Avoiding AI

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I try to avoid AI whenever and however I can.  Being an Apple user, I’ve stopped asking Siri for anything.  Our television isn’t smart.  Our stereo consists of components that don’t secretly conspire with one another.  They use physical cables and have no bluetooth or other software in them.  But with constant “upgrades” on computers, which we have to have because AI is so good at hacking, my daily life has been invaded by Al.  This came clear to me the other day as I was finishing up a short story I’d been working on.  The creative process take time.  I’d started this one months ago.  I get lots of ideas and I start many stories that get dropped when another hook comes along.  Then I’ll remember what drew me to an older idea and go back to finish the neglected piece.

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

It takes courage to submit stories for publication.  I get a lot of rejections, as most writers do.  That means I go for periods without trying.  Besides, all the journals say you should regularly read them to get an idea of what the editors like.  If you work 9-2-5 and have your own blog, and you like to read full books, this can be difficult.  You can, of course, just shoot into the dark.  But I digress.  I finished a story recently and copied it from my writing software into Pages.  Since I use a Mac, Microsoft Word conversion is the last step before submitting a story.  Most publishers go the clunky Microsoft route.  Up until the day I tried to save said story, I hadn’t realized just how much Al had insinuated himself into my operating system.

When you go to save a Pages document, the default used to be “Untitled.”  That was never a problem for me because I’d go in through the finder and change it manually.  Now Al is “reading” your document and suggesting a title for you.  This particular story had a creative title that existed in my head, but not in the body of the fiction itself.  At least not in any obvious way.  I opened a new document in Pages, pasted my content in and went to save it.  A title that missed the point of my story entirely glowed in the Save As field.  Al wanted to “help” by naming my creative fiction.  If there was a way to turn off AI on my Mac, I would.  I don’t want it.  I try not to use it at all.  With software updates nearly weekly now, how long before the creative process, when done on a computer, is taken over completely? Hey Al, I don’t want, or need, your help.

Undersea Series

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As A Series of Unfortunate Events goes on the volumes become more adult in their complexity.  The writing is still recognizably Lemony Snicket, but the laughs are fewer and the plot is thicker.  Although The Grim Grotto is perhaps the one book (post book three) that I remembered the best so far, there was much I’d forgotten.  Rescued from the Stricken Stream by a submarine named Queequeq, the Baudelaires meet Fiona Widdershins, the step-daughter of the eccentric captain.  She becomes Klaus’ first love interest, just as Quigley Quagmire had for Violet in the last book.  Searching for the missing sugar bowl to help the V.F.D. against the schism, they encounter the eponymous grotto where Sunny is poisoned.  One of the things I remembered clearly from reading this some two decades ago was how worried I was for Sunny, although I knew she couldn’t be killed off.

Literary references abound in this volume.  The Herman Melville references are obvious enough, but I was impressed that Handler gives a brief lesson on Plato’s cave analogy and brought in several other literary figures as well.  Contrasting Melville with Edgar Guest (and I admit that I had to look up Guest) is brilliant.  Guest wrote optimistic poetry which earns him the scorn of Snicket.  Indeed, when Count Olaf shows up, late in the story, the crew of his submarine (in a riff on Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea) wears suits with Guest silhouettes on them, as opposed to the Queequeq Melville images.  The book also introduces children to the poetry of Lewis Carroll and T. S. Eliot, and I’m sure that there are others I’m forgetting at the moment.  It’s a service to young people to stimulate their interest in other writers.  I’d forgotten that “briny beach” comes from Carroll.  Even the tedious bits of this volume service a didactic purpose.  There may be spoilers below.

Not that The Grim Grotto is without humor.  Apart from the roasting of Guest, the reference to the Mediocre Barrier Reef was a laugh out loud moment.  And the tying together of loose threads.  The hook-handed man is Fiona’s brother.  Josephine’s family ran the destroyed aquarium, and Mr. Poe shows up near the end only to be eclipsed by Kit Snicket.  There is so much to like here.  Including the thin line between good and evil that the children keep coming back to.  Returning to the series after two decades with only the movie to partially remind me of the tale has been enjoyable so far.  Even though they weren’t part of my own childhood, I’m glad to make their reacquaintance now.

Harvest Time

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Dark Harvest literally sat atop my literal “to read” pile for almost a year.  Norman Partridge’s book came into my possession sometime after Halloween last year but I wanted to wait until, well, harvest season to read it.  It’s a very good choice as autumn really begins to settle in.  It’s a story with its own world and its own rules.  In a small town in a farming community, a dark ritual is kept alive by a powerful group of local citizens.  On Halloween night, a specially grown pumpkin atop a crucified scarecrow, comes to life.  One of the people from town cuts the scarecrow down, carves it a face, animates it with candy, and hands it a butcher knife.  The October Boy, as he’s known, heads to town.  Meanwhile, the local boys between 16 and 18 are sent out with makeshift weapons to stop this monster.  If it makes it into the church before midnight, serious consequences will follow.  The boys, hungry from a week of fasting, prowl the night, looking to be the winner who takes October Boy down.  All of this is overseen by the town’s cop.  Things can get out of hand on Halloween night.

This is a horror story with heart.  I won’t put any spoilers here, but I will say, as in the best of horror, the monster isn’t who you think he is.  This elaborate game has taken its toll on the town for generations.  This Halloween, however, four people are out to stop it.  Supernatural horror that pays off the suspension of disbelief, Dark Harvest is also an emotional tale.  It’s a story of loss and one about the high cost of observing convention for convention’s sake.  Having the ending set in a church brings religion and horror together nicely.  And it also raises some deeper questions for those who care to steer that way.  Sacrifice is a major theme in the story.

I’m glad I waited until Halloween season to read this one.  A short book, it doesn’t take long to get through.  And it presses the right buttons for the season.  Partridge is an author who really gets what the autumnal setting can do for a horror story.  I enjoy good horror set in winter or summer as well.  (Okay, so spring too.)  There is, however, something special about novels that engage seriously with harvest time.  Harvest has always had a deep symbolic value that’s often overlooked in what is, inherently, a spooky period.  I really appreciated the author’s afterword as well.  I’m glad I waited for the right season.

Puzzle Conscious

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Those of us who write books are all working on putting together a puzzle.  Even though we often disagree, it is part of the same puzzle.  We’re trying to expand human knowledge.  Some make a living doing it, most do not.  As this thought initially occurred to me, I wondered if it applied only to nonfiction.  It doesn’t.  Even the novelist is participating in piecing together this immense, at least planet-sized, puzzle.  We don’t understand consciousness.  Some of us are convinced that it pervades other living beings as well.  Philosophers far more brilliant than yours truly have suggested that if consciousness is emergent then it can be traced back to matter itself.  Our human part of the picture is pieced together in libraries.  Those collections of human thought.

Being raised in a literalist environment, I thought books (nonfiction) were researched and written leaving the author mostly in the background.  I’ve come to realize that a nonfiction book is the author’s interpretation, having read the many interpretations of others.  And that each tome is part of the larger conundrum of mapping out human consciousness.  No matter how minor the publisher or how poor the sales, the book is, to some degree, a piece.  The puzzle we’re trying to construct is missing many, many pieces.  Long ago we surpassed the point at which one person could read every published piece of human knowledge.  Now, lifetimes would be required, and even then no one person could put it all together.  Consciousness is very slippery that way.  Not to mention the many, many unpublished books.  The task is immense and the end result is our contribution to the knowledge of how this universe works.

The humble contributions that I’ve attempted to add to the conversation may seem irrelevant.  They certainly haven’t brought in fame or money.  Those of us who write feel compelled to do so.  Others have no such compulsion and each of us has our role to play.  My thoughts go back to monks in the medieval period.  Many of them copying, a few of them composing, sacred objects.  Books were rare and all handwritten.  Today those that survive are priceless treasures.  They’re also pieces to a vast puzzle.  As we try to understand this very strange, very weird world in which we find ourselves, many of us still turn to books.  What we may not realize as we open the cover, is that we’re doing our part in a collaborative exercise in which we’re all involved.  Even if the puzzle is never fully completed.

A 48,000-piece puzzle

Building Horror

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Christina Henry grew a reputation rewriting fairy tales.  At least that’s how I found her.  I read The Girl in Red and then Horseman (which was after I’d begun work on Sleepy Hollow as American Myth).  I thought she’d found her niche as a writer.  Lately, when browsing bookstore shelves in the horror section, I’ve discovered she has a reputation there as well.  The House that Horror Built caught my eye, and I trust certain writers, based on past performance.  (Which is, I suspect, how most agents assess their clients.)   In any case, I wanted to give it a try.  Speaking of trying, I’ll attempt to avoid spoilers here because there’s a twist ending.  The story begins innocently enough.  Harry, a woman down on her luck, has a job cleaning the house of a famous horror director, Javier Castillo.  Barely making ends meet in Chicago, she cleans his horror props three days a week.

Castillo is in Chicago because of the disappearance of his wife and son after the latter was accused of a murder he probably committed.  His family gone, Castillo moves away from Hollywood while trying to work on his next project.  Meanwhile, Harry’s landlord is evicting her and her son Gabriel.  Upon learning that Harry likes horror movies, Castillo invites her and her son to dinner one night.  Things get a bit chummy for Harry’s tastes, but they return once more when a couple of actors are staying with the director.  One of the actors has a tragic accident, falling to her death.  Meanwhile the eviction date is moved up and Harry has no choice but to accept Castillo’s offer of hospitality.  She’s known for some time that his house is haunted.  I think I’ll leave things there.  Hopefully it’ll peak some interest.

I don’t know much about Henry, but she does seem to understand the plight of the poor.  It isn’t easy to survive when you can’t earn enough beyond what covers the necessary expenses.  And when you have a child, the anxiety increases exponentially.  For the most part, this is a slow burn horror tale.  The suspected ghost is introduced not too far into the proceedings, but the explanation is more than the reader expects—at least this reader.  The last couple of chapters are page-turners with some full-on horror.  I don’t mind waiting for some payoff.  To me, however, the darkness in the threat of homelessness is its own form of horror.  And it’s not too difficult to imagine for the majority of us.  I’d say Henry has bridged successfully into the genre.

Old Man Country

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As a movie fan, you eventually come to trust certain filmmakers.  The Coen Brothers produce consistently good work.  I’d missed No Country for Old Men and was somewhat reluctant to see it.    Films about sociopathic killers bother me, and I knew that the Cormac McCarthy novel was about a drug deal gone bad (and made him a household name).  Drugs are another of my triggers, having grown up in an alcoholic household.  But still, the film won the Academy Award for best picture, and it was a rather glaring hole in my viewing of Coen Brother major movies.  While the film isn’t horror, it is one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in some time.  The ending is devastating, and sad, and reflective.  It’s easy to see why it appealed to the critics.  Nothing is neatly tied up at the end.  I haven’t read the novel, but I hear the film follows it closely.

Llewelyn Moss comes across a drug deal gone bad.  He finds a couple million in cash and takes it to the trailer park so he and his wife can retire.  A hit man, Anton Chigurh, pursues him and eventually Moss realizes that a transponder has been hidden among the cash, giving away his location.  Meanwhile, the local sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, does what he can to protect Moss’ wife and tries to save him from what he realizes is an unstoppable foe.  Chigurh proves as tenacious as his reputation suggests, and viewers learn that Moss is as equally tenacious, but has both a conscience and morality, both of which Chigurh lacks.  The scenes where Chigurh appears to be fair-minded are the scariest in the film.

The log line “There are no clean getaways” about sums up the outcome.  Often classified as a western, the feel is more of a thriller.  “Coen Brothers movie” might be a genre all its own.  The relative lack of humor puts it much closer to Fargo than to O Brother, Where Art Thou? or Raising Arizona on the Coen Brothers scale.  The unrelenting violence also brought Pulp Fiction (different director, different feel) to mind.  The bleakness of the outlook of Sheriff Bell, as well as the look in his eyes, is haunting.  His conversation with Ellis near the end stirs thoughts of Ecclesiastes and the reflection on just how violent people can be toward each other is profoundly disturbing.  I’ve seen many horror films that didn’t scare me half as much.

Slip Sliding

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The world is quiet here.  The Baudelaire orphans have been reunited by the end of The Slippery Slope, but Quigley Quagmire gets separated from them at the denouement.  As a friend of mine once said regarding movies, it’s difficult to watch people who long to be—and belong—together being separated.  Indeed, it is one of the saddest of plot points.  Count Olaf and his band of villains kidnap Sunny while, they think, sending Violet and Klaus hurtling to their deaths.  The orphans were on their way to the V.F.D. headquarters in the Valley of Four Draughts. They eventually arrive to discover that the schismatic group of V.F.D. has already burned it down.  And we get a strong inkling that Volunteer Fire Department is what stands behind the mysterious initials.  Reading this again as an adult also reminds me that this is where we caught up with the series since we began buying the hardcovers for my daughter as they came out.

This segment of the Series of Unfortunate Events once again has the orphans wondering if they’re becoming as bad as the villains.  They decide that instead of fighting fire with fire they need to work to make the world a quieter, more peaceful place.  And two of Count Olaf’s associates, the women with white faces, leave his troupe.  A pair of criminals that have even Olaf nervous show up in this episode as well.  Lemony Snicket’s humor remains intact, despite the darkness of the tale.  There are laugh-out-loud parts in the last two chapters.  And some memorable quotes/ideas: “Count Olaf, like any good businessman, has committed a wide variety of crimes.”  The idea that somebody well-read is potentially trustworthy is repeated throughout the story. I mentioned a biblical connection (of course I did!) for The Carnivorous Carnival, but here there’s an explicit one as Snicket categorizes Adam and Eve’s decision to put on clothes “to leave the snake-infested garden” as an impulse passion.  After drying my tears, the cleverness of all this sank in.  Typically the impulse passion in Eden is precisely because the primordial couple is unclothed.  There’s much to chew over in these books ostensibly for children.  The message of what distinguishes good from evil wasn’t lost on me.

I recently discussed with my daughter how some authors are able to bridge from children’s, or young adult, novels into those for adults.  There’s kind of an invisible line there.  Adult life can be serious business, and it often is.  There are some great funny novels as well for the adult crowd.  And sometimes they can even be disguised as books for young readers.

Hollow Singing

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Since it’s Sleepy Hollow season I suggested to my wife that we watch the Disney version of the movie last night, rainy weekend evening that it was.  I discuss in my book Disney’s strange pairing with “The Adventures of Toad,” but one of the points I emphasized in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth is that Disney is largely responsible for making the story what it is in our culture.  It doesn’t stand alone, of course, but most people I’ve asked learned of it through the Disney film.  Except my wife.  She learned of it through the Disney record based on the Disney film, released in 1971.  My wife didn’t grow up with monsters the way that I did, but her parents got their kids the vinyl version.  She found it online to play for me—I’d more or less overlooked it in my book, which deals primarily with movies and novels.

First of all, the record more naturally pairs Sleepy Hollow with Irving’s other hit, “Rip Van Winkle,” on the B side.  Narrated by Billy Bletcher, it includes two songs from the film, “Ichabod Crane” and “The Headless Horseman,” the latter sung by the formidable Thurl Ravenscroft.  A shortened version of the story is narrated and, of course, the showcasing of Bing Crosby is missing.  The cartoon itself is only half an hour, and the record cuts the telling to twelve and a half minutes.  As my wife read the comments of others who’d rediscovered the recording online, I pondered how many people might’ve discovered “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” through Disney’s record.  The story as written by Washington Irving isn’t aimed at children.  Despite its early nineteenth-century language, it’s kid friendly, but not the kind of thing children seek out.

I don’t want to give away too much of my book, but I would point out a couple of things.  Disney borrowed the idea of making a movie with Sleepy Hollow from Ub Iwerks, the co-inventor of Mickey Mouse, who began his own cartoon studio after working with Walt Disney.  The second point is that Disney made it an explicitly Halloween tale.  Whenever autumn and its pumpkins roll around thoughts turn to Sleepy Hollow.  The Disney song “The Headless Horseman,” by Don Raye and Gene DePaul, does most of the heavy lifting for inventing a new mythology of said Headless Horseman.  Even though my book was published last year, there’s more digging to be done around the origins of America’s ghost story.  I’m reading another book about it right now myself.

Monster Mash

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You think you know a guy.  Actually, I never claim to be a Washington Irving expert.  Sure, a read three or four biographies, while researching Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, but the idea of that book was to trace the story he wrote forward, not to make stunning claims about Irving himself.  Still, doing this kind of research you tend to think you know a bit about the life of a person.  Irving was awkward around women but he seemed to fall in love from time to time.  He was engaged at least once (in his mind, at least twice).  His first love, like that of his younger contemporary Edgar Allan Poe, died young of tuberculosis.  Irving had considerable success with his first novel A History of New York, putatively written by Diedrich Knickerbocker.   He was sent off to England by his family and it was in Europe that he wrote the book that made him famous, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.  It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Irving stayed in Europe for 17 years and wrote other books that kept him going.  None would match the acclaim of The Sketch Book.  (It also included his tale, “Rip Van Winkle.”)  Since he remained in Europe, his fame was trans-Atlantic.  He was doing what few could—making a living by writing.  Most who did so, or tried to, struggled financially.  One of those people was Mary Shelley.  She’d begun writing Frankenstein when she was 18.  Twenty when it published, two years later she was widowed when her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned.  Shelley had a rocky relationship with his aristocratic family and Mary made a living by publishing lesser known pieces.

At some point—keep in mind Mary Shelley was a young widow and often lonely—Shelley tried to initiate a romance with Washington Irving.  He was older and, perhaps playing into her thoughts, an established writer.  That’s what she longed to be.  Irving was not interested in this particular relationship.  He’d fallen in love with an American girl traveling Europe with her family, and had been burned.  As Halloween approaches, this interesting confluence of the creators of Frankenstein’s monster and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow—two iconic seasonal monsters—has its own kind of wonder.  Neither Irving nor Shelley were “horror writers.”  That concept wouldn’t emerge until much later.  Nevertheless, they had brought to life two characters without which Halloween as we know it would be severely diminished.  You never know what might happen when you publish a monster story.

Thorny Path

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Although we’ve all heard “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” we all do.  An image, or artfully done cover design, speaks to us.  I admit I bought A. G. Slatter’s The Path of Thorns because of the cover.  I don’t remember exactly where, but it was in an independent bookshop, probably either in New Hope or Lititz, or some town in-between, and it was face out on the shelf.  I noted it was somewhat thick, and I have a penchant for shorter novels, but the thorns, werewolf, and hand of glory on the gothic cover spoke to me.  I have to confess that it took quite some time to get into it.  Asher Todd is an unreliable narrator.  And she keeps secrets.  It took several chapters to be grabbed by the story.  But to be honest, I’m finding lately that stories that take their time building are frequently worth the wait. Trust the author.

Placed in a setting that a couple of the blurbs classify as “fairy tale,” Path of Thorns is told by Asher, a mysterious woman who we know is a witch.  She’s on a shadowy mission not revealed until quite late, to the Morwood estate.  There she uses her magic discreetly to help both members of the family and some people on the grange.  Witches are still hunted and killed.  She introduces the priest, called a “god-hound,” and it turns out that he has a minor, but important part to play in the story.  The Morwood estate is run by a vain, self-centered son Luther, while the matriarch, Leonora, technically in charge, is more or less an invalid.  Until Asher, out of pity, cures her blindness.  From there the story unfolds.

There is a werewolf, and the hand of glory has a role.  It’s not really a horror novel, though.  It does have a gothic, dark fairy tale feel to it.  And once the major turning point in the plot is revealed, it’s difficult to put down.  This is made even easier because the chapters are uniformly short, which means you can pick it up and reach an obvious stopping point without committing half an hour.  In the end it’s quite a well-told story that I’m glad to have read.  Whenever I go to a bookstore, I do so with a list.  Given the nature of my interests, I often have trouble locating anything on said list.  Those of us who prefer not to walk out of an independent bookstore empty-handed frequently benefit from judging a book by its cover.

Serious Series

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

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

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

In Public

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I’ve written about the virtues of reading in public before.  Book reading, that is.  I was reminded once again how restorative an exercise it can be.  The occasion this time was a book sale at the Bethlehem Public Library.  We didn’t realize this was one of those bi-monthly kinds of events—at least this year there are six such sales.  We met some friends there and I exercised considerable restraint, buying only two books.  One was a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.  I’d had a copy of this, but it was ruined in the flood.  I decided to replace it.  The other book was a collection of all Flannery O’Connor’s stories.  I’d been thinking just the day before that I should read some of her work.  It happened that I finished before other members of our party so I waited in the hall and started reading the story “Geranium,” with which the book starts.

After a few minutes a college-aged guy walked by and said, “Great book.”  I thanked him for affirming my choice.  He said, “I’ve just been reading O’Connor, you’re in for a real treat.”  This brief exchange reminded me of being in Easton on a warm evening a few years back, reading in a public square.  I was there to pick someone up and they weren’t quite ready yet.  A couple of young women, probably Lafayette College students, walked by and asked what I was reading.  It was Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  They weren’t familiar with it and asked me what it was about.

Now, I’ve always been quite a shy person.  I don’t mind responding when someone talks to me, but initiating a conversation is something I don’t do very well with strangers.  I’m happy to respond when someone shows an interest in a book I’m reading.  I’ve had dentist hygienists ask about the book I inevitably bring in with me, asking if it’s any good.  The few times when I forget to bring a book and I have to try to entertain myself on my phone (it’s not easy; I quickly grow bored), I’ve never had anybody stop and ask what was interesting on my phone.  It’s the printed book, at least in populations with college students, that seems to bring out a willingness to chat.  I wonder how much of that bookish sociability that we’ve lost now that the electronic revolution has taken place.  How many discussions does a Kindle start?  It’s a virtue to read an actual book in public.

Haunting the House

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Although it starts off a little slowly, the premise of The Haunting of Ashburn House keeps you reading.  I don’t mind taking the time for a story to unfold.  I know many people want action to draw them in, but I’ve been reading about quiet horror and since it often takes its time, I know to appreciate it.  I’ve not read Darcy Coates before, but as this tale unspooled itself it grew gripping.  Even before the action took off, the situation was intriguing enough to draw me in.  I do quite like a haunted house story.  So, Adrienne has inherited a big old house from a great aunt she only vaguely remembers meeting once as a child.  A writer a bit down on her luck, she’s glad to have a place to live, but she knows nothing of the recently deceased relative who lived there.

Ipson, the town outside of which Ashburn House sits, is peopled with citizens who remember, often incorrectly, the tragedy that took place in Ashburn decades ago.  An entire family, apart from a young daughter, had been slaughtered there.  The daughter, sent to a foster family, returned as an adult to care for the house.  It has many secrets.  The people have been kept away from the house during the aunt’s long life alone there.  Adrienne arrives with little money and no acquaintances, and no knowledge of the history of the house.  She soon discovers that it’s haunted.  Not one to believe in ghosts, it takes some time to convince herself that the occurrences are supernatural.  Once that’s confirmed in a very stark way, much of the rest of the novel unfolds over the course of another day and night.

I don’t remember where I learned of this novel, but I do recall it was on a list of gothic literature.  Indeed, it is gothic.  And it’s a horror story.  The monster—“ghost” is a bit mild—has to be explained, but it fits within the context.  These days to make horror stories work you need to isolate protagonists from phones or “signal.”  Putting Adrienne in a small town, in a house with no wifi, and even partially without electricity, serves this end quite well.  Making her more or less penniless raises a bit of anxiety—such things can happen far too easily in real life.  The story is nevertheless well told and once the monster attacks it becomes difficult to put down.  I don’t remember where I learned about The Haunting of Ashburn House, but I’m glad that I did.

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.

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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.