The Eater of Darkness

by Robert M. Coates

American expat name of Charles Dograr is tricked into firing a laser death ray. Chuck is so in love with the idea, he helps the laser's maker plan a bank job. Then it gets surreal. First published by Robert McAlmon in 1929.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Science Fiction

238 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1926

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

A women in Paris searches for a disappeared man. In New York, that man is drawn into a plot. Crime genre devices proliferate spuriously, tangents emerge and are abandoned, characters and storylines are advanced in fragments, lists, and clippings, and eventually the whole collapses into a kind of atomized pulp, a cinematic collage of various genre devices and familiar gestures.

Composed amid the bustling Parisian literary scene of the 20s and variously referred to as the first English-language dadaist or surrealist novel, this does not have so much stylistically or thematically to do with either movement. But this is certainly one of the most genuinely unique of the Lost Generation's novels and evinces more interaction with the experimental literary milieu than the other expat 'hits' of that period. (Not so incidentally, Gertrude Stein, another foremost innovator of that set, helped get it into print.) Playful, serially involving in spite of its flippant storytelling style, and enduringly strange.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

I would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for your concern and sympathy. But I just want to let you know that it's all ended on a rather sweet note. See, I had spent that US$23.93 for this oop treasure, which for a mm, is far too much already. And then when I was reading it I discovered that someone literally took a scalpel to the best (graphic) pages** and removed them. What does it say down there below (?), something like six to a dozen pages. Missing. So but see The Village Bookshop (again!) came to the rescue of my cause and for a meager 4.50 has provided me with what appears to be a complete copy. Which is very nice of them.

In sum, this is one you won't want to be overcharged for ; but it is definitely worth keeping on your radar and picking up when you have the opportunity.



** this is not exactly unlike what that proverbial editor is supposedly supposed to do ; scalpel out the good stuff. I used a scalpel (literally) just the other day to remove a days old bothersome splinter from my left index finger ; the thing was so damn small! I always let these things sit there under my skin for a few days before I dig them out. Bad habit.



_________
Okay. Let's do this. "This" will be more collage than review. I've got some tabs open on my browser ; I'll be pasting some handy url's your way, then closing the tabs. Please be patient.

Robert M. Coates is BURIED.

In the Intro he wrote for this 1959 mm edition :: "...to add one more anecdote to the annals of Steiniana. I'll make it as brief as possible. We'd got talking one day about Anthony Trollope, who was one of her great admirations, and when I confessed I'd never read him she promised casually to send me some books of his. A few days later an expressman delivered, not a parcel, but a carton, a crate full, heavy with books--with Trollope, in short: the Barchester series, the Parliamentary series, practically all of him, and as you probably know all of Trollope means a great deal of reading indeed." --Gertrude Stein Recommends Trollope To Me.

"A tremendous mystery story with science-fiction overtones, this is also the first surrealist novel in English." --backcover [so but if you're a genre junky, your genre fix won't be found here ; whether mystery or sci=fi it is first of all Fiction] but don't get twisted about that 'surrealist' nomer, it reads just like all that great (experimental) 20th cent stuff you're already familiar with.

Three whole pages were cut out of my copy! And they were the good ones ; the ones with some typographical goodtimes.

I learned about this novel from Steven Moore's recent piece on J.P. McEvoy :
http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2017/03...
where he says :: "The 1920s saw a surge in experimentation with the form of the novel. In Ulysses (1922), James Joyce used a different style for each chapter, including the play format for the notorious Nighttown episode. Jean Toomer’s “composite novel” Cane (1923) consists of numerous vignettes alternating between prose, poetry, and drama. John Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer (1925) abandoned traditional narrative for a collage of individual stories, newspaper clippings, song lyrics, and prose poems. Taking his cue from European Surrealists, Robert M. Coates likewise deployed newspaper clippings, along with footnotes, diagrams, and unusual typography, in The Eater of Darkness (1926). Djuna Barnes’s novel Ryder (1929) includes a variety of genres—poems, plays, parables—and is written in a pastiche of antique prose styles. William Faulkner..." --ie, when an unfamiliar title pops up among half a dozen familiar and fantastic titles, one just plops down the 26 odd bucks and gets a copy of the damn thing.

This 1959 edition is an attempt to unBURY this CLASSyc. A failed attempt. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. SPADES=hoch!!!

wikipedia says :: "Nowadays, Coates is best known for The Outlaw Years: The History of the Land Pirates of the Natchez Trace(1930), which deals with the history of the land pirates of the Natchez Trace."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_...


I found three internet pages with stuff written about Coates. Let's take a look.

____________
from International Noir Fiction
"Forgotten books: The Eater of Darkness, Robert M. Coates"
http://internationalnoir.blogspot.com...

"There's been a lot of stuff in the blogosphere lately about forgotten books...." But not nearly as much as there has been about valueless book prizes.

"....at least loosely in the crime genre."

"The first and possibly most forgotten is The Eater of Darkness, by Robert M. Coates, which had a hardback edition in 1929 and a paperback edition in 1959, and that's it."

"The book has a lot in common with Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman..."

"What they all have in common is literary experimentation based on pulp- and crime-genre themes and tropes."

"...and even much crime fiction that has been written since--except that the exposition is wild and unpredictable..." --that's not an 'except'. That's literally the wHole pie.

"The Eater of Darkness has been called the first Dada novel in English (and it was indeed published with the help of Gertrude Stein)"

"...but one of the most interesting and entertaining aspects of Coates's novel is that the thriller plot works, in a sci-fi, Three Stooges sort of way."

"But it really only works if you disengage the brain and all your tendency to interpret or make sense of it." Sheesh. It's definitely not all that. Not all that too difficult to comprehend.

And see the long comment after the article where one can also read "but also such lesser-known French protosurrealists as Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel." Cool.


____________
From some blog called ::
Tongue Sophistries
https://tonguesophistries.wordpress.c...
"Review: The Eater of Darkness by Robert M. Coates"

uninteresting first para.

"...seemed to be a particularly strange mongrel of genres – of science fiction, murder mystery, literary noir, and surrealism." ugh. This kind of genre=junkie hang-up is knot my hang-up. What genre is Bottom's Dream? And why is the list of available genre(s) so small when history gives us a new one every eight years or so?

"I already knew that what lay before me was one of those anarchic, blatantly irreverent, irrational, “experimental” literature that tries, in vain, to represent the subconscious mind by creating fantastic imagery and randomly juxtaposing ideas or concepts that seem to contradict each other and have no contextual meaning." People who say this kind of thing. I just. I mean. What? Really, to even have that as a possible predisposition makes you wrong.

"(but I really would like to say “pretentious”)". Seriously.

oh dear god. You read the rest of this blog if you can and get back to me.

"Perhaps one should read this on an acid trip." That's a big Fuck You to you!


____________
apologies for that prior blog=link. But when something's BURIED as deeply as this one, you just need to gather every last bit of data.

Here's something better ::
"On the Trail of The Eater of Darkness" by Rick Poynor.
I think it exemplies well the distance between the random blog post and someone (scholar, academic) who actually attends to things with some measure of discipline, rigor and method.
http://designobserver.com/feature/on-...
Nothing spectacular, but it's what little we have to go on...

"...undertaking research into visual prose, sometimes also called visual writing..."

"...appeared to be a genre-busting collision of science fiction, murder mystery, and Dada and/or Surrealism."

"... that it featured artful typographic arrangements, with texts wrapping around each other and fragmented syntax."

"...anticipated the multi-voiced patchwork layout of Jacques Derrida’s Glas..."

[avoid the 2012 edition ; even if it's available]

...the reader-beckoning, centrally placed exclamation/question motif with the gothically styled points — a graphic “what the heck.”

Reproduces one of the pages sliced out of my copy.

"...turned out to contain fewer departures in visual prose than I had hoped."

"(My lecture was prepared for a one-day event at the Royal College of Art about the British experimental writer Christine Brooke-Rose....such as Glas, Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book, Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing, and Mark Z. Danielewsi’s House of Leaves, alongside Brooke-Rose’s Thru.)"

"...a three-page list of objects that the X-ray bullet passes through before destroying its target’s brain"

"...a chapter broken into sections labeled (a) to (i) like a textbook;
footnotes (years before Nicholson Baker);
an annotated diagram of the “engine of death”;
conjunctions that lead on to empty spaces followed by other conjunctions;
and a lengthy passage rendered as if describing a movie, with interpolated captions summarizing the scene in the manner of intertitles."

"The novel seems like perfect material for Exact Change, Dalkey Archive, or Atlas Press..." ahem. Or Verbivoracious.


Seriously, Verbi, you want this one in your stable. Before the others find out. It'll be a Cash Cow.


Now, on to the next thing. Following Strangers: The Life and Literary Works of Robert M. Coates (0.0 · 0 Ratings · 0 Reviews ) by Mathilde H. Roza. If you want to lead an obscure academical life, just choose as your life's work some obscure nobody genius like McElroy or Vollmann. Everyone will leave you in peace and not bother you. You might even be able to get a job (but there may be some difficulty in that ; better just work on Shakespeare).

amazon's listings for Eater begin at Forty You=Ess Bucks. And there's only three of them. abe lists 6 copies of the pb between 35 & 50 bucks plus shipping. They also list three first editions (apparently the true first from 1926 (not the '29)) starting at four hundred smackeroos.



A.C. :: Just because it's BURIED doesn't necessarily mean it's good!
T. :: Yes. Yes it does. 'Good' is contained in its very concept.

[Tyler Crumrine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely amazing. Published in 1926 with the help of Gertrude Stein, Coates nimbly weaves comedy, intrigue, surrealism, philosophy, and even screenplay in this literary tour de force. It's a that shame it never really caught on. Even as a member of Stein's "Lost Generation," The Eater of Darkness was largely considered too experimental for its time. Instead Coates is better known as the art critic who coined the term "abstract expressionism" for the New Yorker in 1946. Nevertheless, some of the literary techniques he commands here are still considered unique and modern today. Consistently funny and intriguing, imagine A Confederacy of Dunces meets Dick Tracy wrapped in a dadaism. Like Confederacy, it also has one of the most surprising and utterly satisfying endings I have ever read. If there was ever a book that deserved to be saved from obscurity, this is it. Highly recommended.

[Ed Erwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

My library shelves this 1926 book as SF. The back cover says it is "the first Dada novel by an American". That gets my attention.

But It isn't really either of those things. It is an experimental novel that takes ideas from SF, detective fiction, romance novels, film techniques, dada, etc., and throws it all in a blender. The dedication includes many names including Nick Carter, Gertrude Stein, and Fantômas.

A note in the back calls it pre-postmodernism, and that sounds about correct to me.

I liked it, but barely.

[Charles Beauregard · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely good book. If you are interested in Modernism, this is a must-read. If you like unique and funny books, this is also a must-read. Unfortunately, it is obscenely expensive now, come on publishers, get a hold of yourselves and get this brilliant work out to more readers.

Gertrude Stein pulled some strings to get this book published, and it was originally published by Robert McAlmon. Coates knew all those interesting people on the Left Bank in the 20's.

This story has satire of genre-fiction, surrealist interludes, and meta-fictional aspects not seen in American fiction for another 40 years. If you can get your hands on it you should read it.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Referred to as the “first Dada Novel in English” and critically linked to the Surrealist scene, this novel never really justifies either comparison, but is still a stylistically inventive and madcap work of literary experimentation.

Coates was one of the many American expatriates active in the 1920’s Paris literary scene (he was hanging out with Ford Maddox Ford, Malcolm Cowley, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein – per his NY Times Obit he is responsible for introducing those last two) and is firmly considered a member of that Lost Generation group of writers; I would think it’s reasonable to say that he’s up there with Stein in that group as those pushing the bounds of free-wheeling literary-form-experimentation and unhinged train-car-rushing-off-the-track plot explosion

There’s a really good pdf available on Google books - here - which comes from Mathilde Roza’s “American Literary Modernism, Popular Culture and Metropolitan Mass Life: The Early Fiction of Robert M. Coates” which contains a number of pages dedicated to The Eater of Darkness, and is by far the most robust criticism and discussion of this work I could locate. In it Coates is quoted describing the plot as such:

“[The novel’s] plot is a fantasy developed along Nick Carter lines, [which] tells what a girl in France (who has read of New York only in the tabloids and the sensational fiction) imagines is happening to her lover, when he goes there. It is, naturally, a moviesque hodge-podge of murder, armored cars, x-ray bullets and bank hold-ups”

This book is sadly long out of print and even the paperback version released in the 50’s goes for silly amounts of money – there is a later re-print from 2012 that is apparently a terrible OCR release and is to be avoided – I went the ILL route (and my library surprised me by getting a copy up from Houston in less than a week). This was easily the most nervous I’ve ever been reading a book – the copy I received was a poorly treated crumbling hard cover (held together by a rubber band when I received it) from the 1929 run that I read with the lightest touch I could manage. It’s a genuinely weird and fun read; diverse in style and structure – a forgotten gem of experimental fiction that practically begs a larger audience.

[Bob Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightfully dada.

[G.M. Lupo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thornton Wilder described this as the first Dadaist novel, but I believe a more apt description is that it's the first surrealist novel as others have described it. The language has a dreamlike quality about it that works on the senses more than the intellect. I'm not 100 percent certain exactly what happens within the confines of the story. Events happen and characters appear and reappear, often under assumed names, sometimes many assumed names. In the end, the main storyline somewhat coalesces, but even the story's conclusion is in doubt. The main hero is Charles Dograr, who the plot and other characters flow around, and who, at times, seems to be directing the action. It's not always clear how all the pieces fit together or what the ending really means, but I found it a satisfying, if somewhat confusing read. If one is partial to James Joyce, this one won't disappoint.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

High hopes tracking this down, and then was really disappointed reading it. Read like an Amazing Tales novel to me.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aptly credited as the first surrealist novel in English, this 1926 absurdist crime/sci-fi pastiche by New Yorker art critic Coates (1897–1973) stands out even among other iconoclastic works midwifed by Gertrude Stein. After a curiously impressionistic opening sequence, readers dive headlong into the weirdest of Weird Tales, as young Charles Dograr meets an old man wearing only green stockings and algebraic tattoos, feverishly tinkering at the dials of “a stereopticon gone berserk” that he terms the x-ray bullet, for reasons that are soon made horrifically if inexplicably clear some 2,976 yards and two feet across the river in New Jersey. From there, a succession of cascading genre tropes and playful stylistic and tonal shifts from frenzied to sensual, hilarious to bizarre sweep readers along in a sort of pulp fiction fever dream. Like Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, this whimsical tour de force is not for every reader, but it’ll be a massive amount of fun for more readers than one might expect.

[Benny Morduchowitz]

Began this years ago in a university library rare book room that I never returned to, but I came across a decently priced copy a few months ago and finally returned to it this weekend.

Basically a mad scientist story that tosses in a bunch of other genre digressions, news stories, stream of consciousness, lists of vignettes, silent film-esque captions/intertitles.

Found the pace propulsive, but not much of an emotional punch at all. Badly dated gender and sexual mores abound.

The caper and final chase were pretty well choreographed, but I wonder what it was Gertrude Stein admired in this book...

Great Milton Glaser cover art.

[Kaitlyn Caughfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did I understand what was happening in this book. Absolutely not. But I think that's the point. It is, after all, a surrealist work. This is definitely a read where you're just along for the ride and for the vibes.

[Charles Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up because how do you say no to that title? And then to find out it's a Dadaist novel that's also a murder mystery about x-ray bullets?? PUT IT RIGHT IN MY VEINS. It's silly and weird and trenchant and also so weird. I have no idea whether I actually understood it. What a treat.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is one of those novels, which get heavily refferenced in genre encyclopedias, compendiums, etc., but which, until recently, was near impossible to get.

It also proves that many such old rarities are rare for a reason. The same with Collier's "No Traveler Returns", the same with Visiak's "Medusa", the reason for why this book had not come out in all these decades is it's not very good.

The idea of a man stumbling upon an inventor with a terrible, mysterious past, possessing a machine he can use to murder anyone at will through walls, across miles and miles of country, suddenly and without warning...and then agrees to help him murder people, and even bumps off some of his literary friends is good.

But the author introduces too many irrelevancies, such as an entire subplot of the main character fooling a secondary character to "research" the murders as a private investigator, which has no point to it and makes no sense in universe.

Then there's the gimmick that made the book get the "Dada" label, but it's extremely superfluous. Briefly, there are about two brief scenes, where the description of events is made confusing by jumbling the words into a typographical mess. It has no real influence on anything, and feels just like a thing done for the heck of it.

Also the City Point Press editions' e-book didn't really handle these sections well and I had to find an online picture of both pages uploaded in a review of the paperback edition to be able to tell what was being said, because the e-book edition is just incomprehensible and tiny.

This all ends up making the thing rather underwhelming, but had I actually spent the several hundred dolars this usually went for before the reprint I would be VERY unhappy.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clearly, I am not smart enough for this book. I can rate it this high only because I admire the innovation it represents, but I found the plot incomprehensible. On the one hand, I find myself wondering what the point of all this is, but on the other, I recognize that the point of Dada is that it had no point. In terms of that concept, Coates achieves brilliantly, but in terms of reading pleasure, for me this fell far short. I guess it is a book one is supposed to like, but it sure is hard to enjoy.

Maybe the above is a bit harsh. "Eater of Darkness" teems with satire of all kinds of genres, and some of it is effective. There were even a few laugh-out-loud moments for me. The footnotes are truly a gas. But if you have any interest in characterization and plot, don't look here to have that satisfied.

I guess, in light of the affection other readers have for this book, I have probably pretty much missed the point. I also acknowledge its importance in literary history. But for absurdist fiction, I have to admit I much prefer (and thoroughly enjoy) Donald Barthelme.