Artificial Iscariot

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It was only a matter of time.  A recent story on 404 Media confirmed what others had suspected, Amazon is ordering large numbers of rare books and destroying them so they can be scanned for AI “learning.”  Apart from the infuriating aspect—some of us save up our money to afford rare books—is the flawed premise behind the whole AI craze.  Words, as much as I love them, do not embrace the entirety of the the thinking process.  Scientists have argued for years that feeling—emotion—is essential to how we think.  We don’t understand emotions, but we do know they’re an essential part of being both biological and conscious.  Other animals experience them too.  Destroying books so they don’t have to pay to use copyrighted material stirs an emotional as well as a rational response.  All for a fad.

Generative AI is a waste of money and resources.  Sure, it can look things up quicker than I can, but it can also lie and hallucinate and make things up.  It wastes my time by sending me bogus emails.  It’s after my savings.  And yours too.  People don’t want the massive data centers required to process this one part of human experience.  Kids who grew up emulating Mr. Spock, perhaps uncomfortable with their own emotions, are now trying to run the world.  Like all fascists they do so by destroying books.  The end game isn’t to make life easier.  It’s to make a product to sell.  To take over the marketplace.  To take books that can’t be replaced, cut them apart, and scan them.  Other publishers, by the way, also do that but with the intention of republishing the books.  At least there’s some form of resurrection there.

Time and again we’re reminded of the mess that’s made when those who have too much money try to run things.  They don’t know the experience of the vast majority of people who either struggle or get by but who do so by dint of being human.  They have determination—which isn’t always rational, but which is a great motivation—to survive (biologically) and thrive.  Some of us have lived our lives for the cause of books.  In desperate days as a younger person I sold rare books I’d obtained to meet current needs.  Some booksellers are noting large, anonymous orders for rare books.  One put a tracker in the package and learned that they were going to Amazon to be destroyed.  The company that once sold us books is now taking them away for good.

Village People

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Even when reading A Series of Unfortunate Events years ago, many of the Poe references stood out.  Having just re-finished The Vile Village, a noted a few more nods to the master.  This particular number in the series also advances the story, letting the Baudelaire orphans know that the V of V.F.D. is “volunteer.”  They meet, briefly, Jacques Snicket.  He is murdered by Count Olaf.  Meanwhile the orphans have to try to find the Quagmire Triplets while being held in the Village of Fowl Devotees, which has a mania for burning people at the stake.  This one does get pretty dark.  Their actual guardian in the village, Hector, is kindhearted but timid.  He tries to rescue them but in the end, the orphans realize they need to take care of themselves.  Klaus turns thirteen and Sunny learns to walk.  But what of Poe?

From the beginning the guardian of the Baudelaire fortune is Mr. Poe.  A singularly ineffectual individual, he’s dismissive of what the children know, but he’s not a bad person.  The Poe connections begin, however, with the orphans’ surname.  Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was a French writer who was famous as a translator of Poe into French.  Naming the protagonists after him was surely another nod to Poe.  As is the series of unfortunate events themselves.  One of the reasons Edgar Allan Poe is such an intriguing writer is that his life was, from a distant view, a series of unfortunate events.  Losing his mother, being taken in by a hard father, failing to attain fame through his writing, the death of his brother, the death of his wife at a young age, his own struggles with alcohol.  His was a storied, but not fortunate set of circumstances.

The Vile Village is populated by a huge murder of crows—ravens tend to be solitary.  The crows roost each night at Nevermore Tree.  This, of course, is a nod to Poe’s most well-remembered poem, “The Raven.”  The people of the village are extremely protective of the crows, even as they live by a massive set of rules that are enforced with the punishment of being burnt at the stake.  Olaf shows up late in the story by pretending to be Detective Dupin, the name taken from Poe’s famous investigator.  The story naturally ends with the orphans being separated from the Quagmire Triplets and left to find their own way forward.  The author also enters the story as the brother of the murdered Jacques and lover of Beatrice, and the mystery continues into book eight.

Strange Publishing

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One of the (many) oddities of the publishing business is that nobody really seems to know the exact number of copies a book has sold.  This may seem strange, but as Michael Castleman’s wonderful book The Untold Story of Books points out, there has always been a kind of antagonism between publishers and authors regarding who has earned what.  In the early days of publishing authors pretty much had to pay to be published.  These days royalties are specified in publishing contracts but tracing them accurately remains a fool’s errand.  Ebooks are very easily pirated and many, if not most, are available for free on pirate websites.  Some publishers themselves, depending on the software they use, may not have a precise number of how many sold.  Trying to get a clear idea of how much reach your book has attained is well-nigh impossible.

Book publishers carefully guard sales figures.  In the biz, we use a vendor known as BookScan to get point-of-sales figures for other publishers which, we all know, aren’t fully accurate.  BookScan is run by Nielsen, the same company that does television ratings.  How many people actually watched a specific television show?  Nobody knows.  Depends on how many people were in the room.  And other factors.  Was the TV on but nobody actually watching?  Was it a public television?  If so, how many people saw it?  You get the idea.  It may seem weird, but the book business also operates with such constraints.  As an author, however, one gets curious. 

I’ve written six books that have been published.  For my first book I have never in my life received a royalties statement.  Ever.  I never even had a contract for it.  For my second book, I get regular royalties statements but they don’t include lifetime totals.  The same is true for my fourth and fifth books.  Statements, sometimes irregular, only grudgingly cite the number of copies sold since the last statement.  If it ever arrived.  The publisher for books three and six does actually say directly how many copies of the book sold on their royalties statements.  Gold star!

This may seem unbelievable, but it is true.  It’s difficult to imagine it, but businesses don’t always know what assets, in physical form, they actually have.  In the case of publishing, ebooks complicated an already tenuous process of counting how many copies of a book have been sold, let alone read.  I do get curious and even occasionally email publishers to try to get a sense of how many copies made it out the door.  Each of my six darlings represents years of work.  It’s only natural to wonder how well they’re doing out there in the world.

The Shaft

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For those following my musings on Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, I’m up to book six of the Baudelaire orphans’ adventures, The Ersatz Elevator.  There’s much to appeal to adults in these stories, as ridiculous as some parts are.  In this installment the Baudelaires are adopted by Esmé and Jerome Squalor, wealthy benefactors who live on Dark Avenue.  Mrs. Squalor, who’s very wealthy, follows whatever’s in at the moment, setting the theme for this part of the saga.  Of course, many “in” things are quite silly and they keep the situation light.  Although they live on the 66th floor (at 667), the Squalors have the elevators decommissioned because elevators aren’t in.  Count Olaf uses an abandoned elevator shaft to help work out his scheme to control the orphans, all the while trapping the Quagmire triplets.  The V.F.D. theme is further emphasized, but not yet explained.

The world-building of this series is impressive.  I remember reading through the first time and being increasingly drawn into the question of what V.F.D. could mean.  Although the 2004 movie picks up on Olaf’s arson activities, it doesn’t include this particular aspect.  The rest of the world Handler devised is also intriguing.  The time-frame is unclear.  The place, although it goes to outer-lying areas, centers on a city unnamed but which clearly has relevance for the overall plot.  People of this world are singularly clueless, including the orphans at times.  The world with its desultory, or even sinister, place names reflects that constant theme of misfortune that somehow isn’t depressing.  And an educational element, particularly in introducing children to new terms, phrases, and concepts, is generally present.

I learned the word “Ersatz” in German class.  A noun denoting “substitute,” it became an English adjective only in the last century.  Once the concept is defined in the way the children devise to climb down the elevator shaft, it’s used in reinforcing ways throughout the rest of the story.  Often in humorous contexts.  Also, the character of Lemony Snicket starts to grow more prominent as Beatrice is brought more explicitly into the plot.  The first mentions here are subtle, but her role takes on some shading as the series moves on.  This use of narrator as character had some influence on me as a writer.  While I’d written a not very good novel before beginning my doctorate, I started on my fiction again, on and off, during the period when I was reading these books to my child.  Coming back to them continues to inspire an adult who loves their gothic flavor, even if as ersatz adult literature.

Ghost Belief

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I haven’t read Plato since I was a college student.  It’s not that I don’t want to read more, but as with most things it comes down to a matter of time.  If I’m honest I’ll confess Plato wasn’t the reason I read Cathy Gutierrez’s Plato’s Ghost.  It was the second word.  And the subtitle: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance.  I’ve always been interested in Spiritualism.  In fact, Lily Dale is on my bucket-list of places to visit.  The idea that ghosts can inform our spirituality is an intriguing concept.  While Gutierrez’s book is an academic one, it contains many stimulating ideas and shows that the Spiritualists were perhaps the truest progressives of their era.  And they had their heyday during the Victorian Period.  I enjoyed learning more about their theology and social views.  And, of course, ghosts.

When academics venture into esoterica, some amazing things can result.  I occasionally discuss Jeff Kripal’s books—he’s on the forefront of this movement—and now and again the books of other academics who engage the unusual.  Ghosts have, of course, been noted and believed in since the earliest humans who wrote.  Probably before.  They are still reported and chasing them has become a business model by which one might make a living.  A religion foregrounding the departed, however, is fascinating.  As Gutierrez demonstrates, Spiritualists were very forward-looking while keeping an eye firmly on the past.  While reading her book I kept stumbling upon astonishing observations that made me stop and wonder.  Spiritualists supported abolition, feminism, fair treatment for all, and, at least some of them, free love.  Numerous historical asides also brought me to a halt.  The idea, for example, that patients with multiple personality disorders might benefit from putting a non-dominant personality in charge.  There are Easter eggs like that throughout the book.

While Plato’s Ghost is academic, and there are parts that require some careful reading, it is the kind of book that laity interested in Spiritualism could benefit from picking up.  There are sections that enlightened me, and I’ve been studying religion for many decades now.  In general I’ve been steering away from reading academic tomes in my time off.  When I go to do my own writing it tends to veer back toward getting published only in academic presses, which I’m also trying to avoid.  I’ll make exceptions for books like this one, however.  I was drawn in by the promise of ghosts, and while they weren’t exactly what I was expecting, they were a rich feast nevertheless.

Paperback Writer

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Change can occur quickly, like an avalanche, or slowly, like the build up to an avalanche.  Lasting change is of the slow variety.  In my mind I’m still a professor wannabe, although that ship has long since sailed.  The changes of an advanced degree are indelible, so I continue to write books and I still read a lot.  Here’s where the slow change comes in.  My reading lately has shifted towards fiction.  Not completely, of course, but I’m finding that my nonfiction reading pile erodes more slowly than its fictional sibling.  I hope that I’m not losing the capacity to handle the real world, but the realm of fiction feels so much more welcoming.  And I’ve been doing a bit of fiction writing myself lately, and to school myself I read fiction.  I’m not sure if the change is permanent or not since the end hasn’t yet been written.

My work on this blog bibliography continues slowly.  It will record most of my reading for the past decade and a half.  But not all.  I read books not quite born yet, for work.  And I read things other than books.  It will be an incomplete record.  Finding the time to work on it, however, is difficult.  Mainly because of all the reading I want to do.  And, since it’s that time of year, yard work.  I’m thrilled that my first novel will become a reality.  That’s especially good news to me since my energy has been focused on getting my most recent novel into what I hope is publishable form.  At times I wonder how many novels I’ve read.  I started reading scads of novels intentionally by the time I was in seventh grade.  I’m sure I’ve forgotten many of the fiction books I consumed.

As a professor I’d put novel reading on the back burner as nonfiction heated the research and writing projects I undertook.  I recall, however, guiltily sneaking in a novel now and again.  How many I don’t know.  I wouldn’t even know how to begin to count.  I suppose that’s one reason I’m trying to pull this bibliography together.  It won’t cover a couple decades of a literary life, but, as a friend used to tell me, “a little cotton is better than no mattress at all.”  There were some memorable big books: Jaws, The Godfather, War and Peace—and many more modestly-sized offerings.  Even more short ones.  The change in me has been slow, but steady.  Reading will do that to a person.

Paperback Dreams

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Although I’ve been focusing on my fiction writing lately, I still think about my poor, overlooked nonfiction books.  The other day I had an intriguing royalty statement from Bloomsbury.  (It’s not intriguing for the amount, which is negligible, but the implications.)    The name Bloomsbury is a story in itself.  Nightmares with the Bible was published by Fortress Academic and Lexington Books.  Lexington is (was?) an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield.  R&L was a fairly successful academic publishing brand, although not a university press.  A couple years back Bloomsbury, a British publisher, bought R&L.  Bloomsbury isn’t part of the “big five” publishers in English, but they did have the foresight, years ago, to sign up an unknown author by the name of J. K. Rowling.  Bloomsbury, cash in hand, began buying up smaller academic publishers.  That’s one way that publishers grow.

For me, that meant that Nightmares now had a new owner.  I have no idea which editor oversees it.  It’s a backlist title now, and I know from my own experience that when you inherit a backlist title, well, let’s just say there are more than enough frontlist and potential frontlist titles to keep you busy.  I was after my R&L editor for a paperback edition since Nightmares is my most expensive book, now that Gorgias Press has released a paperback of A Reassessment of Asherah.  This brings me back to my royalty statement.  On it there was a line for a paperback.  It even had an ISBN (9781978703209).  ISBNs cost money and many publisher don’t buy them unless they plan on using them.  Is there a paperback in the works?  I’m not getting my hopes up since ISBNs can be reassigned.

Earlier this summer I visited my local library to donate my books (if they would want them).  The head librarian kindly made time to discuss this and accepted Holy Horror and Sleepy Hollow As American Myth.  I left a little sad that I couldn’t offer Nightmares as well.  I only have two copies and I can’t afford to buy more, even with an author’s discount.  (Author discounts are usually between 40 and 60 percent; for a book that’s priced at over $100 that’s still not a bargain.)  I’m mature enough to know that a paperback wouldn’t fly off the shelves, but I consciously wrote Nightmares as a companion volume to Holy Horror—the two go together but were separated at birth.  You’ll pardon me for being excited at seeing a paperback ISBN, then.  I’ve been in publishing long enough now, however, not to read too much into it.

Lovecraftian Layers

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Lovecraftian dreams dominate Hugo Yelagin’s Deadlights.  A few major themes are addressed in this debut novel.  One, which always stands out to me for some reason, is the search for the father.  Maxwell Corvid, a former medical student at Miskatonic University, is returning home to his father’s once grand estate.  Accompanied by a banker who delights in pointing out that his father’s debts, Maxwell learns he’ll inherit debt rather than anything substantial.  Accosted by a brigand, the two leap into a huge sinkhole that has taken the estate.  Maxwell finds himself among moldy people transforming into fish (Lovecraftian, as I say), but befriends a young girl who knows her way around.  They find the banker and brigand and begin trying to solve the strangeness they encounter in this world.  A couple other major characters enter the tale, but I don’t want to give any spoilers.

While novels that heavily feature dreams aren’t my personal favorites, this dark fantasy intrigues you into turning pages.  I really couldn’t guess the ending, and, like a dream, not everything wraps up neatly.  The amazing thing about H. P. Lovecraft is that his vision has inspired so many others to grapple with his worlds.  Many modern writers find the call of Cthulhu irresistible.  The sloshy, watery fear of being transformed into something you’re currently not.  This, I think, is a second theme.  Transformation.  Realizing maybe the way you see someone isn’t the whole of that person.  And, of course, the theme of light.  This sinkhole world is dark and occasional lights help the characters to see.  And they learn that those different from themselves aren’t necessarily evil.  (Although one or two might be.)

I’m not sure I’d consider this a horror novel, although there are monstrous sorts in it.  It doesn’t try to scare like many horror novels do.  It does have a gothic setting, but the timeframe isn’t specified.  Lovecraft tends to conjure the Victorian period in my imagination, but his stories probably reflect his own time, as opposed to an earlier one.  I acknowledge my own weaknesses as a reader, and as someone with historical training, knowing “when” gives me a useful framework within which to paint a story in my head.  But then again, in worlds dominated by dreams that may be a moot point.  It’s just that, in my own canvas of this story, I do wonder what was, in this Lovecraftian world, really real.

Dark Academy Series

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With Prufrock Preparatory Academy, A Series of Unfortunate Events enters directly into dark academia.  Not only that, but The Austere Academy also introduces the V.F.D. that kept me guessing for quite some time the first read through.  But let’s start with dark academia.  Any gathering of young people with the intent of equipping them to get along in the world is a school.  And schools all have their dark corners.  That’s because adults trade in secrets and other shadowy things.  Of course, Lemony Snicket makes Prufrock Prep into a pretty dismal academy with harsh rules, boring classes, and unsatisfactory accommodations.  The Baudelaire orphans are found by Count Olaf, of course.  They do, however, make friends with the Quagmire Triplets and the larger scheme of what happened to their parents begins to unfold.  It does seem that the tales grow darker and not quite as funny as they reach this point.

The school motto is Memento Mori, “remember you will die.”  Although this is a good life lesson, it might be a bit harsh for children.  Some of us grew up with a religion that made sure we understood this from an early stage in our lives.  I can’t say that was a fun way to grow up, but I can see the wisdom in it.  Our culture is about the denial of death and then when it does come it can be devastating.  Of course, these are children’s books and they don’t linger on such thoughts too much.  And although Count Olaf is dangerous, his disguises are always a bit silly.  In The Austere Academy, as in The Miserable Mill, he stays somewhat in the background, orchestrating schemes that make the orphans fail, and offering to take care of them.  In this case his disguise involves a turban that he cannot remove for “religious” reasons.  A fascinating misuse of pluralism, it made me think how some people hide behind it.

Not having written books in a series, and not having had a publisher’s input into what I’ve written, I don’t know how far ahead Daniel Handler planned the series.  I do recall that from this point on the mystery of what V.F.D. is becomes important.  I’d completely forgotten about the Quagmire Triplets.  Reading books for young readers as an adult can reveal quite a lot.  Sometimes it’s easy to forget that they’re written by adults and they may have had to go through the same rejection trials that other creative adults face daily.  Trying to break into publishing can indeed be a series of unfortunate events. Dark academia indeed.  I’m glad Lemony Snicket broke through.

Holy Sequel

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I’ve made reference, from time to time, to “Holy Sequel.”  This was a potential book to follow Holy Horror, in which further examples of the Bible in horror films would be explored.  While I only half-heartedly supposed I might write such a book, I have kept track of references to the Bible in the horror movies I’ve seen since my book was published.  I haven’t done this religiously, but it struck me that someone else, someday down the road, might want to do more research.  I recently uploaded my list of such movies in the section of this blog called Full Essays.  It also lists all the movies mentioned in Holy Horror.  (I may eventually add those from Nightmares with the Bible too.)  Not all of those movies are discussed in the book(s)—some are incidental references—but a good many of them are.  And as this bit of data shows, a good many more could be.  The main reason for adding the list to this website is to offer a filmography of movies that could’ve been in the book, but were discovered too late.  Or were produced later.

I watch horror with my Bible radar on.  It’s widely recognized that strong religious themes began in horror with Rosemary’s Baby in 1968.  One of the things noted both in Holy Horror and in the list on Holy Sequel is that the Bible appears in films earlier than that.  Its cinematic nature changes over time.  I should also note that some of the movies on Holy Sequel are marked as “maybe.”  The reason is that reference to the Bible isn’t terribly explicit, or, if it is shown it’s not done clearly.  In the book I discuss this explicitly if a movie is questionable, regarding its use of the Bible.  Another feature of Holy Sequel is that it will be updated; it is now my version of record.  In fact, since posting it a movie has already been added.

In my abundant free time (ahem), I’m adding links to the blog posts in which I discuss these movies.  As with my blog bibliography, this will take some time to complete.  I realize these posts are read on other formats such as Facebook and Goodreads, but the website itself has more information than simply the daily blog posts.  I do hope it’s a resource for those with similar interests.  There are many movies with the Bible in them.  There are no indexes or lists of such movies and I’ve stopped keeping track.  Except if the movie is horror.  If it is, it will eventually be added to Holy Sequel, if I find it.  It’s a book I likely won’t have time to write; my to-do list is far too long.

Many Thanks

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My thanks go out to James Annitto and Victoria Jaye for a delightful discussion about demons on last night’s Nine Gates Podcast.  I will put a link to it on Spotify on the Other Social Media & Interviews page on this website.  I have to admit that I was a little nervous about it.  I wrote Nightmares with the Bible in 2019 and ’20, mostly.  Since then, in addition to the 9-2-5 that never ends, I wrote The Wicker Man and Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  I have a good deal of another nonfiction book written, but I’ve been polishing what I hope might be my second published novel lately.  In other words, would I have forgotten about demons?  The amazing thing about being a podcast guest is that it suddenly brings back the past.  It’s like a time machine.

On my Other Social Media & Interviews page I have links to the various podcasts to which my books have garnered invitations over the past few years.  Last December Biblical Time Machine had me on to talk about Asherah.  Amazingly, although I wrote that book over three decades ago, I remembered quite a lot.  Some details were fuzzy around the edges, of course, but writing a book seems to seal certain facts in your gray cells.  The Incarcerated Christian podcast had me on for three episodes, two for Holy Horror and one for Nightmares.  My gratitude always goes out to TheoFantastique for chats about all of my books since Holy Horror on.  It’s devilishly hard to get attention as an ex-professor.  Being an editor is a quiet job.  So I’m full of gratitude for all of those who’re willing to listen to me prattle on for an hour.

I realize, by the way, that some readers find these posts on Facebook, Goodreads, and other social media.  There’s actually more to my website than my daily posts.  (They are the largest part, no doubt.)  I have individual pages on each of my books.  There’s a bit of contextualizing biographical information on this old ex-professor.  And there are links to my attempted vlogs on YouTube.  Chatting with James and Victoria last night, I was reminded again how much I’d like to get back into doing videos.  The only thing stopping me is time.  Even a 20-minute video can take an entire weekend to put together.  Thankfully there are a few folks out there who find my efforts worth an evening’s (or weekend afternoon’s) discussion.  I am profoundly grateful to this who do, if you’ll pardon my brief stint of self-indulgence.

Demons, Once More

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Victoria Jaye’s book got me thinking, once again, how powerful movies are.  Ever since I was a child, I think, I had some awareness that movies were more than simply entertainment.  Things I saw that scared me stayed with me.  They’d come back in nightmares or unguarded moments.  Indeed, they would frame what I thought of as real, or possible.  I read Hell, Horror and Despair in preparation for my appearance on the Nine Gates Podcast.  Perhaps it’s a combination of my age, how busy I am at work, and how I move from one project to another, but I do tend to forget things about the books I’ve written.  I needed to remind myself about Nightmares with the Bible, and reading Jaye’s book definitely helped ring a few bells.  I remain interested in all the subjects I’ve published on, from Asherah to Sleepy Hollow (and beyond).

Hell, Horror and Despair is about demonic fantasy—broadly, the ideas culture sustains about demons, largely influenced by movies.  Jaye recognizes, as many authors do, that The Exorcist was formative.  The more I ponder it, the more I think it might be the most influential horror movie ever.  William Peter Blatty famously wanted it to draw people back to faith.  I think it probably did that and mostly through the fear it inspired.  The money brought in attracted other filmmakers.  There’s gold in them thar hills!  Counting the number of movies I’ve seen featuring some kind of demon would take more than an hour or two.

And maybe they weren’t only fiction after all.  Demonic fantasy is fiction about demons that derives from the media.  The beliefs that The Exorcist kick-started have grown and evolved over the years until all kinds of beliefs about demons are held, but not tested against evidence.  Any evidence itself is dismissed by science, so people turn to the only available source: the fiction of movies and pop culture.  This is really a fascinating development.  Now we have congressional leaders, and a Vice-President, who believe UFOs are demons.  Talk about your Middle Ages!  Since science doesn’t investigate the immeasurable world, and since experts in religion tend to be unemployed these days, of course this kind of thing is going to happen.  Jaye’s book points out the problems with demonic fantasy.  Historically, prior to movies and television, it often contributed to literal witch hunts.  Today it is used to make political opponents seem evil.  And it contributes to a belief that demons are everywhere—something the Catholic Church tried to tamp down after the Dark Ages.  I’ll be on the podcast on Tuesday evening.

Sleepy Hollow Returns

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Timing has never been my strong suit.  Regular readers may know that the reason I tried to get Sleepy Hollow as American Myth out when I did was that Lindsey Anderson Beer had been announced as the director for a new Sleepy Hollow movie.  I prioritized getting the book done and settled with a publisher.  Still, even in the time it takes to write a book and get it through the production process, the movie was no closer to being seen.  Yesterday while reading a trade news article I learned that Lindsey Anderson Beer has just signed a publisher for her first novel.  Its title?  Hollow.  One guess as to what it’s about.  Beer, of course, is known as the writer/director of Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, a prequel to the Stephen King story.  An up-and-coming horror director. I was anticipating that her Sleepy Hollow venture would make a big splash.  And my book would be just out.

Sleepy Hollow is one of those stories that keeps reappearing in American culture.  That’s the point of my book.  Indeed, even as I was attempting, in vain, to get it noticed, I learned that J. W. Ocker was finishing his own book on Sleepy Hollow, due out in September.  And now I learn that the putative director of a new film is writing her own novel.  The story bears repeated retellings.  The way that I characterize it in my book is as a labyrinth.  I have also started my own fictional retelling of the story.  I’ve got a couple novels that I’d like to get out the door before turning back to it, but I certainly understand the draw.  Sleepy Hollow is America’s founding ghost story.  I do hope Beer continues with the movie.  My guess is that it will be based on her own novel, which, naturally, I will read.

We keep coming back to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  Even now, with August awaiting at the end of this week, autumn is swiftly approaching.  And with it rides the Headless Horseman.  As a figure, he’s ubiquitous around Halloween.  I’m already looking forward to next summer when, I hope, McFarland will be willing to drop the price of my book a bit.  I recently had a friend say they were interested in reading it but it was priced a bit too high.  I get that.  I do hope to be part of the conversation as Ocker’s book comes out and then, a year later, Beer’s.  Even if I’m not, this is precisely what my book is about.

It’s a Series

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The transition between Lemony Snicket’s The Wide Window and The Miserable Mill, volumes three and four, respectively, of A Series of Unfortunate Events, is the gulf between what was portrayed in the 2004 movie and what wasn’t.  The books do show their age a bit in that some of the villains might be considered offensive these days, but the writing is clever and even educational.  Dealing with two of them together is, like the film, an attempt to forge a transition.  The Wide Window, which is both compressed and elaborated in the movie, doesn’t resolve itself as portrayed on the screen.  Of course Count Olaf is at large again and the Baudelaire orphans are left homeless once more.  In the movie Jim Carrey’s Captain Sham is perhaps his best character with his attempts at a cross between a sea captain and a Newfoundland landlubber.  The book raises the ethical issue of what laws it’s permissible to break to save your life, which is missing in the film.

The Miserable Mill, book four, reflects how dark these tales can be without the movie to lighten the mood a bit.  Maybe not quite enough to categorize them as horror, but enough to make them somewhat scary.  Here the orphans have reached the end of their family connections and are passed off to the owner of a lumber mill who puts them to work right away.  Of course, Count Olaf is lurking nearby and is working with an ophthalmologist who specializes in hypnosis.  It is actually a frightening thought to be hypnotized against your will.  The orphans learn to appreciate how difficult their siblings’ specializations are and, of course, make it through together.

Hypnosis is something I’ve never experienced.  I went to a show once where the stage performer attempted to hypnotize the audience.  I was fervently religious at the time, and it didn’t work on me.  I’d read that religious people are difficult to hypnotize (that is, those who haven’t been hypnotized already).  Since that time I’ve been curious if I might be hypnotized as an adult, and, if so, what it would be like.  As a mental state, hypnosis is still poorly understood.  It is used in literature, not uncommonly in horror.  I will, of course, continue working my way through A Series of Unfortunate Events because once you get started it’s difficult to stop.  It is obvious, however, that I’ve watched the film enough to have a sense of what transpired through The Wide Window.  Now, with and after The Miserable Mill, I have little recollection of what might be ahead.

Forgotten

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As most horror fans know, on a stormy night in 1816 a group of Romantics gathered and a scary story “contest” was suggested.  The best known result of this contest was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  More devoted horror fans will also know that John William Polidori’s short story, “The Vampyre,” also had its origins on that night.  It was built on a very slim skeleton suggested by Lord Byron.  Percy Bysshe Shelley’s efforts are lost to history.  As are those of the most overlooked of the group, Claire Clairmont; her story was finished some time later, unpublished.  Claire’s birth name was actually Jane, and she was Mary Shelley’s step-sister.  (Mary was Godwin at the time.)  Percy, Mary, and Claire had traveled to Geneva at Claire’s suggestion.  She was pregnant with Lord Byron’s child.  Shelley and Byron became fast friends and the three young men present on that night would all die within eight years.

Claire is unjustly forgotten.  Of the five gathered in Villa Diodati she lived the longest, making it to eighty.  She had a difficult but occasionally warm relationship with her step-sister.  This book by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton is the first real biography of Claire.  She lived a fascinating life.  Drawn from diaries, letters, and reminiscences of friends, as well as the other sources of the historian’s art, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys is quite readable.  And moving.  Claire was young and infatuated with Byron when she set out to seduce him.  He never returned the love she felt for him, and took responsibility for their daughter on the condition that Claire never see him again.  Her inability to see her own child was the great sorrow of her long life.

Claire went on to live in Italy, France, Russia, and Austria.  She was fluent in French, Italian, and German.  By all accounts she was a gifted musician.  She hobnobbed with high society, often by being a governess in aristocratic households.  She lived near poverty at times, but inherited a living from Percy when his father died.  It’s the sad fate of many who don’t get published that they are forgotten to history.  (Being published is, I hasten to add, no guarantee either!)  Claire’s personality comes through in this account as that of a strong, vivacious woman who defied the conventions of her era.  She made her own way in the world, never marrying, yet being sought out by those who latterly wanted accounts of Shelley’s life.  She’d lived with Percy and Mary for several years.  This is a story of a different but fascinating time.  I hope that future treatments of that famous night in 1816 might take a bit more notice of this deserving, if forgotten, woman.