Make My Bed In Hell

by John Sanford

Aaron Platt has spent every day of his life breaking his back to scrape a living from the rocky, played-out fields of the Adirondack farm he inherited from his sadistic father. One winter morning, he follows footprints in the snow to his barn and discovers a man freezing to death in a horse stall. What unfolds between the two men, past and present, is a brisk, gritty depiction of crime and punishment. But their harrowing story is more than that, exposing the shocking hypocrisy of the people who live in the nearby bucolic town—a legacy of hatred that reaches back to the violent founding of the nation.

This literary masterpiece includes a new Afterword by Jack Mearns, author of John An Annotated Bibliography.

Audible Audio

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

John Sanford was an American screenwriter and author who wrote 24 books. He wrote half of his books after he was 80. Sanford was a member of the Communist Party with his screenwriter wife effectively ending their Hollywood career after they refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. After his wife died in 1989, Sanford devoted his writing to exploring their 50-year marriage. Sanford left three unpublished books.

Also published under pseudonym John B. Sanford and his birth name Julian L. Shapiro.

Reviews

[WJEP · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story alternates between the poetic babblings of a dying vagrant and the testimony of the clodhopper that found him. It turns out the two are not strangers. Since this is testimony at an inquest, the reader knows something unlawful must have happened. The writing gets mighty arty but that didn't bother me because Sanford is a unrestrained misery-ophile. The stories that the farmer tells about his cruel father, suffering mother, and insufferable wife are some of the best misery I have read: "The way I see it is, vermin's vermin whether it creeps on its belly, or flies in the air, or walks around in pants."

This book is billed as the second in a trilogy, the first being The Old Man’s Place. Except for the Adirondacks setting, the stories are unrelated.

[Bandit · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve read both John Sanford novels back to back in one day and now reviewing them I don’t want to be repetitive, suffice it to say the author’s style is very much of its time, very recognizable and very tough. Tough as in jerky, old leathery jerky, that would be the texture of Sanford’s Warrensburg books and their characters. Stretched and beaten down by life’s vagaries, used as target practices for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes and all that.
And here the main character, Aaron Platt, a man who has survived an abusive past and has labored himself to the bone ever since to eke out a living out of his land, finds another man on is property and lets him die. Not kills him, mind you, lets him die. Whether that is or isn’t a criminal offense is a a subject of a trial, which is one aspect of the narrative. The other two belong to the men themselves, a chronological autobiographical line from Aaron and a stream of consciousness ramblings from a dying man.
And then…there’s the verse. That was Sanford beginning to politicize his work and utilizing more of his historical interest to demonstrate the way America’s violent and tragic past echoes into the present (at the time) day. And he decides to do that in verse, more or less mid book, out of nowhere. Which didn’t work for me and didn’t work for great many publishers here and abroad at the time either. Sanford stuck to his guns and insisted that verse remains, which probably explains to some extent the fact that he has never really found commercial success as an author was spent his life supported by his wife, a popular screenwriter at the time.
For me, it doesn’t have so much to do with his ideology, so much as it does with a messed up storyline. It didn’t work within the novel, it didn’t fit, it screwed up the dramatic narrative and so on.
The delirious ramblings were tough enough, but verse…no, just no.
Mind you, Jack Mearns, Sanford’s biographer who provides a very good introduction (for book one) and afterword here to Brash’s Sanford’s rereleases absolutely loved it, but he seems to be a superfan, the likes of which Sanford might not have had too many of, judging, among many other things, by the scarcity of readers’ book reviews out there. I’m the first to rate and review this edition and there were only a few for his gloriously campier covered early publication under the title seventy Times Seven (for some reason Mearns didn’t go into).
Anyway…there’s a good story here, a genuinely potent tale of crime and punishment within two strikingly juxtaposing lifestyles. The main theme, I’d say, is justice, be it legal or moral variant. So it’s compelling in a way, but it isn’t an easy or an easily enjoyable read. And it screams of an author beginning to spiral into deliberate obscurity through experimentation. Which is to say I don’t regret reading Sanford and I don’t think I need to read any more of him. Warrensburg is, after all, too bleak, even conventionally fictionalized. Thanks Brash publishers.

This and more at https://advancetheplot.weebly.com/

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

The novel also goes by the title "Seventy times Seven". It is an excellent novel by a writer hurt by the black list of the 1950's

[Freddie the Know-it-all · Rating 5 out of 5]

Make My Hell In Bed

I liked this story a lot. Once it got going, I couldn't put it down. I only read in bed, before I fall asleep; the first night I was transfixed and fell asleep with it in my hand.

But the second night, I wanted my money back for about 20 pages of it. I paid for a 160-page novel and I only got 140 pages. Those missing 20 pages were some kind of "poetry" -- if that's what you call lines of words that don't make it to the right-hand margin and don't make any sense. And once you see whole pages getting italicized, you know you're in for a real index-finger beating as you try to skip ahead till the pain stops. So that second night was hell. I fell asleep swiping pages trying to find an end to this waste of whitespace.

As I was fast-forwarding I noticed the names of a couple of my heroes in that Word Gumbo: Custer, Terry, Sheridan, &c., so I stopped sprinting and took a look-see. Nope. It was mumbo-jumbo gumbo and it didn't make an atom of sense. And it's a good thing I couldn't figure it too, because in the Afterword I found out that it was a bunch of Indian-loving, anti-American bolshevism and I would have chucked it then and there. I've heard enough of that baloney for one life-time.

When the story finally started up again, it was good stuff, just like before and I'm glad I read it.

I don't feel I gotta put this poetry ambush in a spoiler. For those of you who actually like poetry, you're in for a treat, I guess. (But, frankly, I think you're fakers. You don't like un-rhyming poetry any more than I do, but you're afraid people will think you're a dummy if you say so.) And for those of us who'd rather eat bugs than even just look at stuff that comes up short of the right-margin, I figure I'm doing you a favor by warning you.

[Diane Yackley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant narrative in a time and place I have little understanding. Some of the verbiage are obsolete or never used but taking in the sum of the story, the writing style and the story itself it is noteworthy and well worth reading.

[RingleyFamily · Rating 1 out of 5]

Might be the worse book I've ever read.

This book was confusing, random, and left me perplexed. I am a fan of John Sanford other works and expected the same with this book.

[Josie M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, I grabbed this book out of a free bin at my local bookstore. The short summary on the back cover alluded to some kind of murder mystery on a farm, and the original publish date was 1939, and that combination was intriguing enough for me to grab it for free. I did not understand what was happening in the beginning at all, but one of my OCD tendencies is that I can’t not finish a book once I’ve started (or it will follow me around for the rest of my life). I kept trudging through like what the hell is this? Until, maybe a quarter of the way through, storylines started to click, and it all fell into place in my brain. From that point, I understood that this book is actually genius. The way it is written, taking us back and forth across multiple timelines - essentially the present tense of Platt on the witness stand for a crime and the leading up to that present tense (with multiple narrators in the leading up to the present tense timeline), and no chapters but just one long rambling with asterisks - definitely makes it all seem like gibberish to start, but when you realize how these moving parts are actually one and the same and every section is deliberately interlaced with the other, you have to give Sanford a lot of credit, especially considering the date of publish. To that effect, the underlying themes and messaging here of life and law in these old small towns in super interesting and enraging, and somehow magically timeless. I absolutely love the inclusion of the excerpt from Wharton’s Criminal Law after the last page. Read this book. Do not give up on this book.

[Erika Powers · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only liked the suffering and misery parts. Didnt like the poetic ramblings, parts w the hookers i didnt see the connection of those relationships to the other characters, and the hidden past was never revealed - or i was too befuddled w the ramblings I didnt get it. But i listened on audio tape and thats harder to pay attention.

[James Edward Mills · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is perhaps one of the worst books I have ever read in my entire life. My level of disappointment could not be more profound. I gave it every opportunity and the sprawling convoluted and disjointed narrative, never could engage my fully committed attention.
These are hours of my life I will never get back and sorely regret having wasted.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok read

[MJ · Rating 1 out of 5]

dnf

[Jason McCracken · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was something good here but the writing was a bit dull and I have no idea what it was trying to say.

[Ken Wagner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Watch What You Decide

I enjoyed the narrative that seemed to go from one subject to the next. It brings up how morally one can step over the line for different reasons.

[ANITA STANLEY · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book left me confused.

[Sam Hicks · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started well, then became ridiculous. A simple tale made tricksy in all the wrong ways by a writer desperate to be seen as experimental.

[Daria Lynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Literary story, interesting and confusing, lol. Yet powerful and worth a read. Wish my library had #1 and #3 in the trilogy.

[Kathy Garlow · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yuck!!!!!!!

[Sherry]

First Edition 1939