Taking Stock

A horrific week on Wall Street prompted me to seek out diversions, especially in the hours before (or worse, instead of) sleep that otherwise were spent calculating losses. Bourbon was a tempting option but ultimately a counterproductive one, so I uncorked a few books instead. They were less cheering, but the mornings after were less painful – at least until trading started. If the reader of this post is similarly minded, here are five recent reads I can recommend for next week: one for each day of trading. Whatever happens next on the NYSE floor, all are worth a look.

**** ****

This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Princeton economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff

Published in 2009 (and read by me back then), this remains the definitive examination of the 2006-2008 crisis. I reopened the book last Tuesday. While that might seem to have been an exercise in masochism, there actually is some good news hidden in it. Crashes are unavoidable "equal opportunity crises" that will happen regardless of the political or economic system. "A financial system can collapse under the pressure of greed, politics, and profits no matter how well regulated it seems to be," Reinhart and Rogoff tell us, and they give an abundance of international and historical examples to prove it. What is the good news in that? It is that financial collapses, not market drops, are what do deep and lasting harm (as after 1929, 1987, and 2008) to economies. Not every stock market crash precedes a financial crisis. Many don’t. Even the particularly bad 2000 crash, for instance, while it hurt the tech sector, left banks largely unscathed so the effects were otherwise mild. Today the financial institutions are in better shape than in 2000. So, the economic threat is not structural, but literally viral. We’ve seen and gotten past viral scares before (e.g. SARS), though of course there are no guarantees things will play out the same way this time.

The 1987 and 2008 market drops were both preceded by a free fall in real estate prices, which exposed over-extended banks to bad mortgages. That is not a problem this year. Even were real estate to drop (so far it’s not happening) the banks are capitalized well enough this time to handle it. Real estate is a frequent source of past crises, by the way. As far back as 33 CE a Roman financial crisis began with a decline in real estate values. Lenders and investors (many of them senators) discovered their mortgages were larger than the underlying property values. Tacitus tells us “many were utterly ruined. The destruction of private wealth precipitated the fall of rank and reputation, until at last the emperor interposed his aid by distributing throughout the banks a hundred million sesterces.” The emperor Tiberius was a tyrannical old pervert but he was also a budget hawk who had filled up the Roman treasury, so he was able to bail out the financiers. The recovery was slow nonetheless. It is not even clear the bailout helped in a broader sense though it did ease panic. A similar crisis when Julius Caesar marched on Rome (Julius had no money to spare to bail out anyone) resolved itself in about the same time frame without intervention.

**** ****

Icarus by Leon Meyer

This is truly excellent South African crime fiction. Multiple storylines with multiple perspectives intertwine. The plot centers on the murder of a charming but amoral young entrepreneur Ernst Richter who had his fingers in everything from an internet alibi site for cheaters to counterfeit wines to blackmail. Richter’s alibi site provided false records (airline tickets, hotel bills, restaurant receipts, and so on) to clients in order to cover up their indiscretions in other locations. Recovering alcoholic detective Benny Griessel, a recurring character in Meyer’s novels, assists Vaughn Cupido in the murder investigation by Cape Town’s Priority Crimes unit. It is well that Griessel is not heading up this one, because he has fallen off the wagon after a close colleague committed a murder/suicide. He nonetheless does his part.

Many countries have ethnic divisions – sometimes deadly ones – but few are as fraught with complicated history as those in South Africa. Not even the USA comes close to matching the complexity of South Africa, which is saying a lot. Meyer navigates this cultural mix in very nuanced and human terms. “Human” is not always a compliment, but in this case it is.

**** ****

The Blood Countess by Andre Codrescu

Aside from Vlad Dracul, the 16th century Hungarian aristocrat Elizabeth Bathory is commonly cited as an inspiration for the modern version of the vampire myth. She was tried for murdering peasant girls: possibly several hundred, purportedly to bathe in their blood. The record of her trial still exists but at the time it was kept hush hush because the Bathory family had a claim to the throne and this scandal would have been hard to spin. Elizabeth was confined to a castle room as punishment.

Codrescu originally planned a straight-up history, but instead switched over to a horror novel, which was published in 1995. The story is narrated by a Bathory family descendant as a statement to a judge in 1990s New York. He claims his crime of murder is connected to Elizabeth and therefore he recounts her history.

The prose flows smoothly, the historical elements are well-researched, and the ambience of 1990s Hungary nicely evoked. This is not a vampire novel, though there are more than a few hints of the paranormal. It is mostly a historical drama depicting Elizabeth as an intelligent sadistic psychopath rather than a creature of the night. She is all the scarier for that.

**** ****

Forbidden Hollywood by Mark A. Vieira

One of the most interesting periods in film history is the pre-code era from 1930 to the middle of 1934. The Hays Production Code was a self-censorship code formulated by the film industry to head off government regulation. Though it existed in 1930, the studios didn’t start to enforce it strictly until 1934 when the threat of government intervention became more real. Every era generates its share of garbage, and this one is no exception, but when the pre-codes were good they were very good. The characters have complexity, moral ambiguity, and erotic lives that are very human (in a way often lacking in films today) in films such as Baby Face, Skyscraper Souls, Night Nurse, Red Dust (The New York Times reviewer said that the title was off by one letter), Waterloo Bridge (the harsh 1931 version, not the sentimental 1940 one), Scarface, and many many others. TCM has an excellent DVD collection of these films called Forbidden Hollywood and this is the companion book. It is a brief but serviceable history of the era and contains backstories on numerous films.

**** ****

Joker by Brian Azzarello

The first decade of the 21^st century was a fine time for comics and graphic novels. Many of them were aimed solidly at adults. Marvel had the most successful decade, but DC had its moments. Brian Azzarello’s Joker came out the same year as Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight movie with the iconic portrayal of the Joker by Heath Ledger. Azzarello’s Joker is very different but equally fascinating. Heath Ledger’s Joker is not actually crazy. He has thought about life, concluded that he is a nihilist, and embraced nihilism: witness his “agent of chaos” speech. Azzarello’s Joker, while intelligent in his own way, is not thoughtful. He is ruled by emotion: witness his “what I hate” speech. He is an impulsive solipsistic psychopath who terrifies everyone (including Penguin, Riddler, Dent, and Croc) except Harley Quinn. Harley, who apparently enjoys the danger of his company for reasons of her own, is not a major character in this comic but she is there. Fair warning: the comic is more graphically violent than one expects from DC.

Joker (which has nothing to do with the storyline of the 2019 movie of the same title) is narrated by the character Johnny Frost, a small time hoodlum. Frost decides to get ahead in the world of crime by tying his star to Joker's on the day Joker is released from Arkham Asylum. Accepted as Joker’s sidekick, Frost quickly realizes he is over his head, but he is unable to extricate himself as the mayhem mounts. Frost knows Joker does not tolerate betrayal. The comic implies that there is a way in which the various Jokers of page and screen connect: there may be multiple sequential Jokers, for Johnny (in a kind of Stockholm syndrome) seems ready to fill the character’s shoes before the story is done. Batman, who doesn’t appear until near the end of the comic, therefore will never defeat Joker. Another will take his place. It’s never possible entirely to defeat the dark impulses embodied by Joker. Batman (and we) can only continue the fight in hopes of limiting his influence.

Sammy Davis, Jr. – The Joker

Mural Principles

“Something there is that doesn't love a wall,” wrote Robert Frost (Mending Wall), but that doesn’t keep us from (re)building them any more than it did Bob. My own property has no walls or fences (other than the ones integral to the buildings themselves, of course) designed as barriers to people. There is a retaining wall to keep earth from sliding and a three-rail fence to keep the deer away from the pool (both barriers are in need of maintenance this spring), but neither would pose much of an obstruction to a person. This is simply because, to date, no such deterrence to trespassers has been needed in my out-of-the-way location; my property doesn’t lie between any two places that anyone on foot is apt to go. Some nearby neighbors, though equally out-of-the-way, opt for border walls and fences anyway. Perhaps my immediate neighbors will someday be inspired to do the same. Then I’d have an enclosure on three sides without having to lay a brick or dig a post hole of my own. I can live with that.

Boundary walls have a history as old as civilization. Walls: a History of Civilization in Blood and Brick by David Frye makes just this point. It arrived from Amazon last week. History can be written profitably with a focus any one component of civilization, no matter how large or small. I have read and been impressed by histories of rust, salt, germs, and even cod. Frye’s book on walls is a fine addition to them.

Walls are designed to keep something/someone out or something/someone in. (Frost again: “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out.”) Occasionally they are intended to do both. More commonly, though, they are just for one or the other, and most commonly of all they are to keep outsiders out. The need for them appeared as soon as ancient peoples settled down and built up static stores of food and goods; these were tempting targets for nomad raiders – and also for settled but covetous neighbors. Plundering someone else’s wealth was a pleasant activity – far more pleasant than laboring for it oneself – and so it was a difficult practice to stop. Defensive walls accordingly sprang up around the first cities. Walls have been with us ever since. They come in all types and sizes: frontier walls, city walls, neighborhood walls (aka “gated communities”), and walls around private estates. In general, the less effective the distant walls are, the more numerous the nearer ones will be.

Ancient frontier walls were built remarkably early. They turn up in what was still technically prehistory. When we think of frontier walls the Great Wall of China naturally springs to mind. Over millennia it was built and rebuilt: most impressively by the Ming, the last dynasty under which it served a real defensive purpose. Yet, while the Great Wall is exceptional by scale and by the persistence with which it was reconstructed, it was in other respects not alone and it was far from the first. In Syria, for example, there is a mysterious 100-mile wall more than 4000 years old running roughly north-south. Since writing was still a new idea that hadn’t yet spread to Syria, there are no descriptions of it from contemporary sources and no inscriptions on it. So, who built it and why are unknown. One can make surmises. Like most ancient frontier walls it separated the settled area of farms and cities (in this case to the west) from the unsettled realm of nomads (pastoralists and hunter-gatherers mostly) on the other side. Scarcely more than a meter tall, it wasn’t a very formidable barrier, though it would have presented an obstacle to war chariots, the Abrams tanks of the day. Chariots were among the weapons of the nomads at the time; pure cavalry, sans chariots, was half a century in the future. If defended, it at least would have slowed attackers on foot, too. A few centuries later, Shulgi of Ur built a long frontier wall across the desert “like a net.” The Sumerians did have writing so we have a record of Shulgi bragging about the accomplishment. The purpose was to block the raids of nomadic Amorites to the north. Later, for similar reasons, the Persians built walls against the horsemen of the northern steppes. (Fate being the prankster that she is, Persia eventually fell to horsemen from the south.) The Romans were inveterate wall builders as well. Hadrian’s Wall is most famous, but hundreds of miles of other walls defended the Empire against barbarians from unoccupied Germany (we often forget just how much of Germany Rome held), the Balkans, Syria, and even North Africa. In modern times the Maginot line, a frontier wall of sorts, is often derided because Germans bypassed it. Yet, the line forced the Germans to bypass it, so to that extent it worked. Had the Maginot line extended to the sea, 1940 might have been very different. Expanding empires, one might note, don’t bother much with walls. Border walls are commonly a signal that imperial expansion is over, and that emphasis has switched to holding ground against loss.

City walls were a second (sometimes only) line of defense in ancient times. They could be defeated by a determined and capable besieger, but more often than not they were effective. City walls left the surrounding countryside exposed to raiders, true enough, but at least the towns had protection. From Sumerian times to the end of the Middle Ages, well-defended walls were tough to beat. The Long Walls connecting Athens to the port of Piraeus made the Athenian rise to power possible by thwarting (for a time) Sparta’s more powerful army. For months the walls of Tyre held up Alexander the Great: not a fellow to be easily held up. Repeatedly over centuries the walls of Constantinople saved the Byzantine Empire from invaders. At long last, however, those walls were reduced to ruins by the cannonades of Mehmed the Conqueror in 1453. Orban, the Hungarian metals expert who cast the massive cannons, had offered his expertise to both sides, but Mehmed made the better offer. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be stingy.

Some walls are built to keep people in rather than out: prison walls are the most obvious example. During the Cold War we saw the curious case of border walls – the Berlin wall most prominently – designed primarily to keep the population inside from leaving: a reversal of border walls’ usual function. Most walls and border fences today serve the old-fashioned exclusionary purpose. They often are controversial nonetheless, whether on the West Bank, the southern flank of Hungary, or the US southern border. Those inside at least are still free to leave, however.

Here at home, I’ll soon dig out my masonry tools from the garage for my wall repairs this spring. Once again, my own masonry walls at present merely keep back dirt from where I don’t want it. Hopefully, the need for anything more won’t ever arise. One never can be altogether certain about such things though. Fate is still a prankster.

Johnny Cash – The Wall

Tides and Swarms

Last night after picking up a few groceries I drove through my smallish home town of Mendham and was surprised to find traffic backed up. At any time other than morning rush hour, it is always a surprise to find traffic backed up. The reason was cars coming in and out of the The Black Horse Inn, a restaurant at the central crossroads that has been in business since 1749. I had forgotten it was Valentine’s Day. Apparently the day is alive and well locally at least. Spending was up substantially this year on gifts and entertainment for the holiday according to MarketWatch, yet fewer people accounted for it. They are enough to have crowded upscale restaurants, it seems, but the number of over-18s who did anything to celebrate the day nonetheless was down 20% from a decade ago, with the biggest drop-off in the 18-35 range. Some 5% in that age group planned (with characteristic irony) anti-valentine activities.

This follows the general trend in the population toward lifetime singlehood and away from forming couples – and also from having children. The extent to which this is true is masked by the 80/20 split which characterizes some much of culture and life. (See Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard Reeves.) The culture in traditional media is dominated by the upper 20%, and this class still marries at much the same rate as a half century ago. For everyone else the rate has fallen off a cliff – and not just for marriage but for romantic relationships of any kind. Singles are a majority of the US adult population and many young people express no interest in ever being anything else. Unsurprisingly, the fertility rate keeps dropping. One doesn’t need to be married to have children, of course (40% of US births are out of wedlock), but single people tend to have fewer. In 2019 the US fertility rate declined to 1.7, its lowest level ever. While this is actually relatively high by first world standards, it is well below the 2.1 necessary to maintain a stable population without net immigration.

For those who might think the fertility decline stems from insufficient social supports for parents in the US, countries that have them (e.g. the Nordic bloc) have even lower fertility rates. Finland, for example, has 105-day maternity leaves (fathers get 54 days) during which the Finnish Social Security agency pays a maternity allowance. Parental leave (albeit unpaid) with job security lasts another 158 days. There are daycare subsidies and a child home care allowance. Finalnd ranks fourth globally (after three Scandinavian countries) in gender equality. Yet, Finland’s fertility rate is 1.3. Apparently, something else is influencing these personal decisions.

The global fertility rate, by the way, is 2.4. This is half what the rate was 60 years ago, but it is still enough to keep global population rising from 7.8 billion today to 8.5 billion by 2030 – an increase about equal to the entire world’s population in 1800. If all this discussion of population, seems a digression from Valentine’s Day, it is. But sort of not. The thoughts were stirred up by recently reading two books with similar titles but different emphases. Both are worth a look.

The Human Tide: How Populations Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland describes the ways birth rates, death rates, migrations of people and peoples, and sometimes unpyramid-like population age pyramids shape history and politics. Some information is on a grand scale, some on a small (e.g. “Life expectancy for men in Glasgow is lower than for men in Gaza”), and much is in between. Demographics may not be destiny, but all else equal they very nearly are. The rise and fall of civilizations over the millennia are intimately tied to the size and distribution of their people.

A profound change in human affairs began a little over two centuries ago. Whereas populations once expanded and contracted in accord with war, disease, political (in)stability, and natural conditions, the industrial revolution broke humans out of the Malthusian trap, first in Europe and then sequentially in other parts of the world. Always there is a population explosion followed by a drop in fertility. There are occasional anomalies (e.g. the Baby Boom, which interrupted an early 20^th century fertility decline) but these are short-term responses to unusual circumstances (e.g. Depression and World War). A few countries (Russia and Japan among them) already are contracting in absolute terms. Others are still rising (but aging) due to ongoing reductions in the death rate but will contract in the near future. Replacement of contracting traditional populations by migration will prevent declines is some places, but this is not without social stress. Demographics are reshaping cultures and global power accordingly.

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett covers some of the same ground but with another perspective, He is particularly interested in the origins of division and unity, peace and conflict. Moffett ties human psychology (especially the us-versus-them dichotomy) to animal behavior, including (but not limited to) that of chimpanzees and bonobos. Although conflict tends to grab our attention, Moffett reminds us that humans have a remarkably peaceful tolerance of strangers. You cannot put 500 strange chimps together in a theater without a riot, but humans do this without a thought. Yet, we engage in grand scale warfare (much of it civil) beyond the imagination of our anthropoid cousins. Moffett tells us that ethnicity and other forms of tribalism matter, not because of any biological basis they might have but simply because people themselves believe in them with consequent identity politics that are sometimes benign and occasionally murderous. Moffett, like Morland, notes modern fertility decline but, also like Morland, can identify the conditions under which it occurs but not offer an explanation as such.

Perhaps there is no use overthinking it. It’s enough to say that above a certain level of economic and personal independence, more people choose maintaining that freedom and independence over having a large family – or even a romantic partner. As for those still seeking the latter, sometimes it works out. Sometimes not.

An Anti-Valentine Tune:

Puddle of Mudd – She Hates Me

Go to the Matt

You never know with award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey. When not hawking Lincolns or Wild Turkey bourbon, he might turn up in anything from a lame romcom (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past), to an edgy neo-noir (Killer Joe), to a genuinely effective drama (Dallas Buyers Club). Quality is a roll of the dice. Based on Amazon recommendations, this past week I took a chance and a gander at two from 2019.

**** ****

The Beach Bum 

Written and directed by Harmony Korine, The Beach Bum features a protagonist (McConaughey) named Moondog who doesn’t rise to the level of anything so dignified as the title. We meet him in Key West where he is drunk, stoned, and (very successfully) lecherous – in fact, we rarely see him in any other condition. He is able to live a life of carefree dissipation because he is rich. More accurately, his wife Minnie is rich. Minnie is as unfaithful as Moondog, including with Moondog’s friend and pot dealer Lingerie (Snoop Dog), but everybody is cool about each other’s sexcapades. Minnie calls Moondog back to Miami to attend their daughter’s wedding. Moondog shows up (still drunk, high, and lecherous), but is disappointed that his daughter Heather chose such a boring normal partner. We learn that Moondog (as Minnie, Heather, and Moondog himself all agree) is a great man because he once wrote lewd raunchy poetry (adolescent fare to judge by the samples given) though he stopped when he could afford just to be a bum.

Minnie and Moondog drive drunk the night of the wedding and Minnie is killed. (It is typical of the film that we see nothing of any effects on the driver [and passengers?] of the car with which they had a head-on.) Moondog discovers that Minnie’s Will prevents him from inheriting her huge fortune unless he publishes another book of poetry. Until then he is broke, and his daughter Heather refuses to advance him money. Naturally, he has to drink, blow dope, and letch even more to get his creative juices flowing. Meantime he is recklessly destructive and even participates in the mugging an old man for cash. But that is OK because he is a great artist, you see.

I have no objection to shameless hedonism as a conscious lifestyle choice. I at least understand nihilism, which posits no value (negative or positive) in either creation or destruction. Yet personal hedonism need not entail a brutal disregard for others, and Moondog isn’t a nihilist. On the contrary, he talks a lot about the positive value of fun. He is careless and destructive for the fun of it. He is a jackass. 96 minutes is too long to spend in his company. The only thing worse would be sitting through one of his poetry readings.

Thumbs Down.

**** ****

Serenity

Low expectations after the previous film thankfully were exceeded in this one, but regrettably not by a lot. Serenity starts out promisingly enough as an apparent homage to classic noir. Promises, promises.

Baker Dill (McConaughey) is an Iraq War vet with PTSD. Taking their son Patrick with her, his wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) left him during the war for a rich man. Dill changed his name and retreated to a subtropical island where he operates a deep sea fishing boat for tourists: think Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not but without the Vichy French. Chronically short of cash, Dill makes some extra as a gigolo for Constance (Diane Lane). He is obsessed by a big tuna named Justice who keeps eluding him, but his mind is taken off the fish when Karen shows up. She says that her husband Frank is an abuser. She says she has arranged this vacation so that Dill can take Frank fishing and kill him. Frank doesn’t know Dill is her ex. She offers Dill $10 million to do the job. Yet there is something screwy about the whole business that goes well beyond a murder scheme, and the more he tries to make sense of it the less sense it makes.

Though prettily filmed, Serenity misses on so many levels (including an absence of spark between McConaughey and Hathaway) that it is rescued to a degree by a “so bad it’s good” quality. But only to a degree.

This is not the shipwreck that The Beach Bum is, but ultimately (despite elements I can’t mention without spoilers) it gets a Thumbs Down.

**** ****

The good news is that 2020 should be a better year for Matthew. I haven’t seen The Gentlemen, currently in theaters, but it is getting generally positive reviews. As for Lincoln cars, they are too expensive for my taste. Wild Turkey isn’t bad for its moderate price, though the “101” variant is to be preferred over the standard bottle.

Serenity Trailer

Malice Afterthought

As mentioned a couple of blogs ago, 2020 contains quite a lot of notable 50^th anniversaries for me personally. In the broader world, 1970 was no more or less notable than 1971 and probably much less so than 1969, but in a purely solipsistic sense 1970 was a particularly memorable year. Among other things, it contained my final semester of high school, the first semester of college, and (at the tail end of November) registration for the draft on my 18^th birthday. Beneath those surface events, 1970 was also the first full year my sense of identity had a firm footing.

I think most readers will know what I mean. Whatever one thinks of the old Freudian notions of personality formation in early childhood years, it is true that certain personality traits visible in a person’s childhood commonly remain visible in adulthood. Yet, there is less to this than meets the eye. Take a childhood trait of shyness as an example; even if the trait continues into adulthood, it can be expressed in a variety of different ways; what way a 10-year-old will express it at age 20 or 30 is unpredictable. Hence, there are shy criminals, professors, and army Rangers with quite different general personalities. Most of us firm up our final identities in our teens – not our life paths but our identities. Some take longer. I certainly feel I could have become a very different person today had influences during ages 13-16 been different, even if some early quirks would have carried over regardless. However, though much older (and I hope at least a fraction wiser), I’m very much the same person now as at 17. I don’t think anyone who knew me in 1970 would be surprised meeting me today.

For most of us the mid-teens – generally coinciding with high school – are pivotal and are burned into our memories like no 4-year period before or since. The “reminiscence bump” is a well-known phenomenon: even as senior citizens we remember our teens and 20s better than more recent decades. High school is particularly intense since it generally coincides with a lot of “firsts,” though some of us bloom earlier or later than others. Accordingly, there is a whole genre of high school movies, TV shows, and young adult novels that – though ostensibly aimed at teens – finds its largest audience in adults. YA (young adult) novels might seem the least likely medium to win an adult audience, given the teen protagonists and the coming-of-age themes. Yet a majority of readers of them are adults according to Publisher’s Weekly, with age 30-44 as the single largest demographic. For at least some movies, the median age of home viewers is as high or higher – especially for now classic offerings such as 10 Things I Hate about You, the 80s John Hughes movies, Mean Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the series, not the movie), and so on. I’m not immune to them, even if they’re not my primary fare. Why does their popularity persist into dodderhood? Because we’ve all been there (metaphorically if we’re referring to the ones with vampires), and thanks to that reminiscence bump are still more likely to identify with the teen protagonists than with the adults, be they villains or supporting cast. I must admit to at least one exception, which must mean I truly am getting old. In Buffy I tend to see things from the perspective of the middle-age high school librarian Giles. (My skills in magicks and the black arts are not as refined as his, alas.)

All this brings us to a YA novel that I did recently pick up: Go Ask Malice by Robert Joseph Levy. Despite having first aired 23 years ago, the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer continues to inspire analyses, spin-offs, and sequels in multiple media. This epistolary novel (the same format as Bram Stoker’s Dracula) is a prequel about the harsh life of the character Faith before her arrival in Sunnydale. The character, as viewers know, after a promising start goes over to the dark side in Season 3. (The famously existentialist Joss Whedon, the series creator, was no doubt punning with the philosophy’s notion of “bad faith.”) The novel is fully consistent with the show, but that can be noticed only by readers who watched the TV series – but then, who else would want to read the book? This is not really a Young Adult novel unless the definition of YA has gotten edgier than it used to be. Elements such as Faith’s alcoholic prostitute mother, her mom’s abusive boyfriends, her own loser boyfriends, her prison inmate dad (from whom she nonetheless picks up the phrase “five by five”), her evil foster parents, and her stint in a mental hospital make this book rougher than most YA fare. There are school violence, encounters with Bacchae (yes, really), a false rescue by her Watcher, and the brutal event that sends Faith on the road to Sunnydale. Upshot: the novel is not bad, but once again is only for Buffy buffs.

And you thought your high school years were rough.

The Runaways - School Days (1977)