Good Timing?

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Timing is important.  I hope I have a sense of it, but it doesn’t always work out the way you hope.  My last book, The Wicker Man, was released on the fiftieth anniversary of that cult film.  A bigger publisher with better reach published their own Wicker Man book that year, and mine garnered no attention.  I decided to turn to Sleepy Hollow instead.  This is a story that has been quite well known since 1820.  Although the Fox television series ran out of steam in 2017, I wrote the book when I did because Lindsey Beer has been tapped to direct a reboot of the Tim Burton film of 1999.  Looking for books on the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” I found very little.  This is what is known of in the biz as “a gap.”  I decided to try to fill it.  Fandom helps in situations like this.

I’ve been trying to find the Sleepy Hollow fandom and engage with it before Sleepy Hollow as American Myth comes out.  I am confident that there are fans out there.  The tragic collapse of the Fox series didn’t lead to lack of love for the tale.  Indeed, further renditions have continued to appear.  Some have gained considerable attention.  The online fan base, however, seems to be, ah, sleeping.  I’m not sure when the Beer movie is slated for release.  It was announced in several media outlets but now we’ve come to the lull where updates have ceased to surface.  I’m certainly no Hollywood insider and I generally don’t even find out about movies until after they’ve left theaters (unless they’re very big).  I hope the timing is right this time.

It takes a couple years, at least, for me to write a book.  I’ve been working on this Sleepy Hollow project, in some way or other, since before Holy Horror came out in 2018.  I sure hope I got the timing right on this one.  The many trade publishers and agents I approached didn’t think so.  Maybe it’s just that people aren’t curious enough to read a book about Washington Irving’s story.  I try to make the case in my book that it has risen to the level of an American myth.  The story’s known world-wide, but its largest fan base is here in the States.  Had the Fox series been handled a bit better, keeping both people of color and the apocalypse in the foreground, it might’ve run a couple more seasons.  The underlying story’s not quite dead in the grave yet, I hope.  But then, timing hasn’t always been my strong suit.

F.O.C. Darley, from Le Magasin pittoresque, public domain

In Public

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Mere days after my dentist appointment I had occasion to be back in the waiting room.  Of course I had a book with me.  Then my attention was caught by either a patient or someone waiting for a patient.  This man had not one, but two books with him.  He was poring over one of them, which was an older hardcover, like an academic.  Since I’d just posted about seeing nobody reading books, I felt I needed to publish a kind of, well, not exactly retraction, but reflection.  The sight of this man, about my age, was profoundly hopeful.  I have no idea who he was and waiting rooms are not generally where I choose to introduce myself.  I do sometimes weigh, however, the demerits of interrupting someone reading with the merits of meeting another reader.  We reading sorts can be private people, although reading in public marks us.

The book I happened to have had a bright, trade cover.  His were more somber and academic.  How could I, whose reading looked facile (it was not, but it looked like it might be) approach someone perhaps awaiting a root canal, who had some serious reading to do?  Two hardcovers bespeak serious business.  This made me reflect on another occasion in Easton.  Again, I was waiting for someone and it was summer so I sat outside on a curb, at the traffic circle, reading a book.  It was actually Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  Evening was falling.  A couple of coeds, or they seemed to eyes from my age, stopped and asked what I was reading.  I explained, and, unaccountably, they seemed never to have heard of Morrison, but were interested.  It was a teaching moment.

Back to the dentist office.  Had I missed out on the opportunity for a free lecture?  If this man were a professor, he’d likely have talked gladly about his work.  One thing I learned from being a professor myself is that people rarely ask about your work.  Yes, colleagues in the same field do, but even at Nashotah House with its small faculty, nobody seemed interested in the research of their colleagues.  As academic dean I even tried to institute a faculty seminar where we could read a paper and discuss it.  I was the only one who ever volunteered to do it.  In retrospect, it might’ve been a lost opportunity, that waiting room visit.  I’ve attended many medical appointments in my life, and finding a fellow reader at one of them was a bit of a silent gift.  I was glad to have been proven wrong.

Gothic Illumination

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A mere month ago I had never heard of Sally Sayward Wood.  She has seldom received much attention, and it may be in part because her literary finesse wasn’t quite that of her compatriots.  Wood, however, was the earliest American woman to write a gothic novel.  She was also Maine’s first novelist.  I learned of Julia and the Illuminated Baron from a rather unexpected source, but my interest in the history of horror meant that I knew I would have to read it.  Original printings are extremely rare, but the University of Maine has brought them back into circulation.  Julia was published in 1800 and it is old-style gothic.  Set in France, among the aristocracy, it has gloomy castles, dastardly villains, and damsels in distress.  The story also involves an extremely complex set of titled gentry that end up being fairly closely related by the end of the novel.  Well into the story (after about 150 pages) it grows somewhat exciting, but the denouement is something you can see coming, though.

What is really striking about this gothic romance is the extreme vitriol served up to the Illuminati.  In particular, Wood seems quite affronted by their atheistic outlook, stating rather boldly that without Christian sensibilities that morals can’t be preserved.  This wasn’t an uncommon view around the turn of the nineteenth century, of course.  The Enlightenment had begun to take hold and not a few people were very concerned about the implications.  Social change must be slow, if it is to have lasting impact.  Quick change leads to reactionary backlashes, as anyone who looks at history knows.  Still, this makes Wood’s villain particularly nasty.  Perhaps even more surprising is that such biases continue today.

Gothic was an important part of early American literature.  It owes quite a bit to its European forebears, but it developed into its own form in the New World.  When she does mention America, Wood ladles praise on George Washington.  She was born, of course, before the Revolutionary War, when Maine was still part of Massachusetts.  All of this makes me feel somewhat less of a pariah, knowing that the early American tradition was part of the family tree for horror.  In today’s parlance gothic might seem far from the slasher, but without gothic we’d never have had our classic ghost stories that first gave people the frisson that begged for further expression.  Julia and the Illuminated Baron is a bit too satisfied with the wealthy overlords of the second estate.  It is a work of fantasy, however, of one of the earliest American women to try her hand at fiction.

In Praise of Paper

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There’s an old saying that the tech industry might consider.  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  I’m thinking books.  I work in an industry that’s running after ebooks, sometimes at the expense of actual books.  You know what I mean—the kind printed on paper.  With a cover.  An object.  What techies don’t seem to understand is that something happens to you when you’re reading a book.  It changes you.  Curled up in a chair with a half-pound of bound paper in front of you, you become absorbed.  Chair, person, paper.  All one.  And you’re taken somewhere else.  I’m not saying that reading online isn’t valuable.  Clearly it is.  The experience, however, isn’t the same.  Industry moguls express surprise at vinyl’s return.  They shouldn’t.  It wasn’t broke either.

After reading a meaningful book I’ll carry it around with me for days like Linus’ security blanket.  Its mere presence reminds me that something profound happened to me while I was spending time with that tome.  Especially meaningful books I hesitate to shelve away with the others.  No, I want them to hand to remind me.  To bring back, at a glance, the fascination they engendered.  Let’s call it enchantment.  Capitalism removed enchantment from the world.  In the heat of materialism’s fervor, it made all alternatives irrelevant.  That’s what’s driving the ebook craze.  Hey, I’m fine if you like to read on a piece of plastic, but please leave the option of paper for those who prefer to truly get lost.

I spend most of my waking hours (and all of my sleeping ones) surrounded by books.  When my eye falls on one that I really enjoyed, I take a nanosecond pause to appreciate it.  We all have to decide how we’ll spend our time on this weary old planet.  A good deal of it will be work, and if we’re lucky it will be doing something we enjoy.  Otherwise we have roughly five hours of waking time five days a week to squeeze in the necessary and the enjoyable.  Some will go out and party with friends, others will stay home and read a book.  Many will use devices to fill the time outside the office, whether alone or with friends.  I tend to be in the book crowd.  I’m not embarrassed by that.  Books have been good to me.  Very good.  They say reading is fundamental.  I would add that reading a real book is life itself.

Toothsome Books

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A visit to the dentist always entails a certain amount of anxiety.  Will the sins of my mouth have caught up with me?  Are my sleepy nights’ brushings thorough enough?  Is that spot where I declined to have a false molar replace the missing one causing any problems for the teeth above?  That kind of thing.  In any case, I like our dentist.  The town we live in, which is small, has four dentist offices.  The one I selected is run by three women and instead of always getting the same mouth doctor, on a standard visit you meet with the one who has an opening in her schedule.  I like to support women-owned businesses.  But still, the anxiousness.  Something happened on my last visit that may help.  I’ll try to remember it.

Unlike anyone else I’ve ever seen, I always take a book with me for those minutes in the waiting room.  I have so much that I want to read and so little time, so as long as I’m cashing in a sick day, I might as well get some extra reading done.  Since it’s summer, I didn’t have a coat in which to leave my book, so I took it back to the room with me.  They’ve never said anything about me taking up a little of their medical counter with a book, so I figured it was okay.  The hygienist did the x-rays and cleaning, then the dentist stopped in.  I had never seen this particular doctor before, and she began the conversation by asking what the book was about.  Now, as strange as it may sound, I have wondered why nobody ever asks about the book I inevitably have.  I take books to every medical appointment—I’m not a magazine reader—and in all these years no one has asked me.  Until now.

This wasn’t just a polite query either.  She asked whether I thought it was good, and even suggested some similar things I might want to read.  It was, in fact, a literary conversation.  As I walked home (teeth are fine) I pondered how rare this is.  I’ve told people that I write books and the conversation usually dies when I say what they’re about.  Of course, I don’t go around reading copies of my own books.  I already know what they say.  I guess I miss a literate society where people discuss the books they read.  I do it on this blog, and on Goodreads, but engagement is low.  At least next time I won’t be afraid to go to the dentist.

Expectations

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Our minds are our most powerful tools.  Some of us wonder what reality is, and David Robson has written a very important book that the title explains: The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World.  Now, before your woo-woo meter goes off, Robson is a science writer and everything in his book is backed by evidence.  The basic idea is this: what we expect to happen often becomes our reality due to the “expectation effect.”  The brain, as Robson describes it, is a prediction machine.  And what it expects often takes place.  In other words, belief matters.  Probably the most famous example of this is the placebo.  We all know that patients treated with placebos often recover just as well as patients given the active ingredient.  That pill the doctor gives will heal them, and so it does.  The brain expects it, and it happens.  Belief.

This book also explores the nocebo response.  This is where you expect something bad, and it happens.  The most extreme examples of this, well documented, are when people are convinced an imaginary threat will kill them and they die of it.  In fact, the book opens with consideration of such an occurrence where a cultural expectation led to otherwise unexplainable deaths among healthy Hmong populations fearing a night demon.  Hysteria grew and so did the deaths.  Robson also explores how hysteria leads to expectations that our brains carry out.  He shows how training our expectations can help good self-fulfilling prophecies take place.  Athletes, for example, can seem to do the impossible.  Why?  Partially training, yes.  But also because of their mindsets.  Their expectations.  Their beliefs.

The implications of this are very broad.  Everything from our health, to how we handle stress, to how food benefits our bodies, to how we age as we expect to.  Robson is quick to point out that this isn’t a book to solve all our problems, but it is a book that demonstrates our minds do make things real.  Or at least they can.  It is filled with fascinating examples, backed with science, showing that even how a doctor or nurse introduces a shot “you’ll feel a bit of a sting” versus “you won’t feel a thing” can make a difference to how our body perceives it.  And our brains can make our worries, or our hopeful expectations, real.  Personally, I believe that there may be even more to this than Robson explores.  But then again, I enjoy a bit of mystery.  I believe in belief.  Regardless, this is a life-changing book and I hope, for your own sake, that you’ll read it.

Not Content

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I write books.  When I want to “create content” I do it on this blog.  (And a few other internet sites.)  These aren’t the same thing.  I find it distressing that publishers are trying to drive us to ebooks where content can easily be changed, as opposed to print books.  The shelves of this room are lined with books and the technology doesn’t exist to come in and change “data” without my knowing it.  Facts are secure in print, right Ilimilku?  I’m not looking forward to a Star Wars future where there’s no paper.  I was born in the last century and, perhaps, I’ll die there too.   You see, when you write a book you have a project in mind that has an endpoint.   It may change and shift as you write, but you know what a book is and that’s what you produce.  It gets shelved and you move on to other things.  (At least I do.)

Content is something different and the creative process behind it also differs.  If I find something wrong after the fact, I go into my past posts and change it.  I’m not afraid of admitting I’m wrong.  The point of this blog is to share ideas with the world, not to write a book.  (Although, I confess that I would not say “no” if someone in publishing wanted a selection of worthwhile posts for a book… just saying.)  It amazes me how publishers have pretty much gone after the money and have forgotten what the creative process is like.  Of course, they’re having to figure out how this whole internet with free content plays into it too.  But still, my book writing uses a different fold in my gray matter than my blog writing does.  All of it feels pretty different from writing fiction too.

These things together adds up to a writing life.  I have a ton of “not for publication” writing.  This is something different again.  I suspect it will never be read by anybody, moldering away on some old hard drive after some AI-induced apocalypse.  I write it for of the same reason, I suspect, that people used to spray-paint “Kilroy was here” on things.  The book of Job, it seems to me, was the preservation of words that someone simply had to write.  We know the framing story is folklore.  But those who have words to carve with iron on lead, or engrave on a stone to last forever.  It’s more, I hope, than just “creating content.”

Powerful Belief

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Even someone who’s spent a lifetime studying religion can’t know every single sect.  People are far too creative in that regard, and some belief groups are fairly small.  I had never heard of Unarius, for example, before reading this book.  If I had, it simply washed over me, getting lost in the noise.  Part of the trouble with defining Unarius is that it calls itself a science.  Words can be slippery, and Christian Scientists also use that designation in a similar way.  The word “science,” etymologically speaking, denotes “knowledge.”  In our materialist culture we often suppose that means the physical sciences, grudgingly allowing it to be borrowed by the “social sciences.”  There is a science of religion, but this leads to its own set of discussion points.  Let’s look at Diana Tumminia’s title: When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying Saucer Group.  That give you an idea. 

The “prophecy” part concerns a “failed” prediction, or two, of when the spaceships would land.  Being a sociologist, Tumminia’s real interest is what happens then.  And here’s where things get interesting.  Failed predictions generally don’t lead to true believers giving up their convictions.  History has played and replayed this for us—it’s happening around us this very second—and yet “rationality” supposes that when the ships don’t land, people simply move on.  The Millerites outlived “the Great Disappointment,” after all, when the world didn’t end as predicted.  Their heirs include a sizable Christian denomination.  All this talk of AI has muddled our thinking about what it means to be human.  We are emotional.  More than that, we are believing creatures.  Our society is living proof.

Perhaps the most important, and ill-studied facet of being human, is belief.  Belief (no matter what in) is a religious phenomenon.  This study of a fairly small group shows that convinced people cannot be dissuaded, no matter how many facts are presented to them.  One need not look far to find the same phenomenon surrounding Trump.  (I do not condone violence, but history can inform us if we allow it.)  Make no mistake—he is the center of a new religion.  Unarians have absolute belief that their system is right.  Mistaken predictions—even very public ones—will not convince true believers otherwise.  It seems to me that our society, our democracy, cannot survive without intensive study of belief and how it affects the way otherwise completely rational people think.  My study is full of books exploring various aspects of belief, but we are still no closer to any kind of definitive answer.  And voters, at least a great many of them, follow their beliefs.

Book or Movie?

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I’ve read a few of Paul Tremblay’s novels.  He’s a horror writer with literary style—often a tough sell (at least in my experience.)  Horror Movie is a compelling read.  The conceit is that a group of young people decide to film, well, a horror movie.  Things go awry, but not in a funny way.  The story unfolds interlaced with the screenplay and with the overlay of the modern remake in the works.  It’s easy to get lost between the narrative account of what happened in the original shoot and what’s happening in the script.  Tremblay uses this technique very well, blurring the reality and movie aspects in a way that’s got to be intentional.  I particularly like his asides about the redeeming value of monsters.  I won’t say too much about the plot since you may want to read it yourself. It does riff on the “cursed movie” trope.

The truly remarkable thing to my regular readers will be that I finished a new book within a month of publication.  Normally I run a couple to several years behind.  And this novel contains several winks and nods to other horror movies.  It pays to know the canon.  In that sense, it reminds me of the movie Scream, one of the more self-aware horror classics.  (I have had Scream out for watching again for several weeks now, but time has a way of slipping away.)  Tremblay, like Stephen King, taught before becoming established as a horror writer.  Maybe there’s hope for some of yet!  I started writing novels in middle school—perhaps there’s still time.  That seems to be one of the themes of Horror Movie, by the way.  It has many elements of a parable.

I found Tremblay’s first horror novel, A Head Full of Ghosts, about four years after it was published.  Indeed, I was working on Nightmares with the Bible at the time, so a book about possession was appropriate.  Horror Movie is more a monster tale but it’s also about movies and reality.  This is territory I often traverse since, it seems to me, movies are more than mere entertainment.  Good ones are, anyway.  And like some other books I’ve read lately, this one is also a reflection on fame (something I wouldn’t know about).  How it’s not what it’s made out to be.  In other words, if you’re willing, Horror Movie is the kind of novel that will make you think.  I appreciate that Tremblay is giving us thoughtful horror and I’m looking forward to trying to keep up.

Life After

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Robert T. Bigelow is wealthy enough to speak his mind.  A hotel and aerospace entrepreneur, Bigelow has made no bones about his belief that aliens are among us, for example.  After the death of his wife in 2020 he initiated a contest for essay writers to give their best proof that consciousness survives death.  The results took the form of a five-volume, twenty-eight essay collection that, according to those who’ve read all, is impressive.  Having spent my life studying religion, I can trace my motivation back to this basic concern.  As a child I was terrified of Hell—a fear that has never abandoned me—and consequently studied religion as a means of reassurance.  I’m not alone in this; the whole Methodist movement began because of John Wesley’s similar concern.  Most of us don’t have the money Bigelow has to attempt reassurance.

Having said that, some time ago, the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies—the organization behind the essay contest—offered $500,000 for the first place essay.  The second received $300,000 and the third $150,000.  Those who were selected for publication received a copy of the five-volume set.  Then, the Institute made an announcement: while supplies lasted, anyone with a legitimate interest in the subject could write to them for a free copy.  I’m not of the intellectual caliber of these essayists, but I have studied religion my entire life.  And I am quite interested in what the BICS is calling “absolute proof of life after death.”  All it cost was an email.  They even paid for shipping.

The set arrived yesterday.  The postal worker at the door seemed apologetic (I had to sign for it), noting the package was heavy.  Now, this is going to take some time to get through.  The five volumes are handsomely produced.  The hardcovers are printed in full color (I know from work this is quite costly).  They have gilt edges and ribbon markers.  And a wealth of thought within.  I guess you’ll need to stay tuned here to find out, after I finally finish, if the results are assuring.  Glancing through the table of contents, and having looked over the judges of the contest, I’m optimistic.  Although Robert Bigelow stands at the opposite end of the political spectrum to me, we both understand that deep-seated human need to know physical death is not the end of who we are.  Even the famous skeptic Harry Houdini wanted the answer to this question as he debunked mediums in search of someone legitimate.  In any case, I’ve got years of interesting reading ahead of me.

More Than Dark Shadows

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The Television Horrors of Dan Curtis is one of those books that makes me feel less alone.  Jeff Thompson is not only a true fan of Curtis’ voluminous quality output, but he knows more about Dark Shadows than might seem possible.  I knew I wanted to read this book as soon as I learned of it.  As I’ve confessed many times before, although Dark Shadows was formative for me, I’m a mere dabbler.  I saw a fair number of the original run on afterschool television, I read the novels, but I never dove in.  I was more of a wader.  Still, this book demonstrates that many people were influenced by Dark Shadows, some that you might not expect.  But the book is about Dan Curtis and his horror work (mostly).

Dan Curtis went on to a kind of fame for his war epics (considered “serious” work), The Winds of War and War and Remembrance.  Although he directed some theatrical movies (all of which I’ve seen), he mostly stuck to work in television.  One of the results of this is that he never attained the level of appreciation of a number of auteurs who focused on Hollywood.  And it’s also clear that Curtis was interested in more than just monsters.  I personally dislike gangster and war movies (although my great-uncle Melvin Purvis was one of his interests).  Curtis found them worth of his considerable talents.  As Thompson makes clear, however, even as his own death was approaching, Curtis knew that, like Washington Irving, his early work would be that for which he was remembered.  That’s because Dark Shadows went where nobody else dared to go, and it’s memorable even today.

I learned a lot from this book.  Enough to know that Curtis was an enigma.  He remains less recognized as a director and producer than many Hollywood personalities that are household names.  Still, if pressed, a number of people even today would recognize some of Curtis’ work, whether or not they associate it with him.  Dark Shadows went through a short television reboot, for instance, and a second reboot attempt before being made into a movie by Tim Burton.  This book, however, made me watch some movies I had only known vaguely before.  And it has inspired me to watch others as well.  Curtis was an incredibly hard worker, and a man with definite opinions.  It’s perhaps a bit surprising that he never really attained the kind of fame that other “content producers” did.  Even his Wikipedia article is brief.  This book helps uncover a large amount of information behind a person who influenced many people without the glamour associated with that level of impact.

Cryptid Caper

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I don’t recall how it got on my fiction reading list—I probably saw it on Goodreads—but I picked it up because it was short.  And surprisingly, multiple copies were in Barnes and Noble.  Since James Daunt bought the chain out it has definitely improved.  In any case, Hunter Shea’s To the Devil, a Cryptid looked like it might be a fun romp, and if it turned out that I didn’t like it, well, it was short.  Ads in the back keyed me in that this was a part of a series of horror novels about cryptids.  Besides, I like to support publishers that aren’t part of the big five.  I’d just finished reading a five-hundred-pager, so something under two was very welcome.  The title seems to riff off the horror flick To the Devil a Daughter.  As much as I try to keep up on my cryptids, I was unfamiliar with the Goat Man.  And I did like it, by the way.

So, the real Goat Man is mostly associated with Maryland, but in Texas, where the novel is set, there is the Lake Worth Monster.  This seems a good fit for the cryptid part (whether intentional or not I don’t know).  A bunch of kids messing around with Satanism decide to sacrifice a goat in the woods where a Goat Man cryptid is said to live.  Something goes wrong and the goat fuses with a guy trying to break up the ceremony and mayhem ensues.  Lots of bodies torn apart in this version of the Lone Star State.  Still, the story is fun.  I’ve been writing cryptid fiction for years, and this may be a targeted demographic, but that doesn’t prevent this from being a good horror novel.  Particularly interesting is the resolution.  I’ll try not to give too many spoilers, but the next paragraph reveals something.

How do you stop a demonic, bulletproof Goat Man?  You call in a priest to do an exorcism.  The truly remarkable part of this is that the priest is treated sympathetically.  None of the characters are religious.  And of the two main young people who survive, you really don’t expect them to be found in church.  The story isn’t intended to be believable, of course.  The Goat Man is an urban legend.  Urban legends are often difficult to tease apart from actual cryptids sometimes.  Cryptids remind us that there’s still more to be discovered in the world.  And I may have just discovered a series of stories that work for a quick fix.

Discovering Ordinary

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I wasn’t quite sure what sense of ordinariness to expect from Robert J. Wicks’ The Tao of Ordinariness.  I would say as a whole it is about becoming ordinary you.  I found the whole interesting, but it was chapter four that really caught my attention.  It’s here that Wicks starts to address those whose damaged childhoods have created a false (and frequently re-affirmed) sense of our ordinary selves.  I’ve always known I have issues—it’s pretty obvious that I’m not quite like other people I know.  I often lack confidence and, thanks to my career and publishing history, have had that sense pounded in even as an adult.  (Poundedness is not a protected category, however, and it won’t get you any special consideration.)  Up until that chapter I was thinking, “This is nice, but it just doesn’t match my experience of things.”  Then I learned why.

It is possible to change your outlook, of course.  It’s not an easy thing to do.  Our culture isn’t set up to allow for it, what with 9-2-5s and all that.  You see, my personality really fit the teaching mode and lifestyle.  I loved the work, although it was hard.  And I loved the fact that if you had free time during the day you could, if you needed to, run an errand or two.  I guess I’ve never been one to invest in that capitalistic idea that your employer is buying your time.  For some jobs, yes.  In fact, my first employment experiences were of that sort.  I started at nine, did physical work until five, with a lunch break in the middle.  Now work begins early and doesn’t really end.  Days off are few and they fly by quickly.  Changing your outlook requires time to think.  That, it seems, is what’s missing.  It makes it difficult to find out what my ordinary is.

Wicks’ book is a hopeful one.  His optimism comes through page after page.  He gives practical advice.  The subtitle reveals why the book is important: Humility and Simplicity in a Narcissistic Age.  (That last adjective is so common now that spell-check completes it automatically.)  Politicians have frequently been narcissists, but Trump has made it into a high art—care only for yourself and tell people the lies they want to hear.  You can see the calculating cynicism in every glance and gesture.  And yet, here we are.  Books like this are important.  We need to be told that there’s another way.  If only it were also possible to get your horse to drink.

History Lesson

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This blog, which has come to define me in many ways, wasn’t my idea.  A niece started it for me when Neal Stephenson suggested I should have a place for podcasting.  I still have ideas for podcasts, but finding the time to put them together (and a place to host them) has proven quite challenging.  In any case, the title, “Sects and Violence in the Ancient World,” reflected where I was at the time.  I started posting when I was 46, and now I’m over 60.  Things are bound to change a little.  From the start, I wrote about books.  Indeed, for things I’ve read since summer of 2009, I check the blog to find out when.  I also noted significant movies.  In the early days I tried to limit the posts to religion-themed topics since, well, I have three degrees in the field.

As I gradually grew comfortable discussing pop culture (generally horror), I gradually addressed movies and books without a religious bent.  It could be that I didn’t record everything I read or watched here, and that makes things before 2009 kind of a muddle.  While the muddle really began before 2005—my last year at Nashotah House.  That period was a kind of maelstrom of desperation to find a job, teaching classes, pretending to be an editor, making my way in a world unfamiliar to me and certainly unchosen.  Eventually this blog came to focus on horror movies more than religion.  Now, like my life, it’s a jumble of conflicting impulses trying to make sense of the world as an existentialist with a bit of faith.  I’m still aspiring to that mustard seed.

I’m not sure when it was that I began commenting on most movies I watched.  I’ve used movies as therapy since 2005—for some reason horror made me feel better.  Even now, when I want to remember when I saw a movie I check this blog.  Or if I want to know when I read a book.  My wife pointed Goodreads out to me in 2013, and that became another place to post on books, even if they didn’t qualify for “Sects and Violence.”  But that slushy period between 2005 and 2013 was full of books, I know.  In addition to movies, I read incessantly.  If I want to remember when I read what, however, I’ve only got the last decade really covered.  Goodreads says I’ve read about a thousand books since 2013.  For movies, I have no way of knowing how many I’ve seen.  Or where, for the most part.  Maybe I need to start keeping a proper diary.  Maybe one with a lock and a key.

Empowerment

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Recommended as a worthwhile contemporary gothic novel, Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches is a feminist tour de force.  Set in a world similar, or perhaps parallel, to ours, it follows three witch sisters in 1893.  The sisters are estranged, having been raised by an abusive father, and each has found her own way to New Salem.  The old Salem had been destroyed after the witch trials.  The three find their lives drawn together, not even knowing the others are there.  But there are also still witch hunters.  None worse than Gideon Hill, the leading candidate for mayor.  I’ve long known that books written after Trump are often fairly obvious for the hatred that oozes from political leaders.  This is one such case.  The story is one of female empowerment in the face of constant male opposition.  It goes fairly quickly for a book its size.

It’s an enjoyable read but it grows, well, harrowing towards the end.  You come to like these three very different sisters and appreciate the gifts they offer to their world.  Men, however, make the rules and often they feel that women have no place in making decisions for the public good.  I’m amazed at the number of people who still believe this.  It makes novels such as this so important.  Women with power are crucial examples to present.  The three sisters may cause mayhem, but it is generally good for the city.  When men are in charge, things tend to get repressive.  Sound familiar?

Conveying the gist of a 500-page novel isn’t a simple task so I’ll simply say that this isn’t a conventional witch story.  There’s never a question that witches are good, but capable of doing bad things.  In other words, they are pretty much like all of us.  That’s not to deny that some people become evil and that such people will gain ardent, blind followers.  The characters are memorable and likable in their very humanness.  As far as genre goes, this is a magical realism novel.  As you get drawn into Harrow’s world it becomes believable.  It’s a book that should be widely read and its plea for tolerance must be heard.  I can think of other comparisons—others have also conveyed that an unquestioning religion may become evil unintentionally.  Such conversions aren’t the kind publicly discussed, but they do fit with human experience.  I’ve intentionally left out spoilers since I want to encourage readers.  It certainly has left me thoughtful.