Theme Cult Classics

I'm going to refer to my previous posts here, and reiterate that any book that has a devoted fan-base that connects with it on a visceral level, can be considered a cult classic.

 

Really important observations. Thank you for chiming in.

 

We have brushed the edge of one point here, but not really explored it in this conversation. What creates that devoted fan base? I previously mentioned Frank Herbert's Dune. It is one of those books where you discover new aspects to the story with each rereading. Is that what caused it to become a cult classic, or was it some other aspect?

 

That may be part of it, but more than that the reader connects to the book in a very personal way. In post #13, I gave my experience with one book that had a huge impact on me:

 

I think a way to say it (that works for movies and books both) is that these feel like they weren't just cranked out to the usual industry standards but made as a labor of love by someone who really cares for the subject matter and was willing to take a lot of chances to make it really special, rather than playing it safe to appeal to the broadest possible customer-base. It's when the artists get their way over the bean-counters and manage to make something that really works (it doesn't always happen that way, often the artists end up making garbage). At least it works for the devoted fans.

 

And that something "special" is something that connects to the very core of who the reader is.

 

But what about Steel This Boo by Abbie Hoffman. This was surely what I would think of as a cult classic during its time. Of course readers will connect with a book for it to gain any kind of popularity. Perhaps, a cult classic speaks more to a generation of readers in an unfamiliar way to get that sort of status.

 

To tackle this topic, I prefer to first identify the types of books which I feel aren’t "culty." You know — gaining a better understanding of a thing by coming to grips with what it isn’t. So proceeding from there, I think the first category of novel I would reject would be...

Literary classics. Nothing from Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Herman Melville, Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Mary Shelley, etcetera. Virtually every college graduate has read some, if not a lot, of their stuff, as well as a substantial percentage of high schoolers. Those authors (and their respective books) are basically in the Hall of Fame of Literature, and therefore are too acclaimed for cult status.

The next bunch of novels I wouldn’t initiate into the almighty cult would be: household titles. By that I mean the novels which practically everyone, even non-readers, has heard of. Such as the Harry Potter series, Twighlight, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Davinci Code, Interview With a Vampire, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Treasure Island. Books like those are so well-known they’re part of pop culture. And pop culture is too inclusive a party to have the "secret fraternity" vibes cult classics require.

The final (and possibly most debatable) type I would deny would be: novels adapted into popular films or television series. So this would include: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Shining, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fight Club, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gone with the Wind, Jaws, The Notebook, Dune, The Godfather, and so on. Again, too closely tied into pop culture. If every other grandma or math teacher has heard of the book, it’s simply not obscure enough. Not culty enough.

I only managed to come up with one — outside of "secret fraternity" vibes — necessary trait for my conception of a cult classic novel, and that is: having a moderately-sized, abnormally enthusiastic fan base. If a book has that, and it doesn’t belong to one of categories I would reject, then I’ll probably consider it a cult classic. Then again, maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe there’s less. But at least in terms of my own intuitions about the label, I think I’m fairly close to the bullseye with what I’ve covered.

Hold on — I just thought of one more trait. The novel should probably have several years under its belt. A decade and a half? Two decades? I’m unsure of the exact amount of time a book would need to age, but my point being that I’m fairly certain nothing brand spanking new can be considered a cult classic.

Now, in regards to my favorite cult classics, some books which come to mind are: Drood by Dan Simmons, Darkness Weaves by Karl Edward Wagner, The Elementals by Michael McDowell, The Dark Elf Trilogy by R. A. Salvatore, The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, and The Time It Never Rained by Elmer Kelton.

Those are all bangers; you can take my word for it. But honestly, my absolute favorite cult classic novels are a handful of books from David Gemmell — Waylander, The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend, and Legend (I recommend reading them in this order). Those three books are . . . me! So very me!

 

I would class Dune as a book that broke out of cult classic status into main stream culture. It started out with a following similar to Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a strange land. Then spread by word of mouth through SciFi fans.

 

@Bone2pick - Thanks for the thoughtful comments.

I think it’s important to not confuse a cult following of a book with what we normally think of when we hear “cult” – such as a religious cult. The word is used in two different ways. A cult classic is called so because of its impact on a certain group of readers, who obsessively love the book(s). This is the one criterion. They say things like, “This book changed my life.” What they have read has infected and affected them deeply. It has nothing to do with the number of copies sold, only that there is a devoted fan base in whose life the particular writer figures large.

Did you know there is a Jane Austen Society of North America? I'd say Jane Austen has a cult following. Here’s their mission statement from their website:

https://jasna.org/

Even Shakespeare has a cult following. They absolutely love him!

I don’t see the connection between acclaim and cult status.

Definitely a cult classic, taken up by women fighting oppression. According to an article in The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/the-visceral-woman-centric-horror-of-the-handmaids-tale/523683/

 

Quoted from Cult of Jane Austen, by Deidre Shauna Lynch:

 

Yeah, I would think those authors’ most well-known books fit the bill — moderately popular with disproportionately passionate readerships. Publishing hits, for sure, but not at a level which elevated the stories into pop culture. Other authors such as Neal Stephenson, KJ Parker, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Larry Niven are also probably in that same stratum. It’s a pretty cool space to occupy, honestly.

FYI: I’ve never read Gorky Park, but I recently picked up a copy at my local used bookstore and plan to get to it before the year’s end.

 

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion immediately come to mind. I've read them both end-to-end several times. I know they're best-sellers and all that, but how many LOTR fans have read the books? Honestly? And The Silmarillion too?

I've also read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which is fascinating but harrowing. For escapism, and also research about LA in the 30s to the 50s, I read Raymond Chandler's full canon, which was very enjoyable. (I'm not sure if his books could be published these days, because they have some language and material that could be considered questionable, especially by the PC crowd. But he's depicting LA as it really was, back then).

Speaking of Chandler, I also read the full canon of Dashiell Hammett, which might be considered a cult classic for the same reason -- he portrays the effects of racism and drugs in the 20s and 30s. Both Chandler and Hammett avoid using the N-word, IIRC, but their books are obviously not easy to read. Both Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade encounter the seedy side of society -- racism, drugs, police brutality, pornography. That's not easy to write about convincingly, but both Chandler and Hammett do, which is what makes their books valuable to me ... and which might make them "problematic" (or cult classics) nowadays.

Am I right in thinking this? I'm not sure. What do you think?

 

Hi,

I think the guts of what makes a book a cult classic is in the term. First cult - which basically means a cult following though not necessarily in a religious sense. It means that a certain group of readers will find what is written to be of some especial value to them. They'll love it. Maybe learn from it. Live their lives according to it. And of course they'll talk about it. And the second word is of course classic, which basically means it endures and its following endures.

In telly shows - can't think of a book other than the bible off the top of my head - we're talking about something like Star Trek. (Not Wars - that started out with a blockbuster movie and so was instantly mainstream). But Trek, well the first three seasons of TOS were ratings failures. It didn't go anywhere for years. But people knew the name. And there were enough loyal fans that eventually a movie was made - and so on. That lead to the classic side of the equation. Now only those first three seasons of Trek could really be called cult classic in my view. The rest is too mainstream. It has outgrown its cult status.

Does it have to be subversive? No. It just has to grab people's attention and reel them in. So in the movie / telly world consider a few others that seem to be on their way. Southpark - definitely subversive. But also Firefly and Doctor Who - which is now on its way to mainstream, and neither of which could be called subversive. As for books - Fifty Shades maybe? I'm not really familiar enough with the material to say much about it, but it obviously had something that drew people to it, and made people love it, and others hate it or wonder what the big deal was. Also Twilight. In older fiction we could include the Perry Rhodan books, which started as cult and now, thousands of books later, still seem to have never outgrown that status. They have devoted fans but have never hit mainstream.

Cheers, Greg.

 

Hi psychotick,

Both Twilight and Fifty Shades originated as fan-fiction, and bad fan-fiction at that. (Like anything, not all fan-fiction is bad, but enough of it is). Personally, I'm amazed they got as far as they did. Obviously, there was the whole titillation factor (in Fifty Shades) and/or male beefcake factor (in Twilight), but as far as I'm concerned, it began there and ended there.

There is very little subtlety about either of those titles, and what makes it worse -- the female characters have hardly any agency. Ana Steele allows an entrepreneur, Christian Grey, to take sexual advantage of her. Bella Swan falls in love with a vampire who breaks all the usual vampire rules and sparkles in daylight. She is, furthermore, destined to be his undead love slave because, apparently, her blood is special and is described by Bree Tanner to be the "sweetest scent she ever smelled", and ... I'm sorry, this is about as subtle as a blow to the head. :-\

Now, if this sort of thing appeals to people, fine. I'm not telling anyone what to read or what to be turned on by. I just hope they also read other things, that's all. But if they start and stop here, I'd love to work as Stephanie Grey's or E. L. James's secretary, just so I can tell their fans: "I'm really sorry, but ... you could do better. I know I don't know you, but ... you could do better. Yeah, sure, I'll pass on your message. Thanks for calling. Bye..." ;-)

 

Hi,

That may be. As I say I don't know much about either of them, and don't want to. But they were both on their way to becoming cult classics back then and have now become mainstream. And no one said that a cult classic had to be good.

Cheers, Greg.

 

Hi,

Actually, I was just thinking about this, and yeah quality definitely isn't a requirement for something to become a cult classic. I mean just think about Barbarella (1968), which is horribly plotted, awfully acted, and really doesn't make any sense. Other than Jane Fonda getting her kit off, the film doesn't have a lot going for it. Maybe the original comic had more going for it - haven't seen it and can't read French so don't know. But somehow that's absolutely a cult classic. Then there's Buckeroo Banzai and his adventures in the eighth dimension. Does anything about that scream quality? Not to me. But again it has a legion of ardent fans and has somehow endured as a classic since 1984. There's probably a legion of others.

Cheers, Greg.

 

Barbarella was a controversial film because of Hanoi Jane's actions. I know several people who would be happy to see every copy of that film reduced to ashes.

 

Hey Greg,

I haven't read either Twilight or 50 Shades, and don't want to either. I just read a few online reviews ... which were either utterly scathing or utterly fangirl-esque. *shrug* I suppose some people like them because they fulfil some kind of erotic fantasy, maybe. Meh. Each to their own.

As for cult classics not having to be good ... heh! Did anyone say Ed Wood? Plan 9 from Outer Space? Revenge of the Killer Tomatoes? Need I say more?

Cheers,
Greg
(Yes, really - another Greg!)

 

Those fall into the category of so bad they are amusing. It can be fun to watch something like that and looking for that moment when the microphone is in frame, or the camera man can be seen in the mirror. Then there are the times where you can see the Seam on the cheap rubber mask.