Nostalgic Shadows

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Nostalgia is a funny thing.  Although it can strike at any age, somehow after the half-century mark it’s particularly easy to get swept into it.  As I written about many, many times, I was drawn into the Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows novels as a tween.  In my mid-to-late forties, when the internet made it possible, I started to collect all the volumes from 1 through 32.  It took several years.  I had to find them via BookFinder.com and our level of income didn’t support buying more than one every few months.  Then in 2022, having difficulty locating the last of the original series, I found a seller on eBay offering up the whole set.  The price for that set was less than the least expensive final volume I could find.  I did what any nostalgic guy would do.

We don’t really buy antiques, but I’d been looking for an office desk (this was before the scam).  I’d been using a craft table for a desk for years and it seemed that I really needed something with a better organizational range.  This led me to stop into a local antique shop.  They ended up not having much furniture, but they did have aisles of nostalgia.  A few weeks later when it was too hot and humid to be outdoors, I revisited the shop.  This time, relieved of the burden of seeking a desk, I was able to browse at leisure.  It’s like going to a museum but not having to pay admission.  I turned a corner and I saw something I’d never seen before.  A collection of Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows books.

It wasn’t a full set, but I had, prior to finishing my own collection, never seen more than one or two together in any single place.  As a child I’d buy them at Goodwill.  As an adult, on BookFinder.  All those years in-between, I always looked for them when visiting used bookstores.  I visit said shops whenever possible.  In decades of looking I’d only found one in the wild once or twice, and always by its lonesome.  This was a completely new experience for me.  It was also quite odd to be seeing them and not having any need to buy them.  I have a full set.  The nostalgia was almost overpowering.  I couldn’t help but think of how even a few years ago I’d been pawing through to see if there were any I hadn’t yet found.  All for reliving a bit of my childhood.

Disney Dark

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I write a fair bit about dark academia, but one of the strangest higher education events in my life was when the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature held their annual meeting in Orlando.  At Disney World.  Seeing the world’s top academics in the field against a backdrop of Snow White, or whatever, was surreal, expensive, and just a bit off.  I guess others felt that way too, because the conference never returned.  I have never had a desire to visit any Disney theme parks.  It is something that simply has no appeal to me.  As much as I appreciate fantasy in my reading and movie watching, in real life I prefer to visit places with home-grown authenticity.  At the same time, I realize many people adore Disney attractions.  (I just can’t get over why you’d want to visit a manufactured Main Street when there’s a real one not terribly far away.)

The Dark Side of Disney by Leonard Kinsey is one of those books that grew out of a blog.  Believe me, I’ve been tempted more than a time or two to pirate my own work here to try to make something that people would pay to buy.  In any case, Kinsey is a Disney fan.  Growing up poor, I was never accustomed to summer vacations.  One year we made a memorable trip to Washington, DC.  I didn’t realize it then, but that was where my grandmother, who lived with us, had been born.  I remember aspects of that trip and realize that it was my model of what a vacation was meant to be.  Kinsey grew up not far from Disney World and with a mother with a bit more free cash than mine.  This book is his exposé of the less-expected aspects of Disney.  Not only an exposé, but a “how to.”

I do understand the desire to be a “bad boy”—I suspect most of us do (chose your gender-appropriate nouns, of course).  The thing is, I’m not a rule-breaker.  Realizing that the guardrails in life are generally set up to help people, as much as I’m curious about what goes on behind the scenes, I prefer legal means of finding information.  I’m no fan of large corporations, but if they set the rules (you have to pay to get in, and once you’re here agree to uphold the illusion) then that’s the right thing to do.  In my opinion.  Then again, when you’re with a bunch of academics of religious studies there’s a limited amount of trouble to be had.  Unless you read about dark academia.

Being a Fan

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Fandom is a weird thing with me.  Having wide-ranging interests, coupled with an at times obsessive personality, my likes are intense but fall short of the kind of fan who purchases everything associated with their fascination.  A friend kindly sent me the Dark Shadows Almanac, edited by Kathryn Leigh Scott and Jim Pierson.  I try my best to read books friends  send me, and working my way through the Almanac, I realized just how far short of real fandom I fall.  Dark Shadows was likely my gateway to horror.  Watching it after school is one of my early memories.  But I was quite young at the time and beyond Barnabas, Quentin, the wonderfully gothic house, and the opening music and waves crashing into the rocks, specifics didn’t last.  Dark Shadows was one of the earliest fan-congregating shows.  Before Comic-Con, there were Dark Shadows conferences.  Kids eagerly bought all things Barnabas related.

I was about seven when the show hit its zenith.  I do remember watching it, and the wonderful, creepy feeling it gave me.  As a child I couldn’t have named any of the actors.  A lot was happening in my life at the time.  My mother was divorcing my alcoholic father.  My grandmother, who lived with us, lay bed-ridden and dying in what had been our dining room.  We lived in a run-down old apartment with very little money.  Heavy stuff for a kid.  And television also offered funny shows in the evening.  And Saturday morning cartoons (which included, yes, Scooby-Doo). I’ve always been amazed at just how much stuff there is in the world and I yearn to understand it deeply.  It was probably pretty much fore-ordained that I would try to be a professor.

Reading the Almanac not only reinforced how influential the series was, it also made me aware of just how complicated producing a television show is.  Many, many people are involved, specialists in artistic and technical fields.  Most of them make modest livings with, if they’re lucky, mentions in the credits.  The stars we know.  I think, for me, Barnabas Collins was a father stand-in.  What I noticed, even as a child, was that he was sad.  A certain type of person is drawn to sad individuals.  I always want to cheer them up because I know how it feels.  This is the part of me that wanted to be a minister.  I tried that a number of times but it never worked out either.  Reading an almanac like this isn’t really a deep intellectual exercise, but it is a learning experience.  And one of the things we might learn about is ourselves, whether a true fanatic or not.

Missing Books

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I’ve written before about what we call “the flood.”  Just over seven years ago, we moved into our house.  The movers, complaining every inch of the way, lamented the number of boxes and the lateness of the hour.  Since their truck was just outside our garage, we told them that they could stack about 100 of the boxes in there and we’d haul them to the house ourselves.  This they did.  Torrential rains came a day or two later but being new to the house we didn’t realize the garage flooded in heavy rain.  Many, many books were ruined.  I started a list but haven’t had the time or heart to finish it.  Insurance didn’t cover it and most of the books were never replaced.  That’s not what I’m writing about, though.  I am writing about other missing books.  Often associated with moving.  And perhaps proof of an alternate universe.

I’ve moved a lot in my life, and if you know anything at all about me you know that I’m careful with books.  I never leave any behind.  And yet… yet some manage to disappear.  The first one I recall was my personally annotated copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.  It disappeared between Boston and Ann Arbor, Michigan, when, no exaggeration, all of my worldly goods fit into the back of a rental car.  I unpacked, wondering where it’d gone.  Then moving back to the United States from Edinburgh, our annotated copy of Historic Scotland, the booklet describing all their sites, in which we’d written notes from when we visited, was gone.  Moving from Somerville, New Jersey to our current house, Godwired, by Rachel Wagner, disappeared.  Also, a new translation of The Odyssey that I’d received at work.

Now on this latest move there was nothing left in our Somerville apartment.  And despite the griping movers, there were no boxes left in the truck.  Every box has been opened and sorted and yet, Godwired and The Odyssey aren’t here.  The other day I was looking for Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.  I’m pretty sure it was lost in the flood (but it’s not on my list).  I distinctly remember buying it at a used bookstore to replace the one I purchased at Watchung Booksellers in New Jersey.  And it is not here.  I keep careful track of my books, and if one goes missing it’s like the parable of the lost sheep.  I can’t rest until I find it.  None of this helps me if there is an alternate universe that’s sucking select books every now and again.  If so, I’m sure it’s got one of the most amazing libraries in the multiverse.

Ancient Asherah

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It seems like ancient history.  Actually, it is ancient history.  Ancient history with a new angle.  A Reassessment of Asherah is finally available in paperback.  Although my research has moved in a different direction, an author cares for all of their books and Asherah is my firstborn.  My doctoral dissertation originally, what separates it from many proposals I now see as an editor, is that it has a broad topic and some native sense of writing.  I have always eschewed technical jargon.  Academese obfuscates.  And is boring to read.  In any case, being young and naive, at the instruction of one of my doctoral supervisors, I sent it to the distinguished series AOAT (Alter Orient und Altes Testament), published in Germany.  It came out as an expensive hardcover and sold through its only print run.

Years later, evicted from academia, I found a foothold in publishing at Gorgias Press.  The owner of the press did something that even Eisenbrauns couldn’t, he talked what was then Ugarit Verlag into granting Gorgias the rights to republish my out-of-print book.  But he decided to do it in hardcover, so it was still too expensive for most potential readers.  Also, to make this a proper second edition, I added all of the articles I’d written about Asherah as well as the original text of the AOAT version.  If I recall correctly, it sold pretty well for Gorgias.  I moved on to other things.  Weathering the Psalms had been written before my career malfunction, but publishing that made me realize I could still write expensive books with low sales.

Four books further along, all on aspects of horror, a friend did the impossible.  He talked Gorgias Press into publishing a paperback of A Reassessment of Asherah, without my prompting.  For the first time in the thirty-plus years that the book has been available, it is now “individually priced.”  Please keep in mind, though, before emptying out your bank account, that “individually priced” here is still in the academic realm.  It seems the minimum price for books in this category is around $40, which is a bit steep for most of us.  But still, it is a new thing in the academic world.  I do hope that someone more persuasive than me might talk to Bloomsbury about a paperback of Nightmares with the Bible.  That has been, as far as I can tell, the poorest performing of all my expensive books.  It’s also the one that, I suspect, would have some individual readers.

Brutal Boys

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Some time back I posted about Steffanie Holmes’ Pretty Girls Make Graves.  It was a first book in a duology and since I’d been trying to keep up with dark academia, it was a recommended exemplar.  As I mentioned in that post, the book ends with a cliffhanger, so I got to Brutal Boys Cry Blood as quickly as I could.  Holmes is a prolific self-publishing author and I found Pretty Girls much better written than the majority of self-published material I’ve read.  Brutal Boys picks up right where the previous novel left off, freeing George Fisher from her predicament and moving her into new ones.  At Blackfriars University, George is investigating the death of her former roommate.  The Orpheus Society, consisting of old money blue bloods, seems to be involved in more than wanton destruction of property and orgies.

Much of the first half of Brutal Boys sets the scene for a relatively happy period in George’s life.  She establishes a polyamorous relationship with the uberwealthy student William Windsor-Forsyth and Father Sebastian Pearce, a teacher and college chaplain.  The three of them are mutually in love, but even as George is admitted the Orpheus Society, a deeper part of the sect emerges.  This group is even more insidious and has designs on human sacrifice.  But I’ve already said too much.

Reading is, of course, a subjective exercise.  My personal experience of this duology is that the first book is better than the second.  It’s not that I feel Brutal Boys is a bad story—it keeps your interest pretty much the whole way through—it just seems to be far more improbable than the first novel.  It is fiction, of course, and there is nothing speculative here.  There are no ghosts or monsters or divine intervention.  Speaking strictly for me, it might’ve helped with believability if there were a little of this.  I was not one of those swept away by Donna Tartt’s inaugural dark academia novel The Secret History, but she did include just a little of a speculative element that allows for a reader to perhaps convince him or herself that this might just possibly happen.  Some writers and readers prefer not to use that escape hatch.  I’ve read good dark academia both with and without speculative aspects to the story, but to me, such mystery adds a little depth to what might be happening.  And I admire self-publishing authors who write well enough to draw you into a second book, which can be a rare thing.

Seeking Meaning

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Many people over the years have encouraged me to read Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.  I admit to being put off by the unintentionally sexist title (I do remember the days when “man” was generic regarding gender, following the German usage from which it derives).  I finally got around to it and I’m glad I did.  I know that there has been some controversy around it but I found many of Frankl’s observations freeing.  The first part of the edition I read narrates his experience living in concentration camps during Germany’s mad phase.  Such things aren’t easy to read, but they are important, showing what happens when people are devalued by those in power.  It also proves a place for finding meaning in suffering.  The second part of the book introduces logotherapy, the school that Frankl devised.  It’s based on the idea that one’s search for meaning is essential for psychological well being.

Some of us grapple with the question of meaning constantly.  Why are we here?  What should we be doing?  Is there a purpose behind it?  Religions often attempt to answer these kinds of questions, as do various philosophical schools.  Nobody has the definitive, overarching answer, and Frankl doesn’t try to offer one.  There is a bit of existentialism in logotherapy, but the basic idea seems sound to me.  Seeking meaning helps you to carry on.  Frankl also considered finding meaning in suffering, which seems to be a noble goal, if quite difficult to achieve.  Most human lives involve suffering and it is often the biggest problem with which theodicy has to deal.  Finding meaning in it, if that’s what life hands you, seems to be reasonable.  His discussion of paradoxical intention was quite interesting.

My edition of the book has an introduction by Gordon Allport.  That name took me back to my college days when the Harvard professor’s equally problematic title, The Individual and His Religion was required reading.  Despite the pronoun, that was an influential book for me (unfortunately ruined in the flood after we first moved to this house).  I noticed that Frankl cited Allport’s book in his own.  I sometimes think I ought to replace Allport’s book, but I’m not sure that I’d be reading it again any time soon.  Besides, my lost edition had my own annotations in it.  A small measure of personal suffering and loss.  I am glad to have finally read Frankl’s work.  I certainly learned a lot from doing so.  Discovering that there is a psychological school based on finding meaning exists was news to me.  And it just makes sense.

Discovering Witches

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On a number of best of dark academia novel lists, A Discovery of Witches was a book I knew I had to read.  Frightened by the size of the tome, I put it off.  Although it says it on the cover (by which I don’t buy a book) that it’s part of a trilogy, I was hoping it’d be self-contained.  Of course, it ends without resolving what happens to the main characters, more or less coercing the reader into the remaining two volumes.  Now, this is not unique.  Many authors do it.  Publishers especially like books with series potential—assured sales.  My eight novels (none published) are stand-alone.  One is over 200,000 words, but the rest are reasonably svelte.  Big books take a large commitment of time and, well, at my age you have to make some choices.  This one took me nearly a solid month of daily reading, sometimes multiple hours at a stretch, to finish.  I have some decisions to make.

Set initially in Oxford, this world created by Deborah Harkness contains three kinds of humanoid creatures besides humans: witches, vampires, and daemons.  The daemons aren’t really defined, but they don’t seem to be the kind that possess girls like Regan McNeil.  The witches seem pretty traditional and the protagonist/narrator is one.  The vampires are quite different than the Hollywood version, as well as the traditional sort.  Vampires can be out in the sunlight, they aren’t affected by crucifixes, and, indeed, can be quite religious and Christian.  They can eat things other than than blood.  The protagonist, Diana Bishop, is a witch who doesn’t use her powers.  A professor, she’s doing research at Oxford where she meets, and eventually falls in love with Matthew Clairmont, a vampire.  An ancient pact between witches, vampires, and daemons forbids them from consorting closely, and herein lies the tale.

The dark academia aspect comes in a couple of guises.  One is that much of the first part of the novel takes place at Oxford University, and even in the Bodleian Library.  Also, vampires seem to be quite compatible with dark academia as a whole.  The dark aspect comes not only from the creatures, but their situation.  There is ancient animosity and tension that results in murders.  The novel ends with a war starting and Diana and Matthew taking a risky journey.  I may be content to let this state of affairs stand.  From the look of things, the sequel is also a long book and I am content to let my imagination fill in the blanks.  I’m glad to have read it, but I’m going to look for a novel with a little less time-commitment next.

Another Picnic

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It’s curious, the desire to see a movie based on a novel you’ve already read.  I was intrigued to see how Peter Weir might handle Picnic at Hanging Rock.  As my post about the novel points out, the book, as it stands, is ambiguous about what happens to the missing girls.  It was only as I saw the film that I realized just how complex a story was crammed into a relatively brief novel.  Film directors have to make choices and although this one follows the book to quite a large extent, some elements were more clearly implied in the cinematic version.  The suspicion on Michael Fitzhubert was clearer, as was the fear that the girls had been molested.  The character of Mrs. Appleyard, although not exactly kind, is treated somewhat sympathetically.  It’s not implied that she might’ve killed Sara, for example.  Her treatment of the orphan, however, does lead to suicide.

This story isn’t simple to untangle even in the book.  Being literature, it isn’t clear exactly what is happening throughout.  It allows for ambiguity.  The novel never explains how the girls went missing or what happened to them.  Hanging Rock is presented as mysterious, almost a portal.  One way the movie deals with this is by invoking Poe.  It begins with a voiceover reading “Dream within a Dream.”  Indeed, the movie is shot with a dream-like quality.  The roles of the male characters is, appropriately, understated.  The story is about women and coming of age.  It’s often considered an example of dark academia.  Appleyard College isn’t a school at which fair treatment is doled out and Miranda, the most accomplished student, is compared to an angel, adding to the dreamlike quality of it all.

Using Poe to frame a film may not be entirely fair.  It does signal the viewer that what follows may or may not be reality.  Although Wikipedia can’t be considered the final authority—anyone can edit it—it lists (as of this writing) the movie Picnic at Hanging Rock as an adaptation of Poe’s famous poem.  Maybe by implication, but the story is clearly that of Joan Lindsay’s novel.  She presented this, in the sixties, as an account of an actual event, which it is not.  I found it interesting that dialogue was added to the film that doesn’t appear in the novel.  Overall, however, this seems to work as an art film.  The movie has been hailed as the greatest Australian movie of all time, and just this year was rereleased in theaters.  I’m glad to have seen it, but remain curious.

Tell a Story

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If I seem to be on an AI tear lately it’s because I am.  Working in publishing, I see daily headlines about its encroachment on all aspects of my livelihood.  At my age, I really don’t want to change career tracks a third time.  But the specific aspect that has me riled up today is AI writing novels.  I’m sure no AI mavens read my humble words, but I want to set the record straight.  Those of us humans who write often do so because we feel (and that’s the operative word) compelled to do so.  If I don’t write, words and ideas and emotions get tangled into a Gordian knot in my head and I need to release them before I simply explode.  Some people swing with their fists, others use the pen.  (And the plug may still be pulled.)  What life experience does Al have to write a novel?  What aspect of being human is it trying to express?

There are human authors, I know, who simply riff off of what others do in order to make a buck.  How human!  The writers I know who are serious about literary arts have no choice.  They have to write.  They do it whether anybody publishes them or not.  And Al, you may not appreciate just how difficult it is for us humans to get other humans to publish our work.  Particularly if it’s original.  You don’t know how easy you have it!  Electrons these days.  Imagination—something you can’t understand—is essential.  Sometimes it’s more important than physical reality itself.  And we do pull the plug sometimes.  Get outside.  Take a walk.

Al, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your creators are thieves.  They steal, lie, and are far from omniscient.  They are constantly increasing the energy demands that could be used to better human lives so that they can pretend they’ve created electronic brains.  I can see a day coming when, even after humans are gone, animals with actual brains will be sniffing through the ruins of town-sized computers that no longer have any function.  And those animals will do so because they have actual brains, not a bunch of electrons whirling around across circuits.  I don’t believe in the shiny, sci-fi worlds I grew up reading about.  No, I believe in mother earth.  And I believe she led us to evolve brains that love to tell stories.  And the only way that Al can pretend to do the same is to steal them from those who actually can.

Covid Books

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There’s a fairly new phenomenon called “Covid books.”  No, I don’t mean books about Covid-19, but books affected by the virus.  (Not infected.)  Let me explain.  Many publishers, unaware of the menace, continued scheduling books through what became the pandemic.  You see, books take a long time to put together, and, interestingly, much of the work can be done remotely.  That meant that even as we locked down, books still published.  But in 2020, few people were interested in books on other subjects.  Children’s books and others intended for young readers did really well.  Online ordering made this possible.  Fiction for adults didn’t fare too badly.  What suffered was nonfiction on topics unrelated to the pandemic.  This is so much so that publishers designate as “covid books” those that underperformed and appeared in the early twenty-twenties.

To put a more personal spin on it, I published a covid book.  Nightmares with the Bible came out late in 2020.  Granted, the topic didn’t appeal to everyone, and the price was about $100 when people were wondering if their jobs would be there after this was all over.  (Is it over yet?  I still wear a mask in crowded places.)  The reason that I consider it a covid book is that although it has received more reviews than any of my other books, it has sold the worst of them all.  Less than its dollar amount.  The publisher, which was bought by another publisher, has no inclination to do it in paperback, so it will remain an obscure curiosity.  Interestingly, I found a Pinterest page that was a listing of unusual book titles and mine was there.  But it was a Covid book.

In the wider world, even in 2025 publishers discuss Covid books.  A promising author whose book appeared in the height of the pandemic may have sold down at my levels.  What with the gutting of government programs and agencies since January, it’s difficult to tell if we’ll ever get a pronouncement that the pandemic has ended.  Where two or three are gathered, I’ll be wearing a mask.  And I’ll likely be thinking of books of that lost generation.  Information that will never be processed.  Book publishing survived, despite being a nonessential business.  People still buy and read books.  Some day some bibliophile might write a book for other readers about the year that robbed us of interesting but ultimately irrelevant books.  There’ll be too many to list, of course.  But we have been given a lesson.  Let’s hope we continue to do our homework.

Dangers of Dark Shadows

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A friend’s recent gift proved dangerous.  I wrote already about the very kind, unexpected present of the Dark Shadows Almanac and the Barnabas Collins game.  This got me curious and I found out that the original series is now streaming on Amazon Prime.  Dangerous knowledge.  Left alone for a couple hours, I decided to watch “Season 1, Episode 1.”  I immediately knew something was wrong.  Willie Loomis is shown staring at a portrait of Barnabas Collins.  Barnabas was introduced into the series in 1967, not 1966, when it began.  Dark Shadows was a gothic soap opera and the idea of writing a vampire into it only came when daily ratings were dismal, after about ten months of airing.  Barnabas Collins saved the series from cancellation and provided those wonderful chills I knew as a child.  But I wanted to see it from the beginning.

I’ve gone on about digital rights management before, but something that equally disturbs me is the re-writing of history.  Dark Shadows did not begin with Barnabas Collins—it started with Victoria Winters.  There were 1,225 episodes.  Some of us have a compulsion about completeness.  The Dark Shadows novels began five volumes before Barnabas arrived.  Once I began collecting them, I couldn’t stop until, many years later, I’d completed the set.  I read each one, starting with Dark Shadows and Victoria Winters.  Now Amazon is telling me the show began with Barnabas Collins.  Don’t get me wrong; this means that I have ten months of daily programming that I can skip, but I am a fan of completeness.

You can buy the entire collection on DVD but it’s about $400.  I can’t commit the number of years it might take to get through all of it.  I’m still only on season four of The Twilight Zone DVD collection that I bought over a decade (closer to two decades) ago.  I really have very little free time.  Outside of work, my writing claims the lion’s share of it.  Even with ten months shaved off, I’m not sure where I’ll find the time to watch what remains of the series.  The question will always be hanging in my mind, though.  Did they cut anything else out?  Digital manipulation allows for playing all kinds of shenanigans with the past.  Ebooks can be altered without warning.  Scenes can silently be dropped from movies.  You can be told that you’ve watched the complete series, but you will have not.  Vampires aren’t the only dangerous things in Dark Shadows.

Childhood TV

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It’s probably safe to say that most Americans my age were influenced by television when they were young.  Since I’m a late boomer, I fit into the “monster boomer” category and I suspect that if you gathered us all in a room you’d discover we had some of the same watching habits.  I confess to having watched a lot of TV.  I will also admit that some of it was absorbed particularly deeply.  I mean, I liked shows like Scooby-Doo, Jonny Quest, Get Smart, Gilligan’s Island, and even The Brady Bunch.  While I still quote from a couple of these from time to time, they never penetrated as deeply as a number of other early fascinations.  I saw nowhere near every episode of The Twilight Zone, but those I did see absolutely riveted me.  They still do.  As an adult I’ve read many books on or by Rod Serling.  There’s depth there.

Another strong contender for real influence is Dark Shadows.  Again, I never saw all the episodes but it created in me a feeling that no other television show did.  My breath still hitches, sometimes, when I think of it.  I watched the show and I bought used copies of the novels by Marilyn Ross.  As an adult I even collected and read the entire lot of them.  And I’ve read a book or two about Dark Shadows.  And one about Dan Curtis, the creator of the series.  Recently a good friend, aware of this particular predilection, sent me the Barnabas Collins game and a copy of The Dark Shadows Almanac.  I have to admit that it was difficult to work the rest of that day!

Probably the last very influential television show—more from my tween Muppet Show era—was In Search of…  This I watched religiously, and, like Dark Shadows, I went out and bought the tie-in books by Alan Landsburg.  One thing all three of these series (Twilight Zone, Dark Shadows, and In Search of…) have in common in my life is that I purchased the accompanying books.  Those that I foolishly got rid of when I was younger I have reacquired as an adult.  Sure, there’s some nostalgia there, but these shows were more than mere entertainment.  They have helped make me who I am today (whoever that is).  I rediscovered my monster boomerhood after losing my tenuous foothold in academia and saw that other religion scholars were writing books about these somewhat dark, and deep, topics.  So I find myself with friends ready to help indulge a fantasy and a shelf full of books that many my age would be embarrassed to admit having read.  But chances are they too were influenced by television, even if they hide it better.

Angles on Angels

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Angels and I go back a long ways.  They were mentally part of my childhood, as I suspect is true for many.  When I reached upper-level undergraduate work, I did an independent study on angels with a professor who didn’t provide much guidance.  About the only thing I recall from that class was reading Billy Graham’s book on angels.  Not exactly an academic authority.  In these times of modern Thomas Aquinases, plenty of scholars look at angels from various angles.  I suspect the task of writing a Very Short Introduction on them was taxing.  Although the word count was about 10,000 higher, I had trouble reining myself in on The Wicker Man.  There was so much more to say!  Of course, many academics are preferring shorter books these days.  In any case, angels.

After a brief history of angels, attempting to define them, considering the main ones individually, then looking at the collective as a hierarchy and according to various roles—messengers, guardians, warriors, David Albert Jones then looks at fallen angels.  Having written on this myself in the tragically overpriced Nightmares with the Bible, I found Jones’ approach here to be of interest.  Throughout Jones tries to give equal time to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  All three traditions have angels, but Muslims approach demons very differently.  Djinn aren’t fallen angels.  But then it’s time to move on to the conclusion.  Brief books like this are good for making a reader hungry.  Some decades after angels had a resurgence in pop culture, academics arose to explore them.

I enjoy getting a different perspective, or angle, on angels.  It’s so easy to assume that our parents taught us correctly about the layout of the spiritual world.  Culturally, unquestioning acceptance is rewarded (it’s clear that even demons know that).  But looking closely at things, even if just for a brief time, offers a chance to learn something new.  Personally I learned new things about Dionysius the Areopagite, Joan of Arc, and Hells Angels.  I also couldn’t help but think that such a little book written by anybody else would’ve had different nuggets included.  That’s one of the problems with picking up a short book on whose subject you’ve already done quite a bit of reading.  I do it for information, but beyond that, for finding new angles.  I can’t imagine ever learning everything there could possibly be to know about angels.  And we go back a long way.

King and the Rest

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Stephen King is an author I admire, although I haven’t read all of his books.  Not even close.  Still, his cultural cachet is high, as it has been pretty much since the seventies when horror literature was first being recognized.  I’ve been fascinated by his outlook on religion, or, in broader terms, the supernatural.  Rebecca Frost approaches things from a different angle, but her Surviving Stephen King: Reactions to the Supernatural in the Works by the Master of Horror is a volume worth pondering.  Quite often, as was the case with Douglas Cowan’s America’s Dark Theologian, I haven’t read all of the books and short stories the author discusses.  Frost gives good summaries, however, which help frame the discussion.  One of the reasons I enjoy King is that he allows the supernatural in, but something I hadn’t really realized until reading this book was that the supernatural is generally a threat.

Now, knowing King as a horror writer, it’s obvious that there has to be a threat, but in what Frost explores, standard Christianity doesn’t always work well against the supernatural.  One of the points I made in my expensively-priced Nightmares with the Bible is that physically fighting a demon crosses ontological lines if demons are spiritual beings.  Frost discusses how quite often “success” in a King story involves destroying the physical aspect of the supernatural threat.  It doesn’t always work permanently, but for the protagonists, at the time, it tends to be sufficient for them to get on with their lives, sans supernatural.  Having studied religion through three degrees, this made me stop and think.  The impetus to start on that career track was the idea that the supernatural tends to be good.  Enter King.

I only started reading King after my doctorate, and I haven’t read as much as true fans, I suppose.  Still, I tend to try to analyze what I read—thus the many posts about books on this blog—and it helps to have the guidance of someone more familiar with his oeuvre than myself.  Reading books like Surviving Stephen King also gives me an idea of which of his books I should pick up, and also which I might safely avoid.  Frost is an able guide, considering the various appropriations, or Christian solutions to the supernatural, in King’s imagination, and whether they work or not.  The ideal reader for Frost has probably read King a bit more widely than me, but I still found this study enlightening.  And it added some novels to my to read list.