Secret Formula

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When writing fiction, I’ve never tried a series.  Some, such as Harry Potter, can set a writer for life.  I’ve always had the sense that the Dark Shadows novels were more potboilers.  There was a built-in fan base, and somehow in the sixties and seventies we didn’t expect Rowling-level writing.   It was the entire package: the Gothic, the recurring characters, the moody setting of Collinwood.  And of course, Barnabas Collins.  These novels may be journeyman writing, but here at number 25 in the series, Barnabas, Quentin, and the Magic Potion, there are some signs of literary improvement.  They are slight, rather like the first tinging of leaves with yellow as August begins to settle in, but they are there.  The series is nearing its end for me (provided I can actually find the last few books), but maybe it’s getting better.

What’s my reason for such a burst of enthusiasm?  Well, in this episode we see some features of Quentin that are more in line with how I remember him.  First of all, Ross tries some misdirection.  Quentin is presented as a master of disguise in the series and here there’s some clever hinting that, if you’re trying to think it through, leads you to mis-guess early on.  Not only that, but there’s a more positive view of Quentin here.  He’s not the evil satanist that he is earlier in the series.  Perhaps Ross had figured out by now that if people liked the idea of a Barnabas who is a conflicted victim, the same might apply to Quentin.  He’s not evil, but when you’re a werewolf, well, what can you do?

The “magic potion” is just as contrived and sketchy as most of the plot devices in this series—Harry Potter this is not.  It’s just a get rich quick scheme for a reprehensible old man and serves to move the plot along without really adding anything to it.  Carolyn here discovers that Barnabas is a vampire and, it seems to me, some of the plot devices for the Tim Burton movie might’ve been picked up from this particular novelization.  Although still not belle lettres by any stretch, the story here seems to have made some progress over the previous 24.  As a child, of course, I didn’t read these in order.  I relied on what I found at the bin in Goodwill, when I could find them.  I never had the whole series.  While trying at times, reading them may be a worthy exercise as an adult.  Perhaps series too grow up.

Keeping Categories

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Writing books about movies with a limited budget presents some challenges.  Our subscription to Disney Plus doesn’t really help with the horror genre, but my wife insightfully added Hulu to the package.  Now Hulu isn’t known as a horror streaming hub, but they do have some movies on my viewing list.  The other day I noticed one of their offerings with a title I didn’t recognize.  I  tried searching it on IMDb and came up with nothing.  A bit more research revealed it was an episode of an original Hulu series, mixed in with the horror movies.  The eroding of categories bothers me a bit.  It’s not just Netflix and Hulu and Amazon with movies, but it’s across the board.  I grew up when movie and television were easily distinguished.  Now we live with hybrids.

The same is happening in publishing.  When I sit down to write a book I have a specific end-goal in mind.  Everyone knows what a book is, right?  Well, the future of publishing is all about breaking that down.  Already years ago you could purchase aggregates for classroom use.  These were custom-selected chapters from certain books (electronic, of course) that an instructor could bundle into a “textbook.”  You could mix in articles, blog posts, anything to which you had the rights.  Such a textbook is not a book.  Nobody set out to write it in that form.  It looks like things are moving more and more in that direction.  You’ll be able to purchase just a chapter, or even a paragraph, to use.  Even if the book only makes sense when taken as a whole.

Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

The electronic era is all about breaking down what civilization took centuries to build up.  Not everything about civilization has been good, of course.  It has been patriarchal, treating women unfairly.  It has been supremacist, treating those less technically developed in horrendous ways.  It has been classist, favoring the rich and their interests over those of the vast majority.  Still, it has left us some good legacies—the book, the symphony, the movie.  Such things have made us better people.  It may be fine to break such things down—who knows?  Maybe it will create more fairness for more people.  It won’t help me, however, when I’m trying to write a book about movies.  You still have to know what counts for each category, even if you have to do so on a budget.

Reconstructing Celts

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There are myriads of them.  They come in all shapes, sizes, and colors.  They are believed seriously by the faithful.  Of course I’m talking about religions.  Scholars have been inclined to focus on the “big five” or “six” or “seven,” depending on how you count them, but each of those has sects—some with unbelievable numbers of them.  Christianity alone has somewhere in the region of 40,000 denominations.  I tend to think of them as different religions.  A snake handler has very little in common with the Pope, for instance.  Celtic Reconstuctionism is a smaller religion, but it has a very clear idea of what it is.  The group-written CR FAQ, originally a web document, is a question-and-answer format explanation of this particular set of believers.  It’s fascinating to read.

One thing that immediately stands out is that these are very intelligent and deliberate folks.  They are scholarly, sincere, and clear about what they’re trying to do.  Believing that ancient Celtic religions (for again, there are many) can be reconstructed and refitted for modern use, they learn the languages, read the books, look at the archaeological evidence, and critically engage with other modern religions that borrow from Celtic culture.  Indeed, the inauthenticity of some recent religions’ use of Celtic elements led to Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism.  The CR community is well aware that there are other Celtic revival religions.  This particular sect strikes me as among the better informed regarding the origins of their religion.  Most modern Christians have some vague idea how their empire got started, but they tend to be weak on the details.

Religions have sometimes been deliberately crafted, going back to antiquity.  Zoroastrianism, as far as we can tell, was an attempt by Zarathustra to avoid the pitfalls of indigenous Persian religions.  He wanted an ordered, systematic belief system.  As measured in years it was certainly successful.  It is the world’s oldest continually practiced formal religion.  Both eastern and western religious traditions were influenced by it.  CR is an attempt to live a Celtic religion as if its development hadn’t been interrupted.  Obviously, Christianization of the Celts was a major disruption, but it wasn’t an obliteration.  Most religions manage to survive in the colonizing faith.    Groups worshipping ancient Greek, Norse, Canaanite, and Celtic gods are thriving.  Aware that things have changed, they find value in the pre-Christian religions of their heritage.  If CR is anything to go by, they do so inclusively and thoughtfully.  And for those who wish to learn more, they leave written records.

Ignoring or Ignorance?

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As someone whose career has always been about the Bible, I’ve noticed that many intelligent people are naive.  They seem to believe that since they’ve outgrown the need for religion that it doesn’t exist among the majority.  I guess that’s another way of saying their thinking tends toward elitist.  The vast majority of people in the world are religious.  Among the elites, since about the sixties, there’s been the fervent belief that religion will die out in the face of science.  That hasn’t happened, of course, and it’s not likely to.  In the meanwhile, the idea persists and replicates itself and religion is ignored until people fly jets into towers or elect Trump or commit some other extremely catastrophic act.  There’s then usually a flare up of interest that dies down when the danger is past.

I wasn’t very socially aware in the sixties.  I was quite religious, though.  The religious, although always in the majority, constantly talked about being under threat of extinction.  There was, even then, a paranoia about being discounted.  Some of the elites realized that by pretending to be religious themselves they could make use of those numbers.  In other words there are forces, not from any divine source, keeping the interest in religion high.  Only the naive ignore it.  That’s one of the reasons it distresses me to see institutions of higher education cutting religion programs.  It plays into the worst sort of elitism to ignore the vast majority of the human population.  Meanwhile, subjects that bring in cash thrive.

Should we look away?

Growing up in an uneducated environment may have been a hidden blessing.  It can sometimes instill a lifelong desire to learn, even if your outlook is discounted.  I’ve always believed in education, and when it wasn’t, or isn’t, available I tend to self medicate by reading.  Reading about religion is always a learning experience.  There’s something profoundly human about it.  Acknowledging that something greater than ourselves is out there, whether you want to face it as divine or natural, seems wise to me.  I think we all know it’s there.  How we choose to respond to it, however, differs widely.  We’ve had glimpses of what the universe would be like if humans were the most puissant beings out there.  The results, based on the headlines, aren’t terribly encouraging.  I see these things and say something, but it’s ever so easy to ignore someone whose career has always been about the Bible.

Banning Ideas

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It’s been in the news lately that some communities, in keeping with the current fascist trends, are starting to ban books.  One of the plays in the Nazi book was to burn them, followed soon after by destroying the people who read them.  Ideas are, by their very nature, dangerous things.  Trying to destroy them by banning books, however, doesn’t work.  The kinds of books being banned are predictable: those that portray races as equal, those that offer understanding and acceptance of those differently gendered or oriented, and books that show the white man caught with his pants down (metaphorically, although in actual life this happens quite often literally as well).  Books premised on lies are just fine, but as soon as we get to ideas that make us think, well, we ban and burn.

Book banning is normally presented as protecting the children.  Something any attentive parent knows is that children understand a lot more than we think they do.  I suspect they realize that books are prohibited because they contain the truth.  Nobody bans a book of “harmless” fantasy—books where white men have all the answers and solve all the problems.  And when they lose their tempers they start wars, which, of course, the white guys always win.  Such stories, based as they are on basic untruths, are fantasy indeed.  Our slow move into the new millennium from the growing awareness of the sixties, has shown us the necessity of looking deeper.  Expanding beyond the stories white men tell to comfort themselves.  Those invested in this narrative are very reluctant, of course, to let it go.

The more we move into the new millennium the more determined we seem to repeat the last one.  That one had a pandemic near the beginning and wars and white men only on the front pages.  The younger generation, thankfully, by and large doesn’t share these poison biases.  They were read to as children.  Teachers and other heroes didn’t ban books, but encouraged reading them.  Local communities are making a concerted effort to break down learning and then we wonder why the United States has the highest infection rates in the world.  If only there were some way to figure out why that might be!  Reading books with uncomfortable truths might be a good start.  Ideas that can’t stand up to logical challenges may not be the best ones for building a society.   Read a book rather than banning it, and see if we all might learn something.

Being Vigilant

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While keeping to a budget, I’ve been tying to sample some new movies as therapy.  Interestingly, Hulu has had three on my long-time “to see” list, including The Vigil.  I heard about this one as soon as it came out.  Religion and horror have been a recent area of fascination, so how could I not?  A horror film partly in Yiddish is a novelty for me, and the haunting, endlessly haunting holocaust is never far from the surface.  Jacov, a young man with psychological issues caused by the death of his much younger brother, has left Orthodox Judaism.  He’s hard up for money, however, and agrees to sit as a shomer, a watcher who keeps vigil with a corpse of a person who has no family to do it, for pay.  The rabbi informs him the shomer he hired left because he was afraid, but since Jacov has done this before, he’s sure he can handle it.

Sitting in a creepy Brooklyn house with a corpse is made even more difficult by the widow’s Alzheimer’s disease and Jacov’s seeing things.  Unsettling events take place.  The problem is revealed to be a mazzik, a kind of Jewish demon.  As I explore in Nightmares with the Bible, and Holy Horror, the Jewish idea of demons took quite a different track from the Greek-inspired Christian concept.  Jesus was Jewish, but living in a Roman context.  What we in the west understand as demons is largely based on The Exorcist.  In Judaism demons weren’t the same obsession they were for Christians.  The dybbuk tends to be the soul of an evil person that can’t rest after death.  A mazzik is more a demon sent to harm, as a form of divine punishment.

The Vigil presents Jacov in that pincer of having left a religion only to find himself needing it in a time of crisis.  His Orthodox upbringing hasn’t prepared him for the world of having to interact with women, or even gentiles (as wicked as they can be).  The mazzik has haunted the man who’s just died—a holocaust survivor—and is now looking for another broken person.  Ever since the death of his brother, Jacov has been broken.  The film make effective use of several horror tropes, and is quite claustrophobic in the small house.  Even though set in New York City, isolation is the real threat.  More than that, the movie eloquently articulates how religion and horror rely on one another.  And how they might learn from each other.

Squirrel Wisdom

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In a dangerous world prey animals have evolved to over-multiply.  That’s clear from watching the gray squirrels from my office window.  There’s a stand of maybe a dozen pine trees across the street, and some days it’s like the bark itself is crawling, there are so many squirrels chasing each other.  Especially when mating season begins.  Of course, squirrels get into everything.  We have a problem with them in our improperly sealed garage.  They have a biological need to gnaw and really animals don’t share the human concept of indoors versus outdoors.  They don’t understand that we want them outside, not in.  This leads to my love-hate relationship with squirrels.  I’m usually on the side of the prey, but they can be a real nuisance.  Still, they’re cute and furry and they take their chances going, well, outside.

So the other day there was a kind of love fest, a Woodstock of squirrels, if you will, in those pine trees.  The sun was out and the hormones must’ve been raging like a high school Friday.  A few minutes later I glanced outside and couldn’t see a single one.  A blur of wings caught my eye as a red-tailed hawk landed on a branch.  All the squirrel play had ceased.  Where there had been dozens just moments ago, not a single individual could now be seen.  The hawk seemed in no hurry, lazily flapping from branch to branch, swiveling its head around, watching.  It might not’ve been in a squirrel mood that day, or the prey might’ve been too well hidden.  Or maybe they knew if you play the game right, predators will just go away.

The squirrels’ conflicting urges both had to do with survival.  In a way from which we could learn, they seem aware that the group outweighs the individual.  Something about their level of consciousness gives them a deep wisdom.  We tend to call flighty individuals among our own species squirrelly, or we can say that we’re feeling squirrelly about something.  Rodents, however, are smart.  In fact, they understand some things better than humans do.  After all, there are so many of them because our species has killed off most of their predators, just as we’ve done for deer.  There’s a reason there’s so much road kill.  Watching the abundance of squirrels it becomes clear that they’re in tune with the ways of nature.  They have to chew or their teeth will grow too long.  And they definitively don’t know the differences between outdoors and in.  Still, they deserve our respect, even if they’re occasional nuisances.

Nine Secrets

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By their very nature they make us wonder what they’re up to.  Secret societies, I mean.  That’s part of their appeal.  Those on the outside speculate and usually the ideas swirl around mysterious rights and probably sex and money.  Leigh Bardugo takes it in a different direction in Ninth House.  Since I try not to read reviews before getting into a book, I wasn’t aware of the premise that the secret societies of Yale University were the nine houses referred to in the title.  Bardugo’s imagination takes the route of suggesting that they all specialize in different kinds of magic.  That makes this kind of a fantasy horror novel because the protagonist, Galaxy Stern (“stern” is, of course, German for “star”), can see ghosts.  And some of the professors aren’t who you think they are.

Somewhat gritty, Alex (Galaxy) isn’t exactly college material, let alone Yale.  She’s a recovering drug runner who has a past that would keep her out of most universities, particularly those of the Ivy League.  Still, she’s invited to Yale and she has some personal motivations, not necessarily academic, to accept.  She’s brought there by the ninth house, Lethe, because of her ability to see ghosts.  As portrayed in the novel Lethe is the secret society that makes sure the others don’t go beyond their bounds, the police, if you will.  Each society specializes in a specific kind of magic and it uses it to help its members benefit in school and career.  That’s why the university is so well funded.  It paints a compelling image of New Haven and it manages to capture the mystery many of us felt about attending college in the first place.

Yale is one of the two Ivy League campuses I’ve never been on (the other is Dartmouth).  Even so, Bardugo writes in a way that makes you feel as if you’ve been there.  The story is a page-turner that goes quickly for its size.  Alex, who is a novice in Lethe, spends the novel trying to find her mentor, Darlington, who’s been missing since some bad magic got him.  There are many unexpected twists along the way.  Although I don’t know much about Bardugo’s past, it seems likely that she knows some people in the drug culture.  Maybe she’s even seen some ghosts.  All of this combines to make a magical read that should appeal to Neil Gaiman fans as well as those of Stephen King.  And, of course, those who like to speculate about secret societies.

Can You Recall?

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While recently in touch with a colleague I’ve never met, I agreed to send along a filmography of my two horror movie books, Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible.  I tend not to read my own books after sending them to the printer.  Defensively it might be that I can say, “I know what I wrote,” but in reality it’s probably more a lack of self-assurance.  Writers often experience self-doubt and although you’ve convinced an editor and an editorial board you may still have your harshest critic to please.  Even though you’ve read the book many times through—at least fifteen each for these two books—you fear you might’ve overlooked something.  So it was strange trying to recall which films I’d actually discussed.  Or how many.

The latter point became clear in a recent review on Reading Religion.  Knowing how I went about piecing together Holy Horror, I’d forgotten just how many movies I watched and rewatched for it.  While it was never intended to be a comprehensive treatment of the Bible in horror (I haven’t seen all horror films), it nevertheless ranges widely.  After having submitted it I continued to watch horror and I continue to find various Bibles in it.  The amazing thing is just how truly widespread the Good Book is as an iconic symbol.  Indeed, I’d been reading about the Bible as an iconic book and that idea took hold in the early days of putting words down for the book.  As an editor I help authors figure out these kinds of issues all the time.  Physician heal thyself.

Even though Nightmares with the Bible just came out over a year ago I couldn’t list all the films off the top of my head.  Sometimes you need reminders.  My books are never discussed at work.  The people I interact with on a daily basis have no interest in them.  In other words, unless I’m having an interview or reading a review, I don’t have much opportunity to think about them.  I’ve moved on to my next projects.  The draft of The Wicker Man has been submitted and I have three promised articles to work on.  Still, I’m trying to settle on the next book.  I seem to have found some acceptance among the horror crowd.  Biblical meteorologists and researchers on Ugaritic goddesses are much less seldom in touch.  Monsters are often mixed forms.  I should know that after watching all these movies.

Others’ Weeping

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I was first introduced, consciously at least, to la llorona via the movie, The Curse of la Llorona.  The film is part of The Conjuring universe, but just barely.  It was clear from the movie that the weeping woman (la llorona) wasn’t invented for the film.  I’ve never lived in, or even spent much time in, the southwest.  Even less in Latin American countries.  In my rather strange career path, the best source of such things to penetrate my own experience tended to be my students.  (Those who think professors do all the teaching have the equation backward.)  Since becoming more isolated as an editor, my interactions are often someone approaching me with an idea mostly formed, often fully formed, and few of them have to do with ghosts or folklore.  That’s why I found Domino Renee Perez’s book There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture such a treasure.

As an Anglo reader endowed of white privilege, it’s important to read books where I’m clearly the outsider.  Being a kind of historian, I was curious about the origins of the tale.  As a person living in the modern world I was also interested by its reception history.  This book contains many, many examples of the latter.  It will demand that the outsider reader accept unfamiliar names and cultural conventions.  It will, in some ways, force you to stand “south of the border” and face the suffering our nation has caused and continues to cause in the name of white supremacy and its adjunct, capitalism.  There are other ways to be in this world, but when money gets involved all bets are off.

There’s much to discuss in a packed book like this, but one aspect, near the end, caught my attention.  Briefly, if you don’t know the story, la llorona is a woman betrayed by her husband.  She drowns their two children and is condemned to wander the riverbanks for eternity crying as she searches for them.  Interestingly Perez makes the connection with Rachel in the Bible.  I’ve read the Good Book many times and yet I seem to have missed Matthew’s use of Jeremiah’s interpretation of Rachel’s story.  Joseph was kidnapped and sold to slavery by his brothers but Genesis focuses on the grief of Jacob.  Rachel doesn’t live to be reunited with her lost son like Jacob does.  Perez makes the point that the stories are quite different, but it showed me once again how much I have yet to learn.  We need to pay attention to those who experience life differently.

Write It Down

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Those of us with a bookish outlook often wish we could look things up.  This comes to mind because of a recent documentary I watched, but the thought has occurred many times when visiting museums, particularly for special exhibits.  I’m pretty easily overwhelmed by too much information at once.  In a museum I have trouble reading all the placards and remembering how they tie in because there are so many interesting artifacts to look at.  I leave inspired and impressed and wishing I could look up the information I just read.  I’ve often wondered why museums don’t sell exhibition books that have photographs of the objects with replications of the placards describing what they are.  Maybe it’d just be a market of one, but I’d buy them.

The same thing is true of documentaries.  I’ll readily admit I’m poor with names.  It takes many interactions before a person’s name sticks with me.  (It’s nothing personal, I assure you—it’s just the way my brain works.)  When I watch a documentary I often wish a booklet accompanied it with the names, and credit lines of the interviewees and (because I know this is available on IMDb) a full bibliography.  The books mentioned.  You see, those of us inclined to research enjoy looking things up.  In the case of a long documentary (and that’s only if you subscribe or buy it instead of “renting” it for a one-time viewing) it means having to skim through it all again to reach the information that you could easily look up in a book.  Books are wonderful.

For me, one of the benefits of books is their stability.  Electronic resources change.  When you go to cite a website as a source you have to list the accessed date because things may have changed.  The book on your shelf remains reliably unaltered.  The few ebooks I’ve read come with marks in them.  There’s probably a way of turning this off, but I don’t want to see what other people think is noteworthy.  I suppose it’s supposed to make reading a communal experience.  Reading, in my experience of it, is mostly a private things.  One of the great joys in life is talking about reading with others, whether it’s the same book you’ve read, or a different one.  Why not add to that by making books to go with other species of information-sharing, such as museums and documentaries?  Those of us with a bookish outlook aren’t hard to please.  We just like to have it down on paper.

Relinquishing Control

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Controlling the weather is a dream as old as humanity itself.  Once when I was fervently praying for a rain-free day as a child, my mother pointed out that other people could be praying for rain.  I realized then that weather was a personalized preference and that, on some level, prayers cancel each other out.  Well, it’s Groundhog Day and we’re all wondering whether those who love winter and want more or those who are ready for spring will prevail.  For this we’ll rely on a woodchuck.  The observation of animals for signs of spring seems to have been a germanic practice, and it could also involve badgers (which I’ve never, ever seen in the wild) or bears as well as groundhogs.  The idea is that the majority are looking forward to spring when they can plant and grow food, hopefully enough to last through the next winter.  And so the cycle goes.

We hear a lot about January as a month of transitions.  It is, but so are they all.  February, both the dead of winter and start of spring, provides variety as we continue the cycle.  I’ve already seen my first robin of the year and I’ve been hearing sporadic bird song.  The mating season, after all, comes around the middle of the month.  According to some renditions of the Celtic calendar, Imbolc, which was yesterday, is the start of spring.  Celebrated with fires to encourage the light and warmth, we know that cold and snow and wind chill still lie ahead.  We are reminded, however, that this wheel is still turning.  Slowly, slowly, but ever turning.

I’m writing this post before Punxsutawney Phil even awakes.  The sky is dark and it’s cold outside.  Like Phil Connors I’m thinking about how we want things to stay the same, but when they do they quickly haunt us.  Time forever moves and all seasons are mere transitions to the next.  In this endless cycle we have to come to appreciate where we are at the moment.  There’s a stark beauty to winter.  A snowy landscape can become a transport of rapture.  We have to heat our houses, however, and pay the bills to do so.  We keep our house cool enough that some days I just don’t have the heart to venture outside at all.  Still, I wouldn’t change it.  These cycles are old friends now.  I’ll glance to the west and wonder what Phil might see, but I’ll be praying that we will never control the weather.

Connection

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I’ve met a few famous people in my time.  Meat Loaf wasn’t one of them.  In fact, the only real rock concert I’ve ever attended was Alice Cooper, back in the first part of the millennium.  Still, the good folks over at WikiTree like to let you know your degrees of separation from the famous.  With the news of Meat Loaf’s passing recently the connections emphasized were rockers, and I ended up being some twenty degrees separated from Michael Aday.  Every time this happens I wonder why our world doesn’t take better account of how closely related we all are.  Fear is a powerful emotion and fear of strangers runs deep.  Even babes in arms often object to being held by those with unfamiliar faces.  We could benefit quite a bit, it seems, by learning to get comfortable with fear.

Looking at the political mess in the United States it seems pretty clear to me that its main fuel source is fear.  It’s been decades now since I first learned that politicians are well aware of how fear makes people behave at the polls.  This fear is carefully crafted and exploited to try to get the election results desired.  If we could learn to master our fears just think of how things would improve!  Instead, those who have something personal to gain use fear to attain it.  Not that there aren’t real reasons for concern.  Facts such as global warming are real and deserve our immediate attention.  To address them we have to work together.  Instead, many chose to use fear for personal gain, and we let them.

For me personally, engaging with horror is a means of handling fear.  Like most people I don’t want to be afraid.  At the same time I’m fascinated by it.  I can’t scroll past a web page listing scariest books.  I try to go through tallies of the scariest movies made.  In doing so I’ve found that many of my phobias (and there are many) have dulled a bit.  Perhaps that comes with age, but then I’ve read that fear tends to increase with age.  Why not get it out of the way when we’re younger?  What has all of this got to do with Meat Loaf?  I suppose it’s the kind of gothic quality of his songs with Jim Steinman that drew me in.  The songs are all stories and the gothic was among the earliest influences of what would become horror.  Now my fear is nobody will be able to fill that need.  Perhaps the answer is connection.

Photo by Miltiadis Fragkidis on Unsplash