The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss by Dennis McKenna Read Free Book Online Page B

passion for reading. During his illness he discovered the novels of Zane Grey, which he loved. He also devoured a lot of early science fiction, a genre that, thanks to him, had a huge impact on Terence and me. His favorites included the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, especially the Tarzan and Barsoom books, the latter set amid a doomed civilization on Mars; and the early Tom Swift novels, a series created by Edward Stratemeyer in 1910. In my preteens, I became similarly enamored of a second series that began in 1954 and featured Tom Swift, Jr., the elder Swift’s brilliant son. The closest analog to Tom Swift, Jr. in pop culture today may be Tony Stark, the hero of the popular Iron Man movies starring Robert Downey, Jr. Stark is smart, technically savvy, rebellious, handsome, and sexy, with oodles of money and plenty of cool toys, not to mention babes. The Swift series put less emphasis on girls, but their heroes represented the same fantasy ideal for our father and me that Stark surely does for young males today.
    After consuming all those pulp adventure novels, it’s little wonder that our father, his health restored, left Salida shortly after high school in 1933 to seek his fortune. That quest took him to Delta, where, as mentioned, he sold shoes and fell for an older woman, two years older, my mother, Hadie Kemp. He was twenty-two when they married in 1937. Seven years later, he’d find himself in a B-17 flying missions aimed at crippling the Nazi’s industrial base.
    Our father never talked much about his experiences during the war. His reticence stemmed from the fact that his combat experiences were traumatic, as they were for many soldiers; the horrors of war would shadow my father for the rest of his life. No wonder he was reluctant to discuss events that must have seemed best forgotten. During the 1950s, he developed vitiligo, a skin disease he described as an “allergy to sunlight.” He always wore large hats and long-sleeved shirts to minimize his exposure to the sun, which for an outdoorsman was a major inconvenience. His skin became mottled with large white patches amid normally pigmented skin, and sunlight would exacerbate this condition. Vitiligo struck me as mysterious at the time, but a minute’s research on the Internet reveals a wealth of information about this autoimmune disorder. Its exact mechanisms remain unclear, but some say that stress and trauma may be triggering factors. He may have had a genetic predisposition to the condition that his wartime ordeal activated. As the decade wore on, his symptoms gradually faded.
    What didn’t fade, however, was his new determination to seek “normalcy” at any cost. After the war, he seemed to retreat from his former devil-may-care persona. He still loved adventure novels, but he wanted only to settle down and live quietly. In this respect he was not alone. The craving for stability was common among his generation, and especially among those who had fought in the war. The goal was not to stand out too much.
    On the cultural level this found expression in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit , the 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson that later became a movie. The story chronicles the postwar experiences of Tom Rath and his wife Betsy as they struggle to find happiness in a material world bereft of spiritual meaning. I don’t know if our father was familiar with either version, let alone whether the story spoke to him. I rather doubt it, though I’m pretty sure our mother read the book. I do know my father’s war experiences deeply influenced him and, in turn, his relationships with Terence and me. He viewed himself as an average guy, and that’s what he wanted to be—just one of the herd. This rather unappealing archetype was held up to Terence and me as an ideal throughout the 1960s and sparked many an argument. The last thing we wanted to be was average or normal. In fact, the counterculture was a reaction against that ideal. Like others in our generation, we