Dark Poetry

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Playful.  Serious. Weird.  Very intelligent.  These are the words that come to mind.  Adrienne Raphel’s Our Dark Academia is a poetry book unlike any other I’ve read.  The poems take many forms from impressionistic reflections on life to a crossword puzzle.  From cutout paper-doll clothes to a faux Wikipedia article on dark academia.  It’s quite difficult to summarize since it’s more of an experience than anything else.  It’s the kind of book that makes you want to get to know the author.  Economy of language and an ability to manipulate words are required for poetry, and although I still dabble in it now and again, my tortured mind finds long-form prose a bit easier to produce.  I do try to keep these blog posts short, but I write a lot of other stuff as well.  In any case, Raphel’s keen intellect is obvious throughout this collection.  And she holds a doctorate from Harvard.

I’ve been exploring what is now being called dark academia pretty much my entire life.  And it has an articulate spokesperson here.  The academic life, although I love it, isn’t always the cushy existence it’s thought to be.  It requires a lot of work and long hours.  Those jealous of the lifestyle probably know it by fantasy.  It has taken a hard turn towards the political since about the seventies, something I didn’t know as I enrolled in a doctoral program in the next decade.  You learn by experience, and it’s clear Raphel has that.  The life of the adjunct instructor, which I tried to live for two years, demonstrates the inhumane things educated people can do to one another.  Of course it’s because of money.  In a late capitalist society, what else really matters?

One thing I know about myself is that I tend to take on the characteristics of authors I read, while I’m reading them, if they have distinctive voices.  Thought processes carry on in the mind even after a book is put down.  I find reading endlessly fascinating and wish I could share this enthusiasm with everyone.  I have to stop and remind myself, however, that our society only works with those who are doers as well as thinkers.  It works best, it seems to me, when those who are thinkers are in charge.  But not all thinkers are good.  My solution, at the moment, would be to have them read Our Dark Academia.

Book Stories

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I’m a headline browser.  Sometimes a story will make me sit up straight and click.  I was browsing the headlines in Publisher’s Weekly’s daily updates earlier this week.  One of their regular sections is on independent bookstore news.  When I saw “Oil City” and “Pennsylvania” in the same headline, well, I sat up straight.  I grew up very near Oil City, and attended Oil City High School.  One thing I noticed, even as a child, is that the nearest bookstore we knew of was over in Meadville.  (Eventually a B. Dalton’s, or Waldens, I can’t remember which, opened in the local mall that is now a very sad superstructure to visit.)  I would work the summers and after buying my school clothes would beg mom to take me to Meadville so that I could visit the bookstore.  It was a place that made me happy.

I don’t remember a bookstore ever being in Oil City (or Franklin, except a Christian bookstore).  I wish Raven’s End very well.  If it weren’t six hours away I’d drive there this weekend just to support them.  In these times of challenging human intelligence, we need more bookstores.  We need more readers.  That’s one of the reasons, I suspect, that Publisher’s Weekly informs readers of new bookstores opening.  As a young person you tend to accept things the way that they are.  In one of my philosophy classes I learned that this was called “naive realism.”  I also learned along the way that our brains evolved to help us survive, not to discover reality.  We have to work at the latter, and that means reading.

I live in the Lehigh Valley, a community that has had to remake itself after the closing of Bethlehem Steel.  I grew up in the Oil City and Franklin area which would eventually have to remake itself after the closing of Pennzoil and other large, heavy industries.  As I was growing up there I found books, but in department stores like Woolworths, or more commonly, secondhand at Goodwill.  People are changed by the books they read and, given their own devices, most won’t go online looking for books.  After work I tend to shut the computer down and pick up a book to read.  I also try to carve out reading time each morning.  I grew up without easy access to bookstores.  It gladdens me to see one opening in the small town where I began to realize the importance of picking up a book and learning about this ever-changing world.

Club Frankenstein

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Reading YA novels once in a while reveals that younger folk have quite a good selection of literature from which to choose.  Goldy Moldavsky’s The Mary Shelley Club is a good pick for horror fans as it takes several cues from horror movies and mixes them with the anxieties of high school.  Rachel Chavez is a new student at Manchester Prep in New York City.  Her mother moved her there after a break-in and attack at their old home on Long Island.  With really only one friend at her new school, she finds out about the secretive Mary Shelley Club which meets to watch horror movies—or so she thinks.  Rachel then learns that the club’s real raison d’être is to play a game called Fear Test in which a targeted student is frightened, sometimes to death.  Rachel settles in the the club, being a horror fan, but grows increasingly uncomfortable with the game.

I won’t say much more than that about the plot, but I will say it is compellingly written and a page turner.  I didn’t quite buy the resolution, but that’s often true of horror movies.  It captures well the anxiety of high school, and of moving to a new location.  And Moldavsky certainly knows her horror movies.  I sometimes ponder what makes a novel YA.  I suppose it’s the focus on high school/college kids and a restrained vocabulary, shall we say.  While there’s no explicit sex scenes, there is some making out with intent here (this isn’t a romance), and there are a few f-bombs dropped.  And there is a body count.  Still, for horror, it doesn’t feel as gristly as “adult novels.”  Young people seem to lack the more developed evil of their elders.

My motive for reading it, apart from the horror aspect, was that The Mary Shelley Club is occasionally cited as an example of dark academia.  It’s easy enough to see why.  An exclusive school, wealthy families, and a dark subtext involving a secret society.  These are often hallmarks of the genre.  Dark academia may blend with horror, as it does here, or other genres.  That’s part of its appeal.  In this case the school, Manchester Prep (the name borrowed, it seems, from Cruel Intentions) may not be the center of the story, but it is what brings the main characters together, even if the horror is extra-curricular.  It was a fairly quick read, despite its size, and it bodes well for other good reading while exploring this particular aesthetic.

Double-Dipping

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Double-dipping takes many forms.  The kind I’m talking about is trying to get more than your fair share by either taking twice, or by fooling others into buying the same thing two times.  I’ve fallen victim myself.  Some publishers will sell a hardcover book and then release the paperback with a different title a couple years later.  If you’re a fan of the subject, you’ll buy the same book twice because they won’t easily tell you that it is the same one.  On paper the strategy is to get libraries to buy the hardcover (which costs more) instead of waiting for the paperback.  Why change the title if not to fool someone?  Maybe I’m just embarrassed by the vegan egg on my own face because I realize that I’ve bought the same book more than once.  Maybe more than once.  With a limited budget, I don’t appreciate being deceived.

The egg is even older and more obvious when I realize that those of us of a certain age can’t keep our memories as sharp as they used to be.  I read a lot.  I try to get through 60 or 70 books a year.  Have done for over a decade now.  If a book doesn’t create a strong impact, it may go into that category of enjoyable but not really memorable.  So when I recently learned that a publisher had double-dipped with a book I’d bought and read—twice—I felt violated and embarrassed.  Even more troubling was the fact that I wrote blog posts about each of the books (about three years apart) without recognizing I’d already read it.  To be fair, buried on the copyright page (who reads that?) the paperback confessed that it was the same as the differently titled hardcover.  Of course, I’d already bought the book, read it, and blogged about it (twice) before someone pointed out to me that it was the same book.  Gotcha!

I hold myself to high ethical standards.  I hope that I’m an honest person; I tell the truth whenever possible.  I’d certainly not try to sell someone two of the same thing without telling them that they weren’t buying something new, but simply giving more money for something they already had.  Even Amazon says, “Purchased on,” and gives you the date if you call up a book you’ve already bought.  Publishers, I know, have a difficult time.  Publishing is a “low margin” business, which means that you have to sell lots in order to stay solvent, and each sale brings in only a small profit.  Temptation to double-dip must be very strong.  Still, I feel a bit silly to have fallen for it, even when it’s what I do for a living.

Letting Go

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I should’ve known from the title that this would be a sad story.  Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go won the Nobel Prize in Literature, despite being speculative.  It’s only mildly so, but enough that it is sometimes classed as science fiction.  It’s appropriate that a twentieth anniversary edition was released because it is an extended consideration of the price of technology as well as dehumanization.  I’ll need to put in some spoilers, so here’s the usual caveat.  I read this novel because it’s often cited as an example of dark academia and it certainly fits that aesthetic.  It starts out at a private school called Hailsham, in England.  The students are given some privileges but their lives aren’t exactly posh.  Most of their possessions are purchased on days when a truck sells them things they can buy with money they earn by creating art.  They aren’t allowed to leave the school.  Spoilers follow.

The special circumstances of the children are because they’re clones being grown for replacement organs.  The public doesn’t want to know about them or interact with them.  In fact, most people believe they don’t have souls, or aren’t really human.  They’ve been created to be used and exploited until they die, always prematurely.  While this may sound grim, the story is thoughtfully told through the eyes of one of these children, Kathy.  She becomes best friends with Ruth and Tommy, who later become a couple.  Ruth is a difficult personality, but likable.  As they grow they’re slowly given the facts about what their life will be.  They’re raised to comply, never to rebel or question their role.  Most simply accept it.  Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, in a submissive way, try to get a deferral regarding their “donations.”

I suppose it’s presumptuous to say of a Nobel Prize winner that it’s well written, but I’ll say it anyway.  Ishiguro manages to capture the exploratory friendships of youth and reveals what you need to know in slow doses, all told with a compelling, if sad and accepting voice.  Although the genre could be sci-fi, it’s set in the present, or, more accurately, about twenty years ago.  The technology, apart from the cloning, is about what it was at the turn of the century, or maybe a decade or two before that.  With what we see happening in the world right now, people should be reading books like this that help them understand that people are people, not things to be exploited.  And that Nobel Prizes should be reserved for those that are actually deserving for their contributions to humanity. 

Cat Tales

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Sometimes I go into an independent bookstore and just look what’s on the shelf.  Often this ends up being an attempt to find a book that isn’t monstrous in length.  Much of what’s currently on offer is long, but I grew up reading 128-page paperbacks (not great literature, granted) that set my expectations.  Now, I do read long books.  Since books and movies are staple topics for discussion on this blog, however, I need to keep things moving in both kinds.  All of which is to say that I picked up Sosuke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved Books because it was short.  This particular bookstore was one where I know and trust the owner’s taste.  I’d bought Haruki Murakami’s works there before.  I really didn’t know what I was getting into this time, though.  I like cats.  I like short books.  I like the Japanese authors I’ve read.  So.

The BISAC code on the back of this one didn’t state that it was fantasy.  I like some fantasy fiction, but my tolerance is limited.  The fault is mine entirely; I own that.  I enjoy speculative fiction and a book with a talking cat felt like it might fit that niche.  I thought the story of The Cat Who Saved Books was good, and the message was sound.  But it felt a bit trite.  The previous Japanese author I’d read was Murakami, and he’s pretty incredible.  I can give you a taste of this book, however, and raise a question about it.  A teenage boy is left taking care of his grandfather’s bookshop after his guardian dies.  A talking cat appears and leads him to four labyrinths where the boy has to rescue books that are being misused.  His arguments to save them don’t seem profound, but something might’ve been lost in translation.

The question is that one of the characters claims to be a book almost two-thousand years old that has had more influence than any other book. Was this the Bible?  Interestingly, nearly every book mentioned in this novel is from the “western canon.”  I have to wonder if this particular book, which is a rather severe character, is the Good Book.  I don’t suspect there’s any way to find out, really.  Still, it seems to fit the sense that Natsukawa uses.  This is an innocent enough fantasy novel.  I guess I prefer my fantasy to have solid rules laid down so that I have an idea what to expect.  But then again, my perspective is that of a primarily western reader, and one who craves short books now and again. I’m open to learn.

Death in Cambridge

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In an effort not to give too much away, I’ll try to give only the bare bones and some impressions.  The Maidens, by Alex Michaelides, is considered a dark academia novel.  It revolves around a series of murders in Cambridge and the informal investigations by a psychologist (Mariana), whose niece attends St. Christopher’s College.  There is, not surprisingly, a lot of psychological tension.  It’s also a good illustration of the human condition—our psychology can often be disrupted by those closest to us.  We’re a complex lot.  The whole story is also set against the backdrop of classic Greek tragedies.  Mariana is half Greek herself, living in England.  She’s also a widow and, although not a minor, a woman without parents or siblings.  As a psychologist, she tries to help others sort out their lives.

Perhaps some of us are born prone to trauma through some combination of naiveté, innocence, and neurodivergence.  It’s well known that what simply rolls off one person will traumatize another.  People sometimes comment that it’s surprising that I watch horror, but the fact is that it’s generally removed from my personal traumas.  Looking back over some sixty years, I see quite a lot of trauma and I empathize with Michaelides’ characters who experienced such deficits, some of them without even knowing it.  This really stood out to me while reading the novel.  With the exception of some of the maidens, just about everybody is hurting.  Who are these eponymous maidens?  A group of students who have coalesced around an American professor of ancient literature.  And they’re also the ones who tend to get bumped off.

This is a book that moves along.  Part of the reason is that it has short chapters, something I’ve come to appreciate over my life as things get busier and busier.  Long chapters can be a challenge.  A novel I read recently had no chapters at all (but at least there were scattered extra-spaces between collections of paragraphs).  But what really keeps the pages turning is the story.  Michaelides is very good at misdirection, which is why I didn’t describe the plot in any detail.  You have to read it to see how things unfold and I don’t want to spoil that for anyone.  A literary murder-mystery, it has no speculative elements, apart from a few coincidences.  It does, for at least some readers, have quite an impact.  For me, it influenced my thought process for the rest of the day after I finished it.  At that, with all the books I read, is pretty rare.

More Writing

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I keep a list.  It includes everything that I’ve published.  It’s not on my CV since I keep my fiction pretty close to my vest.  The other day I stumbled across another electronic list I’d made some time ago of the unpublished books I’d written.  Most were fiction but at least two were non, and so I decided that I should probably print out copies of those I still had.  As I’ve probably written elsewhere, I started my first novel as a teenager.  I never finished it, but I still remember it pretty well.  Then I started another, also unfinished.  After my wife and I got engaged and before we moved to Scotland, I’d moved to Ann Arbor to be in her city.  Ann Arbor, like most university towns, has many overqualified people looking for work and I ended up doing secretarial support for companies that really had nothing for me to do quite a bit of the time.  I wrote my first full novel during dull times on the job.

My writing was pretty focused in Edinburgh.  My first published book was, naturally, my dissertation.  I started writing fiction again when I was hired by Nashotah House, but that was tempered by academic articles and my second book.  An academic life, it seems, doesn’t leave a ton of time for writing.  What really surprised me about my list was what happened after Nashotah.  In the years since then I’ve completed ten unpublished books.  Since my ouster from academia I’ve published five.  I honestly don’t know how many short stories I’ve finished, but I have published thirty-three.  What really worries me is that some of these only exist in tenuous electronic form.  I guess I trust the internet enough to preserve these blog posts; with over 5,700 of them I’d be running out of space.

I see a trip to buy some paper in my future.  For my peace of mind I need to make sure all of this is printed out.  My organizational scheme (which is perhaps not unusual for those with my condition) is: I know which pile I put it in.  Organizing it for others, assuming anybody else is interested, might not be a bad idea.  I know that if I make my way to the attic and begin looking through my personal slush pile of manuscripts I’ll find even more that I’ve forgotten.  That’s why I started keeping a list.  Someday I’ll have time to finish it, I hope.

Re-Ruins

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I discovered Scott B. Smith’s The Ruins after having seen the movie version.  The film is scary but the book is scarier.  I wrote about the movie last year, so I won’t worry about spoilers here.  I will say that even with its bleak ending the film has a happier resolution.  If you read my post, and remember it, the following summary may not be necessary, but here goes: two couples and two friends vacationing in Mexico set off in search of one of the friends’ missing brother.  They travel to a very remote location and discover that the missing brother is dead.  Worse, that he was killed by the natives for trying to escape a vine-covered ruin.  The vine is carnivorous, and, unlike in the movie, clearly intelligent, and sentient.  It tricks the young people into harming themselves and then it begins to eat them.  It especially preys on open wounds, but it can smother a person if it so desires.

The book is full of tension.  Although a couple of injuries take place early on, it’s over halfway through before someone actually dies.  And the others don’t follow quickly.  The narrative asks probing questions about ethics and mercy.  When (if ever) is it okay to kill someone who clearly has zero chance of survival?  Is it still murder?  Complicating things, for me, was the fact that I couldn’t remember clearly how the movie ended.  Eventually it came back to me, but this is one of those cases where the film and book, although with the same writer, diverge a bit.  The characters are clearly sketched here but defy expectations and stereotypes.  And it is sometimes the case that you aren’t sure who might be telling the truth and who might be trying to protect themselves through prevarication.

An effectively written novel, it had me looking askance at plants from time to time.  We have a quite aggressive vine in our yard that seems determined to be the Trump of all the plants.  I suspect someone planted it long before we moved in, unless it’s simply a successful exploiter of happy happenstance.  I’ve tried uprooting it every year, but I can’t seem to get to the brain of the operation.  It’s easy to believe that if plants were sentient, and could move a bit faster than they tend to, that such a scenario as in The Ruins might unfold.  The question remains whether the local Mayans simply can’t eradicate it or if they might indeed have some worshipful regard for it.  The two may end up being nearly the same thing as human power is unable to tell nature what to do.

Hugo’s Invention

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After watching Hugo, and wishing that the story were history, I found a copy of Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret.  Martin Scorsese’s adaptation is fairly close to the book but there are, of course, additions and omissions.  One key character is left out and some subtleties to the book didn’t find their way obviously into the movie, or at least not until having read the book.  The story of Georges Méliès’ life in the book is largely accurate.  Hugo, however, and Isabelle, are fictional.  As is the automaton around which the story is based.  The lovable train station vendors in the movie are quite a bit less lovable in the book.  And the station inspector isn’t shown until late in the story and he doesn’t have the leg brace that lends a kind of steampunishish vibe to the film.

Apart from being a tale of redemption—in real life Méliès’ rediscovery didn’t lead to an end of his poverty—the story is an exploration in psychology.  Méliès lost his dream job due to competition after the First World War.  The book makes clear that the clicking of heels drives him to rage because his films were reputedly melted down to make shoe heels.  The story in the book goes so far as to say that ghosts follow those who clack their heels loudly.  The ghosts, of course, are those of Méliès’ lost success as a filmmaker.  One of the reasons this story appeals to me is that I too lost a job that gave my life a sense of purpose.  My writing largely does that now, even if it doesn’t sell.  I can relate to a man who is ready to retire but can’t, daily reminded that he once had a satisfying job but now has to sit behind a desk all day.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a book for younger readers.  About half of the book’s 500-plus pages are illustrations.  The images include stills from Méliès’ surviving films, but mostly drawings by Selznick.  The focus on the young people makes this a children’s book, but the truths it tells of adults with lost dreams are especially appropriate for those who’ve learned that life isn’t always kind to dreamers.  The book, like the movie, inspires me to seek out the surviving films of Georges Méliès and think of what can indeed happen to those who dare to dream, even when the world has already discarded them as irrelevant.

Storytelling

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Those who know me personally say that I’m a good storyteller.  My own head houses, however, my harshest critic.  Since I tend to work alone this creates an inherent conflict.  This is most evident in my fiction.  I finished a draft of my eighth novel earlier this year, but it still needs work.  (No, really it does—not just harsh critic speaking.)  Part of the problem is obviously time.  My morning writing period is frequently held hostage by my moods.  Some of my past novels are, I think, publishable.  I’ve tried repeatedly with one of them, getting as far as having a signed contract, but things collapsed after that.  It sits brooding on my hard drive.  Another—I think it may be number four or five—seems publishable but it requires reworking with magic pixie dust.  Sometimes my supply of it runs low.  (Moods again.)

I sometimes wonder if I read too much nonfiction.  I’m a curious sort of chap, interested in the world around me.  When that world seems to be falling apart, however, fiction is my friend.  I’ve been reading a lot of novels and I’m often struck by the beauty of the prose.  Head critic says, “why can’t you do that?”  Then I recall the writing advice that I picked up from Stephen King’s nonfiction, On Writing.  Adjectives may be bad for your health.  Just tell the story.  With style.  My current novel (eight) tells an interesting story, I think.  If I’m honest I’ll say that I started working on this before any of the other completed novels (except number one, and that was a throwaway).  It was an idea that just wouldn’t go away.  I knew the beginning and the ending, and part of the middle.  I even found a potential publisher, but it has grown too long for them.

About three chapters from the end I realized that I hadn’t tied things up as well as I’d initially thought.  What I need is time away from work to think about it.  Thinking time is rare, even in the time I manage to wrestle from the 9-2-5.  There’s always more to be done, trying to stay healthy and out of the weather.  And really, maybe I should be reading even more fiction.  But what about the “real world” out there, which requires nonfiction to face it boldly and with informed decisions?  It’s dramatic, isn’t it?  Like a protagonist (hardly a hero) on the edge of a cliff.  How does the story end?  Perhaps an actual storyteller might know.

Nanowrimo Night

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Nanowrimo, National Novel Writing Month—November—has been run by an organization that is now shutting down.  Financial troubles and, of course, AI (which seems to be involved in many poor choices these days), have led to the decision, according to Publisher’s Weekly.  Apparently several new authors were found by publishers, basing their work on Nanowrimo projects.  I participated one year and had no trouble finishing something, but it was not really publishable.  Still, it’s sad to see this inspiration for other writers calling it quits.  I’m not into politics but when the Nanowrimo executives didn’t take a solid stand against AI “written” novels, purists were rightfully offended.  Writing is the expression of the human experience.  0s and 1s are not humans, no matter how much tech moguls may think they are.  Materialism has spawned some wicked children.

Can AI wordsmith?  Certainly.  Can it think?  No.  And what we need in this world is more thinking, not less.  Is there maybe a hidden reason tech giants have cozied up to the current White House where thinking is undervalued?  Sorry, politics.  We have known for many generations that human brains serve a biological purpose.  We keep claiming animals (most of which have brains) can’t think, but we suppose electrical surges across transistors can?  I watch the birds outside my window, competing, chittering, chasing each other off.  They’re conscious and they can learn.  They have the biological basis to do so.  Being enfleshed entitles them.  Too bad they can’t write it down.

Now I’m the first to admit that consciousness may well exist outside biology.  To tap into it, however, requires the consciousness “plug-in”—aka, a brain.  Would AI “read” novels for the pleasure of it?  Would it understand falling in love, or the fear of a monster prowling the night?  Or the thrill of solving a mystery?  These emotional aspects, which neurologists note are a crucial part of thinking, can’t be replicated without life.  Actually living.  Believe me, I mourn when machines I care for die.  I seriously doubt the feeling is reciprocated.  Materialism has been the reigning paradigm for quite a few decades now, while consciousness remains a quandary.  I’ve read novels that struggle with deep issues of being human.  I fear that we could be fooled with an AI novel where the “writer” is merely borrowing how humans communicate to pretend how it feels.  And I feel a little sad, knowing that Nanowrimo is hanging up the “closed” sign.  But humans, being what they are, will still likely try to complete novels in the month of November.

No Ordinary Picnic

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I will be including spoilers in this review, so please be advised!  Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel that began as speculative but then turned naturalistic.  Mostly, anyway.  Born in 1896, Lindsay published the novel just after she turned 70.  Since she was Australian, it stands to reason that the story is set there.  Hanging Rock is an actual place and, according to multiple sources, Lindsay ended the book with a speculative chapter that explained the mystery.  What is the mystery?  On Valentines Day 1900, the girls at Appleyard College set out for a picnic at, well, Hanging Rock.  While there, three of the girls and one of their chaperones disappear.  Since everyone travels by literal horse power, getting back and forth from the scene of the mystery takes hours.  The head mistress of the college is frantic, mostly because she’ll be losing tuition because of this.

Eventually one of the girls is found, somewhat mystically, by a young Englishman with whom a romance starts and seems to end abruptly.  The found girl remembers nothing of what happened that day.  Further investigations are held, but the mystery is never solved.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Appleyard, the mistress of the college, takes a strong dislike to one of the girls who was devoted to one of the missing.  After one of the girls’ governesses, recently dismissed, burns to death, the headmistress appears to have murdered the girl she disliked (or she fell/jumped from a window; the novel isn’t explicit on the point).  Mrs. Appleyard, realizing she is ruined, goes to Hanging Rock where she dies by suicide, throwing herself down the rocky side of the outcropping.  The speculative ending—no longer part of the novel—had the missing girls disappear into a kind of time warp.  Lindsay’s editor had her remove that chapter.

The novel became quite well known in Australia, and to the wider world when a movie was made from it.  The interesting thing is that the novel presents itself as describing factual events, like the Blair Witch Project.  This is so much the case that the rumor grew that the events really did happen.  A book was even written, suggesting a solution regarding what happened to the missing girls.  Had the excised chapter been published with the book, it would’ve been clear that this was a fictional tale.  Lindsay had a savvy editor, however.  Nothing sells like a dramatic story that readers believe to be true.  Witness The Amityville Horror.  Even though naturalistic, a bit of the speculative still hangs about the story, making for a good gothic novel without a firm resolution.

Dead, Not Sleeping

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A Nightmare in New Hope is a fairly intimate space.  The owner told us that the collection will change and grow, given that he’s still collecting.  Having a particular interest in Tim Burton’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow—having a book (ahem) on the subject coming out soon (cough)—I was particularly anxious to see what props they had.  To make sense of this it helps to have seen the movie, but you’ll catch on, even if you only know the Disney version of the story.  There were three main items from the movie that they have on display.  One is the wax seal used for the Van Garrett will, used as the movie opens.  The seal is quite large.  Of course, movies substitute props from time to time, blended by celluloid magic.  CGI doesn’t leave as many tracks.

The second artifact is one that wouldn’t have occurred to me to have even existed.  This was the animatronic horse’s head for Daredevil, the Headless Horseman’s mount.  There are a couple scenes in the film involving horse acting, and I’d just assumed that trained animals were used.  Being up close and personal with this artificial head, a couple thoughts came to mind.  One is that right next to it, it’s quite obvious that it’s artificial.  The second thought was just how much thought and effort goes into a big-budget movie.  For a few seconds of a close-up horse head, this model had to be constructed and used and then set aside.  I asked the owner about how such things were acquired, and he noted that production companies don’t keep everything.  He also noted that movie artifact prices have skyrocketed.  Both because horror is now popular and because CGI, as noted, doesn’t leave tracks.

The third, and most proudly displayed Sleepy Hollow piece is the Headless Horseman’s sword.  This appears in the movie far more often than either Daredevil’s head or the wax seal.  One of the aspects of Washington Irving’s story I discuss in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth is that the Horseman’s weaponry changes over time.  I won’t say more since, like museum owners, those who write books hope that they well sell a few copies.  I’ll be revisiting A Nightmare in New Hope from time to time.  For the items on display, I’d seen probably 90 percent of the movies, and a few of them I’d discussed in some detail in either Holy Horror or Nightmares with the Bible.  Of course, the Sleepy Hollow book is forthcoming (ahem).

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Especially the first part, of Mona Awad’s Bunny, is so well written I almost laid down my pen for good.  I really enjoyed this one.  Once the story gets deeper, into the second and third parts, questions begin to arise as to what’s going on.  One reason for this is the story becomes speculative in nature and Awad’s not about to give away what’s “really happening.”  Set among a set of five graduate students at the prestigious Warren University (the name is a hat-tip), the novel is often considered dark academia.  It starts out pretty light, and although Awad maintains her deft hand, it grows progressively darker as the tale goes on.  Samantha Heather Mackey is enrolled in the writing program with a cohort of four “perfect” women—the kind many guys go for.  Sam’s an outsider, though, writing dark and troubled stories while her classmates garner the professor’s praise.

The “perfect” women call each other “Bunny” and they eventually invite Sam into their clique.  This annoys Sam’s best friend and sometimes roommate, a local artist who isn’t a student.  But Sam is caught.  She learns that the Bunnies actually transform rabbits into their ideal boyfriends.  They haven’t got the process down pat, though, and the resultant hybrids often have various deformities.  Sam is the only one who can’t do this transformation.  Until she does.  But it doesn’t turn out like anyone expects.  I’d better draw my plot summation to a close there, otherwise I might hop into spoiler territory.  I wouldn’t want to do that because I recommend reading this one for yourself.  Awad’s writing is beautiful and compelling.  I did wonder if I’d interpreted everything correctly when I finally put the book down.

Dark academia comes in a rainbow of colors.  Here, although comi-tragic, there’s something seriously wrong at Warren University.  There are plenty of books and classes, as well as intrigues among ingenues.  And also some serious reflection on expectations and how they affect relationships.  Friendship and what it really means.  Loneliness, and how it creeps into the lives of creative people.  It’s also a story about writing and learning to write.  As noted above, it succeeds wildly in this.  There are definitely horror vibes about the tale, but it’s so well told that you might lose track of the fact that they’re there.  When Margaret Atwood praises a book, it’s worth paying attention.  While not dark and dreary, Bunny shows the sub-genre off as one of great potential.  It’s worth twitching your nose over.