Whose Stars?

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Star Trek or Star Wars?  I used to hear this among sci-fi fans.  I grew up with Star Trek in the sixties and saw Star Wars in the theater.  Science fiction can shape our future.  Both for good and for bad.  I’m convinced, for example, that many Silicon Valley technocrats are Star Trek people who grew up emulating Mr. Spock.  No emotion, pure rationality.  That idea has come to stand for the faulty equation of brain = computer.  This is incorrect.  As AI began to be developed, the idea was that if we could rationally program computers with human rational thought, they could be taught to “think.”  They clearly forget pon farr from the episode Amok Time.  Even the full-blooded Vulcans know that logic will break down once in a while.  Even now Al is demonstrating that in real time.

Star Wars, on the other hand, depicted a paperless universe.  Nobody, not even old Obi Wan, or the even older Yoda, is shown with an ancient book.  Reading isn’t part of their life.  Tech is.  This idea, I suspect, helped spur on ebooks.  And audiobooks.  I’ve been a proponent of environmentalism since the seventies.  One of the few areas where I think the exploitation of trees is necessary, however, is in the making of books.  The other day I was in a very hopeful meeting where it was pointed out that there are moves afoot to start limiting screen time.  Get people reading books again.  I’m not really conflicted about this, despite my excessive work on this blog.  I spend very little time on social media.  Apart from this blog it’s maybe ten minutes a day.  I spend, if at all possible, at least an hour reading books each day.

Many analysts tend to think that the internet hasn’t really made human life better.  More convenient certainly.  But better?  There was a kind of exquisite longing to reading about a book in a catalogue, walking to a bookstore, ordering it and waiting a few weeks before receiving it.  Such things caused no harm.  Is it logical to speed things up if we can?  Sometimes clearly yes.  At other times, it’s fun to run amok.  To take a walk without your phone.  To pick up a book to spend an unrushed hour or two reading.  These were pleasures.  Now we turn on our devices and hear about the chaos Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu are causing.  All the deaths and suffering they wreak on the innocent.  Would Mr. Spock say this is logical?  Even Luke Skywalker would pull out a book to escape for a while.

Photo credit: NASA

Burton and Bats

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Among the directors I more or less trust, Tim Burton seems to share my aesthetic sensibilities much of the time.  Some of his films I don’t really care for, but I have seen the balance of his feature offerings.  Since I’ve been watching Burton, and since we have DVDs of the Batman anthology that started the present movie trend featuring both Batman and the Joker, I decided to watch it again for the first time in many years.  Certainly the last time was before I began blogging.  Before Burton’s 1989 movie, the last Batman feature film had been in the sixties and it was campy.  The idea of making Batman serious drama representing a disturbed hero was quite the buzz at the time.  Of course Burton and his followers were eclipsed by Christopher Nolan, and Heath Ledger’s Joker outshone that of Jack Nicholson, but Burton’s film isn’t bad.

The pacing is a little slow.  Things have speeded up in the intervening years, however, and attention spans have shortened.  Michael Keaton does a good job playing a pensive Batman.  Nicholson was, for those of us who grew up in the sixties, a satisfyingly unhinged Joker.  The sets also stood out to me.  Burton concocted a gothic Gotham City that I appreciated.  And strangely, although it’s been at least a decade and a half, there are scenes I remembered precisely.  The nod to comic book origins with the Joker’s excessively long pistol struck me both in the eighties and now as strangely nonsensical.  After the build-up of the Bat-plane, it’s brought down by a single bullet?  Overall, however, the movie holds up pretty well.  Nolan’s trilogy is better, but then, Ledger’s Joker is a legend.

I mentioned that a DVD anthology exists.  I remember well going all over trying to buy a copy in the early 2000s.  Mainly it was because my wife and I had watched the original film and Batman Returns in the theater but we hadn’t bothered with Batman Forever and Batman and Robin.  The latter two, after both Burton and Keaton had left, weren’t very good.  I watched the two on my own after finally finding the DVDs and have never had any desire to see either one again.  They’d received poor reviews in the first place, but I really don’t like dropping things in the middle.  Burton’s Batman is darker than some of his other work.  So much so that it startled me a little upon rewatching the film.  It did, however, kick-start an interest in bringing these characters back to the big screen and, although tripping a time or two (that pistol!) was still satisfying to watch as the days shorten.

Strange Academy

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Things have changed in academia.  Fifteen years ago, after my ouster from the classroom and research crowd, scholars studied such things as monsters, horror, and exorcism at their peril.  Not taken seriously by “rational” thinkers, such phenomena were largely considered a waste of time and effort.  Much of that is beginning to change.  And not just in religious studies.  Religion is an apt discipline to examine prodigies and unusual experiences, but I’m seeing more academic disciplines drawn into the discussion.  Philosophy, history, sociology, and even law, ponder how belief in supernatural beings fits in the bank of human knowledge.  This is something that AI has no hope of “comprehending” (as if it’s doing anything more than pretending).  These are very human concerns and, it turns out, they may be more rational than previously assumed.

Such things entered academia as pop culture was reevaluated as worthy of study.  Although ephemeral, what has the interest of the masses is important to understand.  Horror is increasing in visibility and more and more people are admitting their interest in it, at least occasionally.  A lifelong lover of the weird, had I known that this direction was available, in my former life, I would’ve been one of the first to sign up.  Horror, as we now call it, has been around since the Bible and before.  Ghost and monster stories were part of the earliest civilizations.  Often they’re simply there—assumed rather than postulated.  Many people today, some of them quite educated, also believe that there’s more to the world than what fits comfortably in the laboratory.  Although my last several books have been written for nonspecialist readerships, employed academics are writing for that more rarified readership.

Perhaps the thing that’s truly changed is that studies about such things are being published.  Various academic presses, it seems, have ventured into the “what if” territory.  We’re all asking if maybe the world is stranger than we were taught in school.  Our knowledge in technology has grown at what feels like an alarming rate, while our understanding of the shadowy side of our psyches, and the world itself, is only starting to get underway.  In my personal reading I keep trying to steer away from university presses to the world of trade publishing, but with the new interest in the strange, I find myself being drawn back.  You like your explorers to have a bit of skepticism, and an open mind.  Seems like the academy is starting to welcome such thinkers.  I’m glad to see this happening, because the world is a very strange place. If only it’d happened a little sooner.

Undersea Series

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As A Series of Unfortunate Events goes on the volumes become more adult in their complexity.  The writing is still recognizably Lemony Snicket, but the laughs are fewer and the plot is thicker.  Although The Grim Grotto is perhaps the one book (post book three) that I remembered the best so far, there was much I’d forgotten.  Rescued from the Stricken Stream by a submarine named Queequeq, the Baudelaires meet Fiona Widdershins, the step-daughter of the eccentric captain.  She becomes Klaus’ first love interest, just as Quigley Quagmire had for Violet in the last book.  Searching for the missing sugar bowl to help the V.F.D. against the schism, they encounter the eponymous grotto where Sunny is poisoned.  One of the things I remembered clearly from reading this some two decades ago was how worried I was for Sunny, although I knew she couldn’t be killed off.

Literary references abound in this volume.  The Herman Melville references are obvious enough, but I was impressed that Handler gives a brief lesson on Plato’s cave analogy and brought in several other literary figures as well.  Contrasting Melville with Edgar Guest (and I admit that I had to look up Guest) is brilliant.  Guest wrote optimistic poetry which earns him the scorn of Snicket.  Indeed, when Count Olaf shows up, late in the story, the crew of his submarine (in a riff on Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea) wears suits with Guest silhouettes on them, as opposed to the Queequeq Melville images.  The book also introduces children to the poetry of Lewis Carroll and T. S. Eliot, and I’m sure that there are others I’m forgetting at the moment.  It’s a service to young people to stimulate their interest in other writers.  I’d forgotten that “briny beach” comes from Carroll.  Even the tedious bits of this volume service a didactic purpose.  There may be spoilers below.

Not that The Grim Grotto is without humor.  Apart from the roasting of Guest, the reference to the Mediocre Barrier Reef was a laugh out loud moment.  And the tying together of loose threads.  The hook-handed man is Fiona’s brother.  Josephine’s family ran the destroyed aquarium, and Mr. Poe shows up near the end only to be eclipsed by Kit Snicket.  There is so much to like here.  Including the thin line between good and evil that the children keep coming back to.  Returning to the series after two decades with only the movie to partially remind me of the tale has been enjoyable so far.  Even though they weren’t part of my own childhood, I’m glad to make their reacquaintance now.

CronenDrome

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David Cronenberg is an auteur.  Even before I knew his name I’d watched a couple of his films and I’ve been trying to do some backfilling as I can.  Videodrome finally became available at no extra cost, and I wish that I’d been able to see it before writing Holy Horror.  Before I get to that, however, maybe a little explanation is in order.  Videodrome is a broadcast signal that alters reality when someone views it.  Max Renn runs a sleazy television station and he finds Videodrome while looking for new salacious content.  After that, reality and hallucination and new reality become confused.  With Cronenberg’s characteristic body horror, Max’s abdomen becomes a kind of video player and he’s sent to kill a rival of Videodrome.  At least that’s what I think was going on.  He then begins working for New Flesh.

There’s slime and blood and bodies.  Parts of it reminded me of Cronenberg’s later eXistenZ, and even The Fly.  Guns that become bodies and bodies that become weapons.  There’s also a fair amount of philosophizing and social commentary over the role of television.  Specifically, the role sex and violence on screen has on viewers.  (Televisions turn into bodies too.)  The biblical angle comes in after Max has been programmed and reprogrammed, for and then against, Videodrome.  He becomes “the video word made flesh.”  This modified quote from the opening of John’s gospel is significant in his conversion experience.  The plot is a bit confusing, but we see Max transform from a man in control of his own destiny into the pawn for a sinister organization that claims to be trying to do away with those who are inspired by onscreen sex and violence.

Videodrome is a movie that has re-become strangely relevant in the era of scrolling.  One of the characters, Brian O’Blivion, believes marathon viewing makes television replace everyday life.  Ironically, many people experience this with their phones now.  The movie came before cell phones, or at least cell phone popularity.  Certainly before they had screens built in.  Videodrome was well received in the early eighties, and interestingly, my own viewing of it had to await various streaming deals to align.  (And who doesn’t subscribe to a streaming service or two these days?)  The main service I use was charging $15 for it the last time I’d looked.  Then on a weekend after chores, suddenly you could watch it for free, with commercials.  Like a fly, I’m easily drawn into the trap. Perhaps I’ll be scrolling before long.

Democracy

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We interrupt this reflection of horror-themed posts to ask, beg, plead with you to vote tomorrow—if you’re eligible to do so in the United States.  One thing I’ve learned over the past couple of decades is that polls cannot be trusted.  The future of democracy rides on this election.  Some people have asked me why I don’t write more about politics.  I used to.  That was before they began driving people insane.  Shock-jock techniques don’t work well for a presidency, and I don’t doomscroll.  I barely read headlines.  I try to use my time more productively than worrying about the very dangerous state we’ve been in for two years now.  Tomorrow is our chance to say if we’re happy with the way things are going.  A pointless war in Iran.  An ego-soothing congress.  Prices that make being middle class feel somewhat lower on the scale than it used to.

Polls lull people into complacency.  They’re based on samples and samples are, well, only samples.  I’ve bitten into chocolate chip cookies (vegan) and come up with samples that distort the number of chips used.  Charts and graphs and projections don’t bring results.  Voting does.  And please, if your polling station uses electronic voting machines please read the print ticket before hitting submit.  In some early voting tampering has been discovered.  One thing we know about con-artists is that they cheat in any way they can.  Please don’t let them cheat you on this.

It takes quite a lot of effort for me to break my embargo on writing on the state of the world.  It has become such a fractious place in a short number of years.  Back when I started this blog in 2009, the world seemed like a fairly stable place.  Yes, we’d had shallow Republicans as presidents before (the party began its slow collapse with Nixon), but we’d managed to weather the storm.  A new danger reared its head in 2016 and one man has kept himself in headlines, whether in or out of office, ever since.  A decade is long enough.  Please make a plan for getting out to vote tomorrow.  I’ll get back to my usual posts on books, movies, horror, and home-grown philosophy after this, a source of sanity in this world gone sideways.  If there’s a country to come back to, I might crawl out from under my rock in a couple more years.  But for the moment, please dust off your voting shoes and get to the polls tomorrow.

Fear Not

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It takes quite a lot to get me to buy a book from InterVarsity Press.  This is something I think Kutter Callaway would probably understand.  My childhood was haunted not only by my family circumstances, but also by fundamentalism.  When I learned I could run, I did.  When Be Afraid showed up on Theofantastique, however, I didn’t hesitate.  Some of us have found healing and a positive message in some horror.  I agree with Callaway that some series, or concepts, are too nihilistic to really get anything out of.  In this fascinating book, we are given a tour through some dark places by someone who’s still evangelical, but who admits to watching, and even enjoying horror.  And being in California, he can actually meet and interview some of the people who make the films that guys like me watch.

I understand this book began as a podcast.  Since my biggest fear these days is running out of time—I’ve got so much I want to get done!—I have trouble finding time for podcasts.  My stack of books to read miraculously never grows any smaller, no matter how many volumes I pull off the top of the stack.  I started this book a little skeptical, but I was soon won over.  Callaway advocates “fearing rightly,” and he knows something many won’t admit: we’re all afraid.  Some of us tamp it down pretty securely, but others of us stare it in the face until we have to flinch.  And a good number of us grew us in conservative Christian households.  One of the things I found interesting following the author through the contours of his fears is that a number of people who work in the horror film industry have, or still, identify as Christians.  I learned that Wes Craven was raised in a strict Baptist household and attended Wheaton College.

One of the recurring themes on this blog, as well as in my own books, is that religion and horror are closely related.  I explore this through my mini-reviews of horror movies and of various books.  I know some of the actually employed academics who work in the field.  And I’ll freely admit that the end of my teaching career at the hands of “Christians” has colored my own experience of horror.  This little book turned out to be a fascinating read.  And it led me to trust that the author wasn’t trying to covertly convert me.  If you have a religious background and are curious about horror, I’d recommend it.

Celebrating Halloween

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October is always 31 days, but it felt long this year.  That’s probably because the month started on a Thursday, yielding five spooky weekends.  The arrangements of days, along with the generally beautiful weather around here, gave a nice, long run-up to Halloween.  I do take holidays seriously.  The unrelenting nature of work exhausts me—making it all electronic all the time seems to’ve sucked any joy from it.  October is the time to be outside when the weather is fine.  It’s a season to bathe in falling leaves, shuffling through their dried skeletons on the ground.  Breathing deeply and knowing that winter is just around the bend.  In the pagan European reckoning of seasons, winter begins in November and spring starts in February.  Halloween is a hinge-point, a transition between harvest and hunkering down.  A hinge-point where the impossible becomes possible for a day.

Halloween didn’t begin in America, but in a sense it did.  The holiday we’ve exported (without tariffs) has taken root in many places throughout the world.  It’s a time of celebration that makes certain sects of Christians nervous while other sects find it spiritual.  I remember dressing up as a vampire in college.  I’d finally had a nice cape that my mother sewed, I’d discovered pancake make-up by virtue of being in a clown ministry, but I still had to rely on those plastic fangs that were more fit for a werewolf than my brand of the undead.  I went to the sanctioned Halloween party at Grove City College only to have my friends from the clown group ask me why I was celebrating the demonic.    I wasn’t, of course.  I was simply celebrating what I knew even then was a spiritual occasion.

Changes come for us, whether welcome or not.  Halloween is a day of transitions.  We’ve lost part of that by declaring winter doesn’t begin until the old Midwinter at the solstice.  The equinox is a month and a half behind us now.  Old World autumn began in August.  Our time-keeping may have changed, but Halloween retains its position as a point when things change.  The spooky season’s just getting started, however.  All Soul’s Day is Monday and Christmas was the traditional time for telling ghost stories.  Halloween has it’s Headless Horseman, of course, prompting me to leave the final words in this post to a blessing I received from someone who didn’t know I’d written a book on the subject: “May your horseman be headless and not apocalyptic.”

Pick Up

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Although it came recommended by streaming services, I’d given The Black Phone a pass.  Seeing it mentioned a few times in a book I was reading, I decided I’d better give in.  Since it was an unexpected success, I suppose it got a lot of press.  In any case, it is scary but the violence is off-putting, at least to me.  The gritty story matter, however, doesn’t make it unexpected.  So, a serial killer is abducting boys in North Denver.  Finny’s best friend is taken.  His sister has dreams that reveal something of the truth, but their alcoholic father tries to beat the belief out of her.  (Not that it’s an excuse, but her mother also listened to her dreams and that lead to her suicide.)  Then Finny is abducted.  The killer keeps him in an escape-proof basement.  Then the kids who’ve died start calling him on the eponymous telephone.

The instructions the kids give him don’t always directly help with his escape, beyond giving him courage.  Meanwhile, his sister has dreams (except for one night when her profane prayer in the morning is sure to make some viewers blush).  The dreams are taken seriously by the police, but her father is less-than-pleased.  Although he’s repentant at the end, the punishment he gives his daughter is about as severe as the killer doles out to the boys before killing them.  And there’s kid-on-kid violence.  Finny and his sister both get kicked around, literally.  In other words, there’s a lot of threat of, and actual violence.  There’s also a fair amount of religion involved.

Finny’s sister has a ritual that she uses to invoke the significant dreams.  It involves, you guessed it, a Bible.  A Gideon New Testament.  Also a prayer card of the Virgin Mary and a cross.  This makes the movie worthy of Holy Sequel.  And, of course, appropriate for the scary movie season.  I think there may be a spiritual lesson here, but I prefer horror with supernatural monsters.  The supernatural characters in this film are all good guys.  After they’re dead, that is.  In life some of them were also violent individuals.  So, for people like me there were a few triggers with the alcoholic father and the way that children are beaten around.  As well as a psychopath.  The movie was well made, however, and the mask of the villain is decidedly creepy.  Horror that taps into religion often has a depth that makes people take notice.  And if done well, it shows at the box office.

Talking to Vampires

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Perhaps it’s the unremitting dissatisfaction of Louis, but I had trouble getting into the novel Interview with the Vampire.  I put it down for over a year before picking it back up and finishing it.  I wasn’t inclined to see the movie, but it’s the season for vampires, and since it was a commercial and critical success, I gave in.  Although I still found the story depressing, the movie works fairly well.  The A-list of handsome actors gave me pause, but they seem to have taken to their roles pretty readily.   In case you’re unfamiliar, Louis is turned into a vampire in the eighteenth century in Louisiana by Lestat.  Lestat is a French vampire and, for many years, the only other one that Louis knows.  To convince Louis to stay with him, Lestat saves one of Louis’ victims, a young girl named Claudia, turning her into a vampire.  After thirty years as a child, she too becomes dissatisfied and “kills” Lestat.

Free from Lestat’s influence, in Paris Louis and Claudia find Armand, who has a theater full of vampires.  Claudia is killed by exposure to sunlight, for killing Lestat, but Louis is rescued by Armand.  Still dissatisfied, Louis returns to New Orleans where he finds Lestat alive, and by the end of the eponymous interview, quite well.

The movie sets its own rules for what harms a vampire.  Crucifixes don’t bother them, nor does garlic deter them.  Staking them doesn’t work.  They can be dismembered, burned to death, and exposed to sunlight, however.  Vampires have a flexible mythology.  Even though they can move much faster than a human, they don’t always use this skill when fighting one with another.  As I think over this, the movies that have multiple vampires often do similar things; fights between immortals hold their own contradictions, it seems.

With the screenplay written by the author of the novel, it’s no surprise that the film doesn’t appear to deviate in any major way from Anne Rice’s printed story.  Of course, it’s been a few years since I’ve read it.  Apart from the difficulties in consistency mentioned above, the film is well made.  Sympathy for Louis grows readily enough, even though his disappointment at his vampire state remains intact.  Visually it scratches an itch for a (mostly) period vampire piece.  The child vampire—the most striking element in the novel—remains compelling in the movie.  The time is compressed somewhat from the original story.  Given time I may warm up to the series.  I’ve never explored The Vampire Chronicles further, but perhaps I shall.

Harvest Time

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Dark Harvest literally sat atop my literal “to read” pile for almost a year.  Norman Partridge’s book came into my possession sometime after Halloween last year but I wanted to wait until, well, harvest season to read it.  It’s a very good choice as autumn really begins to settle in.  It’s a story with its own world and its own rules.  In a small town in a farming community, a dark ritual is kept alive by a powerful group of local citizens.  On Halloween night, a specially grown pumpkin atop a crucified scarecrow, comes to life.  One of the people from town cuts the scarecrow down, carves it a face, animates it with candy, and hands it a butcher knife.  The October Boy, as he’s known, heads to town.  Meanwhile, the local boys between 16 and 18 are sent out with makeshift weapons to stop this monster.  If it makes it into the church before midnight, serious consequences will follow.  The boys, hungry from a week of fasting, prowl the night, looking to be the winner who takes October Boy down.  All of this is overseen by the town’s cop.  Things can get out of hand on Halloween night.

This is a horror story with heart.  I won’t put any spoilers here, but I will say, as in the best of horror, the monster isn’t who you think he is.  This elaborate game has taken its toll on the town for generations.  This Halloween, however, four people are out to stop it.  Supernatural horror that pays off the suspension of disbelief, Dark Harvest is also an emotional tale.  It’s a story of loss and one about the high cost of observing convention for convention’s sake.  Having the ending set in a church brings religion and horror together nicely.  And it also raises some deeper questions for those who care to steer that way.  Sacrifice is a major theme in the story.

I’m glad I waited until Halloween season to read this one.  A short book, it doesn’t take long to get through.  And it presses the right buttons for the season.  Partridge is an author who really gets what the autumnal setting can do for a horror story.  I enjoy good horror set in winter or summer as well.  (Okay, so spring too.)  There is, however, something special about novels that engage seriously with harvest time.  Harvest has always had a deep symbolic value that’s often overlooked in what is, inherently, a spooky period.  I really appreciated the author’s afterword as well.  I’m glad I waited for the right season.

Carrieing On

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There can be little doubt that horror grew up in the seventies.  If I wanted to sound academic I’d say “the long seventies” since the dam burst in 1968.  I consider movies “major” if I heard about them.  Living in a small town with little money, movies had to be big to get my attention and there were plenty I heard about as I was growing up.  (I didn’t see most of them until years later.)  These are the horror classics of these days and most of the time when my wife and I watch horror together it’s from the classics.  While watching Carrie together this holiday season, I was once again struck by how much religion plays into the story.  There’s likely a reason McFarland chose the remake of Carrie to feature on the cover of Holy Horror.

Stephen King’s story is so well known there’s no need to summarize, but I’d highlight just how religious Margaret White is, in evidence.  This was possible in 1976 because Rosemary’s Baby opened the way in 1968.  The Exorcist in 1973 used religion as its main vehicle.  The next stop for this train is usually The Omen in 1976, but we also find Carrie at that same stop.  The Amityville Horror came out in 1979 with its priestly abuses.  All of these films used the Bible and religion in very different ways, but they were all major horror films of that decade.  I heard of others, of course.  People talked about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), and Jaws (1975), even where I grew up.  (Well, Jaws was a major hit, it’s just I didn’t think of it as horror at the time.)  And although nobody I knew saw Magic (1978), it made it into ads I saw and read in my small town and remembered for years.  This latter bevy of films didn’t have religion in them, but they all demonstrated how much horror had grown up that decade.  As long as we’re using the “long” moniker, Friday the 13th showed up in 1980.

This was a heady time to be growing up, even in a small town.  I didn’t see Carrie until much later.  It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing my mother would take me to the theater to see.  I’d heard Stephen King’s name, of course.  In English class we were assigned one of his short stories in an anthology.  Horror ebbs and flows, just like any cultural phenomenon, but it had to be taken seriously once the long seventies hit.  People were paying a lot of money to be scared.  And a significant portion of those horror classics used religion to move them along.

Horrorigins

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Among those who write about horror, and those who talk about it, a common question is what drew you into it.  The origin story of your fascination.  I read a book where the author posed that question: when was the first time as a child you really felt fear?   I paused and thought.  Thinking back, the better question for me is when do I remember not feeling fear?  I spent a lot of time scared as a child.  I was born insecure, I guess.  Things frightened me.  I had more than my fair share of phobias and garden-variety fears.  Even as I grew up, it didn’t seem that my siblings were the same way.  I was the scaredy-cat.  We all liked watching monster movies on Saturday afternoon, however.  My gateway to manufactured fear was Dark Shadows.  The many posts on this blog about that series should indicate how formative it was for my young psyche.

If you get to know me well enough I’ll tell you some of the traumas I faced early on in this earthly existence.  Being the child of an alcoholic, I kept a close eye, and ear, on my environment.  I still want to know just where everybody is.  I don’t want someone startling or scaring me.  I don’t like surprises.  And I watch horror as therapy.  It’s cathartic.  And I write books about it.  One of those hopeful books is about the spirituality of living in the dark.  This isn’t something I willing chose.  No, it was what I was born into and had to learn to cope with.  I do like to “arm myself with knowledge.”  I read about the world and my small, scary corner of it.  Most everyone I read about had a well-adjusted childhood with one moment when fear coaxed them in.  That wasn’t my experience of it.

As we age our memories of childhood take on different shading.  Picture albums preserve the good times.  “Smile for the camera.”  My mother used to worry about me because I didn’t smile much as a child.  I was afraid.  I hadn’t yet learned how watching scary things might help me.  Besides, I had siblings close in age and there were always distractions around.  These days I’ve overcome most of my phobias.  Becoming a parent, although it introduced new ones, led me to try to overcome some of the older ones.  I sincerely hope trauma doesn’t get passed on genetically.  Maybe I’ve ended up where I have for a reason.  Watching horror gives me a chance to choose what form it will take.

Puzzle Conscious

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Those of us who write books are all working on putting together a puzzle.  Even though we often disagree, it is part of the same puzzle.  We’re trying to expand human knowledge.  Some make a living doing it, most do not.  As this thought initially occurred to me, I wondered if it applied only to nonfiction.  It doesn’t.  Even the novelist is participating in piecing together this immense, at least planet-sized, puzzle.  We don’t understand consciousness.  Some of us are convinced that it pervades other living beings as well.  Philosophers far more brilliant than yours truly have suggested that if consciousness is emergent then it can be traced back to matter itself.  Our human part of the picture is pieced together in libraries.  Those collections of human thought.

Being raised in a literalist environment, I thought books (nonfiction) were researched and written leaving the author mostly in the background.  I’ve come to realize that a nonfiction book is the author’s interpretation, having read the many interpretations of others.  And that each tome is part of the larger conundrum of mapping out human consciousness.  No matter how minor the publisher or how poor the sales, the book is, to some degree, a piece.  The puzzle we’re trying to construct is missing many, many pieces.  Long ago we surpassed the point at which one person could read every published piece of human knowledge.  Now, lifetimes would be required, and even then no one person could put it all together.  Consciousness is very slippery that way.  Not to mention the many, many unpublished books.  The task is immense and the end result is our contribution to the knowledge of how this universe works.

The humble contributions that I’ve attempted to add to the conversation may seem irrelevant.  They certainly haven’t brought in fame or money.  Those of us who write feel compelled to do so.  Others have no such compulsion and each of us has our role to play.  My thoughts go back to monks in the medieval period.  Many of them copying, a few of them composing, sacred objects.  Books were rare and all handwritten.  Today those that survive are priceless treasures.  They’re also pieces to a vast puzzle.  As we try to understand this very strange, very weird world in which we find ourselves, many of us still turn to books.  What we may not realize as we open the cover, is that we’re doing our part in a collaborative exercise in which we’re all involved.  Even if the puzzle is never fully completed.

A 48,000-piece puzzle

Still Headless

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I found J. W. Ocker through Poe.  Specifically, through his book Poe-Land.  I guess I read it last year about this time.  We had a brief email correspondence when I told him about my Sleepy Hollow book and he told me he had one coming out as well.  I’ve had Chasing the Headless Horseman on my list ever since.  Ocker is a travel writer.  (Like most writers he’s branched out into other areas as well.)  This book is a kind of memoir travelogue, telling of Ocker’s long-time relationship with Sleepy Hollow.  For some of us, the story is compelling in an almost ethereal way.  In our own ways we explore it.  Ocker also reviews the movies that Washington Irving’s story has begat.  He also explores the intimate connection the Headless Horseman has with Halloween.  He even delves into Irving’s role in Christmas.  These are all things I stumble on in my own book, but what we’re doing is quite different.

Chasing the Headless Horseman is a fun romp through a place I’ve only been once.  We’ve never lived close enough or had funds enough to visit frequently.  When my daughter was still at home, we made autumnal literary trips, one of which took us to Austerlitz, New York.  And on the way home, through Sleepy Hollow.  I still remember looking at the map—yes, a paper map!—and seeing the name “Sleepy Hollow.”  I hadn’t realized that it was a real place.  At this point in time, Sleepy Hollow, as an official place name, had only existed for eleven years.  It was October and it wasn’t crowded.  Reading Ocker I realize that if we ever try to return in October it will be a very different experience.  Since our one visit, it has become a major Halloween town.  With parking problems.  Last year I looked at hotels and realized that if you want to get within about fifty miles of Sleepy Hollow in October, you have to pretty much book your stay a year in advance.

Ocker is more personable than me.  He interviews people.  He asks them about living in Sleepy Hollow.  He also shows us where historical markers and statues stand (I’m a fan of those too), and which archives have what artifacts.  I always read in awe.  In fact, last year when I traveled to Boston for work, I visited as many places from Poe-Land as I could, given the constraints.  Now I have a similar list for Sleepy Hollow.  If you can’t make it there personally, do yourself a favor and read Chasing the Headless Horseman.  I’m glad I did.