents into madness:
In a long, narrow room like a Pullman car, living cartoons — two rabbits, a fox, and a stoned-looking frog wearing white gloves — sit around a table catching and eating what appear to be fleas. They are cartoons, 1940s-era black-and-white cartoons, and it hurts Jack's eyes to look at them because they are also real. The rabbit tips him a knowing wink as the Sawyer Gang goes by, and in the eye that doesn't close Jack sees flat murder.
Another great scene is when a group of bikers approaches the eponymous Black House, a building that’s designed for people not to notice, and if you do, it has mind-altering defenses to keep you from getting any closer. I’m a sucker for stories about objects that are incomprehensible to the point of madness, such as books like Fever House (a song), The Song of Kali (an old god) and House of Leaves (also a house), or movies like Pontypool (a lingual virus) and almost anything by Benson & Moorhead. If you’ve read my short stories, I’ve explored the same thing with mix tapes, YouTube videos, etc.
Black House also directly folds in the events of The Talisman into the Dark Tower story. I think most DT readers understood it to be connected (like The Eyes of the Dragon), but it’s clear from this point on. This acknowledgment is fun for readers like me, but I can’t imagine what casual readers make of it. Because, like Insomnia and Hearts in Atlantis, this is where the connections become so overt that they get in the way of the story. As Thomas Wolfe once wrote, “You're either on the bus or off the bus” (luckily, by the point these books were published, the DT books were more readily available to mainstream readers).
The score for my appreciation of the Talisman series is tied at 1-1, and my final verdict hinges on how the third book (to be published next year, I believe) turns out. Will it lean more toward The Talisman or Black House? Either way, any new book from King is a gift in itself.
RANDOM SEGUE
The Long Game
I know we're not supposed to talk about it, but with Fight Club being so ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget that the movie bombed when it originally premiered.
The film was famously booed at its Venice Film Festival screening, with rumors that even Martin Scorsese walked out.
Before the screening, Brad Pitt approached Ed Norton and asked, “How do you think this is going to go?”
Norton replied, “I don’t think it’s going to go well.”
“Me neither. Let’s get high.”
When the movie ended and the lights came on, Pitt and Norton were sitting in the back row. As the whole audience was booing, Pitt turned to Norton and hugged him. With tears of joy, Pitt said, “That’s the best movie we’re ever going to be in.”
It’s a long game, folks.
How people react to your work at the beginning isn’t always reflective of how people will see it down the road. Sometimes people aren’t ready for it. Sometimes people get it wrong.
Keep going.
I edited 1.5M words in 2024. If you think I could be a worthy addition to your content team or the right person for your manuscript, let’s talk.
OUTRO
The Pattern
This is a reminder that creating something true to you is like laying down tiles. One tile at a time. Some tiles are more interesting than others. Some are unnecessarily heavy. Some don’t line up perfectly. Sometimes it’s relaxing. Sometimes it’s tedious. You might question why you’re doing this at times — why you’re always struggling on your hands and knees. And that’s when you need to stand up, step back, and recognize the beautiful pattern you’ve been creating.
Have a great one!
