Why create such art? I agree with Kenneth Burke in The Philosophy of Literary Form. After first noting:

Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable.

And expanding:

And if it leads us to a state of acquiescence at a time when the very basis of moral integration is in question, we get a paradox whereby the soundest adjunct to ethics, the aesthetic, threatens to uphold an unethical condition. For this reason it seems that under conditions of competitive capitalism there must necessarily be a large corrective or propaganda element in art.

He then qualifies:

Our thesis is by no means intended to imply that “pure” art or “acquiescent” art should be abandoned. There are two kinds of “toleration.” Even if a given state of affairs is found, on intellectualistic grounds, to be intolerable, the fact remains that as long as it is with us we must more or less contrive to “tolerate” it. Even though we might prefer to alter radically the present structure of production and distribution through the profit motive, the fact remains that we cannot so alter it forthwith. Hence, along with our efforts to alter it, must go the demand for an imaginative equipment that helps to make it tolerable while it lasts. Much of the “pure” or acquiescent art of today serves this invaluable psychological end. For this reason the great popular comedians or handsome movie stars are rightly the idols of the people. Likewise the literature of sentimentality, however annoying and self-deceptive it may seem to the hardened “intellectual,” is following in a direction basically so sound that one might wish more of our pretentious authors were attempting to do the same thing more pretentiously.

Burke immediately adds telling commentary that might be considered briefly in light of the current movie Bugonia (also Eddington and to a lesser extent One Battle After Another):

On the other hand, much of the harsh literature now being turned out in the name of the “proletariat” seems inadequate on either count. It is questionable as propaganda, since it shows us so little of the qualities in mankind worth saving. And it is questionable as “pure” art, since by substituting a cult of disaster for a cult of amenities it “promotes our acquiescence” to sheer dismalness. Too often, alas, it serves as a mere device whereby the neuroses of the decaying bourgeois structure are simply transferred to the symbols of workingmen. Perhaps more of Dickens is needed, even at the risk of excessive tearfulness.

Burke’s critique basically describes Bugonia nearly a century before the fact. Wittingly or not, Bugonia is a type of would-be proletarian movie that falls on its face all the way through. The movie is mostly trite, thin, vacuous, though could easily have been otherwise, but if you fill a film with too many psychos and then have the one sane character kill himself — what in the world are you doing? — neurotic spectacle for the sake of spectacle. Lurching from one spectacle to another, as with One Battle After Another, only more so. Yes, the actors can be endearing but to essentially no end. It’s worth repeating that such a film:

shows us so little of the qualities in mankind worth saving. And it is questionable as “pure” art, since by substituting a cult of disaster for a cult of amenities it “promotes our acquiescence” to sheer dismalness. Too often, alas, it serves as a mere device whereby the neuroses of the decaying bourgeois structure are simply transferred to the symbols of workingmen.

There is some of this in One Battle After Another, while there is much more of it in Bugonia, also Eddington. What viewers get stuck with are highfalutin creators looking down at clichéd grotesques whom they pick apart and condemn. The most sane workingman character in Bugonia oddly kills himself, and the warehouse packing employee protagonist gets blown up unceremoniously due to his baseless delusion that he can successfully confront unknown all-powerful aliens controlling the world.

So Bugonia is all blow up this insane clown, suicide that sad clown, haha the CEOs really are monstrous unknowable aliens, tee hee, look, everyone’s dead! Except it was the collective death of the social IQ that this movie wrought.

Meanwhile, Vampire, Werewolf, and Zombie Walk into a Bar largely though not entirely focuses on the psychological savvy and heroic — though not on the revolutionary perceptive and heroic vitality of far more liberatory or propagandistic stories. The two opening chapters are publicly available here in this post, with the remaining two dozen chapters of Part One behind the paywall.

What’s the story about?

Three monsters walk into a barn-become-bar in Appalachia on Halloween. The novel is an Appalachian horror-comedy set deep in the mountains during a blizzard on a single holiday night, inspired by the West-Virginia-set, and now classic, horror-comedy movie, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. The novel is also a romantic comedy mixed with a visceral fight for home. When Clyde Burr hosts a “Medieval Halloween” grand opening for his newly renovated barn-become-bar, three actual and outraged monsters eager to reclaim their holiday hunting grounds — Vampire, Werewolf, and Zombie — emerge from the surrounding woods and tear into the revelers one by one.

As the carnage escalates, the survivors form a terrified alliance: Clyde, the earnest but hapless bar owner; Avonna, his visiting childhood friend with Hollywood dreams; Elmo, his alcoholic and guilt-haunted neighbor; and Tuari, a Manahoac [Native] man seeking to reclaim ancestral land now trespassed by Clyde’s bar.

Each human has a competing vision for the land — and so do the monsters, who claim a millennia-old Appalachian cavern below the bar as their holiday home. Amid the horrific frenzy in heavily armed Appalachia where the fantastical merges with the all-too realistic — axes, fangs, flying barstools, medieval pikes, modern flame-throwers, and a triple-barrel shotgun — run universal themes of belonging and conflict. The humans fight and work for an unexpected new community built on shared land, shared loss, and new life.

Avonna Lane hit the gravel ruts too fast, and Clyde’s barn reared up out of the dark like something that had grown there rather than been built – half bar, half animal.

The mountain loomed behind it, a black mass against a sky the color of painful bruises. The air tasted like snow, raw and cold, and the parking lot was already a churned-up mess of mud, cinders, and fresh slush beneath the tires of dozens of battered trucks, rusted SUVs, and old sedans.

Avonna rolled to a stop at the edge of the lot and just sat there, fingers locked around the steering wheel. The big roadside sign glowed black and white through the swirl of flurries.

He’d actually done it, she thought. The boy who used to sell hand-tied fishing flies at the farmers’ market had somehow bought an old barn and turned it into a bar. Into this.

A gust of wind blasted the car.

You came, she reminded herself. You flew across the country. You rented a car and drove into the mountains with no cell reception. You are here.

So move.

She shoved open the door. Cold punched her in the throat. Dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, she tightened her hood and tugged her cape tighter around her lace-patterned sleeves as she stepped out, sandals sticking to wet cinders. California had thinned her blood and she wasn’t dressed for the cold. The Appalachian wind knifed right through her.

The barn was all angles and shadows and overdone charm – live-edge lumber and old beams, the kind of rustic she saw all the time in California in restaurants that charged eighteen dollars for toast. Except this was real. The old white pine timber frame bore the scars of its birthing and age – hatchet marks, burn streaks, and the feeling that something more enormous than even the weather had once pressed against the posts but never broken them.

The barn was huge. It felt hungry. Hungry for people and beasts to fill it. Maybe tonight.

“Congratulations, Clyde,” she murmured. “You got your gently used barn.”

The parking lot was crowded with cars haphazardly parked. Costumed patrons trudged toward the entry in clumps – an ogre in work boots, a princess in a puffy prom dress, a cowboy in an old sweat-stained hat. People had gone all out in a place where Halloween seemed to run in the blood like it ran in the hills, Clyde always said, dark and dangerous.

Over the entry door, a banner drooped slightly in the damp and cold.

Below it, Clyde had duct-taped a second sign in blocky marker:

Avonna snorted. Of course Clyde had written that. He was proud of it. No internet yet! The wide world be damned. Clyde Burr loved two things more than anything else – medieval nonsense and country living.

And, once, he’d loved her. Truly, and deeply, and forever. And she’d left him.

Clyde Burr loved Avonna Lane. Maybe he still did. Maybe he always would. Avonna would find out.

Her fingers brushed the daggers at her ankles, bone-handled and absurdly elegant, strapped over bare skin above her mismatched sandals. One black, one red. The metal and bone his birthday gift to her. She’d gotten the package in LA a month ago – no note, just the blades and a receipt with his name on it.

“You’ll visit for Halloween, right?” he’d said on the phone after she’d called to thank him. “It’s the grand opening, Von. Just one night. For luck.”

She said, “Maybe.” Which, in Hollywood, meant no. But here she was.

The old man waited for Clyde on the gravel drive, standing in the peculiar stillness of late autumn dusk – the hour when colors sink into the land. Around him the foothills slumped like sleeping animals, the ridges darkened with red spruce and patches of skeleton-birch that gleamed faintly in the dying light. The barn stood behind him, tall and broad like a big bad creature that would not be moved. Its boards were much older than the old man himself, blackened and grooved with age that didn’t seem architectural so much as geologic. There was something in its posture, in the strength of its roofline, that suggested the barn and its wood block of materials had once been an intimate and living part of the mountain and might still be so.

Clyde felt all this the moment he stepped out from his truck, though the awareness wasn’t heady but more pressure in his chest and something twisting, scratching to be known. He shut the driver’s door softly, as if to not disturb the air.

The old man’s grin was too large for his face. It stretched from cheek to cheek without nuance, as though he’d practiced it in a mirror until he’d removed all the muscles that would normally modify his expression into something human. His eyes were small, sharp, set too deep. When he held out his hand, Clyde saw that the fingers were stained the color of iron, and that the nails were thick and ridged as if from years of tapping stone.

“You made good time,” the old man said. His voice was worn but assured. The man had lived long and borne many harsh winters.

“The roads are clear,” Clyde answered. His own voice felt clumsy.

“For now,” the old man said, the grin fixed. “Storms come quick. The mountains get ground down because of it.”

“Don’t I know it.” Clyde nodded toward the barn. “So. This is it.”

The old man’s grin sharpened. “This is it.” He seemed almost too pleased to be selling.

They walked toward the barn. The gravel shifted under Clyde’s boots in a way that felt unsettled, as though the stones were not resting on soil but on hollows beneath. The barn loomed taller as they approached, the air grew colder – not from the coming storm, Clyde thought later, but from the structure itself. It exhaled cold, as though its interior were much larger and deeper than its exterior suggested. Old drafts moved through the building with purpose. Breathing.

“You said your grandfather kept it up,” Clyde said. “Looks great.” He was trying to replace the feel of the unusual with the ordinary.

“Great-grandfather,” the old man corrected. “He built the first part of it. The aboveground part. The rest–” The man stopped walking and gestured vaguely toward the ground. “The rest was already here. Just needed uncovered.”

Clyde felt a cold line of steel slip under his ribs. “Uncovered?”

The old man didn’t elaborate. He pushed open the barn’s main door, which groaned like something waking from a long sleep. Dust rose in the dim interior, swirling in the draft.

It smelled wrong.

Not of hay or mold or age, but of something mineral and wet, like the breath from the mouth of a deep cave.

“Come see,” the old man insisted.

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