Any presentation of the marvelous whether by nature or artist has a mundane mechanics behind it. A rainbow is reflection, refraction and dispersal of light. A painting is color mixtures and brush strokes and technique. While all art seeks to disguise it’s source, magic has a unique relationship to it’s mechanics. Magicians or charlatans, depending upon their context, work to misdirect your attention from one cause to another. David K. Abbot, contemporary and friend of Harry Houdini, was a premier magician of his time. And like Houdini, Abbott made it a calling to unveil charlatans who used the tricks of his trade for unscrupulous purposes—largely those who claimed to communicate with the dead at the expense of their living counterparts. This book represents Abbott’s take on a few of the acts he considered disreputable—and by unveiling these “impossible” feats he reveals how we all might be manipulated. A quick little book that almost reads like a technical manual, it is fun to be shown the mechanics of the magic and how Abbot’s mind works when he is not sure how the subject performs a trick but still manages to pull off the same trick using a method of his own devising. Recommended for anyone even remotely interested in magic and even for those interested in history. Among his fans are Penn & Teller who have written two books about him.

There is a certain unreality about his book. Beginning with a dream like refrain that seems to mimic the drift into deep sleep, the body of the book is more like glimpses than watching a traditional narrative unfold. As in a dream we see elements that convey the whole story but we are not quite ourselves. This becomes literally true for the main character who’s identity becomes fluid—she does so little to establish who she is at any time that, like a dream, events unfold with a kind of uncontrollable fate or destiny rather than as a result of her actions. There were moments where I fought this feeling at the beginning (probably why I have had lifelong sleeping problems) but the sooner you give yourself over, the more you will enjoy the book. Once this dream is set in motion, Woolrich manages suspense from thin air as if it is seeping from the walls. Every furtive step on a staircase or neighbor glimpsed from a window or tap on the shoulder during a dance feels heavy with portent. More often than not pay-off is deferred increasing the debt of suspense and by the end there are twists, hopes rise and fall and…you find yourself slipping out of the deep sleep you have been in for 200 pages. I had to surreptitiously agree not to wake up to truly enjoy the purgatory like ending of I MARRIED A DEAD MAN but I’m okay with that.

For reasons that I can't fully fathom, I was immediately enamored with the images of Milk and Cheese. Was it the boxy heads or face filling features or the almost always in motion over-sized feet and hands. Maybe. But I suspect it really was the greasepaint Groucho eyebrows appropriately borrowed from the original menace of mayhem--unless you count Attila The Hun. There is really little point to all this but to wreak havoc--quite literal and visceral physical destruction--while being self referential and breaking the fourth wall but it is very amusing for awhile. Best read in small doses or enjoyed as originally published individually in various comic collections where they would benefit from clearly standing out from everything else around it. While each comic skewers a different subject, too often it is "second verse, same as the first". I almost always enjoyed them and suspect I would have enjoyed them more had I stumbled across them in the 80's when they originally debuted. Of course, I could never truly bad mouth anything that references Merv Griffin, lawn darts and catching Monk at the Pussycat Lounge. And of course beating up a record store clerk at least in part because he'd never heard of Nat King Cole didn't hurt either.