Cloistered

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Free will.  I’ll go on the record as a proponent.  Any kind of determinism gives me the willies.  At times, however, it does feel as if we’re merely pawns.  Katy Hays deals with the concept of fate, and the occult world of tarot, in The Cloisters.  The writing is quite compelling and the story moves along at a good pace.  It follows Ann, a graduate from eastern Washington who wants to get away from the town where her father was killed.  She accepts the offer of a summer program at the Met in New York City, but because of a mix-up ends up at the Cloisters instead.  I’ve never actually been to the Cloisters, but this novel makes me want to go.  At this museum of Medieval and Renaissance art, Ann works with Rachel, another assistant, Leo, a gardener, and the curator, Patrick.

Rachel has been at the Cloisters for some time and Patrick, her boss, has become enamored of tarot decks and their history.  He’s been seeking perhaps the oldest complete deck known and has come to believe that perhaps the cards do have the ability to tell the future.  Ann befriends Rachel.  The two begin to make discoveries, particularly Ann, but Rachel, who is independently wealthy, manipulates her, taking advantage of the fact that Ann never wants to return home.  Then Patrick is poisoned.  I won’t reveal whodunnit here, but the last half of the book has several twists that make you reassess whatever conclusions you may have drawn.  It’s a fascinating story, well told.

This novel is another example of dark academia.  Much of it takes place in the library of the Cloisters and Patrick holds a Ph.D. while Rachel is a graduate student.  Ann is about to enter a doctoral program.  All of them have some fairly dark secrets in their lives.  And all of them are driven.  The story has elements of social commentary as well, particularly concerning how life in New York City will drive people to extremes when the competition makes this necessary to survive.  Although three of the four commit crimes, they are all likable people.  Three of them are academics as well.  All four are quite intelligent.  I was drawn into this tale from the start and even as the darkness was revealed couldn’t bring myself to dislike any of the characters.  Some novels have antiheroes that you just can’t feel for.  The Cloisters moves in the other direction, and it does make you wonder just how much choice you actually have and how much is left to fate.

Learning Bunnies

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Although it was released during the first Trump administration, Jojo Rabbit was written before he was sharp bit of dust in the GOP’s eye.  Still, in the second debacle, it seemed like a good time to watch it.  Its message is appropriate for any time, but especially now.  Jojo is a ten-year-old boy who’s an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth.  So enthusiastic that he has Hitler as his imaginary friend.  He buys the party line without even thinking (he who has ears to hear, let him hear).  Jews are evil, according to the rhetoric.  Monsters even.  Jojo’s mother tries to help her son, missing his father, understand that love is the better way.  Then Jojo discovers something.  A girl his deceased sister’s age has been living in the walls of his sister’s room.  He quickly deduces that she is a Jew.  Were it not for her threats to implicate him and his mother, he would turn her in.

An unusual coming of age story, we see Jojo do something rare—he matures.  Getting to know Elsa he can’t reconcile what he sees with what he was taught.  She’s not evil.  She has no horns.  She’s not rich.  She fell in love with a guy and wants the same thing anyone wants.  The conflict faces Jojo every day as he decides he must learn about Jews to report this intelligence to the authorities.  The authorities, however, know Germany is losing the war.  It’s only a matter of days.  When Hitler dies by suicide, Jojo fully realizes that he has been simply following along instead of following the evidence.  His mother was hanged for not being loyal to the party and his father, he learns, was also helping the Jews.  In a moment of singular hope, Jojo grows up.

Movies can teach lessons.  Some are widely enough viewed to make a major impact on society.  Can any of us imagine a world without Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker?  In this era when sensible people seem to have forgotten that fascism is evil in its nature, films like Jojo Rabbit are important.  Thinking is not a crime.  Learning is not a crime.  Even if they’re being touted that way by the wealthy in order to protect their privilege.  We watched the movie for entertainment on a Friday night, but I received an education instead.  I wonder just when the message of love fell out of Christianity.  But then, I think it becomes clear when you think about particular movies and how we’ve come to be where we are.

Contours of Dark Academia

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As I attempt to trace the contours of dark academia, I’m learning that much of my reading has been classified that way by others.  My main engine for discovering this is Goodreads, making me think I should shelve my own books more.  Also, I recently visited a local Barnes and Noble where one of the front tables was dedicated to dark academia.  Looking over the titles gave me fiction reading ideas for months.  In any case, apart from classical dark academia, where the setting is an institution of higher, or specialized learning, the category for many includes books about books.  This would pull in titles such as Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, which I read before my current conscious interest in the genre.  I think I was looking for gothic books back then.  I include, on my personal list, books about students with dark experiences, such as Familiar Spirit by Lisa Tuttle.

The books about books category does shed some insight.  I love Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, but it’s not really dark enough to be, well, dark academia.  I understand the critique that dark academia tells stories of privilege, but that dissipates somewhat when including books about books.  Higher education is, and remains, a domain of privilege, but it is possible for those raised poor (such as yours truly) to break in.  I enjoyed higher education throughout the eighties and into the aughties.  After that it began to get far too political and business-oriented.  (Not that I wouldn’t go back if I had half a chance.  Or even a quarter.)  My point is, dark academia can deal with those who lack privilege, but I also believe there’s no point in denying privilege does exist.  And opens doors.

Dark academia is new enough that its parameters are permeable.  To me the real draw is that a fair bit of sculduggery really does exist in higher education.  The reading public seems eager for it.  Thinking of all the odd, somewhat tenebrous things that occurred in the course of my couple of decades in academia, the genre rings true to me as well.  As I think back over the books I’ve read, I think maybe I should build a shelf especially for dark academia.  I’m trying to read in it more intentionally now, but I’ve been unintentionally exploring it for decades.  When you add books about books, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose joins the crowd, and I read that one all the way back in seminary.  I tried to be part of academia, but there’s a darkness about an unrequited love, and so it just makes sense to me.

Institutionalized

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When movies set out to present a different period, a bit of historical research can go a long way.  Someone like Robert Eggers offers such verisimilitude that you feel like you were at the intended time.  Others are less successful.  The Institute claims to be based on true events, and, apparently human trafficking did take place at the Rosewood Institute for a number of years.  The movie, however, gets many period details wrong and suffers from a labyrinthian story.  Also, it is shot so dark that even with brightness at full it’s difficult to tell what’s happening much of the time.  So what are these allegedly true events?  Wealthy women are admitted to the fashionable institute to recover from mental stresses.  At least that’s why Isabella Porter is there.  Drugged by the fictional Aconite Society, she is trained to be impervious to pain, erase her identity, and believe she is fictional characters to act in plays.  A strange premise.

Her brother suspects something is wrong, but under the influence of wolf’s bane, Isabella kills him.  The women are repeatedly tortured and dehumanized, ultimately to be sold to the wealthiest elites of Baltimore as slaves.  The true part of the true events is quite slim, and it’s never explained why Isabella is trained to believe that she’s Young Goodman Brown, and paired off with another woman as his wife Faith.  Also, there are Satanists involved.  With all the stops pulled out, the whole begins to sound rather silly.  It’s unfortunate since there does seem to be the core of a good idea here.  It needs a little less rather than more.

If all the storylines came together into a coherent whole, there might’ve been some takeaway.  As it is, layers of a secret society cover other layers and when you get to the center there’s nothing there.  Movies about mental institutions are difficult to pull off well, particularly when they’re based on true stories.  While a wolf-bane drinking society of the uber-wealthy does sound plausible, it leaves unanswered why they want their female patients to act out stories when they could easily afford to attend plays with professional actors.  ’Tis difficult to fathom.  The satanic aspect is never really explained but again, I wouldn’t put it past the rich.  The acting is good, from what I could see of it, except for the institute’s doctors, all of whom were woodenly portrayed.  Perhaps this was intended to be a parable, or maybe a retelling of “Young Goodman Brown.”  There was a bit of Poe thrown in as well, so all was not completely wasted.

Deep Backlist

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It’s kind of a personal archaeology.  Exploring the terrain of one’s own mind, that is.  Back in January, I mentioned my “deep backlist,” which is actually my “to read” list stored on an online book vendor site.  When it comes time to buy (or provide a gift request for) a new book, this list is my first stop.  I started the list in 2010.  Since I’m cautious about book buying (believe it or not), there are many items on that list that never got purchased.  And if I go back far enough, I have to confess to myself, there are books I really don’t want to read anymore.  At least not at this time.  That list, however, is a snapshot of my interests at the time an item was entered.  I don’t delete things from it unless I actually get them.  Life has taught me that when interests fade it’s usually not permanent.

Sometimes I think I should be more intentional about my reading.  When I was writing Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, I was adding lots of books related to the subject.  Many of them came off the list as I purchased and read them, but not all.  Although I’m currently involved in my next writing project or two, I don’t remove the remaining Sleepy Hollow-inspired books because I may well, depending on length of life, come back to them.  The same is true of all my books from Holy Horror on.  Depending on where I am on that list, I can tell what book I was working on, and not a few that never got finished.  An accountant once told me that if you are writing books to earn money (as paltry as those earnings may be), the books you buy may be tax write-offs as business expenses.  Such is the mind of capitalism.

My wishlist is a personal archaeology of some poignancy.  It took me many years after being shunted out of academia (no matter how dark) before I found employment stable enough to allow for me to start writing books again.  Weathering the Psalms was started around 1997 or 1998.  It was published in 2014.  Even after that it took a couple years to realize that I could write Holy Horror.  And there are other books that, if I’m honest with myself, I know I won’t have time to write or finish.  I find scrolling through my “deep backlist” an inspiring but melancholy exercise.  We all have layers, and strangely enough, even the books that we wanted to read, or just remember, can speak volumes about who we are.

Dead Darlings

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The thing about being a writer is that there’s no one size fits all.  I watched Kill Your Darlings because it is an example of dark academia, or so it’s sometimes presented.  I have read some Beat Generation writers, but the movie made me feel very ignorant of that aspect of American counter-culture.  The movie is based on true events and such things as coincidences of writers always makes me feel terribly alone.  In case you don’t know the story (I didn’t) Allen Ginsberg came under the influence of Lucien Carr at Columbia.  Carr had been surviving at the university by the writing of his one-time lover David Kammerer.  Carr introduces Ginsberg to William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and the four (excluding Kammerer) kick off what would become much of the Beats.  Carr, however, kills Kammerer and Ginsberg, who has become Carr’s lover, must decide what to do.

Ginsberg grew up in a broken home, as did Carr.  I could relate to their feelings of loss.  Of course, the Beats relied on drugs and alcohol and sex to write, breaking the rules of institutions like Columbia.  Now that I’ve written my “million words” (and more), posted for free on this blog, I think back to my literary friends.  Both in high school and college I knew guys (I was awkward with girls) who dreamed, or at least talked, of becoming writers.  Over the years this pool has dried up.  Seminary and doctoral study were too focused to find those who really wanted to write.  Academic books, maybe, but not forms of self-expression.  Now, I’ve never used drugs, nor have I wanted to.  I write nonfiction books that are creative forms of self-expression.  Naturally, they don’t sell.

Many of us who write were raised in broken homes.  With tattered dreams we set out to try to make something of our lives in a hostile world.  My behavior in college wasn’t exactly conventional, as any of my roommates could attest.  It often appeared that way on the outside, even as poems rejected from the literary magazine were called “too depressing.”  So I pursued an academic career, but there was, whether anybody saw in or not, always a wink in my eye.  The same is true of my writing since.  This blog scratches the surface.  There’s a huge pile of fiction, and yes, poems, underneath.  They may someday be found, but I do have my doubts.  Movies about writers will do this to me.  Even if they don’t really fit my tastes in dark academia.

First Tower

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In these days when daring to think feels dangerous, R. F. Kuang’s Babel: An Arcane History feels dangerous to read.  Good literature is like that, even if it’s uncomfortable to read as a “white” man.  A fantasy largely set in Oxford, it’s based on the premise that languages, when placed next to one another, engraved in silver, have enormous power.  The power to run an empire.  This is a post-colonial story, and I took comfort in the working class support, for their own reasons, of exposing the very dangerous world of capitalism.  With its “human capital” as we’re now being called by businessmen.  But I digress.  Four students, three from abroad, are brought to Babel, a tower in Oxford that houses the Royal Institute of Translation.  Their use of their native tongues helps build immense power in this Oxford tower.  Power that fuels Britain’s imperial goals.  But all is not well in academic paradise.

Slowly three of the four scholars come to realize that their home countries are being exploited for purposes of yet further exploitation.  The wealth always flows back to England, and even the small emoluments it offers to those other nations cannot negate the fact that the end goal is British superiority.  The protagonist is Chinese, taken from poverty to live in academic luxury, in exchange for what was his birthright—his linguistic ability.  It doesn’t end well.  This is not a happy novel.  But it does highlight something we seldom consider; our language ability is truly an amazing thing.  We try to convey a fraction of what’s going on in our heads to another person, and that person has some ability to understand it.  And languages are ways of thinking.  I used to tell my students that all the time.  It’s more than just words.

This is also a fairly long book.  As with most fairly long books, you’re left feeling it once the story concludes.  Even though language allows us to communicate, it’s sometimes uncomfortable to hear what someone else is thinking.  We don’t have to be woke to realize that Black, or Asian, or indigenous experience is quite different from what we call “white.”  And such voices deserve to be heard.  We live in a time when white men don’t like to be told that they’ve participated in oppressive behaviors.  Probably most of them (for I believe people are generally good) are not intentionally evil, but they participate in a system which can be.  And often unthinkingly so.  Thus these days thinking feels dangerous.  And this book will make you do so, nevertheless.

A Plea

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One literary Saturday recently I found myself in the attic.  When we first moved to this house I sometimes wrote up there but I quickly learned that with no heating it was intolerably chilly on autumnal mornings, and that didn’t speak well for the coming winter.  Nevertheless, I set up a shelf with my fiction writing on it.  I was looking for something on that shelf when I discovered many things I’d forgotten.  Novels mostly.  I don’t know how many I’ve started, but I have completed six (now close to seven).  Going through the papers and folders on that shelf I found about 250 handwritten pages of another novel—one that I’d completely forgotten.  There were stacks of short stories, also handwritten, awaiting some recognition.  I haven’t had a ton of success in getting fiction published—the current count is 33 short stories—but I was inspired by what I found.

When my wife and I visited a lawyer some years back to make out our wills, I kept trying (unsuccessfully) to interject a literary executor.  At that point I had published only three books and two of them were academic.  Besides, there’d probably be an extra charge for adding that codicil.  I guess what I fear is that all of this work will just get dumped when I die.  Retirement doesn’t look like a realistic possibility for me, and what I need is time to sort it out.  Some of the novels aren’t good.  I know that.  Some are.  One was actually under a book contract for a couple of years before the publisher decided to kill it when the acquisitions editor left.  I haven’t found a replacement publisher yet.  Then, a few years back, my laptop started complaining about the amount of writing I was asking it to remember.  I had to buy external hard drives to store some of my writing.  Even I forget it’s there sometimes.

Graphomania should have its definition expanded to include those whose thoughts overflow to the point that they’re constantly writing.  There’s a reason I get up so early in the morning every day.  Up there in the attic I found what I was looking for and pulled it off the shelf.  A half-written novel that I had, unwittingly, started to write again presuming that the original had been lost.  All of the writing has been done while trying to hold down a demanding 9-2-5 with no sabbatical and few vacation days.  Not all of it is finished.  Not all of it is good.  But someone, I hope, will stand in front of the dumpster on some future day and say, “This doesn’t get thrown away.”

Low Stakes

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Elsewhere on this website I refer to myself as an “unfluencer.”  This quasi-serious attempt at humor does bear a kernel of truth.  It’s difficult to get your voice heard on the internet.  By the time I began blogging, vlogging had already become a thing and people prefer watching to reading.  (I do have a few YouTube videos out there, but they take an awful lot of time to put together and I’m kinda busy trying to write obscure books.)  The reason I mention this at all is to make a point.  People sometimes wonder why a guy who has a doctorate in religious studies wastes his time with horror.  There’s a good reason.  People will pay attention when the stakes are low.  Is horror important?  I think it is, but most people don’t.  Genre fiction is easily dismissed as being off in fantasy land, despite the growing number of voices suggesting we should be paying attention to how it influences (unfluences?) religion.

Those who delve in such blue collar things sometimes grow to be taken seriously.  I suspect—since I wouldn’t know—that it’s a matter of sticking with it long enough, and producing enough content that people have some standard for comparison.  And the interesting thing is, you often notice fascinating features along the way.  While working on my next book the other day, I realized a major gap in the study of history of religions.  I can’t say what it is here, of course, because someone without a 9-2-5 may scoop me.  But the gap is clearly there.  And I would never have noticed it if I weren’t spending my time writing about low-stakes monsters.

I’m a blue-collar thinker pretty much through and through.  Talking it over with my brother the other day, I realized that despite the years and years of higher education, I was brought up working class and I look at the world through those lenses.  When I was actually a professor that began to change, but in retrospect, I think that’s why my students liked what I did in the classroom.  I wasn’t some child of privilege handing down tired observations meant to impress other children of privilege.  I’m just a peasant trying to figure things out.  I can point to no highly educated forebears—neither of my parents finished high school.  No, I have been fortunate enough to have clawed my way through three higher degrees only to realize that people only listen if the stakes are low enough.  And I’m alright with that since I get to spend the time with my beloved monsters.

Poking Around

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I’ll always prefer indies but ever since James Daunt took over Barnes & Noble it’s become a much better place.  I unfortunately didn’t get to any of Daunt’s stores while living in the UK, but unlike most corporate types, he gets books.  He understands book buyers and, I like to think, he reads.  I happened to need to stop into a local B & N recently on a Saturday morning.  I got there a little early and I saw a line at the door.   Naive as ever, I supposed it was a reading or writing group that’d be meeting there.  The queue had one thing in common: they were all males between thirty and fifty years old.  Who says men don’t read?  I went in and got what I was after, and even browsed a bit.  When I got to the register they were in line.  Hands empty.

Then I noticed that as each one stepped to the register, the sales clerk would step back to a place behind the counter and come with the same thing for each one.  As I got close enough, I saw that they were after Pokémon Prismatic Evolutions.  The Prismatic Evolutions Poster Collection released just the day before when they were probably at work.  The game sells for about a Franklin and the shelf was nearing empty by the time I finally reached the checkout.  I looked back.  At least five more guys had come in and immediately joined the line, no products in hand.  I’ve never seen the appeal of Pokémon but I couldn’t feel smug because I was there because of an obsession as well.  I didn’t buy a game, or cards (one guy bought 14 packs of the same card set, clearing that rack), but I was guilty nevertheless.

I’ve been fascinated by Dark Academia for some time now.  That week, when I had also been at work, I realized that one of the books I had in that genre had been destroyed in what we refer to as “the flood.”  (The story is here on this blog, but the short version is when we moved into our house, the movers stacked our boxes in the garage because they were complaining it was so late.  Before I could move the boxes into the house—the day after the next, in fact—a torrential rain fell and many of the boxes got wet, destroying at least 100 books and some other items that can’t be replaced.)  I was missing that particular book and it was old enough that I was pretty sure the local indies wouldn’t have it in stock.  Daunt’s B & N did.  So the line that morning contained a bunch of obsessive guys, but one of us, I have to confess, was over sixty.

Trouble on Campus

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I know what it’s like to have a story living within you.  Academics writing novels don’t always qualify as Dark Academia, but Kathleen Kelley Reardon’s Shadow Campus does.  Continuing my current kick of that genre, I eagerly read of the skulduggery taking place at the fictional Pacific Coast University and found myself nodding with recognition.  Higher education is highly political.  I have to wonder if where two or three are gathered politics will inevitably be in their midst.  Perhaps thus it has always been, but it seems to me that when universities decided to model themselves on corporations, it grew much worse.  In any case, Meghan Doherty is a business professor up for tenure.  Her only family is an estranged brother in Connecticut.  Then one night someone attempts to murder her on campus and make it look like a suicide.

Shamus, her brother, flies to California to see her in the hospital and soon begins to suspect things are not as they seem.  I don’t want to give away too much here, in case you want to read it too.  I can say that sometimes life on campus is like this.  I’ve made the claim to have lived Dark Academia, and I’ll stand by it.  After the unpleasantness at Nashotah House, I was hired for a year as a replacement professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.  I really enjoyed teaching there, apart from having to leave my family in Oconomowoc; I stayed with a former Nashotah House student to whom I’m eternally grateful.  The department chair and colleagues liked me.  I was a good fit.  There was talk of making this a full-time position for which I’d be the inside candidate.  Then one of the other professors began to dislike me (long story).

I was called into the department head’s office and told that my eight courses for the next year had been reduced to one.  Permission to hire had been granted, but it had to be a specialist in women’s studies.  I was welcome to stay on as an adjunct, of course.  I’m a blue-collar guy and I recognize a boot when I see one.  And that was only the second time something similar had happened to me, and it wasn’t the last.  I’ve paid my dues to academia and yes, it is often dark.  So I enjoyed reading Reardon’s fictional account of underhanded dealings at Pacific Coast.  In my own experience guns were never brandished, but then, you can’t have it all.

Reading Unwritten

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There’s a style of writing—I’m not sure what it’s called—where an author keeps revealing new, and necessary information on nearly every page.  The effect on me, as a reader, is almost as if the book is backwards; too much wasn’t revealed up front and that kept me from understanding the story as it unfolded.  I confess that the fault is mine.  I’ve always appreciated a narrative that begins with much of what you need to know and then reveals unexpected things along the way.  This unwieldy preamble is to say that I had trouble getting into the otherwise delightful fantasy The Library of the Unwritten.  A. J. Hackwith is a solid writer, but since this is fantasy there’s some introduction to the unfamiliar world that readers like yours truly needs.  At least a bit more than is on offer here at first.

This is a fun book with a fun premise.  Books in Hell’s library are unwritten and restless.  If not watched, their characters come to life and the book goes missing.  The idea of the unfinished also applies to paintings and other creative endeavors.  At first I thought this was going to be like Jasper Fforde’s Tuesday Next novels (several of which are discussed on this blog; you’ll have to use the search function) but the character from a book quickly gets swallowed up in a larger story involving demons with backstories slowly revealed, as well as a librarian and a muse, also with baggage that we only see once the train has left the station.  About halfway through, the story really starts to move and becomes quite enjoyable.  I guess I need more orientation than some readers.

The novel unfolds into a potential battle between Heaven and Hell, but those aren’t the only realms in play.  There’s Earth, of course, as well as Valhalla, and some nameless realms where the gods have died out.  And it focuses on a library.  It’s this final aspect, I suspect, that leads many people to categorize this novel as an example of Dark Academia.  Indeed, that’s where I discovered the book, on a display table with that label.  Although written with a light hand, and often somewhat funny, there is a deeper meaning here, a narrative about the importance of books that faces the reality that some would rather destroy them than read them.  I’m sure there are some religious folk that would see this book as promoting satanism and darkness, but instead it emphasizes loyalty and goodness.  I’ll be pondering it a while.

Vampire Lovers

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Stylish, gothic, dramatic.  If it weren’t for the vampires you might not know that Only Lovers Left Alive is a horror movie.  Indeed, some say it’s not.  You can have movies about vampires that aren’t horror films, right?  Still, vampires defined horror, at the earliest stages.  There’s no on-screen violence in Only Lovers.  No, it’s about a pair of vampires named Adam and Eve, who are many hundreds of years old, that have developed different outlooks on undeath.  She reads and lives in exotic Tangier, enjoying herself.  He’s a depressed musician who lives in Detroit—there must be a book in horror movies set in post-industrial Detroit, wondering what’s the point.  In any case, they decide to get together in Michigan where they revel in each other’s company.  But then Ava, Eve’s troublesome sister pops in, unannounced.  Not refined or cultured like her sister and brother-in-law, she leads to trouble.

Eve and Adam move back to Tangier where whey have difficulty locating a good source of blood.  As cultured vampires, they do not attack people—zombies, as they call them—but procure it from doctors willing to sell.  When the supply runs out, they do what they must to survive.  This gentle story is art-house quality and it brings a different angle to the aristocratic vampire.  These vampires are the creators of culture.  The mortals sometimes appreciate it, but are generally too busy destroying the world to pay much mind to the superior creations all around them.  There’s not a hint of evil about these undead, subverting the usual narrative of such beings.

Vampire movies offer some complex possibilities.  They’re also a reminder why “horror” isn’t the best movie label ever invented.  Monsters by definition, vampires are portrayed in many ways—from animalistic, sometimes even with wings, to European nobility with great politeness and decorum, even as they bite your neck.  Then there are those who don’t attack people unless absolutely necessary.  They’re symbols of capitalism, with its greedy sucking of the blood of others.  They’re also symbols of evil, at times barely distinguishable from demons.  They seem endlessly adaptable.  In Only Lovers they are folks you’d be okay with, if they lived next door.  As long as Adam didn’t play his music too loud.  Since horror is a slippery term anyway, I opt for counting this in that genre.  In fact, I learned about it from a website listing stylish horror movies, so I’d say it counts.  Even if it’s just a bit out of the ordinary.

Echoes

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Among the first books I read that might be considered Dark Academia was P. D. James’ Death in Holy Orders.  That was so long ago that I don’t remember when, although the inscription tells me it was purchased in 2002.  There’s no mystery as to why.  There was buzz at Nashotah House when the novel came out.  It was about a murder at a conservative Anglican seminary with few students.  It seemed very much like Nashotah House to some there, so I read it.  Now, I’m not a fan of murder-mysteries.  I’ve read nothing else P. D. James wrote.  I had no idea who Adam Dalgliesh was.  The book was a New York Times bestseller.  Reviews were mixed, and among fans of Dark Academia it is scarcely noticed.  Still, Dark Academia is still in its toddlerhood.  Its boundaries aren’t clear and it overlaps with other genres, as most modern genres do.  There may be spoilers below.

In a very complex plot (mystery writers like to show off in that way) a rich seminarian at St. Anselm’s, dies by suicide that was strange but not really suspicious.  His wealthy stepfather receives an anonymous letter suggesting foul play and super-sleuth Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard is brought in. After the suicide, an old housekeeper dies of an apparent heart attack.  But then an Archdeacon is murdered in the chapel (here was the frisson at Nashotah House).  Since there were visitors on the isolated campus at the time, and the Archdeacon was not liked by most people there, it becomes a whodunit with conflicting motives, one of which is to see the seminary closed.  It owns artifacts worth millions, and, it seems, someone stands to inherit.  Dalgliesh and his team pick through all the clues and, of course, figure out the guilty party.

Even at the end the motivation seems odd.  There is a kind of Dead Poets Society letter of confession about preserving the arts.  The murderer is a professor of Greek.  These elements definitely cast the book into the realm of Dark Academia.  Still, it’s primarily a detective novel, and I suspect that’s why many fans of Dark Academia haven’t yet come upon it.  I do recall, upon first reading it, that it felt real enough.  I was living in a setting not unlike that of the novel and small seminaries do have big secrets.  This time through I was less impressed.  Super-sleuths are just too smart, which means their writers have to be exceptionally clever.  The setting suggests something wrong in the educational world, however, and that is true enough.

Questioning Paradise

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The term “dark academia” is somewhat difficult to define.  It is a rather new aesthetic, but it has been the topic of books and movies for some decades.  Among the books often considered dark academia is Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.  Since it’s one of the shorter exemplars of the genre, I recently picked it up.  A bit disorienting at first, it is the story of a fantasy world where oceans flood the lower floors of an elaborate labyrinth in which two people live.  The narrator (or more properly epistolist) is one of the two.  We come to learn that he is actually the only full-time resident of this world.  And that this world was conjured from the world in which the rest of us live.  It takes Piranesi, the narrator, about 70 pages to realize that something isn’t quite what he’s been led to believe.

The writing is beautiful and the world-building is fine.  It would be possible to set an entire novel in this world, but, like most paradises, it wouldn’t satisfy.  Indeed, there’s almost a biblical recognition of sin and human character.  The voyage of discovery that Piranesi undergoes is both encouraging and dispiriting.  Having a world in which one’s needs are met, and where most danger can be avoided by careful observation, seems desirable.  There’s a sense of inevitability in Eden as well.  The human psyche requires challenges and exercise.  To remain in paradise would have been stultifying, if without danger.  I’m not sure if Clarke intended that in her novel, but I definitely encountered it there.

But what does this have to do with dark academia?  I asked myself that question along the way.  The creator of this world was, at one point, an academician.  Such are the kinds of people who attempt to build perfect worlds.  The darkness comes from the fact that this world is not what it seems to be.  It comes with a very high price.  Even so, it is compelling to those who find it.  Its creator is a cold and scheming individual.  Unlike some such stories, we don’t hear much of the university life that gives the genre its name, but the classical setting is much like what universities once taught.  And when they go wrong, this genre suggests itself.  I don’t want to reveal how the story ends.  It gets pretty exciting about halfway through and I had misguessed a few things along the way.  In many ways it feels like fantasy, but it also dips into the academic world gone wrong.