By JONATHAN CARROLL (St. Martin’s Press; 1990)
Here’s a typically odd and unpredictable contemporary fantasy by the inimitable Jonathan Carroll, a 76-page novella about all sorts of things. BLACK COCKTAIL is Carroll’s shortest book, yet also one of his most thematically wide-ranging.
The narrator is one Ingram York, the Los Angeles based host of OFF THE WALL, a radio talk show whose guests consist of “full blown kooks.” Ingram’s compulsive storytelling buddy Michael Billa, a fellow who “had things to say and knew you were going to like them and want more, but you had to fix your pace to his and not show impatience,” relates a highly fanciful story (storytelling and unreliable narrators being major components of this book). Michael’s allegedly true story involves Clinton Diex, a “very, very crazy” childhood friend who disappeared after killing a boy at age fifteen, but has reentered Michael’s life—and hasn’t grown any older.
From BLACK COCKTAIL, Dave McKean Illustrator
Next the fifteen-year-old Clinton contacts Ingram to reveal the “truth”: Michael has performed some sort of spell that has stopped Clinton from ageing. The next day, however, Ingram’s producer informs him that he spotted these two apparent enemies dining together, suggesting both were being misleading in their respective explanations of the Michael-Clinton dynamic. This leads to a deliriously weird finale in which the mystical explanation to all this lunacy is revealed, and you can rest assured that it’s as nutty as anything dreamed up by Carroll in any of his other books (which include THE LAND OF LAUGHS and BONES OF THE MOON)—which is to say, as nutty as anything written by anyone.
From BLACK COCKTAIL, Dave McKean Illustrator
In true Jonathan Carroll fashion, BLACK COCKTAIL offers far more than supernatural shenanigans. Astute moral and philosophical digressions are contained in the proclivities of Ingram’s talk show guests (such as an unnerving description of a state-appointed interrogator who “used the same methods to win his wife as he had to get information out of hundreds of doomed prisoners”), as well as the many other weird occurrences, all explained (not entirely satisfactorily) by the ending. Rounding things out are dreamy black and white illustrations by comic book legend Dave McKean.