Little Gems

Leave a comment

On a recent diversion to a curio shop we like, I found that one of the “Dark Shadows” paperbacks they had was one I hadn’t read.  Dark Shadows had, of course, spurred a pretty amazing franchise for its day.  It’d sunk its fangs into many young people who would not have otherwise been inclined towards soap operas.  I’ve written several times about the spin-off books by Marilyn Ross.  That series encompasses much of my childhood.  This particular book was a knock-off with the same branding titled The Dark Shadows Book of Vampires and Werewolves.  Now, to be fair, the asking price was about the same as a trade paperback price today—a little less, even—and the collection included, I saw at a glance, Polidori’s “The Vampyre.”  So now it sits on my shelf next to the other Dark Shadows books.  Apart from the gimmick of listing the book as edited by Barnabas and Quentin Collins, it is actually a nice period piece.

In addition to Polidori, eight stories I’d never read.  Two of them make the claim of being non-fiction, and a third maybe.  The tales, which favor vampires over werewolves, also include what are some little gems.  One is a story by M. R. James (“Count Magnus”).  Other noteworthy members are “Wolves Don’t Cry” by Bruce Elliott and “The Vampire Nemesis” by “Dolly.”  “For the Blood is the Life,” by F. Marion Crawford, is also good.  In other words, the collection was better than I suspected it would be.  I’d not read any of these before, so they were all new to me.  I was particularly intrigued by “Dolly.”  Apparently the author of The Vampire Nemesis and Other Weird Tales of the China Coast has remained anonymous since its 1905 publication.  The book has been rediscovered in modern times, and I’m now curious about it.

Although I like to think myself immune, I am sometimes susceptible to branding.  For whatever reason, that olive-green oval-cutout cover design, when spotted in the wild, makes me ecstatic.  My childhood wasn’t ideal, and I remember when I started to find these books used.  It was a very challenging phase in my younger years.  I knew even then that these cheap paperbacks would take me away from my troubles for a while.  And they would transport me back to an even more troubling period of my childhood when I would watch the show after school with my brothers.  A visit to the curio shop from time to time may be just what the doctor prescribes.

Cool Book Festival

Leave a comment

So yesterday I was at the Lehigh Valley Book Festival.  (It occurs to me know that I should perhaps post such notices in advance, but I know few people in the area where I live.)  I was there displaying my books.  I have participated in the Easton Book Festival for at least four years now, but I had only recently learned about this event held in Bethlehem.  The weather was clear, but cold for an outdoor event that involves a lot of sitting—it put me in mind of having to put on gym shorts and tee-shirts to go outside one November in college to have the coach lecture us about football, with no moving or actual playing involved.  It turned out to be an endurance test.  Not quite of the Shackleton magnitude, but I am sensitive to cold and it was struggling to reach 40, and this on the 28th of March.  At least there was a cool breeze.

Several lovely people stopped to talk and showed some interest in my work.  I’m grateful to all of them.  As an author you often wonder if you really are alone in your interests.  Since my table was next to a run of three tables of children’s books—when those authors decided on an unauthorized move of their tables into the sun (we were on the shaded side of the building), they did not invite me to join them—I was a bit self-conscious.  Parents hurried their kids past my modest display.  I took a quick swing through the other stands and I think mine was the only one for adults.  Many people glanced and frowned as they walked by, but several people got it.  I know there are local horror fans out there, but I have trouble finding them.

The Lehigh Valley Book Festival isn’t huge and several people just happened upon it, asking why we were there.  It was held at the main branch of the library and it is fairly centrally located in town.  Also, there was a cherry blossom festival taking place on the other side of the library.  I couldn’t be certain but it seemed that many more people were headed for that.  And honestly, I’ve lived in this area for going on eight years and I just learned about the festival last fall.  And I’m a book guy.  Not too connected locally, I’ll admit.  There was enough interest that I might consider it again next year (if selected again).  Especially if the temperatures are back towards the seasonal norm.

Bounce Back

Leave a comment

I confess to being a graphomaniac.  I write a lot.  I’ve done this pretty much most of my life, and so I tend to have backlogs, both fiction and nonfiction.  This is necessary background for this bit of friendly publishing advice—avoid bounce-backs.  What I mean by this is if an editor tells you “no,” don’t come back a week or two later with another project.  It speaks of desperation when an author does that (and believe me, I know about desperation!).  Publishing is a slow industry (which is one reason that AI is so dangerous).  Authors who can quickly pull together a new proposal, let alone a manuscript, in only a couple of weeks may as well wave a red flag at an editor.  Give it some time.  Give it some thought.  There are plenty of publishers out there, and targeting one for repeat requests isn’t likely to achieve success.

Photo by Samuel-Elias Nadler on Unsplash

We all know the rebound relationship.  You’ve just been dumped and you need to find someone to fill that hole in your life.  The person selected too quickly is a rebound, or bounce-back.  In my experience, such relationships don’t end well, if they ever get started.  It’s a life lesson we sometimes don’t think to apply to that other passion many experience—the desire to be published.  Many of us have publishers that we want to be associated with.  Mine is W. W. Norton.  My very first publishing job interview was with Norton.  They flew me from Milwaukee to New York City for an interview.  I didn’t get the job, but it was like being let go by the girl (or guy) you just can’t have.  The bounce-back, in my life, was Gorgias Press.  And you can piece the rest of the story together from this blog.

In any case, if you’re inclined to learn from the voice of experience, don’t keep pushing after you’ve been told “no.”  Please understand that I know how this desire feels.  If you want to be published, you need to be professional about it.  And sometimes you need to take a strategic approach to reach a more lofty goal.  I started writing my first attempted novel at about sixteen.  It was never finished.  The first one I completed was in 1988.  I had to take a few years off to write a dissertation, then a second book (during which time I began a novel that I only recently finished).  Please note, that span of time was over twenty years.  Publishing is a slow business, and the bounce-back is a sure way to gain a reputation you don’t want to have.

Still Haunted

Leave a comment

Having watched Haunted Summer, I was curious about the origin of the screenplay.  I’d read that the movie was based on a screen treatment by Anne Edwards, a screenwriter and novelist, but that it had been rejected.  Edwards then transformed her screenplay into a novel that was published in 1972, over a decade before the film came out.  It’s sometimes easy to forget that movies spend quite a long time in development.  For example, about four or five years ago it was announced that Lindsey Beer was going to write and direct a new Sleepy Hollow movie.  That was the proximate cause for my writing Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  I wrote the book, found a publisher and then watched as sales only bumped along the bottom and still no Beer film appeared.  Timing isn’t always my strong suit.  In any case, I decided that it would be good to read Edwards’ book as a follow up to the film.

Marketed as a gothic novel, it came out in my beloved mass market paperback form.  It’s now not easy to find.  The story is well researched, but fictionalized, of course.  The five Regency Era creatives—Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont—had gathered near Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816 (the “haunted summer”).  Famously, the idea for Frankenstein came out of ghost stories they told each other to pass the time during a rainy summer.  Polidori’s story, “The Vampyre,” also traces its origins back to that night.  Edwards’ novel focuses on Mary, making her the narrator.  Since it is a novel some fictional elements are added to what happened that summer.  To me, the most obvious was moving the ghost stories from Villa Diodati to Castle Chillon.  This allows Edwards to introduce Ianthe, a tragic keeper of the castle.

The story focuses on Mary as a strong woman very much devoted to Percy Shelley and standing up to Lord Byron.  Her lack of regard for Polidori was a little jarring since, it seems, historically, she felt sorry for him.  In any case, other than the changes Edwards introduces, the plot largely follows what happened during that summer.  The climax of the book is Mary’s telling of the  basic story of Frankenstein in Chillon Castle.  I found the Author’s Note of particular interest; novelists are also researchers, even if not always treated as such.  The historical incident of this meeting drives my interest, and this largely overlooked novel is a piece of a larger puzzle.

Summers and Hauntings

Leave a comment

I’ve written before about that odd Ken Russell movie Gothic, one of my “old movies.” In case you missed it, the film is a fictional retelling of the gathering of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, John William Polidori, and Claire Claremont in the summer of 1816.  They read ghost stories to pass the time and decided to try writing them.  Two famous stories came of it: Frankenstein and Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” a story that would go on to influence the genre.  I hadn’t realized, being generally the one invited to someone else’s choice of film, that two years following Gothic a movie called Haunted Summer was released.  Directed by Ivan Passer, it is a slow-paced romance that tells about the same meeting.  It’s somewhat more believable than Russell’s movie, but it has some oddities.  Perhaps the most telling is that it doesn’t mention the famous “contest” at all.

No doubt, one of the most compelling aspects of that summer meeting was the fact that a nineteen-year old Mary Godwin would go on to write one of the most influential fictional books of all time.  The influence of Frankenstein is visible in most unexpected places.  Internet personalities create “Franken” products by mixing together discrete products.  (For example, “Frankensoap” is when you cut up and blend different soaps.  You’ll actually find Frankensoaps in our bathrooms at the moment since that’s the way I handle soap scraps.  Soap never seems to go fully away before it becomes unusable.)  Frankenstein influenced everything from feminists to science fiction.  Not to mention horror.  Haunted Summer, however, although it has Polidori as a character, doesn’t mention his story at all.  It really focuses on the sexual tension between Byron and Mary Godwin.

Our imagination of that meeting of two famous writers and one soon-to-become famous one, often doesn’t make room for the fact that Shelley and Godwin were actually traveling with their infant son William—not shown in the movie.  (Mary had delivered a premature daughter the year before, who didn’t survive.)  I suppose putting a baby in the mix might, in Puritan America, dampen the romance implied in Haunted Summer.  Both that movie and Gothic make use of Henry Fuseli’s painting “The Nightmare.”  And although Haunted Summer isn’t a horror movie there are a few moments of fairly high tension—one when Godwin has her dream of the creature approaching her bed at Villa Diodati.  The story, however, had already been told by Ken Russell’s movie and Haunted Summer failed to make much of an impact.  That isn’t, however, quite the end of the story.

Earnestly

Leave a comment

Christening.  The subject may sound old fashioned, but it was once, within Christendom, where a name was officially conferred.  These days a birth certificate, issued very shortly following a live birth, is the official record of name, but not so long ago religious authorities had the final word.  This came to mind upon seeing a local (Lehigh University) stage production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.  I’ve read the play before, but hadn’t seen a stage production.  As is likely widely known, the play’s title plays on the name Earnest.  Two characters, Jack and Algernon, both claim to be named Earnest only to learn that the women they’ve proposed to both insist on marrying a man whose name is indeed Earnest.  In order to remedy this situation, both men ask the local vicar to be christened, changing their names.

Names are chosen for us and given to us.  Although it is possible to change one’s name (I’ve done so twice), many consider this almost insulting to the parents who provided the name.  Since baptism, or christening, was so widely practiced in medieval Europe, this experience was fairly universal in western culture.  The Reformation eventually changed that; some traditions declared that a person had to be old enough to consent to baptism and you couldn’t very well wait until seven or eight to be given a name.  I was baptized in a river at about six or seven, and by then had learned my given name quite well.  Names become our identity.  I still recall the lines about names from another play, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”  Thus spake John Proctor.

The Importance of Being Earnest is, of course, a satire.  Even the name of the priest, the Rev. Canon Chasuble, DD, is a joke.  A chasuble, in the ecclesiastical world, is the outer vestment worn by a priest who is the celebrant at a formal mass.  Clothes make the man, so the saying goes.  Those of us who write fiction often wrestle with names.  In my day job I quite often encounter what seem to be unbelievable names.  Names that, were I to put them into a novel, would earn the scorn of critics (assuming any) that it was made up.  So I enjoyed being earnest for an afternoon.

The Vampire’s Father

Leave a comment

I’d been very curious about D. L. Macdonald’s Poor Polidori for several years.  This is not an easy book to find.  (I have noted before that I find university press book pricing illogical and unconscionable.)  John William Polidori was, as the subtitle states, the man who wrote “The Vampyre,” treated sometimes as a novel, at other times a short story.  Polidori, apart from being treated as a fictional character, is a difficult man to get to know.  This critical biography contains much useful information.  There are sections, however—and probably the reason for the pricing—, that interest only scholars of literature looking to find an exegesis of works of Lord Byron and Polidori himself.  My curiosity about him derives from the fact that “The Vampyre” was a very influential story and yet its author is somewhat consistently considered insignificant.  This seems to have predated his association with Byron; Macdonald points a finger at his father.

So who was Polidori?  Born in England of an Italian father and English mother, he was raised with literary aspirations but his father (who was a writer) had other plans for him.  Catholic in a period of strongly Protestant sentiments, John was sent to Catholic school and considered the priesthood.  His father eventually sent him to Edinburgh University to become a medical doctor.  Clearly this wasn’t John’s interest, but he complied.  Finishing his qualifications, he found setting up practice difficult because of both his foreign-sounding name and his Catholicism.  Lord Byron, about to exile himself from England because of scandals, wanted a personal doctor and settled on Polidori.  He knew of Polidori’s literary ambitions and frequently belittled them.  Polidori was present in the summer of 1816 when Percy and Mary (soon to be) Shelley visited Lord Byron along with Claire Claremont, Mary’s half-sister pregnant with Byron’s child.

Famously, the group read ghost stories and at Byron’s suggestion each started writing their own.  Byron’s fragment led to an idea Polidori later wrote out, after Byron had dismissed him, as “The Vampyre.”  Mary Shelley’s story, of course, everybody knows.  “The Vampyre” was published without Polidori’s knowledge and was attributed to Byron.  Even Goethe read it and thought it Byron’s best work.  Polidori was eventually credited with the story and tried to make a living as a writer.  He produced other works, but no real success.  He decided to become a lawyer.  Unable to establish his independence from his father, he died at 25 by ingesting prussic acid.  Even during his life, which was quite interesting, he was called “Poor Polidori” by more than one acquaintance.  His literary output isn’t bad, according to critics.  To me, he’s a kind of patron saint of those who would write but who are overshadowed by Byrons and Shelleys.

Logan Again

Leave a comment

A couple of friends, both younger (ahem), liked my recent post on Logan’s Run.  As did someone my post on Goodreads.  I was pleased to see that.  I was alive, but not yet literate, when the book was originally published.  So, predictably, I sat down to watch the movie again.  My wife had to work that weekend and I had last seen it in 2011.  This time, the book fresh in my mind, I was able to notice just how much the movie diverges.  For practical reasons, the movie has people live to 30 instead of 21.  The issue was finding enough young actors (this was the seventies, after all) who could carry off the story.  Michael York was over thirty, but he could pass.  The book is a romp across the country, and it would be unbelievable in the film if Peter Ustinov were able to walk from Washington DC to Los Angeles.  

The movie has Logan dedicated to Jessica, but in the novel they have to grow to love each other.  In the film, Logan is sent on a secret mission to find Sanctuary, which, it turns out, doesn’t exist.  The novel has Ballard (transformed into “the old man” in cinematic form) disguised as Francis, Logan’s fellow Sandman, from pretty much the beginning.  On the screen, Francis remains a dedicated Sandman to the end.  Gone are the zoo animals in Washington, the hovercraft chases, and the little children who save Jessica’s life.  Granted, a lot in the novel would be very difficult to transfer to celluloid, and changes had to be made.  The whole episode of the religion of “Carrousel” isn’t in the book, but was added to give the movie coherence.  I did find it odd that they included the scene with Box, which really doesn’t fit the film.  

In any case, it warms my heart that some of my younger friends have fond memories of this movie.  It’s definitely a period piece.  Fitting for the seventies, there’s kind of an atheistic undertone to it.  Sanctuary only exists in people’s minds.  Nobody is “renewed” (born again).  But not all is doom and gloom.  The old man quotes from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, by T. S. Eliot.  (That fact is the only way that I could get my daughter to watch the film.)  And it does have an optimistic ending.  Logan and Jessica decide they want to stay together—marriage was ancient history in their world.  And the young people, my greatest hope for the future, came to see the old man was fascinating.  Something that gives this particular writer a true sense of hope.

Vengeance Is Hers

Leave a comment

A Lesson in Vengeance, by Victoria Lee,  is a novel with some twists that I’ll try to conceal.  It is a kind of young adult horror-themed dark academia novel.  I really enjoyed it although there are a few improbable events.  That’s the way of fiction with an unreliable narrator.  Felicity Morrow, a girl from a wealthy Boston family, is enrolled at Dalloway School.  Dalloway is a girl’s prep school in upstate New York.  Felicity had to take some time off, during which she was institutionalized, after the death of her best friend, and lover, Alex.  Now that she’s back at school she feels the ghost of her friend coming back for vengeance.  She lives in Godwin House, which only has space for five.  It’s also part of the story of the Dalloway five, girls accused as witches when the school was founded, who all died there.

A new girl is starting at Dalloway this year.  Ellis Haley has already written a published novel and is working on a second.  She lives in Alex’s old room.  In spite of their rocky start, Ellis and Felicity become friends.  Then more than friends.  Meanwhile, they’re both working on their senior projects but Ellis wants to form a fictional coven and replay the way the Dalloway five died, for her novel.  Things grow tense as Felicity begins to remember more and more about what happened to Alex.  Then a murder takes place.  I won’t say more about the plot.  The last several chapters are ones where putting down the book is a real struggle.  You want to know who did it.  And since Felicity is the narrator, you gather that she must survive.  But this isn’t without danger.

The horror elements involve ghosts and witches.  Since Felicity is revealed to be an unreliable narrator it’s unclear whether the ghosts are real or not.  Most of the events are revealed to have had naturalistic answers, but one remains as either a real ghostly visitation or a delusion on the part of Felicity.  I read this book as part of my ongoing fascination with dark academia, and I’m glad I did.  It’s quite a well-told story.  Enough information is held back and revealed in moments of insight as the story unfolds that I was kept guessing until very near the end.  And the final realization only hits at the very end.  This is a good entry into dark academia for anyone wondering where to start, at least in my opinion.

Talking Tolkien

Leave a comment

I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings back in college.  Although I enjoyed them a great deal, they weren’t enough to swing me into high fantasy.  I do sometimes think I should go back and re-read them, but with so many books on my to read list, it’s a matter of time.  In any case, I’d read that the movie Tolkien was a good example of dark academia, cinema-style, so I finally got around to seeing it.  Although I learned quite a bit about Tolkien’s life from it, as a movie it really never soars.  The academia part is pretty straightforward as King Edward’s School and Oxford University play a large role in Tolkien’s life, and in the movie.  As does World War I, which is where the darkness comes from.  That, and being an orphan.  And also a guardian priest who prevents you from being with the girl you love.  The movie stays with Tolkien until he begins writing The Hobbit.

The difficulty with biopics of writers is that trying to portray where they get their ideas is a fraught business.  Those of us who write fiction know that inspiration comes in many forms, from dreams, to real life events, to the visit of an unusual shop.  Travel, intriguing people, and ideas out of the blue can all trigger a story or novel.  How do you capture inspiration on film?  A love story is, believe it or not, somewhat easier.  The film portrays Tolkien’s early fascination with Edith Bratt, whom he would eventually marry.  One thing that I’ve learned from psychology and those who teach storytelling is that certain narratives more or less play automatically in people’s minds.  Now, this cannot be asserted universally, but if you introduce a young woman and a young man in a story, many people’s minds naturally begin to bring them together romantically.  Showing how a writer goes about their craft is different.

Many biopics of writers are considered examples of dark academia.  Probably one of the reasons is that no lives are lived without loss and trauma.  People handled traumatic events differently.  Many writers use their art as a coping mechanism.  I can’t know, but I suspect that such things often lead people to become writers.  Poe, for example, keenly felt the loss of his mother at a young age, a trauma that would lead to a lifetime of writing.  I hadn’t known, until watching this movie, that Tolkien had become an orphan.  I knew little of his life; I’d read his books, and even walked by his house in Oxford, but this movie did provide a bit of context.  I’m glad, for that reason, to have seen it.

AI Takeover

Leave a comment

It’s already beginning.  As if the world under Trump isn’t bad enough, AI (you can call me Al) is beginning to play its tricks.  You see, I know my place.  I am a writer who gets a few hits on my blog now and again and whose books cost more to write than they ever earn.  (I do hope to reverse that trend, but this is the truth of the matter.)  I call myself, on my introductory website page, an “unfluencer.”  Again, I strive for accuracy.  That means that when I receive an unexpected email from someone much higher up the ladder than I am, I’m suspicious.  So the other day I had an email purporting to be from Rose Tremain, the author of The Road Home and other novels.  Dame Rose Tremain, just so we’re clear.  “She” was writing to me to ask which of my books she should read first.  Suspicious?

Any writer likes to feel flattered.  A moment’s reflection, however, made me realize a few things.  My email address is not on my website, which “she” claims to have explored.  The actual Rose Tremain is 82 and is unlikely to suddenly be developing a taste to read nonfiction books about horror movies written by someone whom most horror fans wouldn’t even recognize.  I honestly have no idea why Al is yanking my chain like this.  I have received emails before that, I suspect in retrospect, were AI generated.  They ask innocuous questions, sort of like you think a young extraterrestrial interested in academic earthly arcana might ask.  Nothing threatening.  Nothing asking you to reveal too much.  Almost as if Al is lonely.  I begin to wonder if I have ever received any legitimate emails at all from people I didn’t reach out to first.

The future of Al impersonating people is already here.  We have our information out there on the web.  Those really, really curious can find my email, I’m pretty sure.  Security questions, although I try not to reveal too much personal information here, are getting harder to pick.  Did I ever mention my first pet’s name?  The town in which I was born?  The address of any of the many places I’ve lived?  Anything shared on social media (and perhaps off social media) is available for Al to use and exploit.  And yes, Al will attempt to take advantage of your all-too-human curiosity and sense of accomplishment.  Take it from an unfluencer, individuals formally recognized by the British royal family don’t send chatty emails about your favorite book.  The AI takeover has begun.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The Black Monk

1 Comment

Back at Nashotah House the local ghost was called “the Black Monk.”  A plausible origin story circulated with the name; a student broke through the ice on the lake one winter night and met his demise.  Some even claimed to know which was his gravestone in the cemetery on campus.  I really didn’t give much thought to any of this until I learned that Anton Chekhov wrote a short story titled “The Black Monk.”  Now, I don’t know if some literate Nashotah student was referencing Chekhov or if the color was just fitting for a cassocked community of quasi-monks.  In either case, I decided to read the story.  The Russian tale involves a man named Kovrin.  He holds a Master of Arts degree, in the way that degrees in Russian stories bring the holder a great deal of respect.  He was raised by a wealthy farmer who owns extensive orchards, and, needing some time to relax from his city schedule, goes to stay with his former guardian and his daughter.  While there he relates the tale of the Black Monk, who was seen all around the world, and maybe even in space, from where he walked in Arabia or Syria, a thousand years ago.  It was rumored that he would return a millennium later, and, as it turns out, Kovrin sees him.

G.K. Savitsky’s illustration “The Black Monk,” public domain via Wikimedia

Kovrin is a successful, bright, and cheerful scholar.  He begins to see the phantom and have conversations with him.  The monk assures him that he (Kovrin) is extraordinary, a genius even.  That other people, satisfied with mediocrity, melt into the herd.  True genius, however, is often perceived by others as madness.  They have long conversations.  Kovrin marries the farmer’s daughter but their relationship is troubled.  One night she awakes to find him speaking to an empty chair—nobody else sees the Black Monk.  Convinced that he is mentally ill, she and her father put him in a doctor’s care and his new regime of lifestyle changes prevents further visits of the Monk.  Kovrin, however, grows sullen and dull.  He realizes that his genius is gone and that he has become ordinary.  His marriage falls apart and when he goes on a vacation to the Crimea, he once again sees the Black Monk.  His feelings of being extraordinary begin to return, but he dies that night.  His corpse wears a smile.

This tale had me thinking.  It’s not clear that Kovrin was really mad but no doubt he’d been quite intelligent.  He was given a university chair and received the praise of others.  It was the cure that destroyed him.  It robbed him of his enjoyment of life and also led to the downfall of the farm since his father-in-law died and his daughter, now separated from Kovrin, writes to curse him for his insanity.  The farmer and his daughter aren’t always sympathetic characters, but until his dying day (literally) Kovrin had lost all that made his life meaningful.  The Black Monk admits he’s an apparition, but Kovrin was clearly brilliant while he met and conversed with him.  I’m not sure of any parallels with Nashotah House, but it has a character in common with Chekhov’s story.

On the Run

Leave a comment

I come down on the side of book.  Usually.  In the book or movie first debate.  I have to confess, however, that I learned about Logan’s Run because of the movie.  It was quite impressionable on a teenage me, thinking that in such a world I’d have less than ten years left.  I bought the movie tie-in book and read it.  It was very different from the film.  I only remembered one scene from the book and so, nostalgia smothering me, I had to read it again.  The book was actually published in 1967, when I was quite young.  The movie came out in 1976, as did the tie-in novel.  The story has been replicated since then but the basic idea is that in the future overpopulation leads to the radical decision that everyone dies after turning twenty-one.  This is a world of the young.  Politics are handled by computer, and Sandmen, like Logan, hunt down and kill runners—those who try to escape their mandatory death.

There are a number of things to say about this.  One is that the two authors, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, had distinguished writing credits.  Another is that this is good sixties sci-fi, but belles lettres less so.  I still enjoyed reading it again.  It had been literally fifty years.  When this was written a population of six billion was considered unsustainable.  We’re now at over eight billion and it does seem as if we’ve tipped some kind of balance.  Another thing that stood out, one of the dangers of future-projecting sci-fi, is that newspapers are still a thing in the future.  They’re hardly a thing now.  They do make predictions for 2000, so maybe they should’ve pushed things out a bit further before committing.

In real life, the “developed” world actually has a problem of too many of us seniors and falling birth rates.  Nobody to take care of us when we no longer can.  This seems to be true in the United States, Japan, and China, at least.  Hopefully we won’t go to Logan’s solution.  So, as the book title suggests, Logan decides to run.  There’s a fair bit of religion in here.  He runs to find Sanctuary but, until very close to the end, intends to kill Ballard, the guy who helps runners escape.  There’s lots of adventure, several changing scenes, and a fair bit of testosterone.  Still, the story isn’t a bad one.  It’s old enough (ironically) to be a classic.  And yes, it’s still in print.  Part of my childhood has been restored.

Gothic Dreams

3 Comments

I love this book.  Roger Luckhurst understands that the gateway to horror is the gothic.  In Gothic: An Illustrated History he offers a world-wide, luxuriantly illustrated tour of both classic and contemporary gothic.  As a category, it’s difficult to diagram precisely.  Luckhurst does it through a series of themes: architecture and also form, various landscape settings, how the four cardinal directions appear in the gothic imagination, and, of course, monsters.  Each of these themes is divided into four or five chapters.  Not wanting to rush, I limited myself to a chapter a day, but I’m sure I’ll be dipping back in again.  This is the kind of book that both gives you ideas of new books to read and movies to watch, and affirms the choices that you’ve already made in those regards.  In other words, this is a place horror fans would naturally feel at home.

The gothic entered my life at a young age, partially because I was living it (unwittingly) but mostly because it appealed to me.  It made me feel good watching monster movies and Dark Shadows with my brothers, and later, reading gothic novels.  There’s definitely a nostalgia to it.  I loved gothic architecture from the moment I first saw it.  Not that Franklin had soaring cathedrals, but there were some very nice Victorian houses in town.  And when I saw cathedrals I felt a strange stab of joy.  Although I sublimated my love of gothic while working on my academic credentials, I couldn’t stay away from ruined castles and abbeys  in Scotland.  Although I was trying to be a scholar, I knew what secretly inspired me was made of coal-blackened stone.  Even if I didn’t say it aloud, the monsters of my imagination lurked there.

The narrative accompanying the wealth of images in this book probes what makes gothic tick.  It would be impossible to cover it all in one tome, of course.  My current fascination is with dark academia (an aspect perhaps too new to be in Luckhurst).  Dark academia’s draw is that it revels in the gothic, placing it in educational settings.  But it can occur anywhere, as Luckhurst clearly shows.  Anywhere that there might be shadows or reflections.  Anywhere that experiences nightfall and autumn.  Anywhere people must face their fears.  While my usual avocations always please me, when I see the gothic addressed directly it takes my breath away.  No doubt, mine has been a strange life.  One in which, even before I reached my first decade, I found the gothic vital and necessary to an odd kind of happiness. This book brings it clearly into focus.

Dark Dreams

Leave a comment

I’ve been pondering the role of religion in dark academia.  While not a major element, it’s certainly present in Ashley Winstead’s In My Dreams I Hold a Knife.  There are plenty of plot twists, and I’ll try to avoid giving away whodunit, at least ultimately.  The basic idea is that a group of seven students, the “East House Seven,” band together at Duquette University, a near-Ivy League school in North Carolina.  They get into some college hijinks, but things turn dark when one of them (Heather) is murdered their senior year.  Jessica Miller, one of the seven, has become a corporate climber, despite her family background, and ten years later she goes to Homecoming to show off her accomplishments.  But things don’t work out as planned.  Heather’s younger brother, who works at Duquette, has been doing some detective work and uses Homecoming to confront those who remain about the murder.

The seven (which actually involves an eighth student) pretty much date among themselves.  Some of them, including Heather, are quite wealthy, but not all.  Jessica isn’t among the affluent, and another of the seven, Coop, ends up dealing drugs to make money on the side.  Heather’s boyfriend was suspected in the murder, but had to be released for lack of evidence, and he decides not to attend Homecoming.  Those present for the event are confronted by Heather’s brother and the story is told as flashbacks from the Homecoming to events that took place during the college years of the seven.  As I say, I won’t reveal who did it, but each of the remaining seven is suspected until the reveal comes near the end.

For me, these kinds of stories are a little difficult to follow because of the number of active players.  Jessica reveals herself to be an unreliable narrator, and although the story felt long to me, it takes quite a bit of space to get to know all the characters well enough to understand their motivations.  Two of them were raised religious, which is what ties this theme into the novel.  The wealthy students aren’t exactly the kinds of people to emulate, and those raised religious end up being the good ones at the end, although they do participate in Greek life with its parties and other activities that college encourages.  (Sorry about the long sentence.)  Overall, this is a good story, but it’s hard to give too much sympathy to the group as they do have shifting alliances and are mostly power-hungry.  Yet, isn’t that like life itself?  It is dark academia.