Rating:

How bad do you want it?

Author: Gretchen Felker-Martin

Ellen Kramer works for a disgraced film restoration company, and her new project is The Baroness, a film only recently discovered to have survived its supposed destruction by the Nazis. The film makes Ellen deeply uncomfortable – from its history (the Jewish man who produced it and the cast all ended up in concentration camps – dead), its occult rituals (including human sacrifice), and its intensely graphical homosexual content. But Ellen is not like that anymore – she never was, it was a phase, she’s cured – and the film is just a project, right? Just a long-forgotten porno, a relic of a bygone era, the last creation of a man who died in infamy and agony.

Of course, The Baroness is far more than a porno turned snuff film. It’s a legacy and a curse, and Ellen is now deeply enmeshed as it unreels. She’d kill to escape its clutches. She’d kill to stay strangled within its luscious, erotic folds. She is so confused. And she wants. She wants desperately. Dangerously.

Black Flame is not my usual horror flare. The entire cursed film sub-genre has never appealed to me, and my lackluster encounter with Silver Nitrate did not change my mind. The evil-film stories have many logical gaps and so much Hollywood/cinematic history worship, neither of which are my personal cup of corrupted, horror polluted tea. But . . . one must read what the GoodReads book club chooses, and the cover is FIRE.

What works in Black Flame is the writing. The words are alive here, sinuous and beautifully ugly, pulsing with an infected life that keeps calling us just as it repulses us. Gretchen Felker-Martin can write. In one sentence, one paragraph, he can create and cast a mood like a dark sorceress. He commands language, and every dirty bathroom tile, every heavy boot fall, every sharp-edged flick of film has us spellbound and ultimately terrified. A surreal fever dream that sucks us in and refuses to let go. The atmosphere is half the fun and all the horror.

The plot on the other hand – it needs work. It needs explanation. The cover-blurb suggests that Ellen is devolving into her own world, one that is mostly mental purgatory – an insanity story given wings and rage. Yet, the novel itself reads very much like the film is indeed cursed, indeed a real-life catalyst. Perhaps Ellen is susceptible to its spell, this queer rage boiling under the surface, but other characters, ones who seem more in tune with the world around them, experience the same. When we read, we are not really left with any wiggle room. The film is supernatural and Ellen has, somehow, awakened its spell.

Image by Dan from Pixabay

Which leaves me with so many questions. The producer was exposed to hatred and persecution both for his race (Jewish) and his sexuality . . . and he has this not really explained heredity occult power to essentially rain hellfire and brimstone . . . and yet he chooses not to avenge himself in life, on the Nazis, but through a weird second version (never explained why we need a second version) of a porn film he and his friends made that attacks the watcher – a fellow Jewish queer person? Please make that make sense. If you have these kinds of powers . . . why would you not make the curse a bit more pointed and, you know, go after the Nazis who are persecuting you and your friends?

Likewise, when Ellen finally embraces her power (delusion, insanity?) and decides to call down some serious revenge, she goes after the bad boss (who is, admittedly, a racist shit) but the rapist boyfriend we all desperately wanted to see killed meets his doom off screen. What? Also . . . what about the mother, the catalyst for so much angst? We spent way more time seeing how she negatively impacted Ellen, yet the barely-there boss gets the show-down gore scene.

The right ingredients were there, but, as with so many novellas, we needed more time, more page space, a better explanation of the why and how. Promising, but ultimately there are just too many logical gaps.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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