Things have been so busy that I forgot that today is Beltane.  That’s all the more ironic because yesterday I’d been on a panel to address the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies special interest group on Horror Studies, about The Wicker Man.  Lest you get the wrong idea, BAFTSS did not approach me to talk about my book (which has largely disappeared, as far as I can tell), but another recent Devil’s Advocate author approached them about having a panel featuring recent titles.  This special interest group has a program called Weekday Night Bites where they gather virtually to have speakers talk about horror.  Yesterday there were seven of us, discussing five books, one of which was The Wicker Man.

The theme of the panel was No Safe Space, about place and space in horror.  This meant I spoke briefly about The Wicker Man as folk horror.  As I told the assembled group, I actually interpret Wicker Man as holiday horror—it’s based on May Day, and I didn’t even think to mention that it was today—instead of folk horror.  One of the the hallmarks of the Devil’s Advocates series is that it tries to approach horror films from unexpected angles.  When I first contacted the editor who started the series at Auteur (who has, unfortunately left), he told me that they didn’t have a Wicker Man volume because everyone was pitching it as folk horror.  He wanted to see a different interpretation.  I’d been writing a book about folk horror and decided to give that a try.  The critics liked it, and thus my book was born.  And here it is, May Day, and I’d forgotten all about it.

There was a reasonably sized group present for the discussion and it was a lot of fun.  It reminded me of my Miskatonic Institute for Horror Studies course on Sleepy Hollow two years ago.  Both of these were efforts to stir some interest in my books.  Horror and religion is a new avenue of approach and there are a handful of us working in this area.  The others, it seems, have a knack for getting their books published in places where you don’t have to take out a mortgage to afford them.  I’m more in the group whose books are relegated to the Summerisle of sales.  Either that, or I’m actually Sergeant Howie, unwittingly flying there to help someone I think is in trouble. Who knows?  Anything’s possible on Beltane.