In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
The stories in Mallory Smart’s collection Book of David masterfully unearth the darknesses found in the American Midwest.
Eric Larocca wrote of the book:
“Every reader who peers into the pitch-black maw of Book of David unwittingly surrenders and bears witness to a gospel of cruelty engraved in viciousness, darkness, and unrelenting rot. Bewildering and utterly breathtaking…”
In her own words, here is Mallory Smart’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Book of David:
I’ve been calling Book of David Midwest rot instead of Midwest horror. There are basements, highways, dead friends, old technology, local legends, bad weather, and people who stick around longer than they probably should. There’s also Dave. He keeps showing up.
This isn’t exactly a soundtrack to the book. Some of these songs were around while I was writing it. Some feel like the Midwest I know. Some remind me of people I haven’t seen in years. Some just sound like something bad is about to happen.
Defiance, Ohio — “You Are Loved”
Defiance, Ohio sounds like basements to me. Not creepy basements. The basements where you ended up when you were young because nobody had enough money to go anywhere and there was usually an old couch down there.
There are people you spend so much time with growing up that you don’t realize you’re developing rituals. You sit in the same places. Tell the same stories. Nobody schedules any of this. It just happens.
Then you get older and keeping those people in your life becomes actual work. Somebody moves. Somebody gets married. Somebody has a kid. Suddenly you’re picking a Saturday three weeks from now for something that used to happen because it was Saturday and everyone was around.
“You Are Loved” gets at the sadness of that without making it completely depressing.
Broken Social Scene — “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl”
There are people I knew as teenagers who are still teenagers when I think about them. I know they’re somewhere being adults now, but that isn’t the person who lives in my head.
“Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” has always felt a little unsettling to me for that reason. Nostalgia gets strange when you stay inside it too long. Eventually you’re remembering your memory of someone.
Steve Miller Band — “The Joker”
“The Joker” matters inside Book of David. I don’t really want to say why.
I’m fascinated by the way a song can stop belonging to the person who made it and start belonging to somebody you knew. Music is particularly good at haunting people because you don’t get much say in when you hear it. You can throw away an object. You can stop going somewhere. You have very little control over what starts playing while you’re standing in a Walgreens.
Smashing Pumpkins — “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, so Smashing Pumpkins was inevitable.
I thought about picking “1979,” but that feels almost too easy. “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” feels closer to the Midwest I actually know.
My Midwest isn’t endless cornfields. It’s strip malls and subdivisions and parking lots and highways. It’s being close enough to Chicago that Chicago is always there, but far enough away that you’re still going home at the end of the night.
When I was younger, there was always this idea that something more interesting was happening somewhere else. Sometimes that somewhere else was only twenty miles away. You could drive there. You could move there. You could become whatever version of yourself you imagined existed there.
The suburbs are strange because they’re designed around movement. Roads everywhere. Highways everywhere. Cars everywhere. Everyone can theoretically leave.
Then you grow up and realize how many people stayed.
That contradiction feels like the Midwest to me. Restlessness mixed with an incredible ability to remain exactly where you are.
Sufjan Stevens — “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”
I grew up around Chicago, where John Wayne Gacy is part of the cultural memory whether you want him to be or not.
What has always disturbed me most is how ordinary everything around him looked. A suburban house. A neighborhood. People next door.
Sufjan Stevens makes the song quiet when the subject seems like it should demand noise. I think that makes it worse.
I’ve never needed horror to happen somewhere gothic. Give me a normal house with something wrong inside it.
Frank Turner — “Polaroid Picture”
A photograph is a strange attempt at preservation. Here is proof everyone stood together once. Here is what you looked like before you knew what happened next.
I have a strange attachment to dead technology and physical things that outlive whatever they were supposed to preserve.
Sometimes the object survives the relationship.
Sometimes it survives the person.
Echo & the Bunnymen — “The Killing Moon”
Some songs already sound haunted.
“The Killing Moon” has this sense that whatever is going to happen has already been decided and everyone else is just catching up. I like horror that works that way too. Nothing has happened yet, but you already know the night isn’t going to end the way everyone expected.
Morrissey — “Ouija Board, Ouija Board”
One of my favorite things about ghost stories is how quickly the supernatural becomes inconvenient.
Everyone desperately wants proof of life after death until a dead person actually starts bothering them.
“Ouija Board, Ouija Board” is spooky, melodramatic and a little absurd. I assume the dead would still be annoying too.
Donovan — “Season of the Witch”
I like horror most before I know exactly what’s wrong.
The room looks the same. Everyone is acting normally. Something has shifted, but nobody can tell you what.
“Season of the Witch” lives in that moment. It doesn’t explain itself, and I don’t want it to.
Violent Femmes — “Country Death Song”
If someone asked me for one song that sounds like Midwest rot, I might give them “Country Death Song.”
The Violent Femmes are from Milwaukee, but it’s more than geography. The song feels like something somebody heard from somebody who heard it from somebody else. By the time it reaches you, everything terrible has already happened.
That’s how local legends worked when I was growing up. A road had a story. A bridge had a story. A house had a story. Somebody knew somebody who knew what happened there.
The details changed depending on who told it.
That was part of the fun.
I’m interested in the life a story develops after the actual event is over. Maybe there was a real person at the center once. For a while people remember the person. Then they remember what happened to them. Eventually people who never knew them are telling the story too.
The Midwest is particularly good at this. There are places where you can drive past an ordinary patch of road and somebody in the car will tell you not to stop there. Ask why and suddenly you’re hearing about something that supposedly happened thirty years ago.
Maybe it happened. Maybe it didn’t happen exactly that way.
The story survived either way.
Lana Del Rey — “Tulsa Jesus Freak”
I’ve always been interested in the point where devotion to an idea turns into devotion to a person. America is particularly good at blurring those lines. Religion becomes celebrity. Celebrity becomes mythology. A person becomes a symbol people can use for whatever they need.
“Tulsa Jesus Freak” has that strange combination of devotion, desire and American geography.
Even the title sounds like somebody you’ve heard stories about but never actually met.
This is the song I keep playing now.
I started listening to it constantly around the time Book of David stopped feeling like something I’d been working on and started feeling like something that was actually going to exist outside my computer. I don’t know why this became the song. It just did.
Most of the songs on this playlist remind me of something that already happened. “The Cage” is different. Whatever memory I’m eventually going to associate with it is happening right now.
Ten years from now, I’ll probably hear it and remember this period of my life.
I have no idea what part.
Ramshackle Glory — “Bitter Old Man”
Everybody knows some version of the guy in “Bitter Old Man.”
He’s somebody’s friend. Somebody’s ex. Somebody you used to see constantly and now only hear about when something happens.
I like characters who’ve had enough time to disappoint themselves. Book of David has a few.
Johnny Cash — “The Man Comes Around”
This had to be last.
“The Man Comes Around” sounds like an ending before it even starts. Cash pulls from Revelation and doesn’t have to do much to make it frightening. Horsemen. Judgment. Death. The end of everything.
I love the distance between apocalyptic imagery and the way people actually experience catastrophe. The world might be ending, but somebody still needs gas. Somebody’s phone is dying. Somebody is pissed off about something that stopped mattering an hour ago. People don’t suddenly understand the significance of the moment just because it’s significant.
Book of David starts with small things too. Friends. Roads. Basements. Old objects. Stories people tell each other.
Then things get worse.
Johnny Cash can take it from there.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Mallory Smart’s playlist for her novel I Keep My Visions to Myself
Mallory Smart is a Chicago-based writer, editor-in-chief of Maudlin House, and podcast host.