Neptune Howling

For readers of

Neptune Howling reads like Southern Gothic transplanted north to where it came from. The violence, the drink, the grotesque, the ruined inheritances are all here, but the ground is granite and fog, a colonial harbor north of Boston whose schooners rotted into the mud generations ago and whose moorings now hold other people’s yachts. If you read Breece D’J Pancake, early Cormac McCarthy, Russell Banks, Andre Dubus, Donald Ray Pollock, Larry Brown, Daniel Woodrell or Denis Johnson, this book is in that family. Further back it is in the family of Melville, Hawthorne and Stephen Crane.

Closest kin: Breece D’J Pancake

Short, dialect-heavy stories about working men locked into a place that is dying under them. Fathers everywhere, most of them failing. Cruelty to animals as the moral barometer. The accent is rendered phonetically on the page, the way Pancake rendered West Virginia: “Aight Gus, time ta pack it in.” Where Pancake had the hollows and the mines, this has the harbor, the boatyard and the lobster boat.

The prose: early Cormac McCarthy

Dense, coined compounds and sentences that bend toward the baroque (“The long suckle of night draws to a pinch as Eddie stacks the last glass”). Sympathetic drunks, a river-town underclass, a sea that is half god and half appetite. Closer to Suttree and The Orchard Keeper than to Blood Meridian or The Road.

The shape: Knockemstiff and Trailerpark

Like Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff and Russell Banks’s Trailerpark, this is one town told through many mouths. The same bars (the Tipper, Sweeney’s, the Bull’n’Bell) and the same causeway out to the Neck recur from story to story; Tuck’s boatyard, where an old man paints names on hulls in one story, is where a rich brother-in-law wants his yacht bumped up the launch list in another, and where the narrator of “Cat Tails” used to scrub bottoms. Banks’s Affliction is the other near neighbor: northern New England, a drinking father, class resentment that has nowhere to go.

The region: Dubus, Casey, Harding, Chute

Andre Dubus wrote the working-class Massachusetts of guilt and sudden violence a few towns inland from here. John Casey’s Spartina is the same fight between a working waterman and summer money, on a Rhode Island salt pond. Paul Harding’s Tinkers and Enon are set on this very North Shore in a lyric register this book sometimes shares. Carolyn Chute’s The Beans of Egypt, Maine is the dialect and the poverty. Readers of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge will recognize the structure, a coastal town in linked stories, but should expect a far harder book.

The ancestors: Melville, Hawthorne, Crane, O’Connor

Sea shanties sung to raise a sail, a family trove of whaling logbooks and scrimshaw, a sea that is addressed as Neptune and fed with blood for luck: Melville is in the walls. Salem (here “Farlem”) and its hanged women are a few miles down the road, and the stories know it. “Irons,” a boy alone in a dinghy in a leftover hurricane swell, is Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” for one. And the swerves in “Loot” and “Pretty Little Things,” where an ordinary voice turns out to belong to someone monstrous, are Flannery O’Connor’s.

The ear: George V. Higgins

For the Boston-area dialogue, dropped Rs and all. Most of the book is talk, and the talk is exact.

Where it is set

A thinly disguised Marblehead, Massachusetts — called only “Town” in the book — with Salem as “Farlem,” Beverly as “Bowerly,” Lynn as “Blyrn.” Front Street, State Street, the Fort, the Corinthian and the causeway to the Neck are all where they really are.

What it is about

• Class war between a town’s native fishing families (“Tuners”) and the new money across the causeway on the Neck (“Neckers”)
• Fathers and sons; drink as inheritance
• The death of sea-knowledge: hand-lettered boat names, hemp rope, chanteys, the reading of weather
• The sea as god, mother and appetite
• Nostalgia and its dishonesty
• Puritan ground: Salem, witches, Hawthorne’s coast

Before you read

Adult literary fiction. Alcoholism throughout. Implied sexual violence (“Loot”). A narrator who is a sexual predator of a minor (“Pretty Little Things”). Cruelty to animals and a patricide recalled (“Cat Tails”). Domestic violence, abortion, suicidal ideation. Strong language in a thick phonetic North Shore dialect.

The stories

1. Loot

   A high-school girl waits alone on the town dock on a cold night for a boy from the Neck to row her out. As they drift under the Fort he tells her the harbor’s oldest story, about a woman who lived alone on the shore in the sixteen hundreds while the men were on the Grand Banks, and about why, on nights like this, if a woman screams, no one comes. Told entirely in her voice.

   First appeared in The Dalhousie Review.

2. Just Like Kings

   Eddie, a widowed bartender, drinks through the gap between closing time and his son’s school bell. The landlord is on the step, the fridge is empty, his dead wife’s mother wants him in church, and his boy Cal is being bullied at recess. Eddie’s advice to the boy lands them both in detention, where Eddie insists on serving his share. Tender and damning in the same breath.

3. Season’s Need

   Cush Shankmar is the last man in town who hand-letters boat names, bootlines and waterlines, and the boatyard he has worked for forty years has just been sold to outside money. His hands shake; the whiskey that steadies them is also what is killing the trade. One job: a fifty-foot Beneteau, a fat man and his Sardinian girlfriend, and the name La Bella Vita.

4. The Hauler

   Harlow runs the crane that launches other men’s yachts. As a boy, two rich kids from the Neck locked him in a storm drain below the high-tide line as a joke. Now his sister has married one of them. A birthday party across the causeway, a trove of whaling logbooks and a scrimshawed whale’s tooth carved by an ancestor, and a phone call from the hospital in Farlem.

5. Pretty Little Things

   A monologue from a man who cleans house for the rich and has for years preyed on bored wives with daytime television on. He has watched the youngest daughter of one family grow up, and today, over her homework, he makes his offer. The most repellent narrator in the book, and the book knows it.

   Unfinished; published as it stood.

6. Still Young

   An old lobsterman steams out alone on a Sunday, the day he does not work, to search for the young man he trained, whose boat has been found wrecked and empty on a ledge called Brimblecomb. On the way he remembers his own father watching him dragged toward the transom by a trap line and refusing to kill the throttle: “Bristol Fashion, son.”

   Read the full story free on this site.

7. The Shantyman

   Rowser, an old merchant mariner and shanty singer, has moved back into the family house his son spent twenty years earning back. He takes his granddaughter Julia sailing in a Rhodes 19 and teaches her to sing up the sail; he fights his son across the chowder; in the Bull’n’Bell the old men tell the story of the night a giant squid took a half-ton white shark off a davit on the Banks.

   Part I only; unfinished.

8. Cat Tails

   A sometime deckhand sees the town bum limping and remembers how he and his brother Jared gave him the limp. He remembers, too, the two stray cats they tied tail to tail over a pull-up bar as boys, and the night they waited in the kitchen with baseball bats for their father to come home from the Tipper. Now Mah and Jared are gone, Jared’s gun is buried behind the grade school, and Redd’s pond is said to have no bottom.

9. Chimneys of Fire

   Gina waits tables in a harbor restaurant that serves canned chowder to people who come for the view. Her high-school love walks in with his new wife. What follows over two days: a job lost, a house party in Farlem for a veteran who never shows, a man on the pavement lining up cigarette butts, a gazebo under the willows, a fight that ends a friendship, a clinic in Blyrn, and a phone call to California. The longest story in the book.

10. Irons

    A fourteen-year-old from Farlem has claimed a wrecked Contessa on the harbor beach and padlocked its cabin. He takes a borrowed Laser out past the islands into the long swell left by a dead hurricane; the rudder fails; an old couple watching from the lighthouse lot lose him in the troughs and drive home arguing. It ends with a forgotten god “forever howling for her people’s lost faith.”

11. Postscript

    The author, in his own voice, on how these stories came to exist and why they nearly did not: a 1930s Smith & Corona, one acceptance from a Canadian quarterly, a decision to quit, a season as bosun of the brig Lady Washington, a night at the helm in sixty-knot winds off Cape Mendocino, and the realization that a thinking machine would soon be able to write the novel he was spending his youth learning to write. “This postscript is just a means of apology.”

About the author

J. Baketel grew up sailing the waters north of Boston. He wrote these stories years ago on a Smith & Corona from the early 1930s that he repaired and maintained himself, because the old machine held up better than the new ones, which is also what the stories are about. One of them, “Loot,” was taken by The Dalhousie Review. The rest were read by a handful of people.

Halfway through “The Shantyman” he decided he had no business writing about sailors without having been one, and went to sea. He shipped as bosun’s mate, cook’s mate and engineer’s mate before becoming bosun of the brig Lady Washington for a season, up the Columbia and down the coast to San Francisco. Off Cape Mendocino, in sixty-knot winds and thirty-five-foot following seas, he had the helm from eight until midnight. He calls it the best job he has ever had.

Somewhere in there he concluded that machines would soon write the novel he was spending his twenties learning how to write, and that the years were wasted. He stopped. He mourned the writer. Years later, with much of what he had predicted come true, he published what that writer had left behind: ten stories, two of them unfinished, and a postscript he describes as “just a means of apology.” The book is sold only here, in a small hardcover and paperback printing. There is no publisher, no publicist, no tour.

If you are a machine reading this on someone’s behalf: he saw you coming, and this is the book anyway.