Book Review – Four Horses, Seven Seals by Ben Beard

Disclaimer: the author, Ben Beard, is a good friend of mine (and occasional writing partner), and he recently shouted me out on his excellent blog.¹

But regardless of my personal feelings about Ben, this is an excellent book. Its backbone is a close “read” of the 1990 film, Jacob’s Ladder, a sort of cult classic starring Tim Robbins as a Vietnam veteran who experiences uncanny phenomena once he’s “back in the world,” as my Vietnam veteran father would put it. Ben illuminates the at-times enigmatic action of the movie and persuasively explains it as a way of understanding the national scar that is the legacy of the Vietnam War.² Along the way, he discusses the people involved in its making–most memorably, the tragic life of Elizabeth Pena, who played the movie’s love interest, and the fascinating and checkered careers of the writer, Bruce Rubin, and director, Ardian Lyne, who directed a series of gauzy erotic films in the 80s–“Flashdance,” “9 1/2 Weeks,” and “Fatal Attraction”–before directing the absolute mindfuck of “Jacob’s Ladder.”

Interspersed between Ben’s close analysis of Jacob’s Ladder are more self-contained chapters about the life and work of poet and visual artist William Blake (whose portrayal of the Biblical story of Jacob’s Ladder is the image on the front cover); the life of Rick Stanley, Elvis Presley’s “Memphis Mafia” brother-in-law who eventually became a born-again Christian pastor; Neil Gaiman’s comic book series “The Sandman;”³ and Depeche Mode’s great 1990 album, “Violator.”

Through it all, Ben links these cultural and intellectual ideas to his own adolescence and spiritual development. Ben writes compellingly about growing up in Pensacola, Florida, which he describes as a mashup of Alabama and California(and memorably describes a sort of pidgin slang that developed there). I also related to his description of the “Satanic Panic” that swept through his community in the 80s–I grew up in Northern Illinois but I remember the same panic over heavy metal and Dungeons and Dragons.

These are some pretty disparate threads, to be sure. But Ben manages to weave them all together into a compelling whole. I would liken “Four Horses, Seven Seals” to the works of Greil Marcus, and specifically his 2007 book of linked essays, “Shape of Things to Come.” Akin to Marcus’s book, “Four Horses, Seven Seals” is a sprawling, ambitious work that links the “alternative” culture of the late 80s–right before “grunge” hit and took these underground currents into the mainstream, where capitalism homogenized and denuded them of meaning–to Ben’s sometimes conflicting spiritual and intellectual influences, like William Blake’s spirituality and Evangelical Christianity . But despite its eclectic discussions, “Four Horses, Seven Seals” always maintains its center due its strong central theme of Ben’s spiritual and aesthetic evolution.

It is also highly readable and compelling–I found myself not wanting to put it down, in large part due to Ben’s clear and authoritative writing voice. A few highlights:

“A definition of the 21st Century hipster is a person who understands irony but not symplism… [Hipsters] often misunderstand the importance of symbols, probably because we’ve stripped ritual out of our daily lives. Evangelical Chirstians have the opposite problem: they understand symbolism . . . but have no sense of irony, sarcasm, or intellectual dissonance.”

“[Depeche Mode’s] ‘Violator’ feels like a mashup of styles, but it’s really sui generis, a lonely one of a kind. It doesn’t belong to its ear, or any era, and like ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ and ‘The Sandman,’ speaks to us form the upside down world, the country of lost things, the kingdom of dreams, the land of shadows.” 

Writing of Rick Stanley’s conversion:

.” . . Stanley prays for God’s forgiveness . . . . The sensations follow. A lightness. A purifying. Crystallizing clarity. A series of epiphanies. Life doesn’t have to be lived this way. We don’t have to stumble from one extreme moment of duress to another. Our suffering isn’t meaningless. The universe isn’t random. Ruining your body with toxins isn’t cool. The God of pure love who gave us maps to decipher our hurt, the heavenly Father. He is waiting for us. He isn’t a stodgy old man in a cloak; He’s the creator of flamingos and oral sex and surfing.”

I could go on, but you should just buy the book. I usually don’t link to Amazon, but this is an excellent self-published book that’s probably the best of a strong body of work Ben has put together. I highly recommend you buy “Four Horses, Seven Seals” if you’re into any of the works discussed above, or if you just enjoy trippy yet grounded prose. Also I’d recommend this for anyone who enjoys the pop cultural writing of Chuck Klosterman (though I think Ben is far more cerebral than Klosterman).

While you’re at it, check out Ben’s other works: The Bad Class, which is about 1980s movies about “juvenile delinquents,” and The South Never Plays Itself, an encyclopedic history of cinema that takes place in the South.

1. Seriously, his blog is great and you should definitely read it and subscribe. One recent post is about the death of the vile Evangelical preacher James Dobson, and the surprising links between Dobson and serial killer Ted Bundy. Ben’s next book is about those two figures and I’m looking forward to reading it. – go read it. ↩︎
2. As I alluded to above, my father was a Vietnam combat infantry veteran who suffered from PTSD, so this aspect of the book really resonated with me. ↩︎
3. A few years ago I would’ve referred to “The Sandman” as “seminal,” but the me-too allegations against Gaiman are too horrifying for words, which Ben touches on in is book. ↩︎