Djinn Genre

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I really don’t like to walk out of an independent bookstore empty-handed.  Many of them, however, are quite small and I have a list to which I try hard to stick.  I do end up getting books I hadn’t intended to, to avoid said empty-handedness, and so I found The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark.  It crosses various genres with elements of steampunk, horror, and fantasy.  Set in Cairo in 1912, where a system of off-ground trams run, the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities is responsible for keeping the paranormal under control.  Agents Hamed and Onsi of the Ministry are called in to handle, well, a haunted tram.  Their department is on a budget and can’t afford a major exorcism—assuming the haunting is a djinn—and they have to find other means.  Their first attempt fails but ultimately reveals that the entity is an al, from Armenian folklore.

Alk are baby-snatchers.  Hamed and Onsi have to learn how to handle this dangerous entity before it can harm any women.  That’s the basic idea.  The novella introduces the reader to some North African/West Asian folklore and builds on both Muslim and Coptic ideas, as well as non-traditional religion.  It’s a somewhat fun story as well.  The agents resort to some unconventional means to deal with the al, and djinn are a regular part of daily life.  As are androids, called eunuchs.  This is, of course, an alternate reality, but one in which Cairo is a major city along the lines of London or New York.  But with a distinctly North African feel.  And a society that accepts all different races equally.  Women, who are rallying for the vote, are the ones who identify and suggest the solution to the problem.  It’s an optimistic story.

Djinn are often thought of as Islamic versions of demons, but “demon” is a slippery word.  Christians adopted a Greek term that referred to entities both good and bad and made them pure evil.  One of the things this story does is to treat each entity appropriately to its realm.  There’s no lumping everything together into the “evil” basket.  In fact, some of the characters have djinn as business partners and others, it is implied, are basically family friends.  This is a worldview completely different from the way such things exist in our current cultural outlook.  The story unfolds fairly quickly since this is a short book.  There are a few horror elements to it, but mainly it is an imaginative vision of a world poised to celebrate equality, and everyone is better for it.

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.

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.

Creating Realms

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I have to confess that I’ve never attended a writers’ conference.  I haven’t been to any big fan fic gatherings such as ComicCon either.  I did attend Steampunk City a couple years when we lived in Jersey, and was even a presenter one year.  I met the organizer and chatted about the concept, but it disbanded soon after.  The reason I raise this is that I recently learned about Realm Makers, a conference for Christian speculative fiction writers.  This brought me back to the culture wars and how evangelical Christianity, especially, has a very selective filter for what’s okay and what’s not.  And that got me to thinking about C. S. Lewis and how he’s been coopted by the evangelical camp, although he was a good Anglican who smoked, swore, and enjoyed time down at the pub.  (If you’re unfamiliar with the evangelical movement, any one of those three things could get you thrown out of the club.)  Let’s start with Realm Makers.

The Eagle and Child, Oxford; one of Lewis’ hangouts

Noting the difficulty Christian writers of speculative fiction have fitting in with typical fan conventions and secular writers’ groups, Realm Makers is a place between worlds.  Writers often tend towards a certain earthiness that evangelicals might find off-putting.  And, I imagine, large fan conventions have all kinds of potential hazards.  At the same time, many evangelicals discourage speculative fiction, especially horror.  Realm Makers is a place for fantasy and sci-fi writers to gather with like-minded colleagues.  The website doesn’t foreground horror, however.  That’s one speculative area that many—either evangelical or secular—aren’t comfortable hanging around.  It’s pretty easy to see how Realm Makers appeals to a specific cross-section of writers.  And so on to C. S. Lewis.

Lewis was clearly a believer although he was culturally very British.  He, like Amy Grant, had crossover appeal.  I see him referred to by secular writers and fans quite often.  Narnia is an idea that appeals to many and for those really into speculative fiction, his space trilogy is a kind of Christian sci-fi fantasy that’s well written and even accepted by some who tend to avoid the softer side of the field.  Being a writer of the unusual can be a lonely occupation.  I know other writers, and many of them tend to keep to themselves.  I also know quite a few who enjoy conferences and all they have to offer.  Steampunk City was several years ago now.  I attended while working on my one steampunk novel (unpublished).  It was fun hanging out with people who enjoyed the speculative.  One thing nobody seemed to be asking is who believed what.  It was all about having a good time.

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 Writer

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Change can occur quickly, like an avalanche, or slowly, like the build up to an avalanche.  Lasting change is of the slow variety.  In my mind I’m still a professor wannabe, although that ship has long since sailed.  The changes of an advanced degree are indelible, so I continue to write books and I still read a lot.  Here’s where the slow change comes in.  My reading lately has shifted towards fiction.  Not completely, of course, but I’m finding that my nonfiction reading pile erodes more slowly than its fictional sibling.  I hope that I’m not losing the capacity to handle the real world, but the realm of fiction feels so much more welcoming.  And I’ve been doing a bit of fiction writing myself lately, and to school myself I read fiction.  I’m not sure if the change is permanent or not since the end hasn’t yet been written.

My work on this blog bibliography continues slowly.  It will record most of my reading for the past decade and a half.  But not all.  I read books not quite born yet, for work.  And I read things other than books.  It will be an incomplete record.  Finding the time to work on it, however, is difficult.  Mainly because of all the reading I want to do.  And, since it’s that time of year, yard work.  I’m thrilled that my first novel will become a reality.  That’s especially good news to me since my energy has been focused on getting my most recent novel into what I hope is publishable form.  At times I wonder how many novels I’ve read.  I started reading scads of novels intentionally by the time I was in seventh grade.  I’m sure I’ve forgotten many of the fiction books I consumed.

As a professor I’d put novel reading on the back burner as nonfiction heated the research and writing projects I undertook.  I recall, however, guiltily sneaking in a novel now and again.  How many I don’t know.  I wouldn’t even know how to begin to count.  I suppose that’s one reason I’m trying to pull this bibliography together.  It won’t cover a couple decades of a literary life, but, as a friend used to tell me, “a little cotton is better than no mattress at all.”  There were some memorable big books: Jaws, The Godfather, War and Peace—and many more modestly-sized offerings.  Even more short ones.  The change in me has been slow, but steady.  Reading will do that to a person.

Lovecraftian Layers

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Lovecraftian dreams dominate Hugo Yelagin’s Deadlights.  A few major themes are addressed in this debut novel.  One, which always stands out to me for some reason, is the search for the father.  Maxwell Corvid, a former medical student at Miskatonic University, is returning home to his father’s once grand estate.  Accompanied by a banker who delights in pointing out that his father’s debts, Maxwell learns he’ll inherit debt rather than anything substantial.  Accosted by a brigand, the two leap into a huge sinkhole that has taken the estate.  Maxwell finds himself among moldy people transforming into fish (Lovecraftian, as I say), but befriends a young girl who knows her way around.  They find the banker and brigand and begin trying to solve the strangeness they encounter in this world.  A couple other major characters enter the tale, but I don’t want to give any spoilers.

While novels that heavily feature dreams aren’t my personal favorites, this dark fantasy intrigues you into turning pages.  I really couldn’t guess the ending, and, like a dream, not everything wraps up neatly.  The amazing thing about H. P. Lovecraft is that his vision has inspired so many others to grapple with his worlds.  Many modern writers find the call of Cthulhu irresistible.  The sloshy, watery fear of being transformed into something you’re currently not.  This, I think, is a second theme.  Transformation.  Realizing maybe the way you see someone isn’t the whole of that person.  And, of course, the theme of light.  This sinkhole world is dark and occasional lights help the characters to see.  And they learn that those different from themselves aren’t necessarily evil.  (Although one or two might be.)

I’m not sure I’d consider this a horror novel, although there are monstrous sorts in it.  It doesn’t try to scare like many horror novels do.  It does have a gothic setting, but the timeframe isn’t specified.  Lovecraft tends to conjure the Victorian period in my imagination, but his stories probably reflect his own time, as opposed to an earlier one.  I acknowledge my own weaknesses as a reader, and as someone with historical training, knowing “when” gives me a useful framework within which to paint a story in my head.  But then again, in worlds dominated by dreams that may be a moot point.  It’s just that, in my own canvas of this story, I do wonder what was, in this Lovecraftian world, really real.

Dark Academy Series

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With Prufrock Preparatory Academy, A Series of Unfortunate Events enters directly into dark academia.  Not only that, but The Austere Academy also introduces the V.F.D. that kept me guessing for quite some time the first read through.  But let’s start with dark academia.  Any gathering of young people with the intent of equipping them to get along in the world is a school.  And schools all have their dark corners.  That’s because adults trade in secrets and other shadowy things.  Of course, Lemony Snicket makes Prufrock Prep into a pretty dismal academy with harsh rules, boring classes, and unsatisfactory accommodations.  The Baudelaire orphans are found by Count Olaf, of course.  They do, however, make friends with the Quagmire Triplets and the larger scheme of what happened to their parents begins to unfold.  It does seem that the tales grow darker and not quite as funny as they reach this point.

The school motto is Memento Mori, “remember you will die.”  Although this is a good life lesson, it might be a bit harsh for children.  Some of us grew up with a religion that made sure we understood this from an early stage in our lives.  I can’t say that was a fun way to grow up, but I can see the wisdom in it.  Our culture is about the denial of death and then when it does come it can be devastating.  Of course, these are children’s books and they don’t linger on such thoughts too much.  And although Count Olaf is dangerous, his disguises are always a bit silly.  In The Austere Academy, as in The Miserable Mill, he stays somewhat in the background, orchestrating schemes that make the orphans fail, and offering to take care of them.  In this case his disguise involves a turban that he cannot remove for “religious” reasons.  A fascinating misuse of pluralism, it made me think how some people hide behind it.

Not having written books in a series, and not having had a publisher’s input into what I’ve written, I don’t know how far ahead Daniel Handler planned the series.  I do recall that from this point on the mystery of what V.F.D. is becomes important.  I’d completely forgotten about the Quagmire Triplets.  Reading books for young readers as an adult can reveal quite a lot.  Sometimes it’s easy to forget that they’re written by adults and they may have had to go through the same rejection trials that other creative adults face daily.  Trying to break into publishing can indeed be a series of unfortunate events. Dark academia indeed.  I’m glad Lemony Snicket broke through.

Sleepy Hollow Returns

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Timing has never been my strong suit.  Regular readers may know that the reason I tried to get Sleepy Hollow as American Myth out when I did was that Lindsey Anderson Beer had been announced as the director for a new Sleepy Hollow movie.  I prioritized getting the book done and settled with a publisher.  Still, even in the time it takes to write a book and get it through the production process, the movie was no closer to being seen.  Yesterday while reading a trade news article I learned that Lindsey Anderson Beer has just signed a publisher for her first novel.  Its title?  Hollow.  One guess as to what it’s about.  Beer, of course, is known as the writer/director of Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, a prequel to the Stephen King story.  An up-and-coming horror director. I was anticipating that her Sleepy Hollow venture would make a big splash.  And my book would be just out.

Sleepy Hollow is one of those stories that keeps reappearing in American culture.  That’s the point of my book.  Indeed, even as I was attempting, in vain, to get it noticed, I learned that J. W. Ocker was finishing his own book on Sleepy Hollow, due out in September.  And now I learn that the putative director of a new film is writing her own novel.  The story bears repeated retellings.  The way that I characterize it in my book is as a labyrinth.  I have also started my own fictional retelling of the story.  I’ve got a couple novels that I’d like to get out the door before turning back to it, but I certainly understand the draw.  Sleepy Hollow is America’s founding ghost story.  I do hope Beer continues with the movie.  My guess is that it will be based on her own novel, which, naturally, I will read.

We keep coming back to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  Even now, with August awaiting at the end of this week, autumn is swiftly approaching.  And with it rides the Headless Horseman.  As a figure, he’s ubiquitous around Halloween.  I’m already looking forward to next summer when, I hope, McFarland will be willing to drop the price of my book a bit.  I recently had a friend say they were interested in reading it but it was priced a bit too high.  I get that.  I do hope to be part of the conversation as Ocker’s book comes out and then, a year later, Beer’s.  Even if I’m not, this is precisely what my book is about.

It’s a Series

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The transition between Lemony Snicket’s The Wide Window and The Miserable Mill, volumes three and four, respectively, of A Series of Unfortunate Events, is the gulf between what was portrayed in the 2004 movie and what wasn’t.  The books do show their age a bit in that some of the villains might be considered offensive these days, but the writing is clever and even educational.  Dealing with two of them together is, like the film, an attempt to forge a transition.  The Wide Window, which is both compressed and elaborated in the movie, doesn’t resolve itself as portrayed on the screen.  Of course Count Olaf is at large again and the Baudelaire orphans are left homeless once more.  In the movie Jim Carrey’s Captain Sham is perhaps his best character with his attempts at a cross between a sea captain and a Newfoundland landlubber.  The book raises the ethical issue of what laws it’s permissible to break to save your life, which is missing in the film.

The Miserable Mill, book four, reflects how dark these tales can be without the movie to lighten the mood a bit.  Maybe not quite enough to categorize them as horror, but enough to make them somewhat scary.  Here the orphans have reached the end of their family connections and are passed off to the owner of a lumber mill who puts them to work right away.  Of course, Count Olaf is lurking nearby and is working with an ophthalmologist who specializes in hypnosis.  It is actually a frightening thought to be hypnotized against your will.  The orphans learn to appreciate how difficult their siblings’ specializations are and, of course, make it through together.

Hypnosis is something I’ve never experienced.  I went to a show once where the stage performer attempted to hypnotize the audience.  I was fervently religious at the time, and it didn’t work on me.  I’d read that religious people are difficult to hypnotize (that is, those who haven’t been hypnotized already).  Since that time I’ve been curious if I might be hypnotized as an adult, and, if so, what it would be like.  As a mental state, hypnosis is still poorly understood.  It is used in literature, not uncommonly in horror.  I will, of course, continue working my way through A Series of Unfortunate Events because once you get started it’s difficult to stop.  It is obvious, however, that I’ve watched the film enough to have a sense of what transpired through The Wide Window.  Now, with and after The Miserable Mill, I have little recollection of what might be ahead.

Lemony Reptiles

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Having embarked on A Series of Unfortunate Events again, and having just finished The Reptile Room again, I might reflect on Lemony Snicket’s contribution to dark academia.  I mentioned to a friend recently that some dark academia aficionados consider the series to fall into that genre.  Having had the books read to her at a young age, she asked “Why?”  That got me thinking again about this wide, wonderful, amorphous category of books.  In my personal calculus, dark academia involves education—and this may be book learning undertaken independently—something going seriously wrong, and, in the best of it, a gothic atmosphere.  While A Series of Unfortunate Events is generally quite funny and fun to read, it clearly has the main elements I seek in classifying dark academia.  The Baudelaire orphans are pursued relentlessly by Count Olaf in a setting which, although difficult to place time wise, has Victorian aesthetics.

Of course, The Reptile Room is the second book utilized by the movie A Series of Unfortunate Events to get it up to feature length.  Reading it again revealed just how distorted my memory of the story had become by the movie.  The resolution of the scam by Stephano in the film is merely a distraction by the children to come to the real reveal in the book.  I’m not one to diss the movie.  It is quite gothic and it has many quotable moments, but it isn’t the same as the books.  I still remember when we first learned about these books from a niece, very young at the time, who enthused about them.  We were just a little cautious about reading scary stories to our daughter because one Roald Dahl book we read really was too gruesome for a child of tender years.  We immediately loved this series, however.

A quarter century or so is plenty of time to forget details.  Rereading these books also reminds me how influential they were on some of my own writing, although I read them as what passes for an adult at the time.  (I was old enough to be, and indeed was, a father.)  It occurs to me, as it likely did back then, just how clueless adults are.  Some of the descriptions of Count Olaf in this book could easily be substituted for a particular denizen of the Oval Office these days.  And, I suspect, children are able to see through those who constantly make up excuses to cover their own incompetence.  I’m looking forward to The Wide Window.

Life Underground

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Having really enjoyed Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, I was looking forward to The Starless Sea, despite its nearly 600 pages.  I don’t mind getting lost in a book; in fact it’s one of life’s true and simple joys.  The Starless Sea came to my attention as a dark academia book.  The story is a good one, but in my uninformed opinion, a bit too long.  The fault is my own, I’m sure.  My sensitivity to high fantasy has reached a point where swords tend to put me off.  And some bits, particularly in book V were a bit confusing.  Still, Morgenstern’s writing is beautiful, and at some points sublime.  If it’d been a bit shorter I’d probably be gushing.  Instead I’m reflectively admiring.  As a sometime writer myself, I know that you write what you write and others may not get it.  That’s life.

The story generally follows grad student Zachary Ezra Rawlins as he finds a book from a library of a world that’s beneath the ground.  A world that includes a harbor on the Starless Sea.  That world is inhabited by the surviving members of a decaying society made up of stories.  Most members of this world (and it’s difficult not to see this as an allegory) have left for the world above (this world).  Access between the two worlds is through doors.  Sometimes real doors, other times doors painted on a wall.  Zachary finally goes through one, having not tried one outside his house when he was just a boy.  He’s not sure if he wants to stay in the Starless Sea world or not, but he gets roped into the story.

Many other characters, at varying levels of the story within a story get involved, of course.  He meets his true love, and one of the undergrads he taught gets interested in his fate, and the denizens of the world below are intriguing characters in their own right.  Despite the length of the book, there are still plenty of gaps left for the readers to fill in for themselves.  Again, my own limitations prefer to have not too many gaps because I get confused.  The story tips a hat to several of its influences explicitly, and in many ways reminded me of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.  With its grad school protagonist, lots of libraries, and even a secret society, this fantasy is a card-carrying dark academia novel.  The genre encompasses may differing books and styles.  And I’m glad to have read this one as part of my own quest in that genre.  It was a sustained escape from life in the upper world.

Bad Start

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I’m not too proud to admit to reading books for young readers.  On a recent family night we watched the 2004 film, A Series of Unfortunate Events (not for the first time), and I realized that my memory of the books by Lemony Snicket was hazy.  Since we bought and read all the books for my daughter, I pulled The Bad Beginning from the shelf and read it in a couple of hours.  Although it was published over a quarter century ago, it is still fresh and it stands as one of those books (and series) that defied convention and presented stories that were potentially disturbing for children.  I have to admit that another of my motivations in re-reading this was the suggestion that perhaps on another family night we might start watching the Netflix adaptation, which, as I understand it, is better than the theatrical movie.

The movie, of course faced a dilemma.  There are thirteen books in the series—too many to comfortably fit into one film.  Each individual book, however, is too slim to fill out a feature-length presentation.  The decision was made to blend the first three books together, beginning and ending the show with the events from The Bad Beginning.  If you’re not familiar with the series, even if you don’t have children, the books are an entertaining read.  Snicket, who was later revealed to be Daniel Handler, is quite a clever author and there were a couple of points that had me, well, snickering out loud.  In any case, I’m given to understand that the Netflix series tackles this conundrum of too much/little material by being, ahem, a series.

A brief summary of The Bad Beginning may help if you’re still undecided about reading it as an adult.  The three Baudelaire children, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, are orphaned in a fire.  Adopted by their scheming uncle, Count Olaf, they are immediately put in peril as he tries various ways to get at their parents’ fortune.  Since Olaf is a thespian, he devises a plot to hold a wedding between himself and fourteen-year-old Violet in disguise as a play.  The plot is foiled, of course, by the children.  The book ends by letting the reader know that the orphans are still in danger because Olaf has escaped and remains at large.  That would take quite a lot of padding to get a feature-length film out of it.  It works quite well as a brief book for young readers.  I was impressed at both the set-up and execution when I first read this many years ago.  And I liked it again the second time through.