I’d long held a fascination with one character in particular; one of the few survivors from the days of clean-cut goodies versus horrible baddies: Mark Calaway’s Undertaker. During the Attitude Era the Undertaker evolved from a semi-supernatural old western-style mortician into a demonic leather-clad “Lord of Darkness” - a Lord of Darkness, we would learn, who harboured a dark and terrible secret. The story went that, in his youth, the Undertaker set fire to his parents’ funeral parlour, killing them both as they slept - and, he thought, his little brother Kane too. The Undertaker’s estranged manager Paul Bearer knew the truth, however, and when his attempts to blackmail his former meal ticket back into subservience failed, he revealed to the world that Kane had survived the inferno, albeit scarred. Soon afterwards, wearing a death mask to hide his reportedly disfigured face, the near seven-foot Kane interrupted the first ever Hell in a Cell match to attack to the Phenom, costing him the match and beginning one of the most intense and heated rivalries of the Attitude Era.
Over the next year or so, Undertaker and Kane fought in many groundbreaking matches, including those in which victory could only be obtained by setting the other combatant on fire, but the secrets and horrors of their past were only ever hazily alluded to. While wrestlers such as Mick ‘Mankind’ Foley – who’s as exceptional an author as he was a performer, by the way – were regularly appearing in The New York Times’ Best Sellers’ List with real life memoirs about their exploits in the proudly-transparent world of sports entertainment, the make-believe history of Mark ‘Undertaker’ Calaway and Glenn ‘Kane’ Jacobs went untold. Did a young ‘American Bad Ass’ Undertaker deliberately start the fire? Is Paul Bearer really Kane’s father? And when did he find out about Kane’s survival, or had he always known? I must’ve written the back story of the Undertaker and Kane a dozen times, be it in my head or in the sprawling scrawl of a young wannabe wordsmith, but never in all my musings did I visualise the startlingly mundane picture that Journey into Darkness frames.
Michael Chiappetta and (the uncredited) David Stern have taken what was, in essence, a devilishly dark comic book back story and turned it into something that could arguably pass muster as being an authentic biography, warts and all. In WWE Kane is an icon, a monster; he’s larger than life. In this book, however, ‘Glen’ is supposed to be a human being with whom one can sympathise. Borrowing elements from the life of the real Glenn Jacobs and that of the fictional Kane, the authors have tried to give readers a book that feels real, but is not shackled by the constraints of truth.
The obvious problem that this presents is kayfabe. To work at all, Journey into Darkness had to depict professional wrestling as being a competitive sport, as opposed to sports entertainment where incredible athletes execute pre-planned finishes to matches and perform planned storylines (or, if you prefer, ‘angles’). Unless as a reader you totally buy into the conceit that Kane went into the wrestling business to legitimately exact revenge on his brother – to “kill him”, basically -, the whole thing can’t help but fall apart. Journey into Darkness needed to be unambiguous on the point that professional wrestling is real, but one moment the authors are trying to loosely imply that it’s not “a work” and that the Undertaker and Kane are both bona fide “fighters”; in the next Paul Bearer is waxing lyrical about how it’s “staged” and worrying about putting on a good show for the audience. This needless blurriness completely debases the whole plot; it just can’t work in a world where wrestling isn’t competitive. Not without a lot more imagination, in any event.
Now that said, the first two thirds of the book aren’t troubled by undermining kayfabe; in fact, they read much like the biography of any orphan let down by the fostering system. Of course, this isn’t automatically a good thing as I for one didn’t buy Journey into Darkness to read about a cursed kid that I don’t recognise being neglected and abused – I bought it in the hope of finally uncovering the dreadful secrets of the Brothers of Destruction’s past and gaining some insight into the twisted mind of Kane. Chiappetta and Stern could have ushered their readers into the portentous world of the Callaways, explored Susanna Kane Callaway’s seedy relationship with Paul Bearer, shown us how the young brothers interacted with each other before their lives were laid to ruin. Instead, such matters are summarily disposed of in the opening chapter, which is actually little more than a vapid prologue.
The novel is also blighted by pointless continuity retcons. Wrestling angles were never intended to stand up to rigorous scrutiny - one could argue that sporadic face / heel turns, to which Kane is prone, are far more harmful to a character’s veracity than any inconsistencies in his back story - yet Journey into Darkness looks to explain away just about every trivial gaffe surrounding the Big Red Machine. The number of words that the authors waste trying to rationalise Kane’s sudden ability to speak without his voicebox after he and X-Pac won the World Tag Team Championship for the second time is patently disproportionate, for instance, and the least said about Kane’s hereditary sensory and autonomous neuropathy the better. Why give Kane a condition that stops him from feeling pain when that particular gimmick was utterly worn out within the first couple of years of his career? There is no logic to it, especially when we consider that the Undertaker milked the same gimmick for the better part of a decade, yet the book paints him as being perfectly healthy. I’m actually quite surprised that the authors didn’t take it upon themselves to throw Jacobs’ mid-90s Isaac Yankem character into the continuity quagmire; we have this to be grateful for, at least.
More troublingly still, the authors merrily gloss over issues that do really matter, such as Kane’s notorious facial scarring - or lack thereof. According to the book, Glen’s facial scars weren’t that bad in his youth, and certainly by the time that he got to high school his peers were far more concerned with mocking his differently-coloured eyes than they were his alleged disfigurement (and high school hottie Katie Vick certainly didn’t have a problem with his appearance…) Yet by 1997, when he makes his first appearance in WWE as Kane, Glen’s scars are prominent again (albeit “anti-climactic”, according to Paul Bearer). It’s convenient, then, that the authors’ narrative ends in late 1998, almost five years before Kane unmasked on RAW to reveal his unblemished face.
And this is what really annoys me about Journey into Darkness - as much as I love the comic book Kane of old, in unmasking to reveal a face that hadn’t been scarred by fire as he’d always claimed, Kane betrayed his true scars, and they were in his fascinatingly warped mind. The interview that he gave to Jim Ross shortly after unmasking should have been the cornerstone of this book, not some wishy-washy family curse, alcoholic foster mother or star-crossed cheerleader romance. This book offered the authors the chance to probe the psyche of one of the most twisted and disturbed characters that WWE has ever created, while at the same time exploring one of its richest branches of mythology. Instead, we get Katie Vick and Kane’s Beauty and the Beast, enlivened by a few predictable Paul Bearer fat jokes and some desperately passionless accounts of what were actually revolutionary wrestling matches.
Some people have read Journey into Darkness and complained about its (presumably deliberate) misspellings of Glenn and Calaway, but I’m far more concerned with substance, and however their names happen to be spelt in it, the Undertaker and Kane of this book are two characters that I’ve never seen before, let alone cared about. If you’re a huge fan of WWE, and already heavily invested in its mythology, then this might just be a two star tome to you. If not, then this is a lone star effort and should be avoided like a tombstone piledriver.
