Mystery of Poe

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I’ve read my fair share of books on Edgar Allan Poe, but I have to say that Mark Dawidziak’s A Mystery of Mystery: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps the best.  Like Dawidziak, I realize that writers, as well as other historical figures, come to be who we need them to be.  This book, which pinwheels around the unsolved cause of Poe’s death, is probing of his life as well.  His younger years and his likely psychological profile as a child who never felt he received the love and affirmation that he required, really spoke loudly.  This explains much of his behavior, which was often contradictory and didn’t serve his own best interests.  Today Poe is an icon of horror, but as this wonderful book explains, Poe was so much more.

People are often typecast.  We have limited time and our own lives are so crowded with stuff we have to do that, as a matter of survival, we need to “profile” others.  I’m constantly reminded of this when I spend time with people (which is not often), particularly those I know well.  I leave realizing that I don’t know them as well as I think I do.  I’ve only seen the surface, or just below, if I managed to engage with any depth.  My own involvement with Poe goes beyond memory.  As in a dream, I don’t know when I was first exposed to him or his writing.  Still, I know that I’ve had a lifelong “parasocial relationship” with him.  I suspect that many of us who appreciate his writing do.  Well, back to the book.

A Mystery of Mysteries begins near Poe’s death, setting the stage.  The chapters then alternate, going back to a chronological treatment of his early life, and then picking up the narrative of his death.  Along the way, a compelling portrait is painted.  Like the majority of us who write, Poe didn’t find much recognition in his own lifetime.  Of course, he died young, but his lifestyle might well have created that situation, regardless.  Jealous of others who received more attention, Poe knew he had a special intelligence that was unappreciated.  It still is.  Yes, Poe has many, many fans, but many, I suspect, don’t have a good idea of who he was as a human being.  For as much as he wrote, Poe didn’t really give us reliable details of his own life.  Dawidziak ends with some well-reasoned speculation of Poe’s cause of death.  But I won’t tell you what he suggests because I want you to read this excellent book.

Witching Season

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I can’t be sure I understood White Is for Witching, but Helen Oyeyemi’s novel grew on me once I started to piece together what was happening.  A long sit in a waiting room finally got me hooked.  This is an odd story that’s quite a bit about atmosphere.  Miranda Silver and her twin brother Eliot, live in the Silver family house (through her deceased mother’s side) with their father.  They run it as a bed and breakfast, but Miranda’s ill.  She suffers from pica—a disorder where a person eats indigestible items rather than food.  Her mother, who died young, and her mother, and grandmother, continue on in the house, but not as ghosts proper.  They are more a controlling presence guiding the way for the lost daughter who, it seems, is destined to join them.

Miranda’s not an unreliable narrator because she’s never the narrator.  Sometimes it’s her brother, other times it’s her girlfriend, and other times it’s the house itself.  Oyeyemi’s writing is compelling, and she’s great when she takes the narrative thread and runs with it.  The fault is entirely mine, of course, but I prefer a straightforward story where I’m not confused from the start.  I recently put a book down because I was confounded about the issues raised.  I’m flummoxed enough by life itself so that when I want to sit down and read I prefer something that makes sense.  Or that I can follow.  The novel has a wonderful gothic atmosphere and the tragic young woman definitely has shades of Poe.

My compulsion to read appropriate books in October led me to White Is for Witching.  It’s set in England, however, and having lived in the United Kingdom for three years I know autumn there is not the same as fall in North America.  That’s not the fault of the story, of course.  The tale is textured and complex, exploring avenues of madness and isolation (it’s set in Dover and Cambridge).  The part where Miranda falls in love with Ore, at college, becomes quite gripping.  There’s some confusion as to why her twin brother acts as he does, with one of the narrators suggesting that he’s unreliable.  There are speculative elements but no ghosts seen clearly.  And race is obviously an issue.  It’s not the central issue (beyond the author perhaps suggesting something by the title).  There’s a lot going on here.  Normally I don’t read synopses before reading fiction, but this is a case where that might be helpful before indulging in this moody, thoughtful tale.

Something Wicked

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There comes a morning each year, pre-dawn, that it happens.  I crawl out of bed and things feel slightly chilly.  The furnace hasn’t been turned on yet, and ever sensitive to cold, I put on long sleeves and slippers to do my morning writing before the sun.  I start getting a powerful hankering to watch my autumn movies.  This year when that happened, in September, I finally watched Something Wicked this Way Comes.  Now, Disney isn’t a studio known for its horror films.  Over the years, however, they’ve produced some family-friendly efforts toward the scary end of the spectrum.  I tried to make the case in Holy Horror (and a list on IMDb agrees with me) that Pirates of the Caribbean falls into that gentle horror category.  I’ve read established writers on horror claim that The Watcher in the Woods was the movie that frightened them most.  I don’t think Something Wicked falls into that category, but I can say I liked it better than the novel.

And that’s saying something, because it was written by Ray Bradbury.  Bradbury’s stories were an integral part of my childhood.  In fact, much of my fiction writing is modeled on his work.  I didn’t really care for the novel Something Wicked this Way Comes, which I read last year.  The film is an improvement.  And it had a tortured way to the silver screen.  It began as a short story.  Bradbury himself adapted it into a screenplay anticipating a role for Gene Kelley.  This was in 1958.  When that didn’t pan out, he wrote it as a novel.  Filmmakers began to show an interest in the early seventies, but the movie didn’t come out until 1983, after Disney bought the rights and took over production.  The screenplay is mostly Bradbury and the soundtrack rips off Star Wars more than once.

Bradbury could get a little too nostalgic about boyhood.  His yesteryears seem far too innocent to me.  Although, having a few scenes where Jim shows curiosity about sex was a bit racy for Disney, I should think.  Jonathan Pryce does a fine job as Dark, and the mood isn’t bad for family-friendly fare.  I was never much of one for carnivals.  I can’t do rides and it’s easy to see through the games you can’t win and even if you do your prize is cheap.  Other entertainments always appealed to me more.  Still, the film sets a mood, and that’s generally what I’m after when the mornings begin to feel chilly and I’m looking off into another winter.

Frightening Legacy

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Like The Wicker Man, The Exorcist also turns fifty this December.  I was caught up in this half-century mania and so I got ahold of Nat Segaloff’s The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear right away.  The reading was disrupted by life events, but I’d been enjoying it, as time permitted.  Written by a movie insider (as opposed to an ex-academic wannabe), this is a fairly full treatment of the film.  It’s actually not unlike what I tried to do with Nightmares with the Bible, but it is yet another testimony of the importance of The Exorcist to our understanding of demons.  Although one book can’t really be one-stop shopping for any worthwhile movie (there are plenty of books out there on the subject), this one is well worth reading.  For those who enjoy learning about cultural phenomena with a bit of horror tossed in, this is a very good introduction.

One of the things I’ve learned as I’ve tried to break into film reading is that a lot more goes on in making a film than most of us imagine.  And when we see a movie we miss an awful lot.  I’m no shill for Hollywood, but watching a movie multiple times brings out things that writers, directors, and producers didn’t even notice.  Think of the Bible, for comparison.  Readers two thousand years later are still finding new things to say about it.  The Exorcist has influenced religious outlooks in extremely important ways.  Our modern ideas of demons and possession largely go back to this film.  Details may change over time, but even the church has had to respond to it, and actual exorcists reference it.  The Bible says little about demons (again, Nightmares), so we have to pick such knowledge up from elsewhere.

The one part I found somewhat thin was, not surprisingly, parts of the final chapter, “The Mystery of Faith.”  It tends to show when a writer really knows religion.  William Peter Blatty, who wrote the novel and screenplay (the latter at least partially), knew Catholicism cold.  One of the things I’ve been yammering on about for years is that understanding religion enhances our understanding of horror movies.  I’m certain that the connection goes even deeper than that, but books written on horror mention religion often in amateur ways.  If we want to get at what’s really going on here, it’s going to be important to listen to those who understand religion as well.  None of that detracts from this fascinating book that will throw new light into shadowed corners.

Starting October

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October’s a difficult month to quantify.  When it rolls around I get in the mood for certain books and movies, but I like to see and read new things.  I check lists to see what others recommend for what I hope is a similar mood.  A book that kept coming up was Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October.  Published thirty years ago, it’s not exactly new, but it was new to me.  It’s a humorous story, told by Snuff, a dog.  But not just any dog—he’s a player in a game that takes place when the full moon lines up with Halloween.  There’ll be spoilers hereafter.  The game involves two sides deciding the fate of the world, and each has the usual monsters lined up.  Dracula, the wolf man, Frankenstein’s monster and others are involved.  One side tries to awaken Lovecraft’s Old Gods and destroy the world while the other side tries to stop them.

Each chapter is a day in October and what the game is is only slowly revealed.  The antagonist for all of this is really the parson.  It turns out that he’s a minister for the Old Gods’ true believers.  Various monsters or players are killed and Sherlock Holmes is hanging about, trying to solve the mystery.  The story’s really a mash-up of several characters from yesteryear.  It’s not scary, nor is it particularly moody.  It’s a good example, however, of how religion and horror, even if it’s comedy horror, work together.  The Old Gods are an existential threat and require clergy to perform the correct rituals.  Roger Zelazny was fond of using characters from existing mythologies in telling sci-fi-ish stories, and this fits that writing mode.

This is an enjoyable story, but my October mood isn’t only a monster one.  Set in England, A Night in the Lonesome October doesn’t really have the leaves, pumpkins, and ghosts of my melancholy season.  Also, the humorous aspect is fine, but acts as a distraction from what I generally seek.  This is a magical time in northern climes.  Of course, I read a good deal of this while traveling to and from South Carolina, so getting the right mood was tricky when it’s beach weather and the flowers are still in bloom.  October means different things to different people, I know.  I’m still looking for the novel that manages to encapsulate my experience of it.  There’s something difficult to quantify about it, and that’s perhaps what I need to define.  

Beautiful Vampire

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It’s been a quest years in the making.  I first found the Dark Shadows novels by Marilyn Ross at the Goodwill Store in Seneca, Pennsylvania.  The series had recently finished its television run and, as this was a used book bin, and limited in size, you could never tell what you might find.  My teenage self, fascinated by vampire lore, eagerly read those I could find.  I got rid of the volumes I had when I attended college and began to miss them when I was old enough to admit such things.  It took at least fifteen years to locate all of them, and now, for the first time in my life, I have read the entire series.  Barnabas, Quentin and the Vampire Beauty isn’t always easy to find.  I certainly hadn’t read it before.  Not that it’s high art—the campiness shows through the gothic setting from time-to-time—and yet it’s an accomplishment.

This particular story again shows some development from what had gone before.  The vampire beauty is a young woman tricked into having weight reduction surgery in Switzerland.  The surgery, naturally enough, transforms her into a vampire.  She needs help so she seeks out Barnabas Collins, which leads her to Collinwood.  From there a set of adventures head toward the typical climax of this series of books.  Nevertheless, W. E. D. Ross seems to have shown some improvement over the thirty-two novels in the series.  This story seems less similar to others in the series as a whole.  Quite a bit of effort is spent on trying to find a vampire cure, but for Adele Marriot rather that Barnabas Collins.

I have to wonder if Ross knew this would be the last Dark Shadows book he would write for the series.  He did write other gothic fiction, and even a novelization of the movie, House of Dark Shadows, but the initial series ends with a kind of knowing that we’ve reached the end of something.  Was he told by someone at Paperback Library, “Hey, we’re pulling the plug on the series” or did he simply run out of steam?  The daily television show ran for about 1225 episodes.  This original novel series had far fewer.  Still, the thrill of hunting all of them down, lining them on my shelf, and then reading them in order was a rare pleasure.  It was a recapturing of, perhaps even a completing of, part of my childhood.  It may have taken decades to accomplish, but an accomplishment is an accomplishment.

Banned Monk

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One of the strange things about gothic fiction is that, although often set on the continent, the early practitioners—inventors, if you will—were English.  Three names among them stand out in many treatments of the genre: Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis.  I’ve read the former two and have long supposed I should read the latter’s The Monk.  This 1796 novel made the author famous, but it is long.  And written in the often florid style of the age.  Still, there are plenty of swoons and thunder-plagued nights.  Set in Madrid with a cast of closely related characters, the novel has a twist ending that I did not see coming, which is pretty amazing considering that the book has been out for over two centuries.  (I may have read about the ending before, but had forgotten, if that was the case.)

The novel intertwines two stories that revolve around Antonio, the eponymous monk.  A paragon of righteousness, he heads an abbey in Spain and all are in awe of his piety.  Until sex breaks through his vanity (so we are told; his piety was based on too high a self-regard).  Once seduced, he can no longer maintain his status as chaste, and this sets in motion a tragedy that will leave innocent people dead and lives ruined.  Lewis, it’s famously known, used the novel to critique excesses of the church.  Its power, the novel demonstrates, corrupts.  Still, at the end I was left feeling sorry for Antonio.  He was set up by the Devil and his chances of winning were quite slim from the beginning.

Although PG-13 by today’s standards, the novel scandalized English society when it came out.  The sex scenes were too explicit for the day, especially since they involved the clergy.  The story has quite a leisurely layout, and only after 200 pages (in the edition I read) does the supernatural enter the picture.  Once it does the pace begins to pick up.  The weird thing is, despite its length, this story works.  It’s considered a classic—although often dismissed because gothic literature generally is—it nevertheless delivers.  Antonio is shown to be subject to weakness, and while vain, not inherently evil.  He’s a victim of human vulnerability.  Readers in the late eighteenth century couldn’t see beyond the sex, but there is a tragic human story here.  Castles, abbeys, ghosts, and subterranean passages, murder and torture, it’s gothic through and through.  Although it took most of September to get through it, it feels like I accomplished something worthwhile.  And I finished just in time for Banned Book Week.

Early Ghosts

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I’m not the most impulsive person in the world, but certain books I know, as soon as I see them, I will read.  Irving Finkel’s The First Ghosts was one of those books.  This wasn’t an easy book to get.  I’m guessing it was some minutiae about transAtlantic rights or some such nonsense, but it was announced a couple of years before it became available in America.  Then, of course, it had to wait its turn on my reading pile.  For those of you who don’t recognize his name, Finkel is a well-regarded Assyriologist who works at the British Museum.  Assyriology (which encompasses Babylonian and Sumerian studies as well) is, perhaps unavoidably, a highly technical field.  The languages are complex and a lot of that has to be explained before a reader can figure out what’s going on.  Some parts of this wonderful book are, unfortunately, technical.

The idea, however, is brilliant.  Ghosts have always been with us.  Finkel is well-placed to open the cuneiform world and he presents the earliest recorded ghost stories in history.  They’re not exactly modern horror, be warned.  Nevertheless, they demonstrate that from as soon as people figured out how to write, ghosts were one of their favorite topics.  Or at least, ghosts were assumed to exist and were written into many myths and legends.  Non-judgmental books like this are rare from academics; indeed, it’s difficult to imagine anyone else having written this particular book.  Even in the small world of academia not too many people read these languages and those who do are busy trying to impress tenure committees and businessmen deans.  (The reboot of Ghostbusters demonstrates this in a comical but too serious way.)

There are plenty of takeaways from this book.  A good general point in that myths do not reflect the everyday beliefs of individuals.  It’s easy to forget that.  Another striking idea occurred in his one chapter on the Bible where Finkel notes that the Good Book tends not to dwell on things considered “detestable,” such as foreign gods or demons.  That makes it an outlier concerning everyday information from antiquity.  After looking through that one window for so long, I suppose that’s why I focused by doctoral work on a “foreign” goddess.  If you can handle the technical bits and try to keep in mind multiple multi-syllabic names from forgotten languages, you’ll find a lot of really surprising and fascinating information here.  I’ve known for years that I’d be reading this book, and as autumn approached the time felt right to seek ancient ghosts.

Rocks and Philosophs

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Porphyry is, apart from being a cool word, a kind of purplish stone that was prized for statue-making in antiquity.  It is also the name a Syrian philosopher gave himself in the third century of the Common Era.  Now, if you read widely about antiquity, as some of us have done, you’ll encounter the name Porphyry from time to time, but those of us who focused on older materials don’t pay him much mind.  I was reading about Porphyry recently, however, and did a little poking around to discover that he’d written a book called, in translation, Against the Christians.  Some historians speculate that Porphyry may have once been a Christian himself, but whether or not that’s true, he developed an antipathy to the sect.  I was curious about what his beef may have been only to discover that this book is lost.

Now lost works in antiquity are the rule rather than the exception.  Literacy may not have been widespread, but those who could write did write, and often prolifically.  Human history was very well documented.  But tonnes of it went missing.  Wars have been part of that history and wars are notorious for destroying written records.  Also, much writing was on perishable materials that, well, perished.  That wasn’t the case with Against the Christians, however.  Porphyry’s work was purposefully destroyed.  By this point Christianity had taken over the Roman Empire.  Rather than accepting the challenge of a philosopher, officials censored and destroyed his work.  Ironically, all that survives are quotes from books of theologians who were trying to refute him.

This made me reflect on the book bans that are currently all the rage among some “Christian” politicians.  Such rearguard actions belie the confidence that imperial religions showcase.  A religion that’s afraid others might see the holes raises many questions, does it not?  It seems to come down to the idea that nothing has changed in two millennia, even though Jesus didn’t have a cellphone—not even one of those old flip-open kind—and much of what we know of nature was still many centuries in the future.  The fact is that we only try to silence those who disagree when we fear them.  Book bans pretend that they can hold the hands of the clock still and that all will remain as it was decades ago.  Learning, however, is a genie let out of the bottle.  Back in Porphyry’s day powerful bishops and emperors ordered his book banned and destroyed.  And we are all the poorer for it.

Cabin Stories

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Almost always I come out on the same side of the debate.  The book is better than the movie.  The book allows things to be explained more fully and is the way the story is “supposed to go.”  Maybe it’s because I found the novel open-ended and I like closure, but M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin, in my humble opinion, is better than The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay.  Now, the author’s title is better, but Shyamalan’s explanation is clearer.  In short, I think the movie works better.  If you’re not familiar with the story, four apocalypticists, responding to visions they’ve had, break into an isolated cabin occupied by a vacationing family of two daddies and an adopted daughter.  Shyamalan characteristically shifts the cabin’s location to Pennsylvania and, yes, before you think it’s all Philadelphia, there are some very isolated places in my home state.

These weaponized apocalypticists subdue the family and inform them that unless they decide which one will be sacrificed, and then carry out the deed, the world will end the next day.  The adult couple tries to explain rationally how crazy this all is.  How could four people be given this hidden knowledge and be tasked with saving the entire world?  It seems more likely that they’ve targeted a gay couple and are trying to break up their family.  One of the things the movie makes explicit that the book doesn’t is that the intruders are correct.  This is the end of the world.  In order to achieve this, Shyamalan had to rewrite the ending to remove the ambiguity.  For some of us, that really helps.

The movie, in a way that a brief blog post can’t replicate, includes quite a bit of dialogue about religion.  Religion and horror are often bedfellows, and this is one of those movies that relies on religion to fuel the fear.  Interestingly, the cabin invaders aren’t stereotypical conservative Christians.  In fact, they appear to be mostly secular everyday people who have come together around a vision that they all had in common.  In the novel there’s always some question whether this is an elaborate hoax whereas the movie makes it clear that the death of each individual apocalypticist unleashes a plague.  Indeed, they are, as the couple finally realizes, the four horsemen of the apocalypse.  Since I’m still here to tell you about it, the end of the world has obviously been avoided.  This movie is worth seeing, even if the novel has a better title.

Closure of a Trilogy

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So the final part of Jessica Verday’s Hollow trilogy really moves into supernatural explanations of life after death.  At least for those destined to become shades.  Since we’re at the end here, I won’t worry about spoilers.  Also, the series has been out for over a decade now, so we’re fairly safe, I think.  (Young adults aren’t my demographic, I don’t imagine.)  To recap, Abbey is in love with Caspian, who is a shade.  Caspian isn’t seen by many people, but he does appear to Abbey.  Throughout the story she mourns the death of her best friend Kristen.  As the action builds, Revenants begin to appear in Sleepy Hollow.  Revenants are beings that assist people who are to become shades as they die.  This indicates to Abbey that she won’t live to graduate from high school.  She will, however, get to be with Caspian—“complete him”—in a form of life where few will see them but they will live on in a limited sense.

The universe here isn’t particularly Christian in background.  Revenants operate in pairs, one tending toward good, the other evil.  They are sent to do a specific job and when it’s over they move on.  As in the movie Dogma, however, one Revenant doesn’t want to move on.  He figures that if he fails to do his assigned task he’ll continue on as an immortal on earth.  At the end he reveals that he killed Kristen in Abbey’s place so a difficult decision’s in order.  To straighten out the mess that’s been made on some cosmic scale, Abbey can die, history will be altered, and Kristen will be the one who survived.  This will involve self-sacrifice, which kinda does bring us back into Christian territory.

This trilogy emerged following the obvious success of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga.  Teen paranormal romances were in, and publishers hearkened to the demand.  It does reflect our times that writing for young readers has taken on an impressive quality.  This trilogy is a great example of how someone who recollects well what it was like to be a teen is able to transport many of us back to that stage of life.  The awkwardness.  The constantly making wrong decisions.  The bewilderment of falling in love.  And of course, if you throw in some ghosts and some light violence, you’ve got a winning combination.  I enjoyed getting to know these characters.  I knew, once I put volume one down that I would have to see how the rest of this story unfolded.  I’m glad I did.  I have a sense of closure, for this series at least.

Reframing

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Theory can be tough to stomach, but once you get through it you can often find all kinds of valuables in an academic book.  I learned quite a lot from Cecilia Sayad’s The Ghost in the Image.  It’s a brief but powerful book.  One of the under-explored areas of life is how our inventions affect reality.  We invent things and they change us.  Photography is one of those inventions and it seems like we should step back for a decade or two and try to figure out just how it’s remade reality.  Sayad explores that specifically in the realm of horror.  Not just movies, but other technology associated with images (and even other senses).  She makes the case that the frame that separates an image from the “reality” outside the frame—think of going to an art museum and how the frame sets a painting off from the “real” wall behind it—has become permeable.  Thus the theoretical part.

Applying that principle to horror, she has fascinating chapters on Amityville and Enfield, the found-footage fictions of Paranormal Activity, and the Slender Man meme.  She also discusses spirit photography, which is really the precursor to the horror film, and what used to be called video games.  I’m not a gamer, I’m afraid, and I’m sure I’m missing out on some culture because of it, but researching and writing books beyond work takes up quite a bit of time.  In any case, the amazing thing is that Sayad does all this without judging.  She doesn’t say that ghosts are “real” but she doesn’t say that they’re not.  Part of the reason for this is that reality is part of the quest here.  We define reality partially (largely) through our technology.  Would politicians become “celebrities” without photographic media?  They’re hardly the cream of the crop anymore (let’s be honest here).

So this book left me thinking.  Imaging technology invents, instigates a new reality for creatures as visually oriented as our species tends to be.  Sayad also explores how other senses are brought into this—sound, most obviously, for movies—and help to confirm that reality.  Theaters have toyed with touch and smells to widen the diegesis of the movie (taste is a bit trickier), each layer brings the image further outside the frame.  The internet has, of course, only accelerated all of this.  The fact that horror is the genre that perhaps best lends itself to this kind of impact on society is, in itself, a telling point.  I need to step back for some time and ponder how this all fits together in what I perceive of as reality.

More Young Fear

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Okay, so the second one has a cliff-hanger ending.  I should’ve seen that coming.  This installment of Jessica Verday’s The Hollow Trilogy moves the story pretty directly into the realm of the dead pervading the everyday world of Sleepy Hollow.  For young adult literature from the era of Twilight, it does raise issues that, although they were around when I was young, have become more prominent in the thinking of teens.  Overdoses, college choices, attempted rape (or at least threatened), seem like things our society might’ve either overcome or matured about.  Instead, we start putting these pressures on our young and wonder why society has a hard time coping.  Sometimes I wonder if we’ve made society too complex.  As an adult it’s become so complex that I’m never quite sure if I’m getting things done correctly, or if they might come back to haunt me later.

In any case, in the first novel of the set, The Hollow, the protagonist/narrator, Abbey, discovers that her boyfriend has been dead all along.  The Haunted, volume two, is about how she copes with that.  I read many years ago that certain narratives are something like preloaded in human brains.  Given even the most basic pieces, our minds fill in the blanks.  When girl meets boy and likes him, our thoughts go toward getting them together.  Of course, a story is all about the difficulties that threaten to prevent that from happening.  For most of us, we start to experience these things as teens and even as adults we remember it well.  These are intense emotions and society complicates them because just when we think we know what we want at high school age, college separates us and we start over again.  Thus college visits.  It’s even more complicated when your boyfriend is a shade/ghost.

How the material and spiritual relate is an unresolved issue.   Materialists have already decided by cutting the spiritual out altogether, but the rest of us, perhaps trusting our feelings more, wonder.  Although these books are more paranormal romances than philosophical musings, they nevertheless raise questions that even adults struggle with (or should).  We don’t have all the answers and we hope that our children might get further along this path than we did.  Young adult literature helps them do so.  Some choose to respond by banning books.  The rest of us know that literature can help to discuss difficult topics in a world we’ve made far too complicated, for young and old alike.

Used, Again

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It may be impolitic to admit it, but I have positive associations with Amazon.  This goes back to before they started using smily boxes.  Before Amazon, getting books often involved mail orders and checks and several weeks before delivery.  Now Bookshop.org does a similar service, and with more of a conscience, but Amazon showed everybody how.  I do have a complaint, however, with the internet giant.  They allow used book sellers to be the top place when ordering a book, since they sometimes have a lower-than-retail price.  I used to sell used books on Amazon, back when I had no full-time job.  I took great care to list books according to the accepted standards of book conditions.  I know I’ve written about this before, but two recent used book orders simply didn’t measure up.  So, herewith, a tutorial:

“Like new” means in mint condition.  You should not be able to tell the book was read.  Look for soft rather than sharp edges on the pages, slight curling of the cover (especially paperbacks) from repeated opening.  Hey sellers, if you have any of this, the proper category is either “fine” or “very good”—not “like new.”  I’m not really a collector (in that way), but if I order a book “like new” I expect that I won’t be able to tell it’s ever been read.  Normally I opt for “very good.”  This brings it down to a less expensive bracket and it implies things are in pretty good shape.  If your book has extensive writing or highlighting in it, it is not “very good,” but “good.”  If it does have minor markings you are required to list them.  I recently bought a “very good” book in which practically the whole first chapter was highlighted.  This isn’t easily missed, and it’s certainly not “very good.”

I get it, classifying books takes some discrimination.  The categories are there, however, to protect the buyer.  People do all sorts of weird stuff to their books.  The used book seller, on Amazon, is morally obligated to tell us about what’s going on.  And Amazon, please make clear when a book is “new” or not!  I recently bought a book that was listed as new but it had clearly been read at least once.  Be honest, people.  Book folk, in general, are good folk.  Reading is so important for a civil society.  Books are collectible items.  If you’re thinking of going into the biz, please remember that I’ve found books for a buck at library book sales in better condition than many “very good” books I found used online.  Just be honest—you’ll still sell the book, even if for a few pennies less.

Hidden Improvement

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I believe in improvement.  Even for a journeyman writer like W. E. D. (Marilyn) Ross.  At least in his Dark Shadows books.  For much of the series the plot is largely the same: a young woman is threatened and finds herself in Collinwood.  Often the threat comes in the form of a mysterious stranger.  The woman falls in love with Barnabas Collins, but in the end it doesn’t work out.  The bad guys are stopped, however, whether they’re supernatural or not.  In Barnabas, Quentin and the Hidden Tomb things have moved on somewhat.  The main female character, Ellen, a southern belle from just after the Civil War, doesn’t fall for Barnabas.  She is attracted to him, of course, but not really in love.  That’s a plus.  And Barnabas is temporarily cured of his vampirism in this story.  Quentin is, despite earlier story lines, really pretty good, if misunderstood.

This installment begins in the Hudson Valley where Ellen’s intended lives.  Unbeknownst to her, her fiancé has died and has been substituted with his identical twin vampire brother.  This northern family lost their fortune during the war and need the marriage to bring Ellen’s cash into the coffers/coffin.  Ellen is rescued by Barnabas, who is a family friend.  He takes her to Maine, figuring she’ll be safe there.  Unlike other women in the series, she has already fallen in love with someone other than Barnabas, so the tension is focused elsewhere.  The disguised enemies come, of course, but this story feels a bit less formulaic.

As I’ve confessed numerous times regarding this series, these are guilty pleasure books from my childhood.  I don’t read them expecting belles lettres, but rather a rush of nostalgia.  They seldom fail to deliver on that front.  There are a limited number of them.  They hearken to a different time when the ability to crank out book after book (Ross published at least 24 novels the year this one appeared—that’s the rate of two per month) didn’t hurt your ability to find a publisher.  Some of his fiction, I’m told, is quite good.  Others, such as the Dark Shadows books, are of a different purpose.  They were meant to supplement the income on an unexpectedly successful soap opera that would go on to become a cultural icon.  It will be no surprise that Barnabas and Ellen prevail in the end.  The enemies are unmasked and, strangely for the series, the vampire is destroyed.  And the legend lives on.