House of Catherine

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A blend of horror and dark academia.  That’s how I’d classify Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas.  For some time I’ve been pondering the connection between the two genres, and this novel is one of slow-building dread.  I’ll attempt to avoid spoilers, but I will say there’s a somewhat optimistic ending to the tale.  The eponymous Catherine House is a three-year college.  Well, not exactly a college.  It is a highly selective school that works with something called plasm.  Only the most select of those admitted are permitted to work in the department that handles plasm.  The others pursue different academic fields.  When they’re done, they’ll be connected for life and will succeed because of the many Catherine graduates who’ve shared their intensive program and reached positions of power.  The novel follows Ines, a girl who had a rough upbringing and who isn’t sure how she ended up at such a school in the first place.

The tip off to the unsavory part of the House is the secrecy.  Students cannot leave campus for their three years.  Their families are not permitted to be in touch and the students are encouraged to forget about their past lives.  Their thought process is influenced by plasm pins.  They are given a freedom many college students would crave—alcohol is freely available and sex is encouraged.  They also have a very rigorous course of studies.  Students do fail out.  Ines, finding close friends for the first time in her life, has trouble believing that she belongs here.  She’s not bright enough to work with plasm, but her boyfriend is.  And then Ines discovers a dark secret.  One that forces her to a very difficult decision.

The dark academia aspect is more pronounced than the horror one.  In fact, the horror is more by implication than by direct narration.  We’ve got an academic setting where something has clearly gone wrong.  We don’t ever really learn what plasm is, but it becomes the ultimate concern, to borrow language from Paul Tillich, for those who research and work with it.  It seems to have supernatural attributes.  Catherine House explores what it means to be young and learning about relationships, and love, and the harder lessons life gives.  At first Catherine House seems like a noble academy, but soon suspicions begin to build into a quiet horror.  An existential variety of horror more than the kind induced by monsters or people that are purely evil.  The characters are likable but flawed.  It’s the system, however, that introduces the darkness at the House.

Weird Films

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I’ve read Gary D. Rhodes before and found him informative and enjoyable.  Although I hope his recent offering Weirdumentary moves beyond its ideal readership, I suspect I’m among that class.  I was alive and somewhat aware of cinema during the period under discussion—the 1970s—and I even saw a few of these films in the theater, as well as watching some of the television offerings.  I think Rhodes is correct in pointing out that this genre was a product of its era.  And what a strange time the seventies were!  I grew up watching the series In Search of…, which is discussed at some length here.  But before I get more into it, I should explain that a “weirdumentary” is a pseudo-documentary that has characteristic features such as dramatic recreations, questionable authenticity of at least part of what it covers, and often a famous personality as a host.

The book is handsomely illustrated with pictures that will offer a nostalgic rerun of the seventies for some of us.  It divides the material into eight sections:  the proto-weird, ancient aliens, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, the paranormal, mysterious monsters, speculative histories, and prophecies.  The proto-weird are this kind of documentary from before 1970, and the rest of the categories sometimes bleed into one another.  Not to detract from this excellent book (it’s often quite witty), my mysterious mind thinks a straightforward chronological treatment might’ve worked better.  “Paranormal,” for example, could cover quite a few of these topics.  Still, the organization of a book can be a personal thing and this layout, with “prophecies” at the end, works well.  A number of speculative religious films make the list, including In Search of Noah’s Ark and Late Great Planet Earth, both of which made it to my small-town theater, and drew me in back in the day.

I also admit to having spent some of my summer earnings to see Mysterious Monsters.  And maybe Chariots of the Gods—although I can’t remember for sure.  I certainly read the book.  Rhodes begins by explaining how 2001: A Space Odyssey set up viewer expectations for such films as these.  I definitely saw that one when I was young.  So the ideal readership here would seem to be those born in the sixties who were old enough to see these movies (and television programs) when they were making their initial rounds in the next decade.  Kids suggestible enough to believe the pseudo-science of many of these offerings, who would grow up to look back on them nostalgically.  Written with a light touch, but true appreciation of the subject, this book was a great way to relive one of the strange segments of my early life. 

Keep Remembering

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Books used to be, and often still are, works of art.  I can’t imagine my life without them.  I read Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse back in 2023.  A psychiatrist that’s a friend of mine recommended it.  Mackesy’s next book of wisdom, Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm just came out in 2025.  It was a stormy year and I can’t help but think this book was one of the antidotes that the world seems to hide next to the poisons it contains.  The book is a work of art.  Like its predecessor, it builds on the importance of love, friendship, and hope.  These are the kinds of things we need in difficult times.  Indeed, we are in the midst of a four year storm that threatens to tear apart 250 years of progress.  We need this book.

I wanted to save this book to be the first I finished in 2026.  To start the year off in a good way.  I’m not a maker of resolutions since I try to self-correct as soon as I become aware of a problem.  But reading a positive book at the start of the year seems like something that is smart to do.  It’s so easy to get drawn into negativity.  Doomscrolling invites itself to be shared with others.  Pretty soon we’re all mired down.  But the horse is fond of reminding the boy, mole, and fox, “The blue sky above never leaves.”  It is there waiting for us, after our self-inflicted storm ends.  As I’ve noted before, writing books is a hopeful exercise.  Reading them can be too.

Charlie Mackesy is my age.  He seems to have distilled more wisdom from our time on this planet than I have.  Reading his observations is the very definition of nepenthe.  When the headlines foreground hate, we must respond with love.  When everyone tells us the storm will never end, we must beg to disagree.  Humans are problematic creatures.  We create our own ills much of the time.  There are those among us, however, who are wise.  And we can improve our state if we choose to listen to them instead of those who loudly proclaim their own praises.  Wisdom is often in short supply in this world we’ve created for ourselves.  It is not, however, completely absent.  Do yourself a favor and find Always Remember.  No need to save it for a rainy day.

2025 in Books

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As has become traditional on this blog, the last post of the year recaps my favorite books from the preceding 365 days.  I’ve finished 68 books this year, a little down on my usual pace.  My only excuse is that some of them took me longer to get through than I anticipated they would.  And life doesn’t always afford the time for reading you’d like, even for those of us who are intentional about it.  As for the books, it’s easiest to discuss them by category.  I read quite a few contemplative books this year that I quite needed to read.  They included Katherine May’s Enchantment, Brian Treanor’s excellent Melancholic Joy, Carlos Alberto Sánchez’s Blooming in the Ruins, and Viktor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning.  These books underscore that thinking can be its own reward, and experiencing life is an opportunity for thought.  I should also add The Oxherd Boy by Regina Linke.

For general nonfiction, Ursula K. Leguin’s Steering the Craft was a good start.  Although older, I enjoyed Martin Tropp’s Mary Shelley’s Monster.  Although sobering, Peter Fleming’s Dark Academia: How Universities Die was an important read.  The Secret Life of a Cemetery by Benoît Gallot was also informative.  I do think my favorite nonfiction book for the year was J. W. Ocker’s Poe-Land.  Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction was quite informative, a learning experience in its own right.  

The largest category for the year, overall, was fiction.  I’ve been trying to read more novels and most of them this year fit into dark academia.  My favorite among them was Mona Awad’s Bunny.  I see the sequel is out, but I’m waiting for it to be released in paperback.   Others that I quite enjoyed were Katy Hays’ The Cloisters, M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains, Kazou Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Goldy Moldavsky’s The Mary Shelley Club, and Brittany Cavallaro’s A Study in Charlotte.  These represent quite a diversity of what dark academia can be.  Among the horror novels, The Bad Seed by William March is another older title, but still scary.  Kiersten White’s Hide and Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea were both memorable.  Kanae Minato’s Confessions spanned dark academia and horror.  

None of this is meant to detract from the many other very good books I read this year, some by authors I know.  Looking back is a funny thing; some books seem to stand out for the impression they made.  This is quite individualized for each person, I’m sure.  I’m grateful to have been able to spend another year reading, and to all the authors I’ve read for providing the necessary ingredients.

Booking Time

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Some time back I mentioned that I was compiling a bibliography of this blog.  (It should eventually appear as a separate page on this website.)  I’m in the thick of it and it makes me think that it’s a good exercise to go back over older writings now and again.  For one thing, I’m reminding myself of books I may have forgotten after reading.  And it may actually give me ideas for new writing projects.  One of the problems, however, with blogging about books is that it creates a reluctance to rereading.  I’m guessing that most blog readers are looking for something new, and discussing something you’ve already talked about may not fit the bill.  Besides, my stack of books to read is already rivaling Babel’s tower for height.  I’ve always been a catch as catch can reader, especially since no longer having university libraries to use.

One of the lessons along the way is just how eclectic my reading tends to be.  (And eccentric, as long as we’re using e-words.)  I’ve read some strange stuff, and I’m still only in the first three years or so of this aging blog.  The real issue is the desire to re-read.  The world is full of interesting books.  I’ve read a few thousand of them, and many of them I’d like to read again.  This bibliography exercise underscores just how precious reading time is.  Those I talk to, apart from the retired, never have enough time to read.  I’ve learned to cram it into small spaces in the day, but even as I’m doing so I’m realizing that I’m shortchanging the experience.  And this is from someone who works in the publishing industry.  

I’ve posted about four books in the past week—on those rare days when I don’t have to work and winter prevents outdoor chores (beyond shoveling snow), I read.  It’s always pleasant to finish up books I’ve been dabbling in for a while.  In a couple more days I’ll be doing my annual review of the year in books.  Again, it’s an opportunity to look back and see what I’ve been up to thinking over the past twelve months.  Since this blog has being going for over a decade and a half, there are many books behind it.  I don’t know how many, at least not yet.  As I say elsewhere on this website, I believe the books we read define us, make us who we are.  Making a bibliography is a way to keep them in order.  And I’m one of those people who actually enjoys making them.  Time thinking about books is time well spent.

Death Trip

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My own personal Wisconsin Death Trip resulted in the end of my chosen career.  I’d never heard of Michael Lesy, or his book, while I lived in the state, however.  In fact, I’ve been racking my brain to remember how or where I’d heard of this strange book.  I do know that it was suggested to me, likely by another written source, many years ago.  My impetus to pick it up at this time was watching Return to Oz and learning that the writer/director used this book to find inspiration.  Having gone through it, I suspect the reason was that this most unusual dissertation was addressing the question of rural versus urban living conditions, but in a way out seventies way.  The book is a combination of photographs from about 1890 through the turn of the century from Black River Falls, Wisconsin, and snippets from the local newspaper.  But also some bits from the intake records of the state hospital at Mendota.  And also some bits from novels.  And further, some summaries apparently by Lesy.

What I found frustrating is the lack of clear explanations of what the sources were.  Nowhere in the introduction or conclusion is it spelled out that, for example, italic sections are summaries of sources by the author.  Nor is it clear why the parts of novels are used, other than adding flavor; were they written by people familiar with Black River Falls?  And the “word clouds” that begin the separate years—why are some words capitalized and others not?  Is this table of contents only to give a taste or it to spell out in detail what will be covered?  The lack of any narrative, apart from the introduction and conclusion compounds the confusion.  In other words, this is an impressionistic book for a work of history.

At the same time, it is creative and informative.  The final chapter discusses how certain recurring themes—suicide, insanity, arson, for example—demonstrate the hardships among the poor.  As Lesy puts it, they came to realize the lie of hard work (meritocracy) and had to face children dying of disease and their inability to get ahead when those who are wealthy control all the assets, and they snapped.  To me that’s the real value of this book.  I noticed while reading through it that of the notices of admission to the asylum, all but one were described as poor, often desperately so.  And we continue to allow this to happen, not just in Wisconsin, but across the country.  Maybe even more people need to read this odd history and consider its implications.

Scary Christmas

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A few days ago I mentioned the connection between Christmas and Halloween.  I’m apparently not the only one to be interested in this because Tim Rayborn wrote Scary Book of Christmas Lore.  This little, holiday-themed book is a gathering of (mostly) scary creatures associated with the winter holidays.  Each creature, or tradition, is treated in less than two pages and the book is generous with color illustrations.  While not a research book (it’s set out as an impulse buy in some Barnes & Nobles at least), nevertheless Rayborn, like yours truly, holds a doctorate from a university in the UK and spends at least part of his time writing books on spooky topics.  (More successfully than yt.) In the process of researching Sleepy Hollow as American Myth I gathered stories of scary Christmas creatures, but didn’t include most of them in the book.

Apart from the obvious Halloween connection, a few things stood out to me about this book.  One is that the majority of these tales come from Germanic cultures.  If these branch up into Scandinavia, almost all of the creatures in the book are covered.  There are a few from other regions as well, but this suggests that winters in Northern Europe used to be seriously scary.  Some of the darker visitors around the winter holidays are clearly local variations of others.  Krampus, for example, is having a day and there are other local versions of a monstrous companion to the “good cop” Santa who comes along to dole out punishment.  Some of the other beings associated with the season are a variety of other monsters—some human, others less so.

The long, dark winter suggests itself as a season for scary stories.  It’s unlikely that this book will send anyone shrieking into the closet or under the bed, but it helpfully brings to the light that people have long found both the fear and entertainment value of telling of frightening creatures.  The Teutonic imagination gave us many of our nighttime fears.  The British, inspired by such tales, tended to codify them into the monster stories that gave the modern horror genre its tentative start.  Although, as I discussed with my daughter on Christmas morning, horror stories began in the pre-biblical era (something I wrote about in an article a couple years back).  And, of course, religion and horror have naturally gone hand in glove for longer than anyone has really traced in any level of detail.  So a little book of monsters around Christmas?  Why not?

Religious Zombies

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Zombies never quite add up in my brain.  I’ve read a few zombie novels, nevertheless.  Joseph Hirsch’s Church of the Last Lamb is one such novel.  I’ll try to avoid spoilers in the note below.  The story begins with zombies already a part of the landscape.  An Army outpost in Ohio is trying to hold out until mortals get the upper hand and reestablish civilization.  The outpost is run by the military and civilians, “softies” have menial jobs as well as other support duties.  One of these civilians, Jon, has dreams of saving enough to be able to settle down and have kids with his girlfriend.  In this world, however, this privilege has to be purchased and generally only those in the military can afford it.  Violating rules about conjugal visits, Jon is brought before the colonel in charge and given the duty to accompany five soldiers on a dangerous mission out among the undead.

Surveillance has shown that a private individual living in the Church or the Lost Lamb has found a way of repelling—killing, actually—zombies.  The squad’s mission is to find the secret and bring it back.  Chances of returning aren’t great.  Zombies respond to the canonical head shooting, but ammunition is in low supply.  Swords and axes play a part in the tale.  The soldiers make it to the church, but one of them dies when zombies swarm their transport.  The others make their way into the church, where a scientist takes on the persona of a priest.  He has, however, come up with a formula to make zombies really dead.  In exchange for it he has a mission of his own that he wants the remaining men to undertake.  Two more die on the adventure.

Jon was a teacher in previous life.  He has to learn how to adapt to this new way of thinking to survive.  Making things more difficult, there are rival groups fighting against the surviving remnants of civilization.  There’s lots of combat and a fair bit of gore.  But then again, this is a zombie novel.  I won’t say more than that.  I enjoyed reading this more than World War Z, but it underscores how much those of us who are softies have trouble understanding military culture.  I found it engaging that religious imagery was drawn into the story as well.  As I’ve often noted on this blog, horror and religion interact well.  The church plays a pretty central role in the narrative, underscoring this winning combination. 

About Books

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I have tried my hand at fiction writing at least since I was ten.  My first attempted novel was at about fourteen.  Fiction has always been a large part of my life.  Now I work in publishing and still struggle to get my fiction published.  I picked up Big Fiction by Dan Sinykin because of another blogger praising his work.  Subtitled How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature,  it is an ambitious book.  I learned a lot by reading it but also found myself putting the book down in a huff.  Not because of the author, but because of the subject.  I grew up in the sixties and seventies, before conglomeration took over big fiction.  Conglomeration is simply the practice of companies buying out other companies.  Even I know that diversifying your portfolio is considered good business practice.  So companies buy one another out.  Thing is, that makes a difference as to what is available to read for the general public.

I’m old enough to idealize elements of the past.  I’ve worked in the corporate world for nearly a decade and a half now and I miss the time prior.  Still, this is fascinating history to read.  Currently there are five major fiction publishers (all of which also publish nonfiction).  They are Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan.  How did there come to be only five?  Sinykin will answer that question for you.  He also explores the smaller nonprofit publishers and the independents.  There’s one big independent publisher left, Norton.  Reading through this book I realized how woefully inadequate my knowledge of fiction authors is.  I read a lot, but there were many, many names I didn’t recognize.  Sinykin tells the stories of many people whose individual tastes may very well have decided which authors you’ve read.

Publishing is a vast and sprawling world, but a very small industry.  In these days when self-publishing is widely practiced, and some authors make a living writing, publishing, and promoting their own books, it may seem that big fiction is less relevant.  Still, these publishers stock the shelves of Barnes & Noble as well as your favorite indie bookstore.  A few things stand out for me: all of this development is recent.  Most of it happened during my lifetime.  There are still powerful editors, but they don’t have the power they used to.  And business-speak has become the language of publishers instead of the countercultural impulse that drives many writers.  This book is an education in itself, even for those of us who work in the book business.

American Revolution

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In these days when America seems to be a nation purely for purposes of stoking Trump’s ego, and the Supreme Court agrees that’s our purpose, many of us are looking for some sense of balance.  I think that was behind, at least subtly, our family trip to Valley Forge this summer.  It was there that we purchased The 10 Key Campaigns of the American Revolution, edited by Edward G. L’Engel.  Now, I’m no fan of reading about wars; I’ve always believed that “rational” beings could come up with better ways of resolving differences.  Some guys like to fight, I know.  And in the case of American liberty we had a king who only wanted to use America for his personal glory.  Wait.  What?  In any case, I would not likely read a book about war, but I feel I need to find some connection to the country that existed before 2016.

My wife and I read this book together.  It is an edited collection, which means that the chapters are uneven.  Some military historians like to get down to the details whereas I prefer a wider sweep.  Nevertheless, as a whole the book gives a pretty good sweep of what happened during those revolutionary years.  Starting with Lexington and Concord, prior to the Declaration of Independence, and moving through the campaign to take Quebec, the loss of New York City, the battles of Trenton and Princeton, Ticonderoga and Saratoga, Philadelphia, Monmouth, the battles in and around Charleston, and finally, Yorktown, the essays give an idea of the breadth of the fighting.  The authors also make the point that this was a civil war, the first of at least two in this country.

Americans have, until the internet, learned to get along with those who are very different.  Now we hang out in clusters of those like us and hate everyone else.  That’s one of the reasons why, living many years in New Jersey, that we unplugged and got out to see these sites.  I visited Lexington when I lived in Boston, and we visited the scene of the battles at Princeton and Monmouth, as well as Washington’s Crossing, when we were in Jersey.  We’ve been to New York City and Philadelphia, of course, but these cities have changed much, showing what can happen when people cooperate instead of being divided against each other.  The same is true of Charleston, which we visited a couple years back.  Although not my favorite book of this year, strangely this one gave me hope.  Maybe America can overcome this present crisis as well.

Half-Way Through

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Here’s a writing phenomenon.  Maybe it only happens to me (I am self-taught), but when I’m writing a book a strange thing happens.  When I’m doing my rewrites, and there are usually several, about halfway through I’ll have an epiphany.  Something I should’ve been doing from the beginning.  Then you’re left standing at a crossroads: should I go back to the beginning again now?  But still need to address a basic rewrite as well as the new approach in the second half, so should I just carry on and then start rewriting from the beginning, catching up with the second half?  That may sound like a trivial question, but I assure you it’s not.  You see, right now I have two books in a complete stage.  “Complete” here means done in draft form.  When I write a book it gets rewritten several times before I consider finding a publisher, but when an important point comes to you halfway through, you’re between worlds.

Now, I work alone.  I am part of a local writers’ group and I’m only now starting to get to know others who’re willing to talk about writing.  I know several writers who don’t talk about it.  They’re still friends, but for me, there are few topics I’d rather discuss.  That’s how I learn.  You see, I have no idea what’s normal.  Do other writers labor over multiple rewrites?  I know some do, but I suspect some don’t.  I know that when I write a short story sometimes the first version seems best to me, but try to get such a thing published.  No, you need to rewrite.  Polish.  Make it shine.  But what if one half is shinier than the other?  This is starting to be a regular occurrence.

Inspiration is fickle.  That’s something we can all agree on.  But when you’ve been scrawling on a topic for weeks, or months, and then a realization dawns, you’ve just added yourself additional weeks or months of revision.  I’m sure a great deal of it is due to my own psychology.  Another part is due to writing under the constraint of a 9-2-5 job.  There are only so many productive hours in a day, and since mine come early they necessarily end when the work day begins.  I’ve tried writing after work but my brain and body feel like a CPR dummy when work’s through with me.  The next morning I start at it again, but the question is still should I finish this up with my new insight, or should I go back to the beginning?

Reading Habits

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I keep track of my reading on both this blog and Goodreads.  It’s a little easier to follow the numbers on Goodreads, so I tend to use their stats.  One thing I’ve noticed in tracking my pacing this year is that academic books slow me down.  I desperately hope this isn’t endumbification, but I feel the need to consult the experts even as I try to write for a wider audience.  Having been trained as a professional researcher, it’s difficult to let go and just read the popular books—those with the style I need to learn to emulate.  But academic books take so long to get through.  Maybe it’s because they’re consciously designed not to be fast reading.  They take time and have concepts that require thought as your eyes consume the words.  They’re also the language I spoke for a good few decades.

My nonfiction reading pile constantly grows taller and I can’t seem to keep up.  Largely it’s because many of them are academic books.  I’m aware that in the real world, where books sell more than a couple hundred copies, that those who can’t claim “Ph.D.” after their names make the most successful writers.  A few of my colleagues have broken through to mainstream publishing, but they generally have university jobs, and tenure.  They don’t have a 9-2-5 schedule that holds their feet to the fire for the lion’s share of every day.  There are writers, I’m learning, who hold down jobs and write more successful books.  They generally aren’t academics, however.  Normal people with intense interests that they express beautifully in words.  Then they go to work.

I’m trying to break into that world.  I know that the publishers I’ve resorted to have been academic publishers.  They don’t really compete with the trade world, nor do they really even try.  Their’s is a business model adjusted for scale.  When you can’t sell in volume, you need to jack up the price.  But to have something intelligent to say about a subject, you have to read books.  I guess I need to learn to read non-academic non-fiction.  Kind of like I have to drink decaf when I have coffee (rarely) and have them add oat milk to make it a latte.  This is difficult for an old ex-academic like me.  I want to know how writers know what they do.  What are their sources and how deeply did they dig?  As I set my shovel aside I realize that I’ve begun to dig that academic hole yet again.

Elementary, Academia

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Continuing my dark academia streak, I enjoyed Brittany Cavallaro’s A Study in Charlotte.  Although I’m not really a Sherlock Holmes fan, I know enough of the lore to appreciate how deeply steeped this novel is in Sherlockiana.  In the world of the novel Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were real people.  Watson wrote the books authored by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in real life.  The books are well known and widely read in the universe of A Study in Charlotte.  The adventures in those novels and stories are, here, factual.  The book is narrated by Jamie Watson, a descendant of John Watson.  While at Sherringford Academy in Connecticut he finally meets Charlotte Holmes, descendent of Sherlock.  They become friends and have a campus murder to solve (thus, dark academia).  I have to confess that I had the image of Jenna Ortega, of Wednesday, in my head as Charlotte.  The two (Wednesday and Charlotte) are similar in many ways.

Although flawed, Charlotte is an inherently likable character.  The story contains enough fun to prevent it from being too grim, even with the death of a Sherringford student and the violent attack of another.  The murderer goes to great lengths to frame Charlotte, and the novel introduces some of the Moriarty descendants as well.  Watson tries to get close to Holmes, but she holds everyone at a distance.  The story includes some family dynamics—the Holmeses rational to the point of being cold, Watson’s mother constantly warning him to stay away from Holmeses while his father eagerly observes how Charlotte works.  Putting the action in Connecticut allows for a trans-Atlantic element since both families are, naturally, British.  The story is well told.

The novel should appeal to those who enjoy detective stories and who appreciate a smart, if troubled female lead.  In this latter aspect, Cavallaro shows herself a perceptive Doyle fan.  Sherlock Holmes isn’t always a perfect character.  He uses drugs and is an eccentric.  This story transfers all of that to Charlotte but making her a young woman while Watson is a rather love-lorn young man, opens the potential for a relationship unlike the classic Holmes and Watson.  I don’t say “romantic” relationship, because Charlotte isn’t really receptive to romance, although her strict rationalism wears thin when something goes seriously wrong.  We all like to believe that there are people a few steps ahead of everyone else, as long as they’re good.  The Moriartys are also masterminds but the novel doesn’t allow us to decide that they’re all bad.  This is an intriguing tale that fits into dark academia in an elementary way.

Being Written

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Some books want to be written, no matter what major publishers have to say.  The truth is, being an author is more like being a radio receiver than a transmitter.  Books come to you, begging to be written.  Given our culture, we equate importance with money.  Tomes that earn the most are obviously the most important and erudite.  So the (capitalistic) wisdom goes.  We follow the lucre.  If you read this blog you’ve probably had an experience like this: you find a book that you’ve never heard of that captures your interest.  You read it, transfixed.  When you tell others, nobody seems to have heard of it.  I’d say a number of books I’ve blogged about fall into that category.  The “general reader” follows what the big five publishers suggest they should.  It becomes a feedback loop.

Academic presses—university presses and others that cater to either students or professors as their primary readerships—produce some fascinating books.  Often they’re priced a bit higher than we want to pay.  That’s because they don’t sell at the volume that a big five book does.  The higher the quantity the lower the unit cost, right?  Books that wanted to be written but either price themselves out of sales, or aren’t backed up by a team of marketers and publicists, may be some of the most interesting reading material out there.  You’d never know it, though.  From the point of view of an author, most of my books came begging to me.  I occasionally think of commercial potential because, well, if you’re going to put years of your leisure time into something, you’d like to get at least a little back.  And you’d be glad for feedback, or someone what wanted to ask you about what you’d been begged to write.

Sadly, we have tunnel vision.  It only sees the shining spots crowded with dollar signs.  And since others are willing to pay for it, we have to assume that it’s good.  I’m working on my next set of imploring projects praying to be written.  I can’t handle them all, being gainfully employed helping others who write books that want to be written.  We write them for each other.  I figure that if I’m receiving the signal somebody must be sending it.  And I have a difficult time turning down an idea that pleads with me.  And if someone unexpected picks one of our books up and gives us a like, we show that even receivers can smile.

Spades Are Trump

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Sometimes it feels like the world is against you.  I can imagine that if you’re African American it feels like that much more often than if you’re not.  Racism, systemic and horribly pervasive, should disappear with education and with exposure to other people and cultures.  Still it persists.  Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s novel Ace of Spades, conveys what it feels like to be singled out because of race.  This it does in a dark academia setting.  Nevius Academy is a private school where typical teen concerns loom large—sex, drinking, getting into a good college.  Chiamaka is a queen bee, a hard-won position that she struggles to keep her senior year.  Devon is also a senior, but from a poor family.  His mother works hard to keep him in the music program there, with the hopes that he’ll make it into a premier program to develop his talent.  Then threatening things start to happen.

Not natural allies, Chiamaka and Devon eventually team up when they realize that Nevius Academy’s secret society, Aces, attempts to destroy the lives of students of color.  The plot runs very deep; a white supremacist faction runs the school and for the pure thrill of it, ruins the chances of the two Black students they admit every ten years.  These two victims fight back.  Added to the racial drama, Devon is also gay.  As the story unfolds, Chiamaka discovers that she is also.  This proves yet another facet of life that leads to ostracism and, in Devon’s case, beatings.  In other words, this isn’t exactly a cheerful story.  Given what has happened politically in the past year it becomes believable that such places might exist.

The darkness of this academia is right there on the surface in this novel.  Our high school years are formative ones and the decision to build up only to destroy during this period is a particularly monstrous one.  In this case the school itself almost becomes a monster.  Fueled by the collective hatred of generations of administrators and alumni, it consumes students of color.  Of course, this story was likely intended as a parable.  Fiction is often where we cry out to be heard.  Àbíké-Íyímídé’s novel became a bestseller a few years back, so hopefully that cry has been heard.  To be effective, however, hearing is nothing without action.  Books can be agents of change.  Our current climate of trying to ban them only perpetuates misplaced hatred.  If only we could encourage reading and understanding instead.