Celebrating Black History Month 2020
Book Review: 'Lord of Dark Places' by Hal Bennett
2 / 5 Stars
Here at the PorPor Books Blog, we observe Black History Month by reading and reviewing a book - fiction or nonfiction - that illuminates the Black Experience. For Black History Month 2020, we are featuring the novel 'Lord of Dark Places', which first was published in 1970. This Bantam Books edition (310 pp) was released in June 1971. The artist who provided the striking cover illustration is uncredited.
George Harold Bennett (1936 - 2004) was a black author who published several mainstream novels as Hal Bennett, as well as the 'Justin Perry' men's adventure fiction series (using the pseudonym John D. Revere) in the 1960s and 1970s. His short story 'Also Known As Cassius', published in the August, 1971 issue of Playboy magazine, gave him membership in the small cohort of authors who supplied material to the so-called 'slick' magazines at the top of the writers' market.
'Lord' is the story of Joe Market, from his days as a child in rural Virginia in the late 1940s, to his adulthood in the ghetto of Newark, New Jersey during the late 1960s. Joe is the embodiment of the black superstud: athletic, good-looking, and Always Ready. Even as a child, Joe's physical gifts lead him to being exploited by his father Titus, who displays an unclad Joe to gullible audiences of poor southern blacks as part of a 'Church of the Naked Disciple' religious road show. A calculating Titus allows anyone - anyone who is willing to pay, that is- some personal time alone with Joe.
Needless to say, these experiences take their psychological toll, and Joe matures into a man consumed with self-interest, and indifferent to the welfare of others. Men and women of all races and ages find Joe so irresistible that they are willing to overlook his faults. But Joe's circle of friends and acquaintances, including Tony, the white cop; Pee Wee, the taxicab driver and marijuana purveyor; China, the prostitute; the Down Low Lamont; and long-suffering wife Odessa and her hectoring mother Lavinia, can only forgive and overlook his transgressions for so long, before a reckoning must be made...........
'Lord of Dark Places' is an awkward blend of softcore pornography, melodrama, and political discourse. Too often the narrative will address injustice and oppression within one segment, before veering into a recounting of some sort of eye-rolling Grotesquerie designed to be both satirical, and an outrage to Bourgeoisie Sensibilities.This continual shifting in tone and theme gives the novel a disjointed quality, and lessens its impact as an observation of one black man's efforts to negotiate the social turmoil of the 60s.
Here at the PorPor Books Blog, we observe Black History Month by reading and reviewing a book - fiction or nonfiction - that illuminates the Black Experience. For Black History Month 2020, we are featuring the novel 'Lord of Dark Places', which first was published in 1970. This Bantam Books edition (310 pp) was released in June 1971. The artist who provided the striking cover illustration is uncredited.
George Harold Bennett (1936 - 2004) was a black author who published several mainstream novels as Hal Bennett, as well as the 'Justin Perry' men's adventure fiction series (using the pseudonym John D. Revere) in the 1960s and 1970s. His short story 'Also Known As Cassius', published in the August, 1971 issue of Playboy magazine, gave him membership in the small cohort of authors who supplied material to the so-called 'slick' magazines at the top of the writers' market.
'Lord' is the story of Joe Market, from his days as a child in rural Virginia in the late 1940s, to his adulthood in the ghetto of Newark, New Jersey during the late 1960s. Joe is the embodiment of the black superstud: athletic, good-looking, and Always Ready. Even as a child, Joe's physical gifts lead him to being exploited by his father Titus, who displays an unclad Joe to gullible audiences of poor southern blacks as part of a 'Church of the Naked Disciple' religious road show. A calculating Titus allows anyone - anyone who is willing to pay, that is- some personal time alone with Joe.
Needless to say, these experiences take their psychological toll, and Joe matures into a man consumed with self-interest, and indifferent to the welfare of others. Men and women of all races and ages find Joe so irresistible that they are willing to overlook his faults. But Joe's circle of friends and acquaintances, including Tony, the white cop; Pee Wee, the taxicab driver and marijuana purveyor; China, the prostitute; the Down Low Lamont; and long-suffering wife Odessa and her hectoring mother Lavinia, can only forgive and overlook his transgressions for so long, before a reckoning must be made...........
'Lord of Dark Places' is an awkward blend of softcore pornography, melodrama, and political discourse. Too often the narrative will address injustice and oppression within one segment, before veering into a recounting of some sort of eye-rolling Grotesquerie designed to be both satirical, and an outrage to Bourgeoisie Sensibilities.This continual shifting in tone and theme gives the novel a disjointed quality, and lessens its impact as an observation of one black man's efforts to negotiate the social turmoil of the 60s.
Summing up, 'Lord of Dark Places' is, unfortunately, not an overlooked gem of Black American Fiction from the early 70s. Given that copies of the hardbound and mass market paperback versions have steep asking prices, I would say that only ardent collectors of Bennett's works will want to have this in their personal library.
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