On October

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October has come quickly this year.  September was quite transitional.  Mostly pleasant, but we shivered through the recent sunless days of the nor-easter around here.  Between work and full weekends, I wish the approach of my favorite month could feel more regal.  I know die-hard horror fans watch movies in that genre every night of this month.  My schedule won’t allow it, and I’ve been so busy that I’ve fallen behind on movie watching.  Most of the time the movies I discuss on this blog are ones I’ve seen the previous month or two.  It seems I have lots of other things to write about.  And I’ve been trying to step up my reading this year.  Goodreads tells me I’ve finished sixty books so far in 2026.  And so October snuck up on me.

For scholars of religion, and those of us who pretend to be such, October starts in earnest the planning for the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting.  It will be in Denver this year.  Last time it was there I shivered the whole time.  A colleague recently asked me to contribute to a volume on Ugarit.  I had to decline, being so out of date.  I could’ve said, “My mind is preoccupied with October.”  Horror movies and Halloween.  The changing of the leaves.  Jacket weather and reading gothic novels.  Pumpkins and apples. October is the month when many in this climate feel that they come alive, just in time for the darkness and cold of winter to settle in.

For many years I’ve been pondering the spirituality of the dark.  I don’t mean “dark powers” or Satanism or anything like that.  I mean the restorative, contemplative nature of being in the dark half of the year.  Since the equinox it’s been more dark than light.  We spend half of each year in this way.  Instead of cursing the dark, it seems to make sense to try to find its spiritual benefits.  In the Middle Ages monks used to awake in the night to say their prayers.  Even today spiritual writers occasionally venture into the realm of asking what we might learn to appreciate in the dark.  October’s a good time to think about such things.  Others have also begun to explore the spirituality of horror films.  This began to occur to me, in rudimentary ways, when I was a student in seminary.  So suddenly October is here.  Hopefully it will have some time tucked away for reflection.  Between watching horror movies, of course.

Heavenly Scent

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There’s a disappointing scent to books printed on demand.  Upon first opening them, they release a waft of laser printer.  The friendly smell of offset printing is banished.  I need to qualify that, however.  While teaching at Nashotah House I acquired a book via interlibrary loan that I remember not for its content, but for its unpleasant odor.  I’m not sure if it was the paper used, but the book smelled unpleasing.  Almost too offensive to read.  I’m not referring to the kind of musty, basement bouquet that some used books, long stored, possess.  No, that aroma isn’t offensive.  It suggests both mystery and the human condition.  How books smell is important.  Upon recently opening a POD (print on demand) book, I was transported to office work rather than the musty study of a scholar.

There are companies that sell scented candles intended to suggest libraries.  Libraries smell wonderful.  The small Franklin Public Library in my hometown has a wonderful, evocative aroma.  I remember it well from childhood.  On a visit to my mother before she passed, my wife, daughter, and I took her to that library.  We didn’t check anything out.  I simply had to smell it again.  Olfactory stimulus is very personal.  Indeed, in polite company we tend not to comment on how a person smells unless it is particularly pleasant.  “Nice perfume/aftershave, etc.”  (You have to be very close to a person to comment on less pleasant odors.) Scent has always been an important sense to me.  I like to sniff things.  When I’m out jogging first thing in the morning, I snuff the air like a bloodhound, eager for the first whiffs of fall during the heat of summer.  Like a dog I tend to think there are no bad smells, but there are some I don’t seek out.  Smells will take you back to the past, as the ultimate time travel.

In my mother’s kitchen I used to sit by her spice drawer and pull out each little bottle and jar to sniff them.  She never had anything as pungent as the asafoetida that my wife and I once bought for a recipe, but I recall those moments fondly.  Mom would be cooking nearby, and it seemed to me that I was smelling far away places that I’d never go.  I did make it to Scotland, however.  Edinburgh often smelled of the McEwan’s brewery.  At least the Old Town did on many a foggy morning.  We live not far from a micro-brewery and when its bouquet escapes, it take me straight back to Auld Reekie.  And, of course, Edinburgh was full of books and their distinctive smell.  All of this makes me want to go plant my nose in a book.

Serious Series

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The Carnivorous Carnival continues to reveal more of the Baudelaires’ unanswered questions.  At the Caligari Carnival the orphans disguise themselves to fit into a freak show, and meet Madame Lulu, who reveals important information—the V.F.D. has split into two parties.  The children still don’t learn what the initials stand for, but they discover that some of the influential adults in their lives were part of it.  The story grows quite gripping and more seriously dark than I remembered it being when I read it to our daughter many years ago.  One of Count Olaf’s associates isn’t mentioned after The Hostile Hospital, where presumably they died.  In this volume, another of his associates is thrown to the lions that give the book its title.

I couldn’t help but think of Daniel in the lion’s den as I read this one.  And Olaf’s plan is only too eagerly lapped up by the crowd wanting to see violence (and sloppy eating).  The reference to Daniel here can’t be coincidence.  The story also has the children questioning their own motivations.  Are they villains too?  Madame Lulu was a good member of V.F.D. who’d turned bad.  The children helped her reform, but in the end she betrayed them to Count Olaf.  Were their motives really pure?  For the first time in a Series of Unfortunate Events, the orphans end up separated at the end.  Neither Mr. Poe nor the Quagmire Triplets appear in this part of the tale.  It does seem, as noted, darker than usual.

Daniel Handler continues his subtle talking over the heads of children, though.  When explaining “déjà vu” for children, he gives other examples such as “ennui” and “la petite mort.”  The latter he explains that it’s a feeling that part of you has died, but Handler certainly knows that the common usage for the phrase is a circumlocution for “orgasm.”  Something many adults know as well, I suspect.  And there is humor for younger readers as well.  The “freaks” with whom the orphans share their job at the carnival provide some comic relief.  As an adult reading the books for myself, I get the feeling that, by this far into the series the story—while remaining pure fantasy—is aimed more at older readers.  It’s amazing what you can forget over the course of a couple of decades.  I trusted Lemony Snicket all those years ago, not to write anything that would seriously disturb our child.  I still trust him as an adult as I look forward to book ten.

Early Romance

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One of the more recent fascinations for me has been the fateful meeting of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont, and John William Polidori that took place in the summer of 1816.  That gathering famously led Mary, later Mary Shelley, to write Frankenstein and Polidori to compose “The Vampyre,” based on an idea of Byron.  Daisy Hay casts her net a bit further in Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives.  Particularly, Hay considers the often unsung role of Leigh Hunt, a young journal publisher, who brought together a coterie of creatives that included Byron and Shelley (although those two met later), but also John Keats and a host of others.  Romanticism pervades this group with Keats, Shelley, and Byron all dying young.  (And Polidori as well, but he’s not really much in Hay’s narrative.)  These three poets threw a very long shadow.  As recently when I was in school, we still learned about them.

In my reading over the past many months Leigh Hunt’s name had naturally come up, but I never considered looking more into him.  He never achieved the fame of his circle, and he fell out of favor by writing an account of Byron that was unkind to the poet, even as his posthumous star was in the ascent.  This account makes for fascinating reading.  Shelley and Hunt shared the scandal of marrying and having the sisters of their wives live with them.  Victorians would, of course, assume something improper was happening.  Byron, it was well known, had many affairs, including one with his half-sister.  People love gossip and even though Hunt’s sister-in-law, Beth Kent, made a name for herself publishing books on plants, both she and Claire—the other women—have largely been ignored.  Claire outlived everyone in the circle apart from the late interloper Edward Trelawny, who cast himself as a fast friend of Shelley and Byron.

Hay does an excellent job of pulling all of this together.  The lives are indeed tangled.  Of course, relationships in general are quite tangled.  This book begins with Hunt and pretty much ends with him.  Hay provides some previously unpublished notes from Claire and has to bring the story to a close with Trelawny.  Historically he was the last survivor.  He was also known in his lifetime for making up incredible stories about himself.  I’ve read his account of Shelley and Byron’s deaths.  That book, with its dark academia vibes, may have been the first I read on this fascination.  It’s been with me, however, at least since 1987.  And it will likely continue.

Class Privilege

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A recent article in the New York Times explores something many of us know from experience: your hopes of getting tenure in higher education plummet if you’re from the working class.  One of the causes the article points out (I think I can gift it, if anyone wants to read it), is that working class folks don’t learn networking from their parents.  That was like a lightbulb being switched on.  Schmoozing is so essential when dealing with anyone in power.  I started to learn this at Nashotah House.  My mother taught me always to be honest and forthright.  Employers have walked all over me ever since.  I never learned to schmooze well.  I still don’t do it.  Until reading this article, in my sixties, I didn’t realize that my academic career was doomed from the start.

It’s like this: neither of my parents finished high school.  I grew up poor and working class.  My grades were great throughout high school and college and I was being groomed to be a minister, not an academic.  But I felt the call of academia as soon as I’d acclimated to Grove City College.  I love reading and learning.  I have innate curiosity.  I question everything.  This seems to fit teaching better than preaching.  Before settling on a doctoral institution, I asked my professors where I should go.  Their advice: Europe.  Bad mistake for pre-internet days and a kid who knew nothing about networking.  Edinburgh is a world-class research university.  Its only real connection (at the time) to US schools was Princeton.  Particularly Princeton Seminary, if your degree was from New College.  Otherwise, the professors didn’t pay much mind to American higher education.  Networking, which I didn’t realize you needed to do, wasn’t emphasized or encouraged.

I was hired by Nashotah House because of two factors: they could find nobody else, and I was Episcopalian.  The chances of networking while at a remote, conservative campus in the woods were nil.  I went to conferences, but Ugaritology was a very small field.  I remained an unknown.  I wondered how my friends, if they ran into unemployment situations, always managed to find other jobs.  They knew, apparently, something I did not.  Networking.  Even getting into publishing was rocky for me.  I had two editorial posts for two years only.  I didn’t network or schmooze.  Authors loved me because I was honest and forthright.  Those are working class values.  And, it seems, they will be deficits to advancing in your career.  Be careful before deciding on a doctorate.  It can backfire unless your parents went to college and taught you what to do.

Read Everything

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I’m aware that I don’t think like other people.  This can lead to a strange kind of loneliness at times.  It might also explain why my books never seem to grow wings.  One specific example prompts this post.  When I get interested in a topic, I read every book I can get ahold of on it.  I guess I always think other people are the same way.  Rationally, I realize that’s largely not true.  Many people will read a book, maybe two, and move on.  A certain kind of brain, however, insists that the information must be tested, and tested again.  I’ve written enough nonfiction books to know that each one is an opinion.  There are those who differ in their outlook.  Who would interpret the same evidence differently.  And unless there’s just one book on a topic (it happens!) I’m always inclined to read another.

That came in handy for writing A Reassessment of Asherah.  That was my dissertation, of course.  I read everything written on the old girl that I could lay my hands on.  (Since this was before the electronics revolution, it was a hands-on experience.)  Of course, a doctoral program is the rare chance to undertake that kind of research without having to work at some kind of menial job, or have class prep and grading to do.  Or working at a 9-2-5.  Now I have to be selective regarding how much I read on a topic.  Not having use of a university library, it often means things I can afford.  Reading may be fundamental, but it doesn’t come cheap.  And I see other books, with perhaps minimal cited sources, selling much better than mine.  Again, I don’t think like other people do.

There’s an invisible line at about $19 over which a book is relegated to rabid fans only.  One of my books was priced at $22 when it came out, and I had people at a speaking event apologize that it was just a bit too much to pay.  The going rate then was $16 for most books (it has crept up a couple dollars since then).  Six dollars can make a difference.  For academic publishers, of course, you need to add an extra hundred to make up for the lack of sales.  I wonder why?  In this respect I think like others who publish with academic presses.  We may realize our books aren’t bestsellers, but we know a few more people would buy them if they were priced down in the range of other books.  I guess other people think about books primarily as money-making products rather than the outpouring of an individual’s thoughts and energy.  Depends how you think about it.

Adult Events

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The best children’s material contains winks for adults.  Those of us who grew up with Looney Tunes and then watched them when we were older know that to be true.  I’d forgotten some of the gems in A Series of Unfortunate Events.  The Hostile Hospital has the Baudelaire orphans wanted for murder, Count Olaf thought to be dead, and the children volunteering at a hospital.  A hostile one.  When Lemony Snicket describes one of his hiding places, he notes that it’s in “the Cathedral of the Alleged Virgin.”  That one elicited a full-blown grin.  Another lemony snicker emerged when two of Count Olaf’s associates get to arguing only to stop and acknowledge that they shouldn’t let their personal issues interfere with their work.  Such an adult scenario indeed.

As far as the story goes, this eighth volume is closely connected with the seventh, The Vile Village, in that the children remain under the suspicion of murder.   This began in book seven and carries on here, adding further tension to the tale.  No Mr. Poe comes to their “rescue.”  As the children hide in the eponymous hospital, they discover a sliver of a clue about their parents as they find a photo of them along with Jacques and Lemony Snicket.  Jacques, of course, had died in the last book.  There’s also a new false lead on V.F.D. with the Volunteers Fighting Disease providing comic relief throughout the tale.  And comic relief is probably necessary for kids, since the story does get darker.  Chapter 11 is hilarious, with Olaf’s associates trying to pretend at being doctors, even as the story takes a serious turn.

The children have their hopes ignited that one of their parents survived the fire.  Lemony Snicket enters a little further into the story.  The Baudelaires are now wanted for both murder and arson.  And they can only escape by hiding in the trunk of Count Olaf’s car.  This is the first book in the series where the children don’t actually see Olaf but only hear his voice.  Of course, he’s still following them.  The Quagmire triplets don’t appear in this volume either, having been whisked away (rescued) at the end of The Vile Village.  Re-reading these books as an adult has been a fascinating exercise.  Daniel Handler is certainly a clever, and entertaining writer.  Of course, the events in the book are silly enough for children, and some of the humor is effective even for adults.  Some of the action is too.  There’s pleasure in re-reading some kid lit, especially as an adult.

Waking Up

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Moody, gothic, and intriguing.  These are words that might describe The Awakening.  It’s also an ambiguous, somewhat confusing ghost story.  To discuss this some spoilers will be necessary, so please be advised.  When you’re on the lookout for a movie to watch on an afternoon when staying awake is a struggle (which, in all honesty, is just about every afternoon), on a weekend I’ll open my long list of movies to see and compare it against what’s streaming for free on the couple of services I pay for.  Seldom do the list and offerings coincide at all.  In any case, when I find something off-list that looks intriguing I usually check IMDb to see how many stars it’s earned.  On some streaming services four out of five stars will translate to three out of ten on IMDb.  The Awakening had 6.5, which is pretty good.

So, set just after the First World War, Florence Cathcart is a seance buster who doesn’t believe in ghosts and who’s written a book debunking the whole thing.  She’s then invited to a boarding school where a ghost has been frightening the boys, one of them to death.  Her own past is deeply repressed, however.  So deeply that she has a screen memory of an event that never happened to mask it.  After setting up all her equipment she does find evidence of the inexplicable.  Robert Mallory, a teacher and wounded veteran, believes in ghosts.  He says that those who went through the war see them.  He and Florence fall in love—her fiancé was killed in the war—and during the school holiday, she’s left alone with him, Maud the housekeeper, and one student.  Here come the spoilers…

The one boy left behind is the ghost of her step-brother.  Florence grew up in that house and Maud was the housekeeper, and mother of the boy.  Her unhinged father killed Florence’s mother and was trying to shoot her as well but accidentally shot his son by the housemaid.  He then killed himself.  Florence has to remember her past to realize she’s been seeing ghosts she doesn’t believe in.  It’s an eerie film but the plot is bit confusing.  It brings religion into the story, and even the Bible.  The tale of Holofernes’ beheading from Judith is represented in a painting.  Her debunking book is kept next to the Bible.  By the end we’re asking ourselves if Florence is a ghost.  This is a good, spooky film.  A bit ambitious, but it gets more stars than the usual freebie on a sleepy afternoon.

Unlikely Heroes

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I discovered Vicious by V. E. Schwab on a list of dark academia novels.  I’m glad I did.  The dark academia comes in because the protagonist Victor and antagonist Eli meet in college.  Eli has already stolen Victor’s girlfriend, and he has a thesis idea that postulates EOs (Extra Ordinaries) gain their ability from near death experiences (NDEs).  Determined to prove this, he and Victor try to kill each other, with consent, so that they can be revived to see if they have special abilities.  They do.  Victor’s parents, self-help book writers, have no time for him while Eli is very religious.  They soon become enemies.  Victor’s ability is controlling pain, both his own and that of others.  Eli can heal nearly instantaneously from any injury.  Ten years later Victor is in jail and Eli has become religiously convinced that he has to kill EOs.  He finds a college woman who controls minds and together they get away with murder.

The book is quite well written.   I’ve read plenty of novels that were a plod to get through, but this one never lost my interest.  The tension builds to a pretty high level at some points.  And yes, there is blood.  I think dark academia is an appropriate classification here, and perhaps low fantasy.  There are horror elements, but the abilities of the EOs make it feel like a superhero movie.  Thoughts of The X-Men kept coming back.  In any case, Victor escapes from prison with his cellmate and goes on the hunt for Eli, who’s been systematically murdering EOs because they go against God’s laws.  They discover Sydney who has an ability on which the entire story turns.  With the page-turning power of a thriller, Vicious was a book I always looked forward to picking up again.

I’m not going to give any spoilers here—the novel is well worth reading.  I was intrigued by the way Schwab used the religion angle to motivate the killer.  Those who come back from death, the plot suggests, have something missing that was there before.  This, combined with his religion, gives Eli the motive for killing.  Of course, his morals were problematic to begin with.  Selfish and narcissistic, he ignores Victor’s needs from the beginning.  Even when being saved by the woman who controls minds, he’s never grateful.  Religious but completely oblivious to his own moral failings, he develops a God complex.  This adds a depth to what might otherwise be simply a speculative action story.  With, of course, dark academia stylings.

Everything Theory

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Many years ago I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.  More recently in time, I’ve become a fan of dark academia in several of its forms.  One of those forms is the biopic of famous, often challenged, academics.  The Theory of Everything is offered as such a biopic.  The darkness is, of course, Hawking’s Motor Neuron Disease.  The movie was critically acclaimed, and watching it made me think it was from before a time when academia fell under sustained fire from various governments.  So much of what we know of the world, indeed, the universe, derives from those rare individuals paid to pursue the life of the mind and take the rest of us the places they discovered.  In the case of Hawking, it seems that without his tragic disease his fame may well have never taken off.  Few people, in my experience, are really interested in physics or cosmology.

The movie, of course, dramatizes the life of Stephen and Jane Hawking.  It deftly focuses on the dynamics and strains of their relationship.  The academic part also plays a role, of course, but this is more of a personal story.   As usual, such films make me miss the academic life I’ve been denied.  I was never good enough at math to manage a career in the sciences.  Some of us have brains that focus much more clearly on the humanities (which, of course, sustain the heaviest fire from critics, despite being the grounds upon which higher education itself was founded).  Many, if not most, dark academia biopics focus on scientists or mathematicians.  Perhaps their lives are naturally more dramatic.  Their discoveries are more often newsworthy.  (Newsworthiness is, however, not the sole measure of importance.)  I’m wandering off topic (how human of me!); this is a very good movie.  It does play off of the fact that Hawking’s atheism was a bit of a difficulty for Jane’s Anglicanism.  Interestingly enough, she was a humanities student and did, in real life, earn her doctorate in literature.  Hers, while not as famous, would also be a life worthy of dark academic exploration.  

The acting in The Theory of Everything is pretty incredible.  And the film does make you interested in learning more about these very human people caught in a tragic, but somewhat heroic, situation.  Ironically, the religion and science fields perhaps come closest in cosmology.  This shows up in the final lines of A Brief History of Time, and continues to be a point of discussion in academia, both dark and light.

Books and Years

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Someone, somewhere, on some social media post pondered whether to divest themselves of their yearbooks.  For those of us who try to make sense of our lives, that would seem like a foolhardy thing to do.  It happens that for a project I needed to check something in my Grove City College senior yearbook.  A couple of unexpected things happened.  One was that I found a poster for a Larry Norman concert I attended tucked inside the cover.  I’d forgotten that I had the poster, although I remember parts of the concert quite well.  Including getting to meet Larry Norman in person.  At that point in my life he was the most famous person with whom I’d ever shook hands and talked.  The second thing is I realized that my years at GCC represent the beginning of an ultra-right conservative shift.  For the school, not for me.  You can tell through yearbooks.

Grove City was always a conservative place.  Even I (very naive at the time) was surprised to learn that the yearbooks was called Ouija.  Evangelicals know that an ouija board is a demonic gateway.  I did ask about it and found out that the title simply came from the French and German words for “yes.”  Nothing Spiritualist about it.  I’ve come to doubt that explanation.  The idea of learning your future love/spouse has been associated ouija boards for generations.  Indeed, looking back at yearbooks, unless you’re one of those people who married a high school or college sweetheart, is a romp through early crushes.  Some of the women I dated, or tried to date in college, populate its pages.  For me college was really one of the first steps in growing up.  I was hopelessly naive in high school.  So yearbooks and romance go together.

My freshman year the yearbook was changed its longterm name.  My copy still has Ouija on the cover, but thereafter it would be only The Bridge.  This too was a romance-inspired title since the tradition was that you couldn’t be called a “Grover” until you’d been kissed (heterosexually, of course) on Rainbow Bridge.  (I wasn’t a Grover until my senior year.)  I have to wonder if this wasn’t part of a growing conservatism that has made the college so right-wing today.  We’d gone from Ouija to Bridge, still predicting whom it might be that we’d wed.  I keep in touch with very few fellow Grove City students.  A couple are Facebook friends, but most have gone their own way and I went mine.  For many, I suspect, if they bothered to crack open their yearbooks, they would be shocked to learn this former classmate prefers Ouija to Bridge now, these many years later. 

Monster Frankenstein

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There have been any number of film adaptations of Frankenstein.  Guillermo del Toro, as an auteur, has a distinctive style.  I wan’t quite sure how well the two might mix.  I’d been avoiding his 2025 Frankenstein for that reason and because it’s two-and-a-half hours long.  Even rainy weekends don’t always have that big a block of time to spare.  When I finally found the time I found it an interesting departure from Mary Shelley’s story, but, as with most del Toro films, well made.  And the Bible appears in it as well.  This, of course, is part of the whole horror mystique.  Other versions of Frankenstein have played with the idea of the creature’s superior strength but del Toro adds the distinct element that Victor Frankenstein’s creation can’t die.  When he’s killed, he recovers.  He becomes the unstoppable pursuer.

The movie also makes clear that Victor is the real monster.  It is he who kills Elizabeth and then blames it on his creation.  Likewise, when his benefactor is accidentally killed, Victor blames the creature.  The dialogue focuses on religion and death—the Bible reference isn’t gratuitous—and in an interview del Toro noted that Frankenstein is, for him, religion.  Like many del Toro horror films, it doesn’t share the feel of much of modern horror.  For example, there are no jump startles and the presentation is more like a drama or adventure movie than it is a horror one.  There is gore, however, and a monster, both of which place it into the expected category.

Another theme that runs through this rendition of the iconic horror story is that of reconciling with a problematic father.  Victor’s father is cruel and demanding.  He, in turn, becomes cruel and demanding with his creature.  Both “fathers” believe they have the right to dictate the future of their sons.  Victor, while brilliant, is emotionally poorly equipped for his role as surrogate parent.  In the end the creature reconciles with his imperfect but repentant dying father.  With large themes such as this, and the religion and death dialogue, it’s natural enough that this movie attained critical recognition.  And the acting is sincere, with characteristic del Toro sympathy for the monster.  Both monsters, in this version.  The creature and Victor both undergo a kind of redemption by the end of it all.  While not emotionally wrenching—the basic storyline is perhaps too well-known for that—this is a monster film with heart.  This is, of course, a del Toro hallmark.

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.

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.

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.