"Bright blazing intuitions may go rushing through a man’s mind, swifter and more terrible than lightning, flashing over a landscape that seems clear in every detail. Then they go out, and there is only a greater blackness."

Nothing is what it seems - unless everything is what it seems - in the account of an eloping couple's ill-fated voyage from New York to Vermont. What strange fate befell this Amish-raised lollapalooza and her gabardine suit-garbed coxcomb on a backroad in the Berkshires? And what does it have to do with a freckled-faced city surgeon, a refugee Basque surrealist artist, the author of an arduous text on psychopathology and the postmaster of Whippleville?

Joel Townsley Rogers's The Red Right Hand is a cipher of crime fiction, a phantasmagoria of molds, tramps, ration books, brain surgery, eyeless houses, sawdust sinkholes, red-eyed rattlesnakes, prewar crepe-soled sports shoes and the beautiful dance of the corkscrew and the bottle. Confused? That's only to be expected when you make the turn onto the old Swamp Road and find yourself transfixed by the chimerical logic of what seems like a straightforward story of murder until it distorts and disorients the narrative into a truly unique reading experience.

In this episode, Christopher Funderburg & John Cribbs veer into this Bermuda Triangle of murky prose - is it all pulp and circumstance or a meticulously fathomless work of art? Together they wade through Rogers's curious cast of characters, casual allusions to alternative history and obsessive repetition of superficially trivial details to reach the elusive epicenter of this crazy book, the very definition of a cult classic.

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John Cribbs on Twitter: twitter.com/TheLastMachine

Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”
 Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"

Broadcast on:

17 Aug 2021