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(5), Grubb, Davis. Ancient Lights. New York: Viking Press, 1982. 540 pp, pdf, a new scan.
This novel is now almost forgotten, and has not to my knowledge ever been converted to epub. The download includes both the pdf of Ancient Lights and a long review published in 1983 by Nelson Hilton.
"Exhilarating, hilarious, amazing... an authentic tour de force." -- Stephen King
"A woolly, punning, pastel-tinted eschatological fantasy - in which Grubb (The Night of the Hunter and others) pulls out all the stops, writing a gnostic, revisionist-Christian slam-bang-arama with the what-the-hell and why-not freedom of a dying man. (Grubb died in 1980.) The narrator is a young woman named Fifi Leech, daughter of West Virginia millionaire Sweeley Leech, a new Messiah. Sweeley's nothing if not up to date (it's 1992): Christ sounds too stuffy, so Sweeley trumpets a gospel called "Criste Lite." To give to the poor, he "unrobs" a Manhattan bank, pouring huge, computer-busting sums into the small accounts of working stiffs. So, eventually, the powers-that-be - a world government called TRUCAD - try to stop Sweeley, and what little, attenuated plot there is here thus involves the complications that arise from the Sweeley/TRUCAD duel: there's a miracle jewel called "Face-to-Face," a pleasure palace named Le Pet au Diable, a rampaging TRUCAD terror organization made up only of women (the Goody Two-Shoes), a disciple of Sweeley's known as Fu Manchu, and - ultimately - an electric crucifixion. Admittedly, all this has the staying power of cotton candy. But the little satiric barbs - the perquisites of future-set fiction - are frequently delicious. Grubb knowingly lashes through the publishing world. (E.g., in order to bury the truths of Sweeley's Criste Lite gospel, TRUCAD has it mass-published and awarded the Nobel Prize.) He offers fiendishly hip culture-comments - like a Broadway theater marquee announcing an Albee/Sondheim adaptation of the work of Otto Rank: "The Perfumed Catheter." He delivers epigrams sure to be savored in savvy urban circles: "Back of every small-town faggot, she said, stands a good church alto." And on and on it goes, to 500+ pages, seemingly impelled by some private, spit-into-the-wind imp: a posthumous gesture that combines an opened palm of benediction with a raised middle finger - in a totally untidy, flakily redemptive book that's a likely contender for Manhattan-based cult popularity." -- Kirkus Reviews
about the author:
Hailing from the small river town of Moundsville, West Virginia, Davis Grubb (1919-1980) became a key figure in the canon of Appalachian literature. The author of ten novels and dozens of short stories and radio plays, Grubb's writings, as Tom Douglass [author of a Grubb biography] observes, "catalogued his life" - and a turbulent life it was, marked by the traumatic loss of both the family home and his father during the Great Depression, the overbearing affections of his mother, the fear of failure, painful struggles with alcohol and drug abuse, profligate spending, and a conflicted sexuality.
Grubb originally aspired to be a visual artist but, thwarted by color blindness, turned to writing instead, honing his skills in the advertising industry. Today he is best remembered for his first novel, The Night of the Hunter (1953), a gripping story of a Depression-era serial killer and his pursuit of two young children along the Ohio River. This book spent twenty-eight weeks on The New York Times best-seller list and became the basis for a classic film directed by Charles Laughton, starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish. While his subsequent work never achieved that same level of popularity, the fierce thematic oppositions he set forth in his debut novel - between love and hate, good and evil, the corrupt and the pure, the rich and the poor - would inform his entire oeuvre. Although Grubb's career took him to the great cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, his work was always rooted in key emblems of his Appalachian childhood - the river, the state penitentiary, and the largest Indian mound east of the Mississippi, all in his native Moundsville.
In his works, Douglass asserts, Grubb was "an avenging angel, righting the wrongs of the past in his own life, in his own country, and putting trust in his own vision of divine love." Off the page, he was riven by personal demons, "more than once in danger of losing his life to self-annihilation and to the self-accusation that he was a fallen angel."
This novel is now almost forgotten, and has not to my knowledge ever been converted to epub. The download includes both the pdf of Ancient Lights and a long review published in 1983 by Nelson Hilton.
"Exhilarating, hilarious, amazing... an authentic tour de force." -- Stephen King
"A woolly, punning, pastel-tinted eschatological fantasy - in which Grubb (The Night of the Hunter and others) pulls out all the stops, writing a gnostic, revisionist-Christian slam-bang-arama with the what-the-hell and why-not freedom of a dying man. (Grubb died in 1980.) The narrator is a young woman named Fifi Leech, daughter of West Virginia millionaire Sweeley Leech, a new Messiah. Sweeley's nothing if not up to date (it's 1992): Christ sounds too stuffy, so Sweeley trumpets a gospel called "Criste Lite." To give to the poor, he "unrobs" a Manhattan bank, pouring huge, computer-busting sums into the small accounts of working stiffs. So, eventually, the powers-that-be - a world government called TRUCAD - try to stop Sweeley, and what little, attenuated plot there is here thus involves the complications that arise from the Sweeley/TRUCAD duel: there's a miracle jewel called "Face-to-Face," a pleasure palace named Le Pet au Diable, a rampaging TRUCAD terror organization made up only of women (the Goody Two-Shoes), a disciple of Sweeley's known as Fu Manchu, and - ultimately - an electric crucifixion. Admittedly, all this has the staying power of cotton candy. But the little satiric barbs - the perquisites of future-set fiction - are frequently delicious. Grubb knowingly lashes through the publishing world. (E.g., in order to bury the truths of Sweeley's Criste Lite gospel, TRUCAD has it mass-published and awarded the Nobel Prize.) He offers fiendishly hip culture-comments - like a Broadway theater marquee announcing an Albee/Sondheim adaptation of the work of Otto Rank: "The Perfumed Catheter." He delivers epigrams sure to be savored in savvy urban circles: "Back of every small-town faggot, she said, stands a good church alto." And on and on it goes, to 500+ pages, seemingly impelled by some private, spit-into-the-wind imp: a posthumous gesture that combines an opened palm of benediction with a raised middle finger - in a totally untidy, flakily redemptive book that's a likely contender for Manhattan-based cult popularity." -- Kirkus Reviews
about the author:
Hailing from the small river town of Moundsville, West Virginia, Davis Grubb (1919-1980) became a key figure in the canon of Appalachian literature. The author of ten novels and dozens of short stories and radio plays, Grubb's writings, as Tom Douglass [author of a Grubb biography] observes, "catalogued his life" - and a turbulent life it was, marked by the traumatic loss of both the family home and his father during the Great Depression, the overbearing affections of his mother, the fear of failure, painful struggles with alcohol and drug abuse, profligate spending, and a conflicted sexuality.
Grubb originally aspired to be a visual artist but, thwarted by color blindness, turned to writing instead, honing his skills in the advertising industry. Today he is best remembered for his first novel, The Night of the Hunter (1953), a gripping story of a Depression-era serial killer and his pursuit of two young children along the Ohio River. This book spent twenty-eight weeks on The New York Times best-seller list and became the basis for a classic film directed by Charles Laughton, starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish. While his subsequent work never achieved that same level of popularity, the fierce thematic oppositions he set forth in his debut novel - between love and hate, good and evil, the corrupt and the pure, the rich and the poor - would inform his entire oeuvre. Although Grubb's career took him to the great cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, his work was always rooted in key emblems of his Appalachian childhood - the river, the state penitentiary, and the largest Indian mound east of the Mississippi, all in his native Moundsville.
In his works, Douglass asserts, Grubb was "an avenging angel, righting the wrongs of the past in his own life, in his own country, and putting trust in his own vision of divine love." Off the page, he was riven by personal demons, "more than once in danger of losing his life to self-annihilation and to the self-accusation that he was a fallen angel."