Brief Thoughts: A Better Crooked

Last year I read Austin Grossman's Crooked, a novel reimagining the Cold War as not merely a diplomatic, economic, and - by way of proxy wars - military conflict but as an occult conflict in which the Soviet Union has raced far ahead of the United States, and Richard Nixon is the last of the sorcerer-presidents. It blends alternate history with political thriller, and layers onto this shades of Lovecraftian horror, Faustian bargains, Cold War-era espionage and intrigue, and suspense. (There will be spoilers.)

At the time I called it a delightful novel and an entertaining read. In the intervening year (roughly) since reading it, I've become more and more dissatisfied with it. Yes, yes, it's a fun novel and there's something very funny about ideas like Henry Kissinger being a thousand-year-old warlock (also a good explanation for how he keeps persistently not dying), or Eisenhower being an abdead not-wholly-human thing, or the existence of the phrase "intercontinental necromatic missile," but...

...the thing is, ultimately, that in positing that there is a darkness at the heart of the American government, attributing it to the supernatural becomes an act of escape. There is, indeed, horror at the depths of the government. But demons are not the answer to it.

Crooked posits Watergate not only as something covered up, but itself a cover-up, something to obscure a darker, supernatural operation: putting an end to a supernatural entity, employed by the Soviet Union, which has made an alliance with George McGovern to win the 1972 Election.

And this is all well and good, but it seems to me that there's a better story that could be told, that grasps for the actual darkness at the heart of the American government - not the darkness of warlocks, sorcerers, or necromancy, but the darkness of the CIA, of MK-ULTRA, of crimes against humanity perpetrated both internationally and domestically.

This would be a bleaker, darker book, and inevitably, this would mean a darker, bleaker Nixon: in Grossman's Crooked, Nixon is pushy, ignorant, a man scrabbling beyond his abilities - and fully aware of it, and thus able to rise to the (supernatural) occasion. But the real Nixon, the one that exists on tapes and interviews, was a man of viciousness, pettiness, and spite; an alcoholic and a pill-popper; a paranoiac and an insomniac; a man sufficiently unstable that on at least a half-dozen occasions the military was instructed by the Secretary of Defense to ignore any orders that might come from him. The real Nixon may not be the monster portrayed in Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power, but he is not far from it. (Setting aside the conspiracizing, Oliver Stone's Nixon may come closest.)

Such a novel would require much more research, mental fortitude, and the ability not just to wrestle with what can be safely described as evil but the ability to wrest meaning from it. I suppose that I really want Crooked to be something other than it is.