Jack Kahler is a mysterious figure in the world of pulp novel book collectors. No one knows who he was and it is possible he never even existed. Some pulp authors’ pen names were used by multiple writers, all with the intention of maintaining anonymity. After reading The Hypnotist, an oddball quasi-science-fiction sex story, it becomes obvious why this author might not want to be associated with this tale of amorality. The slick and multi-layered writing style suggests that Jack Kahler may have been a Hollywood script writer or possibly a serious author trying to make some rent money by writing sleaze fiction. This is a sleazy story but it isn’t just the sexual content per se that makes it so. It is unsettling mostly because of what it means.
John Swift is the main character; whether he is protagonist or antagonist might depend on what you are willing to tolerate. He is a master hypnotist, meaning, in the context of this novel, that he can induce a trance in anybody at any time, making them submit to all his immediate whims. During his years in college, this means commanding attractive young co-eds to fulfill all his sexual desires. The big problem is that, when he pulls a Bill Cosby on a twenty year old student named Lola Bingham, he neglects to use a condom. Lola ends up pregnant and unable to remember how that happened because John Swift used a post-hypnotic suggestion to make her forget who he was. Her quest in the story involves moving to San Diego to find out who knocked her up and how it happened.
Yes, Southern California, that place of sunshine and warmth where people feel they can live out their dreams; but all too often, some people learn a little too late that pursuing your dreams is not necessarily in your best interest. And so places like Los Angeles and San Diego have their share of heroin addicts, cult members, people lured into the porn industry, and tons of homeless people who never had what it takes to become a celebrity. In the 1950s and 1960s some just ghost-wrote pulp fiction to survive.
John Swift keeps up with his old tricks until he has a moral awakening. A neighbor sleeps with him without being hypnotized. She just wants to cheat on her husband and goes for any man who will take her. John realizes how sad she is and puts her into a trance, then convinces her to love her husband and maintain a monogamous relationship with him. John decides he wants to use hypnosis to help people, meets up with an old hypno-therapist who acts as a mentor, and goes on a strange adventure in Tucson, trying to help two schizophrenic twin sisters.
The old doctor advised him to go back to college and study medicine or psychiatry, but John has no money to live on so he gets involved with a jaded carny hypnotist named Everett and his slutty wife. His therapy sessions involve couples, married or otherwise, who are having problems. When Everett hypnotizes them, he makes them take off their clothes and indulge in all sorts of sexual perversions. When Everett watches John conduct a session that ends up being an orgy, Everett is convinced that John is the best hypnotist he has ever seen. He asks John to work with him but John, being the moral kind of serial rapist he is, isn’t sure if that is the right thing to do. But he goes along with it anyways.
Meanwhile, John Swift also gets hired to use hypnosis in order to help Lola Bingham figure out who got her pregnant. The two fall in love and John is now confronted with two moral dilemmas: one is whether or not he should marry Lola and start a family with her. The other dilemma is whether he should use his hypnotic skills to help people with their problems or continue to use it for sleazy sexual manipulation with Everett by his side. THE SPOILER ALERT IS HERE. The first conflict gets solved and John and Lola have a happy ending, at least for now. This happy ending is undercut by John’s involvement with Everett. Several pages before John declares his eternal love to Lola, he has a hypnotherapy session in which he makes a lesbian couple have sex, beat each other up, and end with one of them getting ready to piss on the other’s face. While John decides he wants to marry Lola, he never decides what path his career will take. This conflict is left hanging and unresolved. The lack of closure is a clever way of making the story end on an ominous note.
While The Hypnotist ends with a stroke of horrifying brilliance, the build up to the end is quite creepy too. It is expected that the theme of using hypnosis to rape and humiliate people would be offensive, but this is made even more so because John Swift does what he does with very little moral self-scrutiny. He acknowledges the value of using his talents to help people but while doing this, he continues to indulge in his predatory behavior. His minor feelings of guilt are disproportionately slight in comparison to the gravity of the crimes he commits. His pangs of remorse are tiny, reminiscent of the way a teenager might feel after stealing a pack of gum from a supermarket. The author’s tone is also one of amoral detachment, as if he doesn’t want to put any pressure on the reader to read any ethics into his writing. But that could also be the point. Without explicitly spelling out any moral condemnation, you end up feeling gross for allowing the author to guide you into this ethical abyss.
The amoral tone of the narrator also makes it difficult to gauge what the author’s intentions are in the first place. Considering it was published as a pulp novel you could just dismiss the question by saying that the author just wanted to make some cash. But it isn’t as easy as that. The writing is too skillful, too carefully crafted to be that mundane. The sentences flow with a gentle, rhythmic cadence that is, need I say, entrancing. The atmosphere and mood of San Diego is capture perfectly. The characters are bold with distinct personalities while the plot and subplots weave through the story as if this were a finely textured movie. Even the sex scenes are effectively, even tastefully, done; There are no explicit, pornographic details, just enough information to draw the reader’s attention to the right places so their own mind can fill in the missing details. There was too much attention to detail put into this book for it to be just a cheap knock-off job written by somebody who doesn’t really care. The absence of a clear indication of the author’s intentions is yet another aspect of this book that gives it an unsettling tone.
Jack Kahler’s The Hypnotist is a novel depicting a male fantasy that involves masculine omnipotence and the ability to have absolute control over the bodies and minds of women, objectifying them, making them them the ultimate toys for men’s entertainment. It is a bit of a nightmare but it isn’t a horror novel with serial killers or the supernatural. It is a scary story because it makes you wonder if you are depraved for reading it. This isn’t horror that shows you vampires, zombies, blood, or guts; it is a deeper level of horror, a moral horror that prods at your conscience in an uncomfortable way. Possibly, that kind of moral horror is the most dangerous kind.
Kahler, Jack. The Hypnotist. PEC Giant, San Diego: 1966.
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