What is a monster? Why has a fictional character like Dracula stayed in our minds through the centuries? In this piece for Guernica, Alexander Chee asks us to revisit and sit long and hard with Bram Stoker’s Gothic classic while also considering the modern real-life evils of our world. Chee also makes connections between the story and Stoker’s potentially queer love triangle with Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, the latter a possible inspiration for the Count himself. The essay is the foreword to a new edition of the novel, published by Restless Books.
During the tumultuous months of the Trump presidency, during the Covid-19 pandemic and the George Floyd uprising, the feeling that our fictional sense of evil was not sufficient to match the evil in our world repeated as I watched some of the popular entertainments meant to help me stay inside my home, safe from the virus and out of the overburdened hospitals. As Covid reshaped the world’s economies and democracies, and the spectacle of, first, the Trump administration having competence forced upon it and, second, the playing out of the Biden administration, I kept thinking, “The scale of this evil is set too low.”
Pop culture has tried to improve upon the monster of Dracula, with not entirely satisfying results. Thanos, the popular Marvel villain, for example, while technically more powerful than Dracula, is boring in his omnipotence. How am I supposed to fear an ecoterrorist — a popular villain in movies, but never seen otherwise — when Trump undid air safety regulations around particulates that now kill 10,000 people a year — likely more now, with Covid — and it doesn’t even rank among the things for which we might prosecute him? How do I get myself worked up over a single murderer, of any kind, as thousands die every night due to governmental terror or neglect in countries all over the world? Trump and Bolsonaro’s destruction of Latin America’s healthcare system, done in the name of fighting Cuban Communism, while Covid spread — while they themselves had Covid — is closer to the scale of the horror I speak of, the horror we must write about.
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Catching nonagenarian Nazis, trying to live forever, the overpowering need to return home, forgiving your dad, and finding humor in getting scammed, repeatedly.
Tom Lamont | GQ | September 12, 2023 | 6,622 words
Thomas Will is the bureau chief of—wait for it—the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. He is a Nazi hunter. The last to hold the role in the same capacity; it will end here, in the 2020s, with the final generation of perpetrators already in their 90s. Tom Lamont has spent a great deal of time with Will for this piece, much of it in offices. Yet, somehow, in setting scenes of bureaucracy, Lamont creates a searing, chilling atmosphere. At one point, Will uses a packet of sugar and an empty espresso cup on a conference table for a demonstration. The cup represented mass murder, and the sugar the limits of criminal culpability. The sugar is now at the outer limits. They are investigating secretaries, not camp commandants. People who would have sat in similar offices at similar tables, typing up death orders. The Holocaust was so efficient because every day, civilians turned up at an office and did their jobs. Incredibly uncomfortable to think about. Incredibly necessary. At one point, Lamont asks Will: “What if Hitler’s army had conscripted him and sent him to work in a camp? Would he have gone?” His answer: “I don’t know.” Some people question sending nonagenarian office workers to trial—but it is noticed, it is discussed, and therefore worthwhile. There is such powerful writing here, with many subtle messages. I could not stop thinking about it. —CW
Charlotte Alter | Time | September 20, 2023 | 4,575 words
The idea of rich people trying to live forever is nothing new. But Charlotte Alter’s profile of entrepreneur Bryan Johnson offers food for thought in a time of fast-evolving AI. Johnson is developing a life-extension system, optimized by an algorithm, in an attempt to reduce his biological age. “The goal is to get his 46-year-old organs to look and act like 18-year-old organs,” writes Alter, by following a peculiar lifestyle routine and strict diet, including dark green sludge and a special chocolate that “tastes like a foot.” Johnson seems to view himself as some kind of elevated biohacker in an unprecedented age of humanity—“I have a relationship with the 25th century more than I have a relationship with the 21st century,” he tells Alter—but critics are skeptical of his age-reversal experiments that aren’t backed by science. (Quite frankly, he looks pale and lifeless, like an android straight out of Alien, thirsty for hydraulic fluid. That said, maybe he’s on to something?) Alter visits his home, which resembles an “Apple store in a jungle,” to see what an algorithmically controlled (and ultimately austere and cold) life looks like. Come for the hilarious lines and bizarre scenes, stay for (and ponder) the profound questions: “Aren’t humans more than just brains and meat?” asks Alter. What makes us human? —CLR
Dženana Vucic | Sydney Review of Books | August 14, 2023 | 3,876 words
“Bosnia is a long way away, and it’s an expensive journey,” writes Dženana Vucic in this haunting braided essay from The Sydney Review of Books about escaping from and returning to a place that was once home. There is so much meaning packed into Vucic’s spare, yet beautiful prose. The distance implicit in “a long way away” is far more than just physical; the “expensive journey” exacts a cost far more profound than a monetary sum. In relating the habits of migratory birds, Vucic notes that caged birds prevented from migration feel anxiety, marked by “changes in their sleep behaviour, frantic jumping and wing-fluttering in the direction of migration,” she writes. “When I haven’t been home for a while, I feel the absence welling in the pit of my stomach, a hollow with the gravitation pull of a black hole. Time passes and a mass rises into my chest, my throat, becomes a thing with texture, edges.” In returning, she describes the physical scars of conflict in post-war Bosnia. “The land wears this loss in ruins and abandoned homes with gaping windows, in exposed brick and plastic UN sheeting which, thirty years later, still replaces glass in our poorest neighbours’ homes. Trees erupt from broken walls; blackberry and nettle swarm the hollow bellies of houses across the street.” What’s less plain to see and well worth examining is how Vucic reveals the personal, human toll of a war that forced her to migrate away and yet compels her, time and again, to return. —KS
John Paul Scotto | The Sun Magazine | October 3, 2023 | 2,110 words
We’ve all done it: we’ve concealed our true selves to conform to another’s idea of acceptable behavior. John Paul Scotto did it at school, after being told to shut up for sharing baseball facts and figures with enthusiasm. He did it at home too, shouted into silence by his father. Scotto does a brilliant job reminding us of the power that parents have over us, one that persists into adulthood whether we like it or not; how a sharp word or a dismissive comment can diminish us, reducing us to that frightened child determined to avoid notice—and their parents—as much as possible. “I’d learned how to keep him calm: Don’t complain. Don’t speak to him when he’s focused on a task. Be where he wants you to be at the precise time he wants you there. Do what he tells you to do immediately,” he writes. The beautiful thing about Scotto’s essay is an epiphany worth examining more deeply. His father’s anger and need to maintain order—even at the expense of his son’s spirit—was not because they are so different as humans, but because they are so much the same. —KS
Devin Friedman | Insider | October 1, 2023 | 6,021 words
Devin Friedman and his wife wanted a pool. So they hired a contractor. And when their contractor emailed them to ask them to wire the money to a couple of odd-sounding usernames, they did. Then they did it again. And again. And then they learned that those emails weren’t from their contractor at all. Rather than simply marinate in the shame and self-pity of getting royally scammed, Friedman tried to get his money back. When that failed, he wrote a piece about why he couldn’t get his money back. Sounds like a bummer, right? Not so fast. I mean, it is for them, but it also turned into what might be the funniest feature I’ve read all year. Sure, there’s a little Joel Stein here. (“Like so many things I use to conduct the most critical tasks in my everyday life with a carefree obliviousness, I didn’t really know what Zelle was.”) But Friedman’s self-deprecation is perfectly tuned, and even when the reporting gets heavier, he threads humor through at just the right angle, a necessary weft to the piece’s warp. (“Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the financial industry regulator banks most love to hate, has been petitioning Zelle to find out exactly how much fraud there is. And the data she’s collected suggests there’s probably, technically speaking, a whole fucking lot.”) As he says himself, “[o]ut of all the kinds of money, money to build a pool is probably the very best kind of money for the world to suffer the loss of.” There’s no poor-me going on here. You, however, will be poorer for it if you skip this one. —PR
Audience Award
Do you hear timpani? Here’s the piece our audience loved most this week:
Katherine Laidlaw | Toronto Life | September 20, 2023 | 6,174 words
A cop with expensive taste and money troubles. A wealthy woman who loved and supported him. An old man with dementia with a large estate and no next of kin. And a secret girlfriend and a fake will. Mix these elements together and what do you get? Katherine Laidlaw’s latest story for Toronto Life about a romance and financial scam gone wrong. —CLR
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So you’ve hired a contractor to install a pool in your backyard. Congrats! Unfortunately the contractor’s a little busy. Not the best communicator. So when he emails you and asks you to wire payment to a weird-sounding user name, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that you’d do it, simply for the sheer relief of getting one step closer to Pool. Hopefully things don’t go as colossally wrong for you as they did for Devin Friedman and his wife. And if they do, hopefully you can write a piece as hilarious and insightful as this one.
So yes, we fell victim to some highly suspect shit. But let me ask you this: If your contractor seems like they’re doing something a bit dodgy, would that really surprise you? Don’t you kind of assume your contractor has angles? Don’t you suspect that every contractor is subtly fleecing you, while also subtly fleecing the people who work for him or her, in a velvet-gloved mafioso kind of way that everyone has tacitly approved? Isn’t our national OK-ness with Donald Trump a subconscious admission that we assume everyone in the building trades is on the grift? And isn’t what a lot of us actually look for in a contractor someone who’s a little suspect? Who can maybe find a way to not have to get the permits? Who’s maybe going to pay some folks under the table? Would you bat an eye if your contractor asked you to make your check out to his wife instead of him (which has happened to me)? Or if he told you to just Zelle the money to Personal Breezy?
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We all perform, sometimes to conceal our true selves, sometimes to escape notice. John Paul Scotto recounts concealing his true identity to avoid inviting his father’s anger, and what he lost as a result.
By the time I was rewatching these videos as a teen, Dad never yelled at me. I’d learned how to keep him calm: Don’t complain. Don’t speak to him when he’s focused on a task. Be where he wants you to be at the precise time he wants you there. Do what he tells you to do immediately. Don’t talk back, don’t cry, don’t be noisy, don’t ramble about your obsessions — besides football. He liked to hear me talk about that.
As I’ve become an adult and struggled to manage my own temper, I’ve realized that Dad, like me, craved a calm and predictable environment, and his atypical eldest son’s chaotic energy destroyed his sense of equilibrium. I don’t fault him for this. His impatience, his need for control, his fury — these traits were a part of him long before I showed up. From what I can tell, we all have little or no control over who we are or how we operate. Our personalities just happen to us.
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The fudge sold at Copper Kettle was so creamy, so sweet, so beyond compare, that many candy shops on the Ocean City boardwalk didn’t even sell fudge, because there was no point. During summer vacations to the Jersey Shore in the 1970s, my father would take my brother and me as a treat, when we behaved. A pretty girl in a pinafore would greet us outside with a tray of free shavings. We’d load up on them until her smile strained, then proceed inside. Once we popped actual cubes of the magic stuff into our tiny mouths, we were as high as kids are allowed to be.
For decades, Copper Kettle lived in my head as a kind of childhood memory-scape: the salt air coming off the ocean, the shiny vats of molten fudge, the too much sugar all at once. Then, during the pandemic, my family decided to return to the Jersey Shore for my mother’s birthday, so everyone could gather outside. I told my brother we should make our way back to Copper Kettle, and he informed me that it had long since gone out of business. He had some more information too: about what had become of Harry Anglemyer, the man behind the fudge.
In the early 1960s, Harry had a string of Copper Kettle Fudge shops up and down the Shore. So revered were his stores that Harry was known far and wide as the Fudge King. He was even in talks to build a fudge factory—something that would’ve taken his Willy Wonka–ness to the next level—when he was savagely beaten to death on Labor Day 1964. His body was stuffed under the dashboard of his Lincoln Continental, parked at an after-hours nightclub called the Dunes. The case was never solved.
I spent the next two years sorting through a trove of whispers and accusations around the murder. At first I was just curious, but the more I learned about Harry—a figure beloved by friends and strangers alike—the more intent I was to identify his killer.
I scoured blogs, Facebook groups, newspaper archives, and thinly veiled fictional accounts of the crime. As one local put it, over the years a veritable “Jersey Shore QAnon” had blossomed around the murder, raising questions of culture, class, sexuality, and hierarches of power. I discovered a plausible myth, a trove of red herrings, and, finally, what appeared to be the truth.
Almost six decades on, I wasn’t sure anyone wanted to hear it. When I visited Ocean City while reporting this story, a shop owner I engaged about Harry Anglemyer lowered her voice and said, “You know he was murdered, don’t you?”
I admitted that I did.
She responded, by way of warning: “You sneeze in this town and everyone hears it.”
The Fudge King became one of the richest men for miles, with no qualms about flashing his wealth.
Harry Anglemyer, a stocky charmer out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was born in 1927. His high school summers were spent in Wildwood, New Jersey, where he apprenticed at Laura’s Fudge Shop. He was told that this was a little sissy. He didn’t care.
He left high school to join the Navy, served two years at the end of World War II, then returned to the Shore to open his own fudge shop in 1947. In those days, Ocean City seemed postcard perfect. Ten blocks at its widest, situated on a barrier island about 11 miles south of Atlantic City, it was lined with boarding houses, deep porches with rattan rockers, and striped canvas awnings that softened the summer sun. It called itself—and still does—America’s Greatest Family Resort.
The author Gay Talese, who grew up there, once described Ocean City as “founded in 1879 by Methodist ministers and other Prohibitionists who wished to establish an island of abstinence and propriety.” Prohibitionists remain. To this day, you can’t buy booze within city limits. Or have a cocktail at a restaurant. Or go to a bar, since there are none. If you want to bend an elbow, you must belong to one of the few private clubs that allow it. You can also import your own adult beverages, stopping at the Circle Liquor Store in Somers Point before entering town across the Ninth Street Bridge.
You would think that such a gauntlet might encourage at least a semblance of abstinence and propriety, but a 2017 USA Today article deemed Ocean City the drunkest city in New Jersey. It was and is a place of contradictions.
Just like Harry Anglemyer was a man of contradictions. He donated generously to civic causes and charities, including religious ones. He sat on the city’s planning board at the behest of the mayor. He joined the Masons and the chamber of commerce. He befriended prominent men and their wives, whom he squired to social functions when their husbands were busy. He hobnobbed with local luminaries, including the Kelly family of Philadelphia, who kept a summer cottage in Ocean City that Grace Kelly visited—first as a child, then as a movie star, then as a princess. Harry was so well regarded that 1,500 people showed up at the Godfrey-Smith Funeral Home in September 1964 to view his body. Businesspeople, politicians, and socialites came to pay their respects, packing the place with flowers.
Many of them also knew of Harry’s other, less civic-minded side. When he wasn’t delighting families with his fudge or charming the local elite, he liked to go out. He shut down bars. He was a fixture at Atlantic City’s racetrack, where he played the horses. He spent time at the nearby Air National Guard base. During the summer of 1964, he seemed to have acquired boyfriends from both locations.
Harry was, in fact, a little sissy.
Which everyone kind of knew. He was 37 and handsome, he’d never married, and he dressed fastidiously. He had a small dog, acquired on a trip to Fort Lauderdale—which, he confided to a friend, was perhaps “too obvious.” He once had a girlfriend who wondered why they weren’t having sex. She seems to have been the only one in the dark. Men both known and strange came and went from his large suite of breezy, ocean-view rooms above Copper Kettle, right on the boardwalk, where he lived in the summer.
Harry took no pains to hide any of this, an astonishing fact given the pre-Stonewall, postwar pinko-homo panic. In the early 1960s, and especially in small towns like Ocean City, which had a population of about 7,500 during the off-season, men were expected to find a girl and put a ring on her. Especially handsome men with killer smiles, fitted jackets, and penny loafers that shined like onyx.
But something saved Harry from too much scrutiny—for a time, anyway. He was an entrepreneur, and he elevated the boardwalk’s game. He saw the future, which might have been his shield. Other local business owners looked past his sexuality. They wanted even a little piece of his magic.
Harry placed gleaming copper kettles in the windows of his boardwalk shop, poured in liquid fudge, and positioned above them teenage boys with bronzed skin and sparkling white teeth, gripping big wooden paddles, churning and churning. Outside on the boardwalk, children panted as they watched, their faces cracked from too much sun, their bare feet sandy, their eyes wet and hungry. They wanted that fudge so bad. At night, after the last box was sold and the shop had closed, the kettles remained pin-spotted from above like Ziegfeld girls.
Money surged in like the tide. Soon Harry had shops in Atlantic City, Sea Isle City, and Stone Harbor as well. The Fudge King became one of the richest men for miles, with no qualms about flashing his wealth. He purchased a two-story colonial in the Gardens, Ocean City’s fanciest neighborhood, where he lived in the off-season, and kept two cars: the Lincoln Continental where his body would later be found, and a Chrysler Imperial purchased just months before his death.
Most spectacularly, he acquired a blinding ring: five emerald-cut diamonds, approximately eight carats total, set in a band of white gold. It was valued at about $10,000, almost $100,000 in today’s dollars. Harry wore it everywhere. Which was quite a big deal. With the exception of a few families, including the famous Kellys, whose fortune came from brickmaking, Ocean City was for the most part a resort of the working class. Its tourists and year-round residents had likely never seen such jewels except on television, worn by the likes of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Or Liberace.
Harry’s success made him an object of allure and envy, though by all accounts he shared his fortune with others. He frequently bought dinners for his staff. He gave loans to friends and told them to take their time paying him back. (After his death, his family found a drawer full of IOUs.) He even had a brand-new clothes dryer delivered to a young mother burdened by a bad marriage. She wept knowing there was at least one good man in the world.
That’s what most people said about Harry: how good he was, generous and kind, fun-loving and curious. But in the summer of 1964, they noticed something else about him. The Fudge King was uncharacteristically on edge.
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Despite the current psychedelic boom and promising developments in psychedelic therapy, there haven’t been enough large-scale trials for researchers to really understand how drugs like psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA interact with the nervous system. So a group of researchers—including a machine learning expert and a researcher mapping a mysterious region of the central nervous system focused on introspection—harnessed AI to mine through thousands of testimonials on Erowid, a drug forum from the early days of the internet. The drug experience is so varied—from mystical and blissful to dark and panicky—so the idea was to use existing data from honest, real-life accounts of people who have been sharing their experiences for decades.
But we are far from freely administering psychedelic medication—getting the appropriate dose to the right patient will require a tremendous amount of fine-tuning. But for people to someday be able to use these drugs for therapy, without the hallucinatory side effects? What a trip.
While some entries can be bleak—particularly for harder drugs like meth or heroin—the vast majority are written in a companionable, curious voice that will be familiar to anyone with an older sibling or cousin who likes to test the limits of consciousness from their own backyard. The testimonials include highly specific descriptions not just of the chosen amount and imbibing method, but also the subtle shadings of each experience; sometimes with humor, but always with rigor, vibrancy, and clarity, often down to the passing minutes. These are good faith arbiters, truly interested in exploring the variance of human perception and making sure others can do so safely. There are none of Hunter S. Thompson’s “fools or frauds” here, though any one writer tends to give the distinct impression of being a bit of a weirdo.
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In this beautiful essay, Noreen Masud, a University of Bristol lecturer and the author of the book Flat Place, reflects on landscapes: the nature and wildlife of the flatlands and wetlands of the UK. But there’s a deeper introspection here as Masud recalls a painful childhood in Pakistan and her experiences of trauma and cPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder). Masud’s words are haunting, and her gorgeous voice carries you through to the piece’s strong end.
My life in Pakistan, full of painful nothing, had left a flat landscape inside my head. Not a bleak, dead one. That would almost have been easier. This flat landscape seared with painful livingness. It wouldn’t let me look away: kept me mesmerised by its agonised, intense emptiness. And it seemed more real than any of the strange world around me. Even in safe cosy Britain, where there were consequences for hurting your children and education was free, I sensed something sinister under the gleaming surface. Something stark and painful, and utterly relentless that refused to know how much its wealth and serenity was built on the pain of others, stripped for parts by white colonisers and taught to hate themselves.
From those flat places, drained and bare and empty, and which hid nothing – which, like me, couldn’t stop showing their damage – there rose up stories of more migrants from Asia and Africa. Not birds, this time, but cockle-pickers, farm-workers, a human zoo, a labour battalion. Migrants whom Britain does not know how to see; whom it prefers not to see. I wrote about these walks in my book, A Flat Place (2023). I put the flat place inside me on to paper, made it into a solid flat rectangle bound between boards, so that it didn’t need to surge up under my eyes any longer. I could show it to friends who loved me.
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