Holy Nightmares

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The thing about ratings, as John Green astutely notes in The Anthropocene Reviewed, is that they are in many ways arbitrary.  From the very few reviews of my own Nightmares with the Bible, I get the sense that people misunderstand the book.  Or it could be that they just don’t like it.  To each their own.  To me it is quite a personal book.  It is also a bookend to Holy Horror.  They represent first steps into a new kind of endeavor for me—saying something (hopefully) intelligent about horror films.  And writing books with no institutional support at all.  There are several intentional interlacings between these two books and to understand one it helps to read the other.  For those who want to get a sense of the way this addled brain works, in any case.

Holy Horror was literally one of those “if you see something say something” books.  I had noticed something that apparently nobody else had—the way the Bible is presented in horror films tells us something about the Good Book.  I have not seen every horror movie made.  I know of nobody who has, or even can.  I’d noticed a commonality, however, among those films.  The Bible isn’t rare in horror.  In fact, it’s quite common.  I’ve done quite a lot of reading about religion in horror since then, and this is something that has to be taken into account when considering the effects of Christianization.  It brings fear in its trail.  Nightmares with the Bible is a bit more ambitious and a bit of a hybrid.  That may be why its been reviewed so poorly.  It is a continuation of the thesis—if you want to understand how people really believe, look at what popular culture teaches us.

What do we believe about demons?  What The Exorcist taught us to believe.  Anyone who looks at the history of the idea sees that this concept really only took off, after the Middle Ages, when movies reminded us of the threat.  From the early modern period on, belief in demons and their impact on the world had been in decline.  Anyone looking at the headlines today will have to wonder about the wisdom of that loss of interest.  When The Exorcist hit, it struck a nerve.  Since then demons have been back on the big screen time and time again, each showing providing more information on what to believe.  I suspect those who’ve been rating the book really don’t get what I’m trying to do.  At least, I tell myself, somebody’s reading my work.

Grave Robbers

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My personal reconstruction of the Dark Shadows universe was made by connecting the books by Marilyn Ross that I could find with the episodes of the television show that I saw.  I’ve always been one to try to make a logical storyline out of such things so that I could connect them when they came at irregular intervals.  (I’m still a fan of linear storytelling.)  So it’s a bit of an eye-opener to read the series of pulps in order.  There are continuities and discontinuities.  Barnabas, Quentin and the Grave Robbers again has Quentin, in 1830, portrayed as a good guy.  When he was first introduced in the series some books back, he was a satanist and very nearly evil.  And this was in a more recent era.  You get the sense that Ross was responding to fan requests.

As I noted regarding the last book in the series, the stories do seem to have grown more complex, and sophisticated over time.  The writing remains labored, but the story aspect improves.  Barnabas, Quentin and the Grave Robbers comes the closest to standard horror so far.  This is a dark story with problematic race issues thrown in.  The first two-thirds or so are set in England and are tied into the story by Barnabas Collins being there.  It is distanced from the usual moody setting of Collinwood where, despite all the haunting and troubles, you tend to think things turn out alright in the end.  Here the antagonist grave robbers kill people close to the heroine and the corpses sent to gruesome ends.  And there are zombies.

To flee the evil ringleader, Barnabas takes Paula Sullivan to Collinwood where Quentin is introduced to the story.  In 1830 he’s an unpredictable trickster, but good at heart.  He and Barnabas team up, as last time, to take on the grave robber when he moves, you guessed it, next door to Collinwood.  Then something unusual happens—Paula discovers zombies are afraid of crosses.  This leads to a strange episode of Barnabas—a vampire, remember—chasing a zombie with a cross.  In general religious imagery is scarce in these novels.  A vicar or two may be mentioned, but vampires aren’t menaced with crosses.  That does happen in one of the movies, but here it seems that because Barnabas is a good vampire he’s not bothered by a cross.  Or it could be a consistency issue.  Either way, this is a moody addition to the series, appropriate, as always, for autumnal reading.

Not Over

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It’s not over, you know.  Halloween, I mean.  We may have made it through the actual night of trick-or-treating with all of its build-up, but like many holidays from olden times, Halloween was, and still should be, part of a complex of holy days.  People have long believed that something was transitioning at this time of year.  Halloween spun off of its more sacred sibling, All Saints Day.  Before Christianization, Samhain perhaps spanned more than one day.  As a result of relentless capitalism with its parsimonious counting of days off, like pre-conversion Scrooge, has made all holidays one-day events.  Sometimes you need some time to sort out what’s happening and this three-day complex is one of those times.  Día de los Muertos begins today—this holiday’s just getting started.

I’ve frequently suggested to the few who’ll listen that we need to take holidays seriously.  Culturally we tolerate them as days of less productivity.  Who actually gets Halloween off work?  And how many of us work in places where “Happy Halloween” is a regular greeting on the 31st?  I don’t know about you, but in all my Zoom meetings yesterday nobody was wearing a costume.  And yet, at Nashotah House I learned that today is a “day of obligation.”  Attending services isn’t optional (of course, it never was optional at Nashotah).  But this one was really serious.  The Catholic Church moved All Saints Day to November 1 to counter Samhain celebrations encountered in Celtic lands.  People are reluctant to give up their religion, however, and the day before All Hallows allowed for Samhain to retain its identity.  And even today’s not the end of the season.  Tomorrow has traditionally been All Souls Day.  But what company’s going to give you three days off at this time of year? We’re gearing up for Black Friday.

Holidays serve to give structure to the passing of time.  Winter with its privations is on its way.  This autumnal complex of holidays, whether celebrated as Samhain, Día de los Muertos, or Halloween-All Saints-All Souls, reminds us to take a pause and ponder what all of this really means.  And not only ponder, but also celebrate.  Halloween is fun with its costumes and candy and spooky decorations, but it’s more than just that.  It’s a season of existential questions and of preparing for the inevitable cold days ahead.  We ignore such things at our own peril.  There are reasons for holidays, but those who find meaning only in mammon see no reason to offer even one day off, amid a season we most deeply, intensely need.

This Halloween

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This year I’ve been making a conscious effort to appreciate autumn.  It’s admittedly difficult when you’re forced to sit in an office, even a home office, for most of the daylight hours five days a week.  (At least I have a window here, which I never had on Madison Avenue.)  Seeing the blue skies and colorful leaves, each individual one of which is a singular work of art, or watching the moody, cloudy skies, I wish for freedom.  Every night before falling asleep, if I can remember to do so, the last word I whisper to myself has been “September,” then “October,” to remind myself of the wonder of this time of year in which I’ve been privileged to live.  Since America is driven by money alone, often in the guise of religion, Halloween is practically over before it begins.  Stores have sold their candy and spooky decorations, now it’s on to the more lucrative Christmas season.

Do we really believe that holidays have any power anymore?  Is Halloween really, perhaps, a time when the veil between worlds is actually thin?  Or have we ceased believing in the other world, the one behind all the money and sham?   Holidays are liminal times.  In an ironic way, it’s my heartfelt appreciation of Halloween that led me to write about The Wicker Man, although it’s set half a year away.  Nashotah House was hardly an ideal place to work, but prior to an administration change, it was the best place I’ve ever lived to celebrate Halloween.  A campus with an in-house cemetery, and surrounded (at the time) by cornfields and woods, was adjunct to really believing.  It was a haunted place.

Out on late nights or early mornings, I often felt it.  Trying to photograph a comet down by the lake by myself, woods on either side, in the total dark.  Or dragging a lawn chair through the trees to the edge of a cornfield at 4 a.m. to try to catch a meteor shower.   Hiding in the graveyard on Halloween night, dressed as a grim reaper to follow the hay wagon of kids that the maintenance director would drive through on that night.  Those memories remain as highlights of my foreshortened teaching career.  Since Harry Potter was in the ascendant, students had taken to calling the seminary “Hogwarts,” and, I was told, I was the master of Ravenclaw.  The leaves, miniature Van Gogh’s each one, are fast falling from the trees.  There’s a decided chill in the air.  Something might, just might, really happen this Halloween.

Seasonal Viewing

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Any movie that begins with an excommunication ought to be good.  Especially with its list of stars you’d think To the Devil a Daughter might’ve turned out better.  Still, it is a good example of religion and horror mingling together.  I’ve never read any Dennis Wheatley novels, but reputedly he didn’t like this film adaptation of his book.  It certainly has a convoluted plot.  So an excommunicated priest has started a new religion that worships Ashtaroth.  He has to baptize a child, now 18 (three-times-six, don’t you see), with the blood of the demon so that she can become his (Ashtaroth’s) avatar.  This is apparently the eponymous daughter to the Devil.  She was baptized initially by her mother’s blood at her birth.

The girl’s father, who survived her birth—unlike his wife—has decided at the last moment to save his daughter.  He appears to be independently wealthy yet he talks an author of occult books into doing the saving for him.  The girl, it turns out, is a nun in this satanic religious order and is only too willing to do what she can to serve “our Lord.”  The way that all of this plays out is confusing and Byzantine, but it does raise a serious question: what if a child is reared in a bad religion?  (And there are some.)  Who has the right to decide if a religion is good or bad?  Children are easily indoctrinated and not too many question the faith in which they were raised.  Yes, we all think the religion we believe is the right one.  The problem is everyone else thinks the same thing.

One of the things this movie got right is that the “heretics” are portrayed as sincerely believing that their religion is for the improvement of the world.  Calling themselves Children of the Lord, they believe Ashtaroth is good.  And a good lord wants what is best for the world, right?  This is the dilemma of exclusive religions that teach only their own outlook can possibly be the correct one.  Otherwise you have to give adherents a choice and another religion may be more appealing.  Or worse, they may reason out that if you’re given a choice that means your own religion is also merely one of many.  Historically religions have gotten around this by valorizing true believers who never question anything.  To the Devil a Daughter isn’t a great movie.  It’s not even a very good one.  Nevertheless, it raises some questions that lie, of course, in the details.

Hallowed Tradition

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The more I learn about the movie industry the more complex I realize it is.  Take Trick ‘r Treat, for example.  It was released to some film festivals—and backed by a major studio—in 2007.  I wondered why I’d never really heard of it, and the reason seems to be that it never had a theatrical release.  Until this month.  It is now playing in theaters.  The thing is, it’s already available on streaming services because it gained a cult following when it was initially released fifteen years ago.  I came to know about it by wandering into one of those Halloween pop-up stores recently.  There were plenty of Sam costumes so I did a little research and discovered a Halloween movie I’d never seen.

I have to say, the first time watching it was confusing.  I didn’t realize it was four or five separate, but interlaced stories.  I kept waiting for a central plot to emerge, but it didn’t.  At the same time, I wasn’t aware that it was a comedy horror either.  I have no problem with comedy horror, of course.  I just like to know that before I get into it.  Once I’d figured these things out, I could see the draw.  It is fun and seasonal.  Clearly it’s holiday horror.  In fact several websites list it as being essential October viewing.  It’s certainly different from many Halloween movies in refusing to be taken seriously.  It’s like adults having fun instead of kids enjoying the holiday.

Perhaps the most self-aware Halloween film, it constantly reinforces that you need to obey Samhain etiquette.  Those who are killed (and there are many) die for having violated the rules of the holiday.  I appreciate the fact that it insists that we do these things for a reason.  Wearing costumes, handing out candy, carving and lighting jack-o-lanterns, these all serve a purpose.  The movie suggests we need to do these things to stay safe from Sam.  Sam, of course, can’t be killed which means that a sequel may be in the works.  Trick ‘r Treat gets full marks for staying focused on the holiday.  Holiday horror has been a fascination of mine for some time and this movie has it in spades.  Even if it’s a little confusing at times, it’s a fun way to celebrate the season.  And this year you have your choice of seeing it in the theater or streaming it on your most convenient device.

Data Protection

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I learned to type on an actual typewriter.  For many—likely the majority—of those my age or older, that was the case.  Schools in the seventies, perhaps anticipating the computer revolution, emphasized that both boys and girls should learn typing. At least my school did.  Those were the heady days of electric typewriters that smacked the paper with a satisfying thwack at the slightest touch on the keys.  In circumstances whose details I simply can’t remember, my mother bought me an old, manual typewriter at a garage sale or something.  One thing is certain—it didn’t cost much.  It worked, however, and I typed away writing stories and plays and even attempted letters to editors.  I’d been writing long before that, of course.  Some of my early fiction was in pencil on school tablet paper and I think I still might have a few survivors from that era in the attic.

The image of the noisy newsroom full of clacking typewriters still conveys a kind of power.  Writers in those days, if they were prominent enough, could bang away at the keyboard, jerk the results out, put them in an envelope and be assured of publication.  Everything seems more difficult these days.  Computers have made writers of so many people that it’s difficult to get noticed.  More important, however, is the fact that print preserved data.  Newspaper was cheap, so perhaps the newsroom isn’t the best example.  Kept dry and in climate-controlled environments such as libraries, books keep a very long time.  Longer than the life of the author, or so it is hoped.

Data backup is now a constant concern.  A couple years back, an unfortunate bump on my own terabyte drive led to a quite expensive data recovery bill with some information lost forever.  Throughout the process I kept thinking, if all of this were printed out at least I’d be able to access it.  So true.  The vinyl market demonstrates that not everyone is willing to put up with the artificiality of electronic media.  Those who promote it tend to shy away from discussing its fragility.  Even now when I have a story published I print it out so that if the data becomes corrupted it can at least be retyped.  My most recent double-backup took an entire Saturday to accomplish.  Who knows what memory-intensive software lies behind each keystroke?  I look at the humble typewriter and tell myself that certain plateaus were perhaps more stable than the majestic mountains with their landslides and crevasses.  And I always found that clacking noise soothing, as ideas were preserved in solid form.

The Panel

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More than one person pointed it out to me, so I guess I must be getting a (small) reputation.  During one of my campus editorial visits I stopped into the center for Religion and American Culture at that venerable institution known as IUPUI—Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis.  I was immediately impressed and, of course, since I’m no longer in academia I’ve realized that the impact of religion on culture is my real interest in it.  What was pointed out to me, however, was an episode of their “Religion and” series.  This one was held via Zoom and has been posted here, so if you, like me, work, or are just finding out about it, can still see it.  I encourage that behavior.  This particular panel was “Religion and Horror.”

As the word “panel” indicates, it was a moderated group discussion.  The panelists were Douglas E. Cowan of the University of Waterloo, Erika Engstrom of the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Media, and W. Scott Poole of the College of Charleston.  The moderator was Melissa Borja of the University of Michigan.  What a great way to spend an October afternoon!  It is also good to know that I’m not the only one who’s noticed that religion and horror are similar and even address similar needs.  I’ve read books by Cowan and Poole and have even met the former a couple of times.  No longer a university employee, I largely work in insolation, so it’s great to hear conversation about the kinds of things in my head once in a while.  A number of refrains became obvious during this all-too-brief discussion.

We’ve been conditioned to think of religion as inherently good.  In general, we’ve also been conditioned to think of horror as inherently bad.  As with most black-and-white categories, both of these things get some key points wrong.  Religions, like everything else, have histories.  Those who study those histories learn that much of what’s passed along to believers is intended to make them into repeat, paying customers.  Try teaching in a seminary for a few years and then attempt to dispute that.  And, the panelists pointed out, horror is also a product, intended to sell.  This explains the endless parade of, for example, Halloween movies.  Just when you think you’ve purchased the last one you’ll ever need to buy there’s another.  There was so much squeezed into that one hour that I was glad I was taking notes.  But then, it was a recording—you can see it too, and I urge you to do so.

Small Big World

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Serendipity may have been over-used in the eighties, but the idea of finding something by chance that turns out to be really good is real enough.  My wife found The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto, by chance.  You see, used bookstores are places of serendipity.  This one happened to be in Trumansburg, New York.  Subtitled The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America, this is the story of an early European incursion into North America.  These days it’s difficult to feel good about any of that, but overlooking the misery we’ve caused for a moment, the early Dutch settlement was, comparatively, not as detrimental to the American Indians as later colonies were.  The Dutch were mainly interested in trading, and unlike the Puritans who settled to the north, they were tolerant of difference, even religious difference.

Shorto chronicles how the settlement of Manhattan from the beginning was one of diverse peoples having to get along and accept one another.  The Dutch, like the Puritans, had been infected by Calvinism, but they took a more practical view.  People get along better if you don’t force them all to think the same way.  The book suggests that this was impressed on New Amsterdam from the beginning, and it remained when it became New York.  It’s a fascinating story partially because it begins the narrative before the point where we’re generally instructed in school.  Europe was warring, at the time, of course.  But it was a Dutch idea—that peace could be the default state, instead of war—that allowed for real civic progress.  Those scrambling for empires, however, continued to squabble, even as they still do today.

There are plenty of unexpected insights from this book.  The Dutch in many ways molded the die that would become European America.  Having built a successful trading colony in Manhattan, they had to surrender it when the English, after the Cromwell debacle, decided to take it by force.  The people of Manhattan did not want to fight a clearly superior army and lose all that they’d gained by their tolerant way of life.  And so New Amsterdam became New York.  The story is filled with colorful characters and incidents that, if you’re like me, you’ve never heard of.  I’m not one of those people who has to read everything published on New York City.  Working there for many years was sufficient for me.  But still, this is one of those books that I’m glad my wife serendipitously found while looking for nothing in particular in a used bookstore.

Monster Gods

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“I would go to Catholic Church and the saints made no sense.  But Frankenstein made sense, The Wolfman made sense, The Creature from the Black Lagoon made sense.  So I chose that as my religion.”  Famed writer/director Guillermo del Toro said these words.  They’re not exactly gospel but they do demonstrate the connection between religion and horror that is only now beginning to be explored.  Del Toro and I are of the same generation, and some of us in that time frame found meaning in the monsters we saw as kids.  They were coping techniques for living in an uncertain and difficult world.  A world with hellfire on Sundays and often hell for the rest of the week.  Fears of bullies and alcoholic fathers and lack of money.  Fears of an unknown infraction sending you to eternal torment, even if you didn’t know or mean it.

Image credit: Manuel Bartual, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, via Wikimedia Commons

I didn’t choose horror as my religion.  I didn’t grow up Catholic like del Toro either.  I haven’t seen all of his movies, but he does evince a kind of religious devotion to his monsters.  Pan’s Labyrinth was distinctly disturbing.  Pacific Rim was intense.  Crimson Peak is one it’s about time I watched again.  The Shape of Water offered a lovable monster.  Many of these films don’t follow standard horror tropes.  They’re thoughtful, emotive, and often wrenching.  These are, of course, traits shared in common with religion.  I suspect my own attempts to articulate this would benefit from conversation with someone like del Toro.  There’s no doubt that monsters give me the sense of Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

Religion and horror share a common ancestor.  Fear is an emotion that we apparently share with all sentient beings.  How we deal with it differs.  While a bunny will run away a rattlesnake will strike.  Horror is a way of dealing with fear.  So is religion.  We can’t avoid fear because, honestly, there’s much to be afraid of.  Many choose to believe their clergy, taught by people like me, and assume religion has all the answers.  Others, like del Toro, seek wisdom elsewhere.  When the credits roll at the end, you know it was all just a show.  When you walk out of the church, synagogue, or mosque, you know daily life awaits with its peaks and valleys.  Some may substitute one for the other, while others require the support of both.  And both, as odd as it may seem, can be addressed with conviction.  If you don’t believe me, just ask Guillermo del Toro.

Locally Speaking

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One of the weird things about moving is that you don’t know many people in your new location.  Ah, but who am I kidding?  As an introvert I knew few people in my last two decade-long locations.  So when I blog my readers tend not to be local.  Those I know locally tend not to read what I write.  This is the way of things.  Nevertheless, I make bold to mention the session I shared with Robert Repino and Andrew Uzendoski at the fourth annual Easton Book Festival yesterday.  The session was recorded and may be found here.  The topic is speculative writing.  While speculative writing may encompass nonfiction, it is generally considered to be fiction about things most people consider not to be real, such as science fiction, horror, and fantasy.

The slippery word there is “real.”  There’s a great deal of philosophy to that word.  How we determine reality is hardly a settled matter.  It involves more than the physical, as much as we might want to deny it.  In the case of future-oriented fiction “it hasn’t happened yet.”  Even if it comes true, such as George Orwell’s 1984.  In the case of the past, such as Game of Thrones, it never really happened.  For horror, itself not easily defined, it may range from gothic ghost tales to bloody accounts of carnage, generally set in the present.  Speculative often involves the supernatural.  The supernatural, however, may be real.  Who’s the final judge of that?

If I had a local readership I would add a plug for the Easton Book Festival.  It started strong in 2019 but was nearly choked by the pandemic.  I’ve had the honor of being involved in some way for all four years although I’m a minor author with perhaps the poorest sales figures of any who participate.  The Lehigh Valley is a major population center of Pennsylvania, but there’s wonderful greenery and woods between Easton, Bethlehem, and Allentown.  I live here but work in New York City and there’s no question who gets the lion’s share of time.  Publishing is a mystery to many.  How does it work, and how do you find a publisher?  And once you get published how do you get your books noticed?  And perhaps more relevant to more people, how do you get to know your neighbors?  Apart from the chance encounter across the lawn, we’re hermetically sealed in our houses, living lives on the web.  Unless you happen to venture to your local book festival where you’ll find like-minded individuals.  It goes on through the weekend, so if you’re nearby check it out.

Chilly Ghosts

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The names of many Antarctic explorers are more familiar to me than Arctic ones, so John Franklin was a name unknown to me.  A nineteenth-century British explorer, his expedition was lost beginning in 1845 when his appropriately named ships, Erebus and Terror, became icebound.  Franklin was seeking the famed Northwest Passage and given the slow communication of the time, nobody knew for years whether he’d survived or not.  (He hadn’t.)  Shane McCorristine’s The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration is a fascinating account of the attempts to find Franklin and his ships, often with speculative means.  Franklin’s widow, Jane, was famous in Britain for her constancy and her unwillingness to give up on the search for her husband.  She also consulted clairvoyants and paid attention to noteworthy dreams.

What drew me to this account was the involvement of the supernatural.  Significant dreams and many clairvoyants—all in the Victorian Era—made suggestions and claims about Sir John’s health and survival, as well as his whereabouts.  This was, of course, in the era before anyone reflected on the rightness of the imperial ideology of exploration and exploitation.  (We seem to have a hard time shaking that even today.)  In any case, these unusual, supernatural means of gaining information were often utilized and sometimes even functioned to set the destinations for other ships sent on rescue missions.  The chapters dealing with spectral landscapes of the Arctic are riveting and hard to put down.  Arctic imagination, even for those of us who don’t care for the cold, is powerful.  And we tend to think of it in spiritual terms.  There’s something about the far north.

There are many names involved and there are some places where it’s difficult to keep track of all the characters on a casual read, but overall this study is gripping.  McCorristine, as an academic, can’t tip his hand regarding the authenticity of the phenomena he explores here, but it simply doesn’t let go.  His chapter on women in Arctic discourse is likewise engaging.  Franklin and his crew had died by 1847 but the ships weren’t “discovered” until 2014 and 2016 by Canadian expeditions.  As McCorristine points out, even such political use of resources makes statements about how indigenous people continue to be treated by nations established as colonies.  There is much to say on this point, but the book focuses instead on “polar terror and sublimity” that comes to the surface in supernatural beliefs.  Tying all of this together is an astonishing feat and the results leave much room for wonder.

No Words

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I read something scary recently.  And no, it was not a horror story.  I work in publishing and we have to keep abreast of developments, so I’ve had a glimpse of the future.  Publishers are now starting to look toward the time when information will no longer be conveyed by the written word.  A picture’s worth a thousand of them, after all.  This new future will convey information by video, or whatever the replacement of video will be.  Perhaps some are looking forward to the Matrix direct downloading model.  Perhaps the computer will be able to simulate the pleasures of reading a book, of browsing in a bookstore, of writing with pen on paper.  Something about the process and discipline of reading has made us what we are.

Star Wars, as others have noted, is set in a world with no paper.  You won’t find a scrap blowing in the wind, even on Tatooine.  Nobody is shown reading.  Plenty of action, but no wizard behind his big book of spells, no princess writing down her inmost thoughts.  Make a recording and plug it into your R2-unit.  Perhaps this is heresy, but compare this to Star Trek.  The episode “Court Martial” has Cogley (Elisha Cook, before he applied to become Rosemary’s landlord) saying to Kirk, “Books, young man, books. Thousands of them. If time wasn’t so important, I’d show you something. My library. Thousands of books.”  We always thought even the future would have plenty of reading material.  Now we’re being told the technology is passé. 

The constant emphasis on “data-driven analysis”—mostly in an effort to get more money—seems to mistake the downloading of knowledge for the pleasure of reading.  They’re not the same.  I love movies, as any regular reader will know.  Perhaps ironically, I write books about them.  The thing is, I watch them largely to write about them.  Knowledge downloading is getting the cart before the horse.  I’ve read even nonfiction books wrapped in awe.  An author’s way with words, the phrasing, the craft, the artistry.  These are pleasures.  Sure, images can show an interpretation but there are those of us who will always want to read the book before we see the movie.  Can you get the actors’ faces out of your head if you do it the other way around?  There are those who celebrate this sterile future.  And there are those of us who won’t even go there if we don’t have a book in hand to read, just in case.

Image credit:Bender, Albert M., artist; Federal Art Project, sponsor. Public domain.

When Autumn Starts

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Some books catch my attention and I’m not sure why.  Knowing myself, the title When Autumn Leaves, invoking my favorite time of year with its intriguing syntax, probably did it.  I’m always on the lookout for books that capture the spirit of autumn.  Although she’s quite well known as a lyricist, Amy S. Foster’s name wasn’t familiar to me.  The cover looked autumnal and I knew it was about witches.  It came out quite a few years ago, so my recollection of why I’d marked it then had faded by the time I finally got to it.  The title is a play on both autumn and leaves.  The main character of the ensemble cast is Autumn and knowing that changes leaves from those on a tree to a verb of action.  I’ll try not to put any spoilers here since there’s plenty to say without giving away the ending.

Autumn is a good witch.  Well, the book doesn’t out and say so directly.  Being magical realism there’s some room for interpretation.  She’s the matriarch of Avening, an island city off the west coast.  Those drawn to Avening tend to have some kind of magical powers, whether or not they know of them.  The story unveils the various women coming to be aware of their special talents, but generally they’re unsure what to do with or about them.  Autumn is the one to help them.  She’s been in Avening as long as anyone can remember, but, as the novel opens, she learns it’s her time to leave (thus the title).

Before she can go, however, Autumn has to select a replacement.  This is what introduces us to the various characters in the story.  We hear of the magical powers of some of the thirteen in quite a bit of detail, and others more incidentally.  Many of them don’t know they have these powers.  They know there’s something special about Avening and that they were drawn there, but they don’t know why.  So it’s a tale of female discovery.  Some of the vignettes are difficult to read, dealing with serious subjects, but they reflect realities in women’s lives.  It’s not really an autumnal story, spinning as it does through the wheel of the year, beginning with the winter solstice and ending up at Samhain.  It doesn’t dwell on Halloween, however.  It’s much more a character-driven story.  It creates a wondering image of Avening and what might happen if women were in charge.  And in that respect it’s very compelling indeed.

Shatner’s Space

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We constantly underestimate the power of fiction.  It’s difficult to break into getting fiction published.  It wasn’t always that way.  When the pulps were still a thing often it took a thimble of talent and a handful of persistence.  Publishers were looking for content and those with typewriters were clacking away as fast as they could.  Ding!  Carriage return.  These days it’s harder.  This came to mind in thinking about William Shatner’s trip to space and his subsequent reaction.  As several news outlets said in anticipation of Shatner’s new book, the experience made him feel profoundly sad and not a little cold.  So much empty space and we still haven’t figured out how to travel fast enough to reach our nearest neighbors.  We don’t even know if we’ll like them when we meet them.

Others, in defense of space exploration, were quick to counter Shatner.  He’s not a real astronaut, after all, having spent nine decades earth-bound.  Or so they said.  But I think I understand, as a fellow land-lubber, where he’s coming from.  We’ve only really got one chance on this planet, being the only creatures evolved enough to type, to capture our thoughts—our essence—in words that can be preserved.  And wildlife statistics are showing an alarming decrease in other animals since the 1970s.  If we’re all that’s left and we can do no better than to elect fascists, well, stand me with Captain Kirk.  We look to the skies and see, well, empty space.  And besides, we need to get home because it’s supper time.

Image credit: NBC Television, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The reason Shatner got a free ride to space was, of course, fiction.  Star Trek captured the imagination of my generation and those with actual science ability started to put that kind of future together.  Today we can talk to computers and they still mishear us, often with laughable results.  But if writers of fiction hadn’t been available the show would never have succeeded and what would a Canadian actor have had to do?  Maybe a crime drama or two?  And even those require writers.  It seems to me that we should be encouraging fiction writers with talent.  Believe me, I’ve read plenty who really haven’t got it (often in the self-published aisle) but I know firsthand how difficult it is to get fiction noticed.  It’s like, to borrow an image, being blasted off into a dark, cold, empty space and looking at the blue orb below and wanting to be home for supper.