Books to Bury Me With: Brian Townsley

The book I’d want to take with me to the grave:

I’ll go with Legends of the Fall here, by Jim  Harrison. Harrison was a fantastic author, who wrote poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and was crazy good with language. But the thing about THIS collection is that it contains three pretty fantastic stories—Revenge is probably my favorite, a violent and cruel meditation on friendship and tragic love, while The Man Who Gave Up His Name is a fantastic journey, and Legends is a sprawling western-adjacent tale that tackles loss, warfare, politics, family politics, and corruption. Legends was, of course, turned into a movie starring  Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins, and Revenge was made into a movie with Kevin  Costner, Madeline Stowe, and Anthony Quinn. But the diversity of the stories here and the quality of the writing are just amazing. I could put Blood Meridian here as well, but since we’re talking FOREVER, if there is a knock on BM, it’s a bit of a one-note tale (a phenomenal one-note, to be sure), while Legends has a lot more variety. I’ve got three versions of this at present, and I’m always looking for more.  

 

The first book that hit me like a ton of bricks:

The Bachman Books, by Stephen King. I was a teenager at the time, and Rage is fantastic, but The Long Walk has impacted me to the point where I still think about it decades later. I recently listened to it on audiobook, and it was a fascinating recollection, not only of what I remember and didn’t, but reflecting a bit on why it was such a formative piece for me. 

 

The book that’s seen more of my tears, coffee stains, and cigarette burns:

Betting on the Muse, by  Charles Bukowski. It’s one of his later collections, and many of those I’m not big on, but this one just hits home. The version I have is taped and looks lived in and has been studied and read and guffawed at so many times I can’t tell you, but it contains both poems and short stories, and ‘Think of it’, ‘Betting on the Muse’,  ‘What Happened to the Laughing Girl in the Gingham Dress?’ are fantastic, but ‘A  View from the Quarter, March 12^th, 1965,’ is definitely in my top-3 Buk poems ever. It's just one of those collections I come back to again and again.  

 

The book that shook my world like a goddamn hurricane:

This would have to be Blood Meridian. It definitely reshaped my life, and not simply in the sense that I enjoyed the book. In fact, I’m not sure I do ‘enjoy’ the book. But the prose, and the risks it takes, and the truths it tells—it definitely made me rethink everything. Everything I had written, everything I wanted to write. I grew up with Westerns. My grandpa was a special effects man who had worked with Mitchum and Wayne and Sinatra and others and was often on location in various parts of Mexico and the West, and my uncle was a Western actor, and my dad loved westerns and also worked in the industry as a scenic artist, so I grew up watching westerns. And I loved them. Still do. But there was always this…artificial aspect that I hated even while enjoying them as a pastime. The lack of diversity (about 40% of cowboys were either black and/or Mexican, be sure to look for that in a Wayne film), the fact that white dudes were used for Natives, etc. Drove me nuts. Anyways, Blood Meridian was one of the factors that broke that wide open. And the fact that many of the characters are based on actual historical figures, and the fact that the mission itself (the Mexican government paying for Indian scalps) was also verified, only adds to the craziness. Anyway, I could literally write 5 pages on this, I own 4 versions of the book, as well as Notes on Blood Meridian, Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, I Meant to Kill Ye, and other BM companions, and have read it word for word, page by page, at least five times. I’ve also listened to the audiobook twice, and if that’s your gig, it’s great. Anyways, you see why I  could have mentioned this in the ‘to the grave’ question above. But yeah, everything since (including my Western novella published this year in American  Muse) has been influenced by it, no doubt.  

 

The book I’d shove into everyone’s hands if I were king of the world:

None. If you tell someone they need to read something, a third of the people never will, and another third will hate it for being forced on them (remember high school?). So, let people find shit on their own. If the curiosity is there, they’ll find what they need.  

 

The book that nearly drove me to madness:

Falling Angel, by William Hjortsberg. Love this book. And the twist at the end is mind-blowing. It is also the basis for Angel Heart, the film with Mickey Rourke and Robert DeNiro. Which I also loved. King said of it “as if Chandler wrote The Exorcist,” so yeah, if that doesn’t do it for ya, I don’t know.  

 

The book I can’t keep my hands off of, no matter how many times I’ve read it:

Funny enough, I’m going to say any of the Dave Robicheaux books by James Lee Burke. He kind of writes the same book over and over again—even the characters in the books comment on this, in that Dave is always self-righteous and generally powerless and pissed off at the rich and powerful using Louisiana as their own lawless playground, but he’s written I think over 30 of them, and I’ve read every damn one. Dave is a great and frustrating character, and his sidekick Clete Purcell is one of my favorite characters in all of fiction. In fact, there is definitely some Clete in my own character, Sonny Haynes, who is now in two crime fiction books (with a  third on the way). But the writing itself from Burke is enough to return again and again. I’m not sure he has an equal as a living prose stylist. 

 

The book I’d hide in the back of my closet, pretending I’m too highbrow for it:

I’m gonna flip this question around because when you publish pulp like we do, we’re rarely too highbrow for anything. I don’t like romance novels, but that’s more a comment on the utter lack of literary chops than the content. But ‘highbrow books’ that I’ve enjoyed over the years tend to be by many of the existentialists--Sartre, Camus, and the like. I’d list a few favorites, but I expect they’ll come up over the course of this list. 

 

The book that left a scar I wish I could forget:

I actually don’t have many of these, but one I  will bring up is The Ruins, by Scott Smith. I found it unsettling, but still enjoyed it quite a bit. I did, however, recommend it to my wife, who read it on our  honeymoon, and it unsettled her to the point that she still brings it up. To this  day she’ll still say things like, ‘this isn’t going to be like The Ruins, right?’.  We’ve been married 23 years.  

 

The author who made me think, "Now that’s a soul in torment":

Born Bad, by Andrew Vachss. It is just SO dark. Now, of course, he was an attorney that represented and protected children, so the stories he heard, and the darkness within them—I imagine he HAD to write to try to exorcise some of those demons. But yeah, amazing stuff, hard to read stories, and not for the squeamish. 

 

The book I’d get a tattoo of if I had the nerve:

Well, I have multiple tattoos, so I have the nerve, but it would definitely be from the Sin City series by Frank Miller. I’ve always loved Frank’s art, and being that it’s all black and white, it lends itself quite well to inking. I’ve even looked up numerous potentialities here. Maybe someday. There are also a few lines from The Road by McCarthy that I’ve considered getting. As a side note, I do have the title of my first collection of poetry,  Everybody Pays., tattooed on my forearm.  

 

The book that made me question everything I thought I knew:

It was probably Farewell, My  Lovely (or maybe it was Lady in the Lake), which I read when I was a teen and  instantly went, ‘holy shit, this has so much fucking style.’ I had read a lot of  Encyclopedia Brown to that point (early fave) and a TON of Stephen King (that hasn’t changed), but Marlowe just came across as such a fully fleshed out person on the page. I’ve mentioned this before on the podcast, but it was Chandler who made me go…I may be able to DO THIS. King, whom I love, was always an unreachable thing as I thought about the leap he asks readers to take on a piece-by-piece basis, but the Marlowe series made me go, ‘okay, this is a voice I understand.’  That’s about as simple as I can say it. 

 

The book that’s so damn good I’d never loan it out:

This question cracks me up, because the basis of it is SO TRUE. I do NOT like loaning books out unless I know the person very well and they have a track record of returning them. I’ve loaned books to close friends and family members, and I’ll ask about it a year later (annoyed they haven’t returned it or spoken about it yet) and they have this blank look on their face, and I know it’s not only gone but they don’t even have a clue what happened to it and I feel like punching them in the face. So…lend carefully, my friends. Also, and I realize how precious and ridiculous this sounds, but you have to also take into account whether the person is settled in some way. If they’re moving all the time? The answer is no. If they have toddlers and their house is chaos?  Send them a link to buy it. Truth is, those of us who live literature (like many of you) have a kinship with these books, and our editions OF these books (some have clear packing tape on the spine to keep it intact, notes inside, signed copies, etc.), that others simply don’t get. So, ‘NO’ is an appropriate answer sometimes.

 

The book that’s been my companion through the darkest nights:

Either What Work Is or The  Simple Truth, which are poetry collections by Phillip Levine. His ability to write profound truths simply is just ridiculous. The old saying of ‘artists make the complex look simple’ certainly applies to Mr. Levine. Just an enormous writer. I go back to ‘What Work Is’ or ‘Soloing’ or ‘The Simple Truth’ or ‘My Father with Cigarette 12 Years Before the Nazis Could Break His Heart’ numerous times a year. Honestly, I get a little foggy just bringing it up. It’s like a lifeline to humanity, a shore to return to when I’m lost and I don’t even know it. 

 

The book I’d throw in someone’s face during a heated argument:

Probably my hardback version of The Stand. It’s over a thousand pages, so it’d hurt. 

 

The book that reminds me of a lost love or regret:

Not necessarily on a personal level, just on an overall ‘My God what is this life we’re in’ kind of sense would be The Fall by Albert Camus. It is a study on regret and lost time, on rationalization under even the worst circumstances, and the whole experience is haunting as hell. Add to that the quite unreliable narrator, and it’s a book I think about quite often. 

 

The book I wish I could have written, but know I never could:

Almost anything by Tolkien. I was a total D&D nerd, and loved the fantasy worlds created by Tolkien, and then later by Gary Gygax (what a name), and loved the LOTR movies as well. The Hobbit movies, are not quite the same, but still loved going back into that world. And here I  am, decades later, a writer--and I write crime fiction, poetry, and westerns. Never even attempted a fantasy story. Ever. Not once. And the detail with which Tolkien inhabited these tales with—the languages he created, the songs, the family trees, the centuries as they passed—it makes me tired just thinking about it. Love ‘em, but I have no idea how he did it. 

 

The book that makes me want to drink myself into oblivion:

Either Pop. 1280 or The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. They’re very claustrophobic books, and you know as a reader you can’t change the outcome, and you’re not going to get good news, but you keep reading. And keep reading. It’s a wonderful, incredibly frustrating experience, but a lot of Thompson’s stuff was like that. If you root for the good guy, you probably want to avoid Jim. 

 

The book that’s been my refuge from the world’s cruelty:

Run with the Hunted, the Bukowski Reader. The thing with Buk is that he was great…but he was only great sometimes,  and he published damn near everything he wrote. So, when you really get into the Buk collections, it can become tiresome, even derivative at times, but this collection has some of his best, and man is his best good. It contains both poems and shorts, as well as excerpts from some of the novels, and is strong throughout. Buk has always been a bit of a refuge, a middle finger to the world when you need one, a consoling soul on the dark nights, and this book collects much of that. It is also a book I made the mistake of lending out one time, and I never saw it again (see above question). And when I asked about it, the dude never responded. Bastard. Had to buy another and break it in.