Jackson Ellis’s Black Days is a profound and surprising novel.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“A deeply depressed man takes a break from life via cryogenic hibernation and wakes to a world of trouble. . . . This is a strange and marvelously unpredictable tale, one that raises provocative questions about the tension between scientific progress and moral goodness. The narrative is intelligently conceived and executed, and refreshingly original. A compelling plot infused with philosophical vitality.”
In his own words, here is Jackson Ellis’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Black Days:
I’ll readily admit that Black Days – the follow-up to my debut, the historical novel Lords of St. Thomas, – has an odd plot. Set in the early 1990s, the story introduces us to a divorced man, Daniel Fassett, who is just weeks from his retirement. Unfortunately, on Christmas Eve, 1992, Daniel crashes his pickup into Vermont’s Mad River. Though he does not drown, Daniel suffers hypoxic shock and winds up in a four-month-long coma, interrupting his planned retirement and ruining his finances.
Hopelessly depressed, unable to cope with his ongoing hard luck, and desperate for escape, Daniel enlists the aid of a retired local physician to take part in a wild experiment: overwinter human hibernation.
Is it a horror novel? Science fiction? Rural noir? You could make a case for those genres. But to me, Black Days is simply a tale of the lengths some people will go to in order to escape a life in which they feel trapped by things beyond their control – specifically, the conventions of society, the losses of life and love, and the random cruelty of intractable fate.
Here are some songs I was listening to while writing, plus a few more that I feel thematically tie in to the novel.
“Walking the Cow” by Daniel Johnston
I have long loved Johnston’s lyrics. Somehow, he manages to be both devastatingly blunt and poetically cryptic, often in the same song: “I tried to point my finger, but the wind was blowing me around in circles,” he sings. It’s hard to know exactly what Daniel was aiming for in his life when he wrote this lyric, but it’s easy to relate to. Many people live lives that take them to places – or keep them rooted in places – that they don’t always expect to end up. “I really don’t know how I came here,” he sings in the first refrain. “I really don’t know why I’m staying here.” Who hasn’t felt like that?
The second refrain, at the song’s end, slightly alters the lyrics: “I really don’t know what I have to fear…I really don’t know what I have to care,” echoing the solemn resignation that many people come to feel later in life as they try to accept their lot.
Late on the night of September 10, 2019, I was in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I was on the couch at my mother-in-law’s house using my laptop, looking up a way to contact Daniel. I had hoped to reach out to him to see if I could hire him to draw a simple pen-and-ink sketch for the frontispiece of Black Days. I caught a flight early the next morning, and when I landed back in the States, he was dead.
His vocals and the rough recording of the song as it appears on his album, Hi, How Are You, can be tough to listen to. It’s not for everyone. “Walking the Cow” has been covered many times, but I always especially liked Pearl Jam’s live acoustic cover at the 1994 Bridge Benefit.
Daniel Fassett, in Black Days, is named after Johnston.
“Fell On Black Days” by Soundgarden
Songwriter Chris Cornell once said of this song, “’Fell on Black Days’ was like this ongoing fear I’ve had for years … It’s a feeling that everyone gets. You’re happy with your life, everything’s going well, things are exciting – when all of a sudden you realize you’re unhappy in the extreme, to the point of being really, really scared. There’s no particular event you can pin the feeling down to, it’s just that you realize one day that everything in your life is fucked.”
In Black Days, Daniel Fassett gets to that point, though I’d say his problems are less enigmatic. But then, when you read many of Chris Cornell’s lyrics, his fears and his depression seem pretty obvious too. In retrospect, with regard to how his life ended, he seemed disenchanted, disappointed in himself, and lonely, despite undoubtedly having friends and family who cared for him. Not to mention, he faced the terror that comes with aging, in that you reach a point where you realize your personal history – what you’ve done and what you’ve not done – is unalterable. It can be painful to swallow.
The title of my book is a direct reference to the song. The dark times, the “black days,” are periods we all go through. But it’s also quite literal, in that Daniel Fassett finds that the times when he’s in a coma, unconscious, or in a state of torpor – these are the times when life is most tolerable for him.
“Then everything went black,” he narrates. “I’ve had a lot of days like that.”
“Big Empty” by Stone Temple Pilots
I completed the first draft of Black Days quite a long time ago. It was written in a furious spree at the end of 2015, finalized in the early days of 2016.
A month before I finished, former Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland was found dead. I broke out some of the old STP CDs and cassette tapes from my youth and was listening to them quite a bit during the time I was finishing the initial draft.
I remembered how much I enjoyed “Big Empty.” Thematically, the song’s lyrics reflect the alienation Daniel feels in the story, especially in regards to his strained relationship with his ex-wife. I snuck the title of this song into the text. I wonder if any readers will find it.
Am I showing my age with these picks so far?
“Don’t Know Why” by Kostars (with Ween)
This is a deep cut from the ‘90s courtesy of an underrated Luscious Jackson side project. I really like Ween’s contributions here, as the harmonized duet of male and female vocals perfectly captures the angst and heartache of separation: “Now you’re gone, can’t sleep at night / Lately every night’s a fight / To keep you out of heart and soul and mind / Thoughts of you won’t let me go / ‘Cause you just broke my heart you know.”
Daniel’s ex-wife, Sandy, leaves him in 1980, a dozen years before the main events of Black Days commence. However, she moves into the house across the road from him, the only other house atop the hill where they live. This is actually based on a divorced couple I was aware of here in Vermont. Daniel spends his later years pining for his ex-wife, and I have to believe that even though she left him, she misses him as well.
There is a part of the book where Daniel awakens before the sunrise, and as he is taking his morning coffee at his breakfast nook, he notices Sandy’s light flicker on across the way, and he watches her silhouette as she has her coffee alone too. It is one of my own personal favorite passages in Black Days.
“Full On” By Samiam
“I’m the one with the unreached goals / Never thought I would sink so low,” sings Jason Beebout on “Full On.”
Though this applies to Daniel in Black Days, it also could be said for other characters, including his son, Ralphie, and his older friend, the retired Dr. William Butcher. It is a not-uncommon refrain for many, I am sure, who feel that they’ve failed themselves, at least in part, by not living up to goals or expectations.
Daniel learns that others feel this way, yet fails to commiserate and take comfort in the fact that he’s not alone.
“Proud Mary” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
I believe this is the only song that is directly named in Black Days.
Just before his near-fatal accident on Christmas Eve, Daniel is driving along, sipping coffee and “listening to ‘Proud Mary’ for the millionth time.” Then he hits a patch of black ice. CCR is the last thing he hears before the lights go out.
When you get in a bad accident, time seems to come to a halt. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to capture everything that Daniel was feeling, hearing, tasting, and seeing in the moment. Of course, I had to include music. CCR seemed like an obvious choice, as I’d estimate at least 70 percent of all pickups in the ‘80s and early ‘90s had the CCR greatest hits comp Chronicle permanently inserted in the tape deck.
“King of Pain” by The Police
The lyrics of this track are pretty on the nose, but because the song is so “poppy” I never gave much thought to the hurt in the lyrics. It’s a pity party, sure, but it’s sincere, and it works. It could be Daniel’s theme song.
Jeremy Enigk of Sunny Day Real Estate performed a haunting version of this song during a solo tour that really emphasizes its somberness.
“Cold as Ice” by Foreigner
Speaking of “on the nose,” how about including “Cold as Ice” in the playlist of a story about a divorced man who literally freezes himself?
Lou Barlow did a pretty good solo cover of this under the Sebadoh banner.
“Flirted With You All My Life” by Vic Chesnutt
An absolute heartbreaker of a song, “Flirted With You All My Life” is Chesnutt’s ode to both his dead mother and to thoughts of suicide. Likewise, Daniel flirts with death following his car accident, and then again when he purposefully enters a state of cold-induced torpor. But echoing Chesnutt’s lyrics regarding death, Daniel would readily admit, “I’m not ready.”
“Over the Edge” by the Wipers
Most characters in Black Days are pushed by one external force or another to (or close to) their breaking points. Daniel, his children and wife, and the local physician, Dr. William Butcher, all come close to snapping – and in some cases, well… I’m not interested in giving too much away, but Greg Sage’s rage and frustration perfectly reflect the mindset of the characters who do indeed lose their grip on reality.
Jackson Ellis is a writer and editor from Vermont who has also spent time living in Nevada and Montana. His short fiction has appeared in The Vermont Literary Review, Sheepshead Review, Broken Pencil, The Birmingham Arts Journal, East Coast Literary Review, Midwest Literary Magazine, and The Journal of Microliterature. He co-published VerbicideMagazine.com, which he founded as a print periodical in 1999. His debut, Lords of St. Thomas, received the 2017 Howard Frank Mosher First Novel Prize.