Ep. 81 The Red Right Hand

"Bright blazing intuitions may go rushing through a man’s mind,
swifter and more terrible than lightning, flashing over a landscape
that seems clear in every detail. Then they go out, and there is
only a greater blackness." Nothing is what it seems - unless
everything is what it seems - in the account of an eloping couple's
ill-fated voyage from New York to Vermont. What strange fate befell
this Amish-raised lollapalooza and her gabardine suit-garbed
coxcomb on a backroad in the Berkshires? And what does it have to
do with a freckled-faced city surgeon, a refugee Basque surrealist
artist, the author of an arduous text on psychopathology and the
postmaster of Whippleville? Joel Townsley Rogers's The Red Right
Hand is a cipher of crime fiction, a phantasmagoria of molds,
tramps, ration books, brain surgery, eyeless houses, sawdust
sinkholes, red-eyed rattlesnakes, prewar crepe-soled sports shoes
and the beautiful dance of the corkscrew and the bottle. Confused?
That's only to be expected when you make the turn onto the old
Swamp Road and find yourself transfixed by the chimerical logic of
what seems like a straightforward story of murder until it distorts
and disorients the narrative into a truly unique reading
experience. In this episode, Christopher Funderburg & John
Cribbs veer into this Bermuda Triangle of murky prose - is it all
pulp and circumstance or a meticulously fathomless work of art?
Together they wade through Rogers's curious cast of characters,
casual allusions to alternative history and obsessive repetition of
superficially trivial details to reach the elusive epicenter of
this crazy book, the very definition of a cult classic. Support our
Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke The Pink Smoke site:
www.thepinksmoke.com The Pink Smoke on Twitter:
twitter.com/thepinksmoke Christopher Funderburg on Twitter:

twitter.com/cfunderburg John Cribbs on Twitter:
twitter.com/TheLastMachine Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea
for Two”
 Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"