Staunching Stigma

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Independence Day is not a great movie.  As my readers know, that doesn’t stop me from watching.  I’ve seen it a few times.  Watching it post-UFO/AUP disclosure via the New York Times, I was struck by something.  Even in the diegesis of the movie, where alien craft, clearly visible, hover over major cities, when Russell Casse tells the military he’d been abducted, people roll their eyes.  Of all the stigmas our culture has invented that of the “crazy people” who see “flying saucers” is one of the deepest and most persistent.  Even after the Times, and the US Navy admitted they were real, and their tech is not of human origin, people refuse to believe.  I’ve followed this for some time.  I read a book by Donald Keyhoe before I was old enough to drive.  Like most thinking people on the topic, I kept quiet about it.  Stigma.

When I received Luis Elizondo’s Imminent for a Christmas present, I was secretly very pleased.  You see, the evidence has been in plain sight (Poe nods knowingly) for decades, for those who don’t accept ridicule as an immediate response.  The Keyhoe book I read was published in 1955.  It was my grandfather’s book.  For sure, the stories casting doubt on Elizondo’s reputation and sanity began almost immediately after he cooperated with journalists in 2017 when a fraction of the truth made the New York Times.  Between Keyhoe and Elizondo, many insider, “death bed” books had revealed that this was something we should pay attention to.  People laughed.  Oh, we love to laugh.  Imminent, however, is quite a sobering book.  I’m not sure full disclosure will ever happen, but it’s trickling out and a finger in the dam can’t hold forever.

Stigma as a means of social control is unfortunately effective.  I’ve always felt that mocking what you don’t understand is a poor way to get smarter.  Still, for those willing to consider the evidence over the years, there’s been plenty to study.  Either there’s something to this or our government and military are filled with pathological liars (outside the Oval Office, I mean).  It seems far more reasonable to examine the evidence, when it becomes available.  There are contractors in the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower warned us about this decades ago) who benefit from keeping secrets.  Imminent is an eye-opening book.  Hopefully it will be widely read and the implications taken seriously.  It’d be too bad if a catastrophe were necessary to stop the stigma, after it’s too late to do anything about it.

A Plea

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One literary Saturday recently I found myself in the attic.  When we first moved to this house I sometimes wrote up there but I quickly learned that with no heating it was intolerably chilly on autumnal mornings, and that didn’t speak well for the coming winter.  Nevertheless, I set up a shelf with my fiction writing on it.  I was looking for something on that shelf when I discovered many things I’d forgotten.  Novels mostly.  I don’t know how many I’ve started, but I have completed six (now close to seven).  Going through the papers and folders on that shelf I found about 250 handwritten pages of another novel—one that I’d completely forgotten.  There were stacks of short stories, also handwritten, awaiting some recognition.  I haven’t had a ton of success in getting fiction published—the current count is 33 short stories—but I was inspired by what I found.

When my wife and I visited a lawyer some years back to make out our wills, I kept trying (unsuccessfully) to interject a literary executor.  At that point I had published only three books and two of them were academic.  Besides, there’d probably be an extra charge for adding that codicil.  I guess what I fear is that all of this work will just get dumped when I die.  Retirement doesn’t look like a realistic possibility for me, and what I need is time to sort it out.  Some of the novels aren’t good.  I know that.  Some are.  One was actually under a book contract for a couple of years before the publisher decided to kill it when the acquisitions editor left.  I haven’t found a replacement publisher yet.  Then, a few years back, my laptop started complaining about the amount of writing I was asking it to remember.  I had to buy external hard drives to store some of my writing.  Even I forget it’s there sometimes.

Graphomania should have its definition expanded to include those whose thoughts overflow to the point that they’re constantly writing.  There’s a reason I get up so early in the morning every day.  Up there in the attic I found what I was looking for and pulled it off the shelf.  A half-written novel that I had, unwittingly, started to write again presuming that the original had been lost.  All of the writing has been done while trying to hold down a demanding 9-2-5 with no sabbatical and few vacation days.  Not all of it is finished.  Not all of it is good.  But someone, I hope, will stand in front of the dumpster on some future day and say, “This doesn’t get thrown away.”

Bibliographer for Hire

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Why is bibliographer not a job?  Why can’t a person make a living categorizing knowledge?  I ask this because I see YouTube videos of people saying your job should be what you enjoy doing.  What if you enjoy creating bibliographies?  You see, my research methods are a bit unconventional.  They kind of have to be since I have no institutional support for my writing, and yet I want it to be intelligent and informed.  That means I have to locate my own sources and inevitably, when I’m compiling a bibliography, I’m happy.  Even if it means ferreting out obscure sources and trying to learn where something was originally published, I’m still at the top of my game.  (Yes, this is one of those things that the longer you’ve been doing it, the better you get at it.  These days it means learning to engage the internet for research.  Since it’s more of a money-making venture geared towards entertainment, that can be tricky.)

I remember those days of typing out bibliographies by typewriter, smearing White-Out all over, or trying to use that ribbon stuff that was supposed to be able to type over mistakes.  My friends and fellow students hated bibliographies.  Secretly, and perhaps perversely, I was enjoying myself.  You see, a bibliography is gathered knowledge.  When I finish reading a nonfiction book, particularly one where I want to do further reading myself, I go through the bibliography.  I want to know the origins of ideas.  There’s an irony here since my last few books have featured quite a few of my own ideas supported by what I’d read.  And I know that unless I provide a precise footnote, anyone who might read my work might wonder “how I know” what I’m writing.  It’s increasingly becoming one of those “pay attention to your elders” sort of thing, I guess.

But the bibliographies I could compile!  The really tricky part when writing The Wicker Man was the word limit.  I know authors who struggle bringing the bibliography down to required length, and I feel for them.  I really do.  You see, a bibliography is a record of what it took to get me to write this book.  These are the things I was reading, pondering.  Or found along the way.  There’s an art to a bibliography as well.  Some topics seem to attract authors with last names beginning with a certain letter, for instance.  Or others seem to have a dearth of another letter.  I may be the only person who finds such things fascinating, but can’t that be a paying job?  It is most interesting work, and categorizing knowledge is a full-time job.  If only it was a paying one.

Poking Around

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I’ll always prefer indies but ever since James Daunt took over Barnes & Noble it’s become a much better place.  I unfortunately didn’t get to any of Daunt’s stores while living in the UK, but unlike most corporate types, he gets books.  He understands book buyers and, I like to think, he reads.  I happened to need to stop into a local B & N recently on a Saturday morning.  I got there a little early and I saw a line at the door.   Naive as ever, I supposed it was a reading or writing group that’d be meeting there.  The queue had one thing in common: they were all males between thirty and fifty years old.  Who says men don’t read?  I went in and got what I was after, and even browsed a bit.  When I got to the register they were in line.  Hands empty.

Then I noticed that as each one stepped to the register, the sales clerk would step back to a place behind the counter and come with the same thing for each one.  As I got close enough, I saw that they were after Pokémon Prismatic Evolutions.  The Prismatic Evolutions Poster Collection released just the day before when they were probably at work.  The game sells for about a Franklin and the shelf was nearing empty by the time I finally reached the checkout.  I looked back.  At least five more guys had come in and immediately joined the line, no products in hand.  I’ve never seen the appeal of Pokémon but I couldn’t feel smug because I was there because of an obsession as well.  I didn’t buy a game, or cards (one guy bought 14 packs of the same card set, clearing that rack), but I was guilty nevertheless.

I’ve been fascinated by Dark Academia for some time now.  That week, when I had also been at work, I realized that one of the books I had in that genre had been destroyed in what we refer to as “the flood.”  (The story is here on this blog, but the short version is when we moved into our house, the movers stacked our boxes in the garage because they were complaining it was so late.  Before I could move the boxes into the house—the day after the next, in fact—a torrential rain fell and many of the boxes got wet, destroying at least 100 books and some other items that can’t be replaced.)  I was missing that particular book and it was old enough that I was pretty sure the local indies wouldn’t have it in stock.  Daunt’s B & N did.  So the line that morning contained a bunch of obsessive guys, but one of us, I have to confess, was over sixty.

Not Afraid

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It’s something many of us do.  Trying to explain why, while religious, spiritual, and moral, we find horror fascinating.  I read Brandon Grafius’ Lurking under the Surface, and when I learned about Joseph Haward’s Be Afraid: How Horror and Faith Can Change the World, I figured I’d better read it too.  Haward is a British Baptist minister who seems to support progressive causes.  He also enjoys horror.  He even finds it prophetic.  I have to admit that when I read the foreword by John E. Colwell I was afraid that this would be one of those books.  You know, the kind that only half-likes horror because their religion tells them so.  Colwell is no horror fan, and his foreword doesn’t set the tone for what follows.  Haward finds horror homiletical.

When I was young I used to see movies and analyze them theologically with my friends.  This was in college and seminary, mostly.  We’d discuss the implications of movies—sometimes horror—and how they fit into our Christian worldview.  This book is like that.  It’s Haward’s reading of various horror films, some television, and some novels, integrating them into his theological outlook.  The book is more about theology than it is about specific horror films, although it does mention quite a few.  The discussion is sometimes hard to follow because the paragraphs are so incredibly long and the style is very theological.  I got the feeling that Haward would be an interesting person to have a conversation with.  His book didn’t really do it for me, however. Some things are simply better in person. (I do know Brandon Grafius, and enjoy our talks.)

I’m not into horror for the violence.  Haward tends to point to that element, but I’m generally looking for the mood.  And avoidance.  Also when I was young I learned the truism, “He who lives to run away, lives to run another day.”  I like to think that I’m brave, but violence really bothers me.  My family finds me a contradiction; I won’t watch movies that are based on “true events” unless they’re speculative.  I don’t need reminding that people can be horrible to each other.  I know that from scanning the headlines and from watching the election results.  No, I use horror to help me cope.  And it works best when I know there’s something supernatural going on.  I’ve grown out of theologizing about movies.  I took plenty of theology courses in college and seminary, but they seemed a bit too abstract to be helpful.  Then I’d go out with my friends and watch a horror movie on the weekend so we could talk about it.  There’s a bit of that nostalgia here.

Trouble on Campus

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I know what it’s like to have a story living within you.  Academics writing novels don’t always qualify as Dark Academia, but Kathleen Kelley Reardon’s Shadow Campus does.  Continuing my current kick of that genre, I eagerly read of the skulduggery taking place at the fictional Pacific Coast University and found myself nodding with recognition.  Higher education is highly political.  I have to wonder if where two or three are gathered politics will inevitably be in their midst.  Perhaps thus it has always been, but it seems to me that when universities decided to model themselves on corporations, it grew much worse.  In any case, Meghan Doherty is a business professor up for tenure.  Her only family is an estranged brother in Connecticut.  Then one night someone attempts to murder her on campus and make it look like a suicide.

Shamus, her brother, flies to California to see her in the hospital and soon begins to suspect things are not as they seem.  I don’t want to give away too much here, in case you want to read it too.  I can say that sometimes life on campus is like this.  I’ve made the claim to have lived Dark Academia, and I’ll stand by it.  After the unpleasantness at Nashotah House, I was hired for a year as a replacement professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.  I really enjoyed teaching there, apart from having to leave my family in Oconomowoc; I stayed with a former Nashotah House student to whom I’m eternally grateful.  The department chair and colleagues liked me.  I was a good fit.  There was talk of making this a full-time position for which I’d be the inside candidate.  Then one of the other professors began to dislike me (long story).

I was called into the department head’s office and told that my eight courses for the next year had been reduced to one.  Permission to hire had been granted, but it had to be a specialist in women’s studies.  I was welcome to stay on as an adjunct, of course.  I’m a blue-collar guy and I recognize a boot when I see one.  And that was only the second time something similar had happened to me, and it wasn’t the last.  I’ve paid my dues to academia and yes, it is often dark.  So I enjoyed reading Reardon’s fictional account of underhanded dealings at Pacific Coast.  In my own experience guns were never brandished, but then, you can’t have it all.

Finding the Source

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I need to know the origins of things.  Call it a sickness if you will, but I’m compelled to trace things to their source.  This is why I went on to earn a doctorate, and it’s a trait that hasn’t left, despite my career malfunction.  My interest in origins was recently reawakened by the citation, in a book, of a source that was incomplete.  I turned to the internet, of course.  I found the source, reprinted on a Tumblr page, for which I was grateful, but there was no proper citation there either.  Instead, a link to another webpage, which itself consists of yet another link.  Even after pages of googling, I was no closer to finding the source.  This is why I miss libraries.  You were there with books, some of them centuries old, looking at the source.  Outside the academy this rarely happens.  Particularly when you work 9-2-5.

The internet age is one of taking someone else’s word for it.  That’s why it’s important to establish credibility.  The website where I found the information—the top ranked site on both Ecosia and Google—had old books as the background, but no “about” page.  Who had put this information here and where did s/he get it?  The item I was looking for was from the 1700s.  I don’t have a print copy lying around and I was wondering what the source was—a book?  A journal article?  A newspaper?  An actual archive?  And why can’t Google find it in a library?  I know the source actually exists because I also found it referenced in a reputable print book, but one with inadequate citation.  Some of us were cut out for this kind of thing.  Constitutionally researchers.  But you have to work to live.

One of the greatest pieces of advice ever is to stay curious.  It helps keep a mind active, even a 9-2-5 one.  I’ll keep looking for this mysterious source.  I’ll check out likely references in the bibliography.  I’m sure that other people have the same compunction not to take someone else’s word for it.  Particularly not an anonymous poster on some website.  Especially in this day of AI lies.  One of my high school teachers once said that a reputation for being trusted is something you earn by lifelong cultivation.  If people know you are a reliable source, they will believe the things you say.  Anonymous information can be helpful from time to time, but without knowing the source I always remain skeptical.  And curious.

Book Stages

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Books appear in stages.  All publishers are different.  These platitudes encapsulate my experience in finding a venue for my ideas.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth has just appeared in McFarland’s spring and summer catalogue.  I haven’t seen the proofs yet, but I suspect I will before too long now.  What’s with the spring and summer catalogue?  Well, believe it or not, books are seasonal.  Publishers go by seasons.  For many academic publishers there are two seasons: Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter.  The timing of certain books may fall in a specific place within those seasons but many academic books are aimed at classroom adoptions so early spring and early autumn are the most popular times.  It’s no coincidence that academic conferences also cluster around the semester system, the big ones being either autumn or spring.  Academics have a migratory instinct.

Personally, I’m hoping Sleepy Hollow will be out in late summer.  I don’t have any control over that, but it’s about then that normal people’s thoughts start turning toward falling leaves, long nights, and monsters.  Every year there’s a day in August when I step outside and literally smell autumn in the air.  As a kid seasons seemed like something as rigid as a biblical law: spring was March through May, summer June through August, and so forth.  The older I get, the more I realize how negotiable seasons are.  The Celts celebrated the start of spring in February.  Yes, there are lots of cold days yet to come, but the early signs of spring have begun.  For early risers, we finally start to observe earlier sunrises.  (These technically start around January 10, but they’re slow getting out of bed.)

You might think the ideal season for a book on spooky stuff, like Sleepy Hollow, would be timed for release in the fall/winter cycle.  Not necessarily.  Both Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible hit the market after Halloween.  Normal people’s thoughts had shifted to Thanksgiving.  I’m pleased that Sleepy Hollow will be released a bit earlier.  Summer is ideal for Halloween-themed books.  And yes, I devote a chapter to Halloween and the Headless Horseman.  They are closely related.  So I was glad to receive McFarland’s spring/summer catalogue and find my book on page two.  I don’t have a publication date yet, but I’m looking forward to being part of the discussion about one of my favorite ghost stories of all time.  Speaking of which, it’s almost time to begin gathering firewood for next winter, or at least it will be in summer.  And it’s not that far away.

Worse Seed

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Not too long ago I watched The Bad Seed.  In the 1950s it probably wasn’t considered horror, but it is quite a scary movie.  I’d classify it as horror—not all fifties horror was guys in rubbery suits.  When reading about the movie afterwards, I learned the novel had a darker ending (the movie was pretty dark as it was).  So I decided to read the book by William March.  The movie’s fairly faithful, up to the ending.  As usual, the novel adds more detail and reveals some things rather differently.  For example, Christine Penmark, the mother of Rhoda, can’t ask her father if she’s adopted.  She “learns” this through inference.  Indeed, the book leaves you wondering if she’s actually mentally unstable.  The proof that she’s the daughter of a serial killer is strong but not definitive.  And her father is already dead when the story opens.

The school outing, where Rhoda claims her second victim, is where the movie opens.  Rhoda is expelled from the school because the women who run it can’t abide Rhoda’s dishonesty.  The character of Leroy is very well portrayed in the movie, but he too seems to have some kind of mental illness.  Monica Breedlove is accurately presented as a busybody, but she too spends a lot of time analyzing people, including herself.  Rhoda is, of course, a literal sociopath.  It’s fair to say the novel is an extended exploration of mental illness of various sorts.  I remember from growing up in the sixties that many conditions that are now regularly diagnosed simply weren’t recognized.  Kids were blamed for bad behaviors that were, in all likelihood, caused by being somewhere on the spectrum.

Much water has passed under the bridge since the fifties.  This book was a bestseller then, but I only learned about it last year.  Indeed, it’s been adapted to film three times and was a Broadway play before all that.  There was a sequel released a couple years back.  Rhoda Penmark is herself a trope of the narcissist who lacks empathy.  Hmm, where else do we see that?  It’s still analyzed as primarily a “nature verses nurture” novel, but I suspect there’s something more going on.  We’ve moved beyond Freud and this novel probes what goes on in the minds of those who spend too much time alone, as well as who happen to be the mothers of pathological child murderers.  And the ending is different, but the movie’s is equally as bleak.  The Bad Seed a good book for this particular January.

Getting By

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There are some books, such as Trina Paulus’s Hope for the Flowers, or Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy,  the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, that are inherently hopeful and that you like to have around.  Especially in the coming four years full of hate-filled rhetoric.  My wife asked for Regina Linke’s The Oxherd Boy: Parables of Love, Compassion, and Community, for Christmas.  Of course, I read it too.  It is yet another to add to this hopeful shelf.  The thing about these three books is that you could easily read them all in an unrushed afternoon.  All three are profoundly hopeful outlooks on life.  I would recommend having them at hand.  The Oxherd Boy is a combination of beautiful artwork with bits of wisdom drawn from Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism that can keep you centered in difficult times.

There’s no real storyline here, but rather reflections.  “Eastern wisdom” is kind of a tired trope, but the “religions” of that part of the world can infuse a bit of sanity into many of the facades western religions throw up.  I’m not anti-Christian; I fear our society is.  It has taken one of these facades and claimed the name “Christian” so that it can get its hate on and feel righteous doing so.  There are seldom positive benefits when politics finds religion.  If any.  The Oxherd Boy reminds us to look for the good in simple things.  A life with friends and one in which love is the primary outlook.  I believe Christianity began that way, but it became politicized in under four centuries and politics tend to engender hatred.  A truly Christian state, through and through, has never, ever existed.  And it’s not coming here.

We know hate mongering will take the norm.  In fact, while out driving recently I noticed an increase in rude and angry behavior on the part of not a few drivers.  There was a noticeable uptick in such behavior shortly after Trump’s first election.  In a nation of people that imitate what they see on the media, I suggest staying inside and reading a book.  I would recommend The Oxherd Boy among them.  As long as you’re stocking up, don’t forget Hope for the Flowers and The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse as well.  Books don’t need to be written by academics to try to make the world a better place.  In fact, sometimes I wonder about the choices I’ve made.  So I’ll pull down the books that give me hope, and reflect.

Steering

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I’ve always been self-critical.  Often when someone points out something I’ve done wrong I’ve already figured out that I’ve made the mistake and the reminder is painful.  I can’t help but think that my childhood made me this way.  In any case, since I haven’t ever found much success is writing, I figure I must need help with it.  Recently I’ve read books on various aspects of writing by Stephen King and H. P. Lovecraft (published posthumously).  I’ve read quite a few more over the years.  I recently saw Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K. Le Guin.  I confess that I haven’t read a ton of Le Guin’s fiction, but she is treated with a great deal of reverence in literary circles that I figured a bit of advice from a master couldn’t hurt.  Besides, it isn’t a long book.

Books about writing aren’t volumes that you fly through, though.  Steering the Craft has ten relatively short chapters and ten writing exercises, some in multiple parts.  As I read through I stopped and did each of the exercises.  I really didn’t want to cheat myself of the experience of learning from a departed sage.  The experience was refreshing.  As will surprise none of my regular readers, I’m in the midst of another writing project.  The thing about steering is that you’re constantly doing it.  And if the captain is someone who’s been through these waters, it’s best to listen.  At the same time—and Le Guin was very aware of this—hard and fast rules tend to be neither.  What spells success for one author becomes abject failure for another.  Some of us write because we must, whether anybody reads us or not.

But the exercises.  Exercise is good for your health.  Even writers with native talent need to stay in shape.  I’ve been doing creative writing, in one form or another, constantly, since at least the Nixon Administration.  Publication began in the academic realm when I was working on my doctorate.  I had my first fiction piece published in 2009.  Keen eyed readers will notice that is the same year I began this blog.  I’d been pretty much booted from academia by then, but I’d been writing in the meantime.  Essays, novels, short stories.  Then I tried a nonfiction book or two.  There is a great gulf between writing and publication.  An ocean, in fact.  And if you hope to cross an ocean, it is always helpful to learn how to steer.  I’m still trying to learn why my boat seems to be leaking, though.

Reading Unwritten

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There’s a style of writing—I’m not sure what it’s called—where an author keeps revealing new, and necessary information on nearly every page.  The effect on me, as a reader, is almost as if the book is backwards; too much wasn’t revealed up front and that kept me from understanding the story as it unfolded.  I confess that the fault is mine.  I’ve always appreciated a narrative that begins with much of what you need to know and then reveals unexpected things along the way.  This unwieldy preamble is to say that I had trouble getting into the otherwise delightful fantasy The Library of the Unwritten.  A. J. Hackwith is a solid writer, but since this is fantasy there’s some introduction to the unfamiliar world that readers like yours truly needs.  At least a bit more than is on offer here at first.

This is a fun book with a fun premise.  Books in Hell’s library are unwritten and restless.  If not watched, their characters come to life and the book goes missing.  The idea of the unfinished also applies to paintings and other creative endeavors.  At first I thought this was going to be like Jasper Fforde’s Tuesday Next novels (several of which are discussed on this blog; you’ll have to use the search function) but the character from a book quickly gets swallowed up in a larger story involving demons with backstories slowly revealed, as well as a librarian and a muse, also with baggage that we only see once the train has left the station.  About halfway through, the story really starts to move and becomes quite enjoyable.  I guess I need more orientation than some readers.

The novel unfolds into a potential battle between Heaven and Hell, but those aren’t the only realms in play.  There’s Earth, of course, as well as Valhalla, and some nameless realms where the gods have died out.  And it focuses on a library.  It’s this final aspect, I suspect, that leads many people to categorize this novel as an example of Dark Academia.  Indeed, that’s where I discovered the book, on a display table with that label.  Although written with a light hand, and often somewhat funny, there is a deeper meaning here, a narrative about the importance of books that faces the reality that some would rather destroy them than read them.  I’m sure there are some religious folk that would see this book as promoting satanism and darkness, but instead it emphasizes loyalty and goodness.  I’ll be pondering it a while.

Measuring Books

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You know how some email servers stock your inbox with ads?  I almost never pay attention to them.  Then one for Books by the Foot showed up.  I had to click.  The basic idea is simple enough: you want to look smart so you fill your shelves with books by a company that sells them by the linear foot.  You can get color coordination, rainbows, old books, you name it.  Now this isn’t a free ad.  In fact, this is a rather sad state of affairs.  I’m sure their antique books have been vetted for any real treasures, but the fact that people want to buy books just for display evokes, well, melancholy.  I’m pleased that books retain their cachet as symbols of pride, but these are not books for reading.  I’m left with mixed feelings.  The website states that they have over 5 million books on hand.

At least they’re not selling ebooks.  I love books.  They are a wonderful symbol and I suspect they are among the most noble things that humans achieve.  I grew enamored of books as I entered my tweens.  I was terribly shy by that point.  We had moved to a new, and rough small town where I really didn’t know anybody.  Life, which hadn’t been exactly a picnic to that point, seemed to be getting scarier.  So I read.  And I never really stopped.  Ironically, during my professorial days I had less time to read entire books.  Those who’ve dabbled in higher education know that at even the hint of organizational skill you get bumped into administration, whether you want to or not.  And administration is busy work.  Yes, even professors have it too.  In any case, when I got bumped back down to being a mere adjunct, I started reading a lot again.

One time one of my bosses asked me how many books I had.  This was early in the pandemic when we were seeing inside each other’s houses for the first time, via Zoom.  My office is one of my main book repositories.  (Along with the attic and the living room.)  I answered truthfully that I’ve never counted.  I started using Goodreads in 2013 to keep track of the books I read.  In those early days I didn’t put everything in there (who hasn’t read a book they’re embarrassed to admit to once in a while?), but when I started the reading challenges in 2016 I did.  Mine has been a life defined by books.  Starting with the Good Book, and including many quite the opposite, I have earned books by the foot.  But I’m not selling.  Symbols have value beyond cash, at least in my mind.

Finding Vampires

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Parents always dread when their child will ask them the inevitable question: where do vampires come from?  A number of people have undertaken to answer that question, and Mark Collins Jenkins attempts it with aplomb.  Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origins of an Enduring Legend is quite a romp through the fields of the undead.  Ranging from the chewing dead through epidemics, Montague Summers, movies, Varney the vampire, the origin of the word “vampire,” where zombies come from, and practices of dealing with corpses, this study may not convince the reader that the mystery has been solved, but it will provide lots of information.  I’ve been pondering vampires lately, and this book ties many of these loose threads together well.  Jenkins has a talent for beginning a chapter on an apparently unrelated topic and then weaving it into the growing, ever expanding vampire tapestry.

I’ve read, many times, that vampires have ancient origins.  That really depends on how you define “vampire.”  This book explores those ancient roots, but unflinchingly points out that our modern idea of the walking dead drinking the blood of the living springs from the Balkan peninsula, largely in the eighteenth century.  This isn’t a strictly chronological study, and it isn’t limited to Europe and the lore that grew from that region between Asia Minor and Western Europe.  That doesn’t stop Jenkins from going back further in history.  It was a journey on which I learned much.  I also confess that I was nearly grossed out a time or two.  The vampire requires a stout constitution to study.  Interestingly, it seems that the word “vampire” might’ve derived from a word denoting “heretic.”  Religion and horror belong together, as I’ve said many times.

There’s always a danger with wide-ranging studies, since it’s not possible to turn a specialist’s eye toward all the cultures and historical periods under scrutiny.  Those who’ve tried it, such as James Frazer (of Golden Bough fame), come to be viewed with suspicion by later specialists.  (I discuss this in my little book on The Wicker Man, by the way.)  Jenkins does rely on Frazer a time or two.  Writing a general history on this subject almost necessitates that, however.  Even with the internet and “experts” being those who can gather the largest followings, academia has rightfully demonstrated that to get the real story you need to bury yourself with resources around a very small subject and be willing to live and breathe it for years.  Even then you might get it wrong.  But I digress.  This is a fine study of vampires and their possible origins.  It was a learning experience for me and I now have a better idea how to answer that dreaded question.

Scary Things

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I recently set myself the challenge to come up with the scariest movies I’ve seen, up to 1979.  The date is the publication date (I think) of Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, which gave me the idea.  Book publication dates can be difficult to decipher; I have the Berkley Trade paperback edition, which is copyrighted 1981 and published in ’82.  So, let’s just say 1980.  Now, I would never challenge Mr. King, who is older, and wiser (not to mention much better known) than me.  And I suspect, if I understand writers at all, his views may have changed since then.  Several of the films he discusses are thrillers.  And, of course, each person’s viewing history is unique as their thumbprint.  So let’s give it a try.  First, I need to say there are different kinds of scary.  We all have our triggers, and I’m going for things that frightened me.

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

Since we’re using 1980 as the cutoff, The Shining has to be on the list (of course King wrote the novel).  Like most of these movies, I saw it at home and the theatrical experience would’ve made an even bigger impact.  The Exorcist also has to be on this list as well.  For older fare, Eyes Without a Face certainly qualifies.  The Haunting, based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is among those in this period but it isn’t terribly scary.  I watched a number of King’s movies—many of which I’d never seen—and found some frightening ones among them.  Night of the Hunter, which makes me add the original Cape Fear, should be included.  So is The Bad Seed.  Something all of these have in common, apart from perhaps The Exorcist, is that they derive their terror from psychology.  There may be some supernatural involved, but the mind is the truly scary part.

Growing up—and even in the present—I’m not really looking to be scared.  I have no trouble getting to that state all by myself, thank you.  The monster movies of childhood thrilled with the unusual, and the realm beyond the everyday.  The haunted house movie held its own frisson for a similar reason.  Of course, children are often not developed enough to understand the nuances of psychological horror.  The more I ponder it, the more it seems that “horror” is the wrong name for what I’m after.   We gain bragging rights by watching scary movies.  And I don’t count jump startles as truly frightening.  I’m more of an existential dread kind of guy.  But I do love monsters.  Even this little exercise made me realize how difficult ranking such movies can be.  Perhaps I should bow to the King.