Icelandic Magic

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There’s a danger when you get together with friends.  They might lend you a book that you know you’ll have to buy.  Not because you lost theirs, but because it’s so good you want a copy.  This happened when a friend lent me The Galdrabók: Forbidden Icelandic Folk Magic, by Kári Pálsson.  I’ve always been interested in folklore and Iceland has held a fascination for me ever since we lived in Scotland.  My wife and I, for some reason, took to Icelandic sagas from medieval times.  We read several, including the Orkneyinga Saga (so-called by Penguin; the subtitle is The History of the Earls of Orkney).  We’d visited the Orkney Islands after taking an adult education class on the Vikings.  (Norway’s not far from Scotland.)  So I tucked into this little lent book with gusto.  People naturally enough believe in magic.  This book contains the titular Galdrabók and  the Jarðskinna manuscript.  They’re an intriguing blend of Christianity and Norse folk belief.

The book didn’t take long to get through, but when you’re reading a book about magic at 4 a.m., it refocuses you quite a bit.  You almost find yourself believing.  It happened that I was reading another book at the same time, one which has me questioning reality.  Together the two had an impact on the thought process with which I start the day.  Galdrabók is a grimoire.  After the Christianization of Iceland, such things were feared to the point that you could be burnt at the stake if you were found in possession of one.  The political church wants no rivals.  The book itself has prayers—some very Christian—spells, and magic symbols.  An introduction by the translator helpfully places this material in context.  A brief book, I was reading it in the interstices between my regular morning reading and when I was doing my daily exercises.

Another reason I knew I’d have to buy this book was the publisher, Hyldyr.  First of all, Hyldyr is a publisher with the fortitude to reject AI.  Would that all publishers do the same!  Environmentally conscious and aware of the importance of design, they make paperback books that are works of art.  And they care about academic respectability.  The books are on topics that fall beyond what a usual publisher might take on—Icelandic grimoires, for example.  I found this a stunning little book.  Even as I read it I knew I’d want to refer back to it.  Of course, this friend has lent me books before, and I always ended up buying copies for myself.  Such is the danger.

Losing My Head

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It must be the season.  The same day two friends sent me articles about headlessness.  I sometimes feel that way myself; my book on the Headless Horseman has proved my worst-selling title, although some have told me it’s my best book.  No matter.  It’s headless season and I’m glad for the information.  One story came from an image in an Early Modern book from Amsterdam, showing an encounter between a man and a headless person, both on foot.  The article notes how Kabbalistic tradition includes seeking the answer to the question of whether one’s name is written in the Book of Life.  Nachmanides, a rabbi from the 13th century, suggests going outside on the last night of Sukkot and looking at your shadow cast by the moon.  If it’s headless, you’re in trouble.  This tradition is at least medieval in age, and it may have circulated when Washington Irving was traveling around Europe, working on The Sketch Book.  (Curious?  It’s discussed in my book.)

The second story is about the Irish Dullahan, or headless rider.  The piece traces the earliest written version to 1828, too late to have influenced Irving.  The Dullahan, according to the article, is a piece of Irish folklore.  The author, Irish around the World, points out that there’s no evidence that Irving knew of this tradition.  Irving didn’t invent the Headless Horseman, but his story brought it to popular consciousness.  Every year as October nears, I start seeing Headless Horseman on Halloween pages.  I do explore this connection in the book as well.  I still read about the Sleepy Hollow version of headlessness.  In fact, the book next on my pile (the one I just finished will be posted soon; I’m in the middle of another one at the moment) is J. W. Ocker’s new book on Sleepy Hollow.  (We exchanged emails about it last year.)

Being associated with the Headless Horseman, unlike either the Dullahan or the headless person in the Early Modern Jewish book is an honor.  Very few people may have purchased the book, but I’m glad to have had the chance to participate in the discussion.  Lindsey Beer’s novel Hollow is due out next fall and apparently the movie based on it is moving forward.  Perhaps it will reignite some interest in the headless fellow that was my companion for the years I was working on the book.  I don’t have a ton of free time, but I’m always glad for tips on mentions I miss.  Hints that the Headless Horseman is still relevant in a world dominated by those with much louder voices.  After all, October is when he rides.

Self Promotion

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Perhaps I lack ambition, or maybe my inner critic is over-caffeinated, but I’ve never applied for a book prize.  Don’t misunderstand: when I submit the books to publishers I think they’re good—I wouldn’t do so otherwise.  As with any of the woodworking I’ve done, however, I can see the flaws.  These days young scholars are being encouraged to submit their books for prizes.  Many of them want nominations for several awards.  I’ll admit that once in a while I wish one of my publishers would say, “Hey, this is pretty good, maybe we’ll submit it for something.”  After six books this has never happened, and I don’t want to put myself out there.  Some of my fiction has been nominated for prizes by the publishers.  Some I’ve even entered into contests.  I believe in my work.  It just means more if someone else would be willing to take the next step.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

My time in the academy—about 19 years in some kind of professorial role—ended 15 years ago.  Even so, during my time as a grad student and professor, nobody suggested book prizes.  There are very few in religious studies, perhaps because the motivation to study the subject seems to come from a higher plane.  Of course, in those days potential professors didn’t have to be self-promoters, although some were.  All I was seeking was a steady teaching position to do what I do best, and which allowed me to write a book now and again.  Although I taught full-time for 14 years, I never had a sabbatical.  Or any research leave.  I managed to write a second book in any case.  The thought of submitting it for an award never occurred to me.

Slowly I’m beginning to realize that the academy has become a foreign country to me.  A place where scholars have to reassure themselves—book prizes being one such means—that their work is exceptional.  The real factor, it seems to me, is time.  Will any of your books still be referred to or cited years after a scholar becomes old?  Perhaps asked to leave the academy?  There are so many academic books published these days; publish or perish has become a mantra in the dark academy.  It is more difficult to stand out.  My next nonfiction book (half written), if it ever gets finished, will not be published by an academic publisher.  And were it to be nominated for a book prize (unlikely), the initiative will, I assure you, come from someone else.

Heavenly Scent

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There’s a disappointing scent to books printed on demand.  Upon first opening them, they release a waft of laser printer.  The friendly smell of offset printing is banished.  I need to qualify that, however.  While teaching at Nashotah House I acquired a book via interlibrary loan that I remember not for its content, but for its unpleasant odor.  I’m not sure if it was the paper used, but the book smelled unpleasing.  Almost too offensive to read.  I’m not referring to the kind of musty, basement bouquet that some used books, long stored, possess.  No, that aroma isn’t offensive.  It suggests both mystery and the human condition.  How books smell is important.  Upon recently opening a POD (print on demand) book, I was transported to office work rather than the musty study of a scholar.

There are companies that sell scented candles intended to suggest libraries.  Libraries smell wonderful.  The small Franklin Public Library in my hometown has a wonderful, evocative aroma.  I remember it well from childhood.  On a visit to my mother before she passed, my wife, daughter, and I took her to that library.  We didn’t check anything out.  I simply had to smell it again.  Olfactory stimulus is very personal.  Indeed, in polite company we tend not to comment on how a person smells unless it is particularly pleasant.  “Nice perfume/aftershave, etc.”  (You have to be very close to a person to comment on less pleasant odors.) Scent has always been an important sense to me.  I like to sniff things.  When I’m out jogging first thing in the morning, I snuff the air like a bloodhound, eager for the first whiffs of fall during the heat of summer.  Like a dog I tend to think there are no bad smells, but there are some I don’t seek out.  Smells will take you back to the past, as the ultimate time travel.

In my mother’s kitchen I used to sit by her spice drawer and pull out each little bottle and jar to sniff them.  She never had anything as pungent as the asafoetida that my wife and I once bought for a recipe, but I recall those moments fondly.  Mom would be cooking nearby, and it seemed to me that I was smelling far away places that I’d never go.  I did make it to Scotland, however.  Edinburgh often smelled of the McEwan’s brewery.  At least the Old Town did on many a foggy morning.  We live not far from a micro-brewery and when its bouquet escapes, it take me straight back to Auld Reekie.  And, of course, Edinburgh was full of books and their distinctive smell.  All of this makes me want to go plant my nose in a book.

Serious Series

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The Carnivorous Carnival continues to reveal more of the Baudelaires’ unanswered questions.  At the Caligari Carnival the orphans disguise themselves to fit into a freak show, and meet Madame Lulu, who reveals important information—the V.F.D. has split into two parties.  The children still don’t learn what the initials stand for, but they discover that some of the influential adults in their lives were part of it.  The story grows quite gripping and more seriously dark than I remembered it being when I read it to our daughter many years ago.  One of Count Olaf’s associates isn’t mentioned after The Hostile Hospital, where presumably they died.  In this volume, another of his associates is thrown to the lions that give the book its title.

I couldn’t help but think of Daniel in the lion’s den as I read this one.  And Olaf’s plan is only too eagerly lapped up by the crowd wanting to see violence (and sloppy eating).  The reference to Daniel here can’t be coincidence.  The story also has the children questioning their own motivations.  Are they villains too?  Madame Lulu was a good member of V.F.D. who’d turned bad.  The children helped her reform, but in the end she betrayed them to Count Olaf.  Were their motives really pure?  For the first time in a Series of Unfortunate Events, the orphans end up separated at the end.  Neither Mr. Poe nor the Quagmire Triplets appear in this part of the tale.  It does seem, as noted, darker than usual.

Daniel Handler continues his subtle talking over the heads of children, though.  When explaining “déjà vu” for children, he gives other examples such as “ennui” and “la petite mort.”  The latter he explains that it’s a feeling that part of you has died, but Handler certainly knows that the common usage for the phrase is a circumlocution for “orgasm.”  Something many adults know as well, I suspect.  And there is humor for younger readers as well.  The “freaks” with whom the orphans share their job at the carnival provide some comic relief.  As an adult reading the books for myself, I get the feeling that, by this far into the series the story—while remaining pure fantasy—is aimed more at older readers.  It’s amazing what you can forget over the course of a couple of decades.  I trusted Lemony Snicket all those years ago, not to write anything that would seriously disturb our child.  I still trust him as an adult as I look forward to book ten.

Early Romance

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One of the more recent fascinations for me has been the fateful meeting of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont, and John William Polidori that took place in the summer of 1816.  That gathering famously led Mary, later Mary Shelley, to write Frankenstein and Polidori to compose “The Vampyre,” based on an idea of Byron.  Daisy Hay casts her net a bit further in Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives.  Particularly, Hay considers the often unsung role of Leigh Hunt, a young journal publisher, who brought together a coterie of creatives that included Byron and Shelley (although those two met later), but also John Keats and a host of others.  Romanticism pervades this group with Keats, Shelley, and Byron all dying young.  (And Polidori as well, but he’s not really much in Hay’s narrative.)  These three poets threw a very long shadow.  As recently when I was in school, we still learned about them.

In my reading over the past many months Leigh Hunt’s name had naturally come up, but I never considered looking more into him.  He never achieved the fame of his circle, and he fell out of favor by writing an account of Byron that was unkind to the poet, even as his posthumous star was in the ascent.  This account makes for fascinating reading.  Shelley and Hunt shared the scandal of marrying and having the sisters of their wives live with them.  Victorians would, of course, assume something improper was happening.  Byron, it was well known, had many affairs, including one with his half-sister.  People love gossip and even though Hunt’s sister-in-law, Beth Kent, made a name for herself publishing books on plants, both she and Claire—the other women—have largely been ignored.  Claire outlived everyone in the circle apart from the late interloper Edward Trelawny, who cast himself as a fast friend of Shelley and Byron.

Hay does an excellent job of pulling all of this together.  The lives are indeed tangled.  Of course, relationships in general are quite tangled.  This book begins with Hunt and pretty much ends with him.  Hay provides some previously unpublished notes from Claire and has to bring the story to a close with Trelawny.  Historically he was the last survivor.  He was also known in his lifetime for making up incredible stories about himself.  I’ve read his account of Shelley and Byron’s deaths.  That book, with its dark academia vibes, may have been the first I read on this fascination.  It’s been with me, however, at least since 1987.  And it will likely continue.

In Public

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I’ve written about the virtues of reading in public before.  Book reading, that is.  I was reminded once again how restorative an exercise it can be.  The occasion this time was a book sale at the Bethlehem Public Library.  We didn’t realize this was one of those bi-monthly kinds of events—at least this year there are six such sales.  We met some friends there and I exercised considerable restraint, buying only two books.  One was a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.  I’d had a copy of this, but it was ruined in the flood.  I decided to replace it.  The other book was a collection of all Flannery O’Connor’s stories.  I’d been thinking just the day before that I should read some of her work.  It happened that I finished before other members of our party so I waited in the hall and started reading the story “Geranium,” with which the book starts.

After a few minutes a college-aged guy walked by and said, “Great book.”  I thanked him for affirming my choice.  He said, “I’ve just been reading O’Connor, you’re in for a real treat.”  This brief exchange reminded me of being in Easton on a warm evening a few years back, reading in a public square.  I was there to pick someone up and they weren’t quite ready yet.  A couple of young women, probably Lafayette College students, walked by and asked what I was reading.  It was Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  They weren’t familiar with it and asked me what it was about.

Now, I’ve always been quite a shy person.  I don’t mind responding when someone talks to me, but initiating a conversation is something I don’t do very well with strangers.  I’m happy to respond when someone shows an interest in a book I’m reading.  I’ve had dentist hygienists ask about the book I inevitably bring in with me, asking if it’s any good.  The few times when I forget to bring a book and I have to try to entertain myself on my phone (it’s not easy; I quickly grow bored), I’ve never had anybody stop and ask what was interesting on my phone.  It’s the printed book, at least in populations with college students, that seems to bring out a willingness to chat.  I wonder how much of that bookish sociability that we’ve lost now that the electronic revolution has taken place.  How many discussions does a Kindle start?  It’s a virtue to read an actual book in public.

Haunting the House

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Although it starts off a little slowly, the premise of The Haunting of Ashburn House keeps you reading.  I don’t mind taking the time for a story to unfold.  I know many people want action to draw them in, but I’ve been reading about quiet horror and since it often takes its time, I know to appreciate it.  I’ve not read Darcy Coates before, but as this tale unspooled itself it grew gripping.  Even before the action took off, the situation was intriguing enough to draw me in.  I do quite like a haunted house story.  So, Adrienne has inherited a big old house from a great aunt she only vaguely remembers meeting once as a child.  A writer a bit down on her luck, she’s glad to have a place to live, but she knows nothing of the recently deceased relative who lived there.

Ipson, the town outside of which Ashburn House sits, is peopled with citizens who remember, often incorrectly, the tragedy that took place in Ashburn decades ago.  An entire family, apart from a young daughter, had been slaughtered there.  The daughter, sent to a foster family, returned as an adult to care for the house.  It has many secrets.  The people have been kept away from the house during the aunt’s long life alone there.  Adrienne arrives with little money and no acquaintances, and no knowledge of the history of the house.  She soon discovers that it’s haunted.  Not one to believe in ghosts, it takes some time to convince herself that the occurrences are supernatural.  Once that’s confirmed in a very stark way, much of the rest of the novel unfolds over the course of another day and night.

I don’t remember where I learned of this novel, but I do recall it was on a list of gothic literature.  Indeed, it is gothic.  And it’s a horror story.  The monster—“ghost” is a bit mild—has to be explained, but it fits within the context.  These days to make horror stories work you need to isolate protagonists from phones or “signal.”  Putting Adrienne in a small town, in a house with no wifi, and even partially without electricity, serves this end quite well.  Making her more or less penniless raises a bit of anxiety—such things can happen far too easily in real life.  The story is nevertheless well told and once the monster attacks it becomes difficult to put down.  I don’t remember where I learned about The Haunting of Ashburn House, but I’m glad that I did.

Hope and Reason

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Jane Goodall was a scientist for whom I have a great deal of respect.  She earned her scientific credentials in the field before getting them in the university.  And she had no room for materialism in her world.  Studying our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom taught her that animals think and feel—standard science uses that bugbear of “anthropomorphism” to tell us such things are all in our heads.  Evolution would disagree, n’est-ce pas, Mr. Darwin?  The reason I especially wanted to read Reason for Hope was because here Goodall describes a spiritual, indeed, mystical experience she had that won’t be too unfamiliar to those who’ve allowed themselves to be open to the wonders of the universe, even if found in a church.  Her own experience convinced her that there is something more.  Like any reasonable person she didn’t dismiss science but she realized that it can’t quantify everything.  Biologists should understand that, if they get out of the lab once in a while.

This book also tells, in part, Goodall’s life story.  She explains at the end that this was supposed to be a series of interviews with her, but that didn’t work out and she was essentially compelled to write it out.  It’s just a sense, but I intuited that she was probably not too comfortable describing her spiritual experiences.  I can understand that.  Even in a world that (apart from its leaders, elected or not) is becoming more understanding, discussing religious experiences leaves you vulnerable.  Critics are quick to pick up on this and attack one for not being rational.  The myth of Mr. Spock really has us in a Vulcan neck pinch.  Our emotions are part of our reasoning brain and we ignore them at our peril.

Goodall’s life wasn’t one of a series of pleasant strolls through the forest.  She experienced violence and loss.  She saw how cruel both humans and animals could be.  This book stands as a testament, however, that there remain reasons for hope.  Even if we persist in being as foolish as we have at the polls, and if that leads to the destruction of our species, life will go on.  It will recover.  The more we learn of the universe the more certain it is that life is fairly abundant.  It’s not the rarity it was supposed to be when I was a child.  And in a universe full of life, hope is everywhere.  Parts of her account are difficult to read, but Goodall left us with a hopeful message, if we’ll only do our part.

Djinn Genre

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I really don’t like to walk out of an independent bookstore empty-handed.  Many of them, however, are quite small and I have a list to which I try hard to stick.  I do end up getting books I hadn’t intended to, to avoid said empty-handedness, and so I found The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark.  It crosses various genres with elements of steampunk, horror, and fantasy.  Set in Cairo in 1912, where a system of off-ground trams run, the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities is responsible for keeping the paranormal under control.  Agents Hamed and Onsi of the Ministry are called in to handle, well, a haunted tram.  Their department is on a budget and can’t afford a major exorcism—assuming the haunting is a djinn—and they have to find other means.  Their first attempt fails but ultimately reveals that the entity is an al, from Armenian folklore.

Alk are baby-snatchers.  Hamed and Onsi have to learn how to handle this dangerous entity before it can harm any women.  That’s the basic idea.  The novella introduces the reader to some North African/West Asian folklore and builds on both Muslim and Coptic ideas, as well as non-traditional religion.  It’s a somewhat fun story as well.  The agents resort to some unconventional means to deal with the al, and djinn are a regular part of daily life.  As are androids, called eunuchs.  This is, of course, an alternate reality, but one in which Cairo is a major city along the lines of London or New York.  But with a distinctly North African feel.  And a society that accepts all different races equally.  Women, who are rallying for the vote, are the ones who identify and suggest the solution to the problem.  It’s an optimistic story.

Djinn are often thought of as Islamic versions of demons, but “demon” is a slippery word.  Christians adopted a Greek term that referred to entities both good and bad and made them pure evil.  One of the things this story does is to treat each entity appropriately to its realm.  There’s no lumping everything together into the “evil” basket.  In fact, some of the characters have djinn as business partners and others, it is implied, are basically family friends.  This is a worldview completely different from the way such things exist in our current cultural outlook.  The story unfolds fairly quickly since this is a short book.  There are a few horror elements to it, but mainly it is an imaginative vision of a world poised to celebrate equality, and everyone is better for it.

Read Everything

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I’m aware that I don’t think like other people.  This can lead to a strange kind of loneliness at times.  It might also explain why my books never seem to grow wings.  One specific example prompts this post.  When I get interested in a topic, I read every book I can get ahold of on it.  I guess I always think other people are the same way.  Rationally, I realize that’s largely not true.  Many people will read a book, maybe two, and move on.  A certain kind of brain, however, insists that the information must be tested, and tested again.  I’ve written enough nonfiction books to know that each one is an opinion.  There are those who differ in their outlook.  Who would interpret the same evidence differently.  And unless there’s just one book on a topic (it happens!) I’m always inclined to read another.

That came in handy for writing A Reassessment of Asherah.  That was my dissertation, of course.  I read everything written on the old girl that I could lay my hands on.  (Since this was before the electronics revolution, it was a hands-on experience.)  Of course, a doctoral program is the rare chance to undertake that kind of research without having to work at some kind of menial job, or have class prep and grading to do.  Or working at a 9-2-5.  Now I have to be selective regarding how much I read on a topic.  Not having use of a university library, it often means things I can afford.  Reading may be fundamental, but it doesn’t come cheap.  And I see other books, with perhaps minimal cited sources, selling much better than mine.  Again, I don’t think like other people do.

There’s an invisible line at about $19 over which a book is relegated to rabid fans only.  One of my books was priced at $22 when it came out, and I had people at a speaking event apologize that it was just a bit too much to pay.  The going rate then was $16 for most books (it has crept up a couple dollars since then).  Six dollars can make a difference.  For academic publishers, of course, you need to add an extra hundred to make up for the lack of sales.  I wonder why?  In this respect I think like others who publish with academic presses.  We may realize our books aren’t bestsellers, but we know a few more people would buy them if they were priced down in the range of other books.  I guess other people think about books primarily as money-making products rather than the outpouring of an individual’s thoughts and energy.  Depends how you think about it.

Adult Events

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The best children’s material contains winks for adults.  Those of us who grew up with Looney Tunes and then watched them when we were older know that to be true.  I’d forgotten some of the gems in A Series of Unfortunate Events.  The Hostile Hospital has the Baudelaire orphans wanted for murder, Count Olaf thought to be dead, and the children volunteering at a hospital.  A hostile one.  When Lemony Snicket describes one of his hiding places, he notes that it’s in “the Cathedral of the Alleged Virgin.”  That one elicited a full-blown grin.  Another lemony snicker emerged when two of Count Olaf’s associates get to arguing only to stop and acknowledge that they shouldn’t let their personal issues interfere with their work.  Such an adult scenario indeed.

As far as the story goes, this eighth volume is closely connected with the seventh, The Vile Village, in that the children remain under the suspicion of murder.   This began in book seven and carries on here, adding further tension to the tale.  No Mr. Poe comes to their “rescue.”  As the children hide in the eponymous hospital, they discover a sliver of a clue about their parents as they find a photo of them along with Jacques and Lemony Snicket.  Jacques, of course, had died in the last book.  There’s also a new false lead on V.F.D. with the Volunteers Fighting Disease providing comic relief throughout the tale.  And comic relief is probably necessary for kids, since the story does get darker.  Chapter 11 is hilarious, with Olaf’s associates trying to pretend at being doctors, even as the story takes a serious turn.

The children have their hopes ignited that one of their parents survived the fire.  Lemony Snicket enters a little further into the story.  The Baudelaires are now wanted for both murder and arson.  And they can only escape by hiding in the trunk of Count Olaf’s car.  This is the first book in the series where the children don’t actually see Olaf but only hear his voice.  Of course, he’s still following them.  The Quagmire triplets don’t appear in this volume either, having been whisked away (rescued) at the end of The Vile Village.  Re-reading these books as an adult has been a fascinating exercise.  Daniel Handler is certainly a clever, and entertaining writer.  Of course, the events in the book are silly enough for children, and some of the humor is effective even for adults.  Some of the action is too.  There’s pleasure in re-reading some kid lit, especially as an adult.

Unlikely Heroes

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I discovered Vicious by V. E. Schwab on a list of dark academia novels.  I’m glad I did.  The dark academia comes in because the protagonist Victor and antagonist Eli meet in college.  Eli has already stolen Victor’s girlfriend, and he has a thesis idea that postulates EOs (Extra Ordinaries) gain their ability from near death experiences (NDEs).  Determined to prove this, he and Victor try to kill each other, with consent, so that they can be revived to see if they have special abilities.  They do.  Victor’s parents, self-help book writers, have no time for him while Eli is very religious.  They soon become enemies.  Victor’s ability is controlling pain, both his own and that of others.  Eli can heal nearly instantaneously from any injury.  Ten years later Victor is in jail and Eli has become religiously convinced that he has to kill EOs.  He finds a college woman who controls minds and together they get away with murder.

The book is quite well written.   I’ve read plenty of novels that were a plod to get through, but this one never lost my interest.  The tension builds to a pretty high level at some points.  And yes, there is blood.  I think dark academia is an appropriate classification here, and perhaps low fantasy.  There are horror elements, but the abilities of the EOs make it feel like a superhero movie.  Thoughts of The X-Men kept coming back.  In any case, Victor escapes from prison with his cellmate and goes on the hunt for Eli, who’s been systematically murdering EOs because they go against God’s laws.  They discover Sydney who has an ability on which the entire story turns.  With the page-turning power of a thriller, Vicious was a book I always looked forward to picking up again.

I’m not going to give any spoilers here—the novel is well worth reading.  I was intrigued by the way Schwab used the religion angle to motivate the killer.  Those who come back from death, the plot suggests, have something missing that was there before.  This, combined with his religion, gives Eli the motive for killing.  Of course, his morals were problematic to begin with.  Selfish and narcissistic, he ignores Victor’s needs from the beginning.  Even when being saved by the woman who controls minds, he’s never grateful.  Religious but completely oblivious to his own moral failings, he develops a God complex.  This adds a depth to what might otherwise be simply a speculative action story.  With, of course, dark academia stylings.

Books and Years

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Someone, somewhere, on some social media post pondered whether to divest themselves of their yearbooks.  For those of us who try to make sense of our lives, that would seem like a foolhardy thing to do.  It happens that for a project I needed to check something in my Grove City College senior yearbook.  A couple of unexpected things happened.  One was that I found a poster for a Larry Norman concert I attended tucked inside the cover.  I’d forgotten that I had the poster, although I remember parts of the concert quite well.  Including getting to meet Larry Norman in person.  At that point in my life he was the most famous person with whom I’d ever shook hands and talked.  The second thing is I realized that my years at GCC represent the beginning of an ultra-right conservative shift.  For the school, not for me.  You can tell through yearbooks.

Grove City was always a conservative place.  Even I (very naive at the time) was surprised to learn that the yearbooks was called Ouija.  Evangelicals know that an ouija board is a demonic gateway.  I did ask about it and found out that the title simply came from the French and German words for “yes.”  Nothing Spiritualist about it.  I’ve come to doubt that explanation.  The idea of learning your future love/spouse has been associated ouija boards for generations.  Indeed, looking back at yearbooks, unless you’re one of those people who married a high school or college sweetheart, is a romp through early crushes.  Some of the women I dated, or tried to date in college, populate its pages.  For me college was really one of the first steps in growing up.  I was hopelessly naive in high school.  So yearbooks and romance go together.

My freshman year the yearbook was changed its longterm name.  My copy still has Ouija on the cover, but thereafter it would be only The Bridge.  This too was a romance-inspired title since the tradition was that you couldn’t be called a “Grover” until you’d been kissed (heterosexually, of course) on Rainbow Bridge.  (I wasn’t a Grover until my senior year.)  I have to wonder if this wasn’t part of a growing conservatism that has made the college so right-wing today.  We’d gone from Ouija to Bridge, still predicting whom it might be that we’d wed.  I keep in touch with very few fellow Grove City students.  A couple are Facebook friends, but most have gone their own way and I went mine.  For many, I suspect, if they bothered to crack open their yearbooks, they would be shocked to learn this former classmate prefers Ouija to Bridge now, these many years later. 

Period Exorcist

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The prediction was that it would be forgotten in five years after it lost the Oscar for best picture to The Sting.  The Exorcist, however, is a movie that continues to spawn new books and analyses.  I read The Story Behind The Exorcist because I wanted a contemporary account with its seventies impressions.  I didn’t see the movie when it opened; I was younger than Regan at the time.  I certainly heard about it, though.  Throughout my childhood it was whispered of as the scariest movie ever.  Peter Travers is a well known movie critic; the book was written before he joined Rolling Stone.  Stephanie Reiff is a little more difficult to pin down.  She wrote two other books, both about the occult, published in 1977.  Travers would’ve been in his early twenties when the book was published.  It shows in the at times punchy style.

The Exorcist was a phenomenon.  My awareness of it was second-hand for many years but I did hear about the long lines to get in to see it.  A whopping box-office success, it was the first horror film to be nominated for a best picture Oscar.  Horror films still tend to be shunned by the Academy, despite their frequent financial success.  In any case, when I discuss horror movies with those born in, say, the eighties or later, The Exorcist rarely comes up as among the scariest films.  It is, however, largely responsible for the way that demonic possession is understood.  No possession movie since hasn’t owed a debt of gratitude toward it.  The Exorcist often lands on lists of the greatest movies ever made.  It’s interesting to read the dismissive period reviews of the critics reproduced in the book.  The film is over fifty years old and still discussed.

While I don’t spend much time on social media, the other day a friend posted a picture of himself reading a book about The Exorcist.  I’ve read at least five on the film specifically.  Interestingly, William Friedkin, the director, never reached these heights again.  William Peter Blatty, author of the novel as well as screenwriter and producer, never replicated the success.  Not only was the movie a runaway hit, it represented the true coming of age of the horror genre.  It attempted things never before seen.  And it influenced religion itself in ways nobody dreamed mere celluloid could.  I’m still reading books on it.  This particular one doesn’t have the greatest depth, but it captures the feel of the times.  Adding The Roman Ritual as an appendix, however, may have been playing into the Devil’s hand.