Naming Names

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I recently saw a story suggesting that Elon Musk was named after the leader of a Martian colony in an unpublished novel written by none other than Wernher von Braun.  Now, I don’t know if this is true or not, but it did get me to thinking about names.  The awesome responsibility that parents have in naming their kids.  I suppose many people don’t think much of it, but I remember asking, at a young age, why I was named “Steve.”  (There’s no “n” at the end, despite what people throughout my life have tried to “correct.”)  An old belief suggests that children might emulate those they’re named after.  Of course, some of us just can’t let things go.  Nobody else in my family was named “Steve,” and being very Protestant, I wasn’t named after no saint.  (Besides, he was Stephen.)

My mom told me a couple of things.  First of all, she wanted to name me after her father, Homer.  As an adult I think it might’ve been worth the childhood beatings I’d have to have taken, but my father vetoed it.  “Steve” was taken from a character in a Dick Tracy cartoon.  Mom liked the sound of it and my father didn’t object.  I’ve never read Dick Tracy—I’m not much of one for newspapers in general—but I did see that Warren Beatty movie back when it came out.  Once I tried to find a character named Steve in the cartoon line-up and I did find that there was a criminal by that name at one point.  Mom never told me this and I only found it as an adult, after I’d already decided against a life of crime.  But still, names sometimes inspire behaviors.  Influence choices.  Don’t they?

Homer and His Guide: Image credit: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Children named after their parents sometimes follow in their footsteps.  Or those named after a great person in history use that in their internal monologue as they try to attain similar things.  Now, I haven’t researched this—I’m just guessing here.  But for many years it was unusual to find a German boy named Adolf.  There are also names that are retired for someone being, say, the son of God.  Mom swore it was wrong to name a boy “Jesus,” even in admiration.  She didn’t know that the Anglicized Hebrew name was actually “Joshua,” common then as it is today.  Homer was a pagan, and I wondered how my great-grandparents came up with that name.  The best I can figure is that they were from upstate New York and there’s a town called Homer in Cortland County.  And I wonder if he ever asked his parents why he was named that way.

Contours of Dark Academia

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

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

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

and Seek

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I’m afraid there may be spoilers—but not for the ending—below.  Discussing this story will be difficult without giving some things away.  Kiersten White’s Hide has given us an imaginative world with masterful misdirection.  Fourteen people a bit down on their luck, and strangers to each other, are offered an opportunity to win $50,000.  They have to hide in an abandoned amusement park for a week where two of them will be caught each day and the last person remaining wins.  The novel mostly follows Mack, a woman whose father killed her family while she survived by hiding.  Not only does she have survivor’s guilt, but she’s been homeless and the shelter director thinks she’ll have a chance at winning the prize.  There is a lot of social commentary here, as well as a monster.  Okay, spoilers below.

The minotaur is a most useful monster.  The backstory here isn’t in Greece (well, the deep backstory is, but that is only played out partially here) but in Asterion.  No state is given for the town, and the contestants can’t be given that information.  They’re locked in the park, with supplies, but very little information.  Then the contest starts.  After a couple of days Mack and a couple others begin to suspect that something’s wrong.  Those who get caught while they’re hiding leave personal effects behind, and since they all need the money that seems unlikely.  Then their host stops coming, leaving the bewildered contestants on their own.  Mack and those she’s befriended come to understand that being “out” is really being eaten by the minotaur.  Well, they don’t realize it’s the minotaur.  The one who does gets eaten before he can tell.

In any case, this is a tense horror story based on a classic tale.  There is, of course, a rationale for the murderous behavior in a modern setting.  White keeps you waiting quite a while to learn what it is, and there are plenty of places where I thought I’d figured out how it’d end only to be proven wrong.  And she gives believable character sketches and explores the kinds of motivations that drive different people who find themselves needing an income.  (One of the characters was raised in a religious cult—bonus!)  Those who are poor aren’t always at fault, but those who are wealthy will do anything to preserve their excess.  We see that playing out in daily life, even as it’s being explored in fiction.  The minotaur isn’t always what we think it is.  And the more you think about its insidious origin story provided here, the scarier it becomes.

To Dracula, a Daughter

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Nosferatu, by F. W. Murnau, was deemed in copyright violation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and ordered destroyed.  Rights to the novel were properly purchased by Universal and the horror film proper was born.  Other studios wanted to get in on the action, so the rights to the story of the Count’s daughter were bought by MGM.  They then sold the rights to Universal so that the latter could produce a sequel to their earlier hit.  Dracula’s Daughter didn’t do as well as the original, but it kept the vampires coming.  Some years later, Son of Dracula came out, keeping it in the family.  Having watched Abigail, I had to go back to Dracula’s Daughter to remind myself of how the story went.  I recalled, from my previous watching, that it wasn’t exactly action-packed, but beyond that thoughts were hazy.

Picking up where Dracula left off, von Helsing (that’s not a typo) is arrested for staking a man.  Then a mysterious woman arrives and steals the body to destroy it in an attempt to rid herself of vampirism.  We see that just five years after Dracula the reluctant vampire was born.  Creating a scandal at the time, Dracula’s daughter also seemed to prefer females.  Apparently the script was rewritten several times to meet the approval of censors during the Code era.  The modern assessment is that this is based more on Sheridan Le Fanu’s Camilla rather than an excised chapter of Bram Stoker’s novel.  Since the world wasn’t ready for lesbian vampires in the thirties, she falls for Dr. Garth, a psychologist that she wants to live with her forever.  Kidnapping his secretary to Transylvania, she draws him to Castle Dracula.  Her jealous servant Sandor, however, shoots her with an arrow.  Von Helsing explains that any wooden shaft through the heart will do.

Already as early as Stoker, at least, Dracula had brides who were vampires.  It makes sense that there might be daughters and sons.  And studios, learning that people would pay to watch vampires on the silver screen, were glad to keep the family dynamics rolling.  Vampires proved extremely popular with viewers—a fascination that has hardly slowed down since the horror genre first began.  Some of the more recent productions explore themes and approaches that simply wouldn’t have been possible in the early days of cinema.  We don’t see Dracula’s daughter actually biting victims—one of the many things the Production Code wouldn’t allow—and there’s no blood.  Nevertheless, the story itself went on to have children and they are still among us.

Dead Darlings

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

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

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

First Tower

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

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

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

In Praise of Paper

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I write quite a lot.  I’ve done so for decades.  As I’ve tried to carve out a writer’s life for myself I noticed a few things.  I’ll start a story or novel and put it aside.  Sometimes for a decade or more, then come back to it.  I recently found what looks to be a promising novel that I began writing, by hand, back in the last century.  As electronics forced themselves more and more into my life, I began writing it on my computer.  I must’ve picked this story up a few years back because I clearly began revising it, but I ran into a problem.  The program in which I’d written it—Microsoft Word—was no longer supported by Apple products.  I eventually found a workaround and was able to extract a Rich Text Format from files that my computer told me were illegible.  If you want illegible, I felt like telling it, go back to the original hand-written chapters!

I dusted this off (virtually) belatedly, and started working again.  Then I reached chapter four.  That’s where I’d stopped my most recent revision.  Then I discovered why.  Near the end of the chapter were two paragraphs full of question marks with an occasional word scattered in.  A part of the Word file that the RTF couldn’t read.  Frustrated and heartbroken—there’s no way I can remember what this said some thirty years after it was initially written—I simply stopped.  This time I went to the attic and found the hand-written manuscript.  I went to the offending chapter only to find that the corrupted passage was missing.  It was what we used to call a “keyboard composition” and it was eaten by the equivalent of electronic moths.

Photo by Everyday basics on Unsplash

Now, I’m no techie, but I just don’t understand why a word processing file can no longer be read by the program in which it was written.  Publishers urge us to ebooks but how many times in my life have I seen a new system for preserving electronic files fold, with the loss of all the data?  It’s not just a few.  And they’re asking us to make literature disposable.  If I have a book on my shelf and I need to look up a passage, I can do so.  Even if I bought the book half a century ago and even if the book had been printed a century before that.  I’m aware of the irony that this blog is electronic—I used to print out all of the posts—and I have the feeling that my work is being sacrificed to that void we call electronic publication.  That’s why I keep the handwritten manuscripts in my attic.

A Plea

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

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

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

Bibliographer for Hire

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Why is bibliographer not a job?  Why can’t a person make a living categorizing knowledge?  I ask this because I see YouTube videos of people saying your job should be what you enjoy doing.  What if you enjoy creating bibliographies?  You see, my research methods are a bit unconventional.  They kind of have to be since I have no institutional support for my writing, and yet I want it to be intelligent and informed.  That means I have to locate my own sources and inevitably, when I’m compiling a bibliography, I’m happy.  Even if it means ferreting out obscure sources and trying to learn where something was originally published, I’m still at the top of my game.  (Yes, this is one of those things that the longer you’ve been doing it, the better you get at it.  These days it means learning to engage the internet for research.  Since it’s more of a money-making venture geared towards entertainment, that can be tricky.)

I remember those days of typing out bibliographies by typewriter, smearing White-Out all over, or trying to use that ribbon stuff that was supposed to be able to type over mistakes.  My friends and fellow students hated bibliographies.  Secretly, and perhaps perversely, I was enjoying myself.  You see, a bibliography is gathered knowledge.  When I finish reading a nonfiction book, particularly one where I want to do further reading myself, I go through the bibliography.  I want to know the origins of ideas.  There’s an irony here since my last few books have featured quite a few of my own ideas supported by what I’d read.  And I know that unless I provide a precise footnote, anyone who might read my work might wonder “how I know” what I’m writing.  It’s increasingly becoming one of those “pay attention to your elders” sort of thing, I guess.

But the bibliographies I could compile!  The really tricky part when writing The Wicker Man was the word limit.  I know authors who struggle bringing the bibliography down to required length, and I feel for them.  I really do.  You see, a bibliography is a record of what it took to get me to write this book.  These are the things I was reading, pondering.  Or found along the way.  There’s an art to a bibliography as well.  Some topics seem to attract authors with last names beginning with a certain letter, for instance.  Or others seem to have a dearth of another letter.  I may be the only person who finds such things fascinating, but can’t that be a paying job?  It is most interesting work, and categorizing knowledge is a full-time job.  If only it was a paying one.

Poking Around

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

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

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

Trouble on Campus

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

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

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

Slimy Monsters

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Stuart Gordon apparently had in mind to do an H. P. Lovecraft cycle, as Roger Corman did with Poe.  I first saw Dagon—clearly his best—and some time later picked up Re-Animator.  From Beyond was his second Lovecraft movie and it doesn’t have the visual appeal of Dagon, but it is certainly a passable gross-out for those who enjoy slimy monsters.  Gordon was pretty obviously of greater libido than Lovecraft ever was.  From Beyond puts sex in the spotlight’s periphery without making it absolutely central to the story.  A Dr. Pretorius has built a “resonator” that allows him to see extra-dimensional beings.  It does this by stimulating the pineal gland.  His assistant Dr. Tillinghast, is present when a creature from, well, beyond, kills Pretorius by wrenching off his head.  Tillinghast is suspected in his murder but is being held in an asylum rather than a traditional jail.

Dr. McMichaels, the love interest in the film, believes that Tillinghast is sane and that he actually did witness these beings from beyond.  As a scientist, she wants to see if the resonator really works.  It does, but in addition to providing the ability to experience the other realm, it also boosts the sex drive of those under its influence.  She decides, against the warning of Dr. Tillinghast, to try the resonator once more, but this time the other-dimensional Pretorius has become strong enough to prevent her from shutting the machine down.  Tillinghast is transformed into a modified human with an extension from his forehead and as she tries to explain what she witnessed, McMichaels is classified as insane.  She and Tillinghast escape the asylum and McMichaels manages to blow up the machine, ultimately going insane for real.

Lovecraft strenuously avoided sex in his written work, limiting the number of women characters who appear.  I suspect he would not have been pleased with this treatment of his story.  Gordon went on to make one more Lovecraft movie beyond Dagon, a television movie of Dreams in the Witch House (which I haven’t seen).  Of the three theatrical releases, I find Dagon the most convincing since the mood is serious and it seems to capture much of the feel of Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmouth,” one of his best stories.  Lovecraft himself apparently didn’t care that much for that particular tale.  And he was critical of the conversion of stories into movies.  It’s a good thing that one doesn’t have to see eye-to-eye with Lovecraft to appreciate his works.  And some of them transfer to film reasonably well.  Especially if you’re in the mood for slimy monsters.

Book Stages

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Books appear in stages.  All publishers are different.  These platitudes encapsulate my experience in finding a venue for my ideas.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth has just appeared in McFarland’s spring and summer catalogue.  I haven’t seen the proofs yet, but I suspect I will before too long now.  What’s with the spring and summer catalogue?  Well, believe it or not, books are seasonal.  Publishers go by seasons.  For many academic publishers there are two seasons: Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter.  The timing of certain books may fall in a specific place within those seasons but many academic books are aimed at classroom adoptions so early spring and early autumn are the most popular times.  It’s no coincidence that academic conferences also cluster around the semester system, the big ones being either autumn or spring.  Academics have a migratory instinct.

Personally, I’m hoping Sleepy Hollow will be out in late summer.  I don’t have any control over that, but it’s about then that normal people’s thoughts start turning toward falling leaves, long nights, and monsters.  Every year there’s a day in August when I step outside and literally smell autumn in the air.  As a kid seasons seemed like something as rigid as a biblical law: spring was March through May, summer June through August, and so forth.  The older I get, the more I realize how negotiable seasons are.  The Celts celebrated the start of spring in February.  Yes, there are lots of cold days yet to come, but the early signs of spring have begun.  For early risers, we finally start to observe earlier sunrises.  (These technically start around January 10, but they’re slow getting out of bed.)

You might think the ideal season for a book on spooky stuff, like Sleepy Hollow, would be timed for release in the fall/winter cycle.  Not necessarily.  Both Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible hit the market after Halloween.  Normal people’s thoughts had shifted to Thanksgiving.  I’m pleased that Sleepy Hollow will be released a bit earlier.  Summer is ideal for Halloween-themed books.  And yes, I devote a chapter to Halloween and the Headless Horseman.  They are closely related.  So I was glad to receive McFarland’s spring/summer catalogue and find my book on page two.  I don’t have a publication date yet, but I’m looking forward to being part of the discussion about one of my favorite ghost stories of all time.  Speaking of which, it’s almost time to begin gathering firewood for next winter, or at least it will be in summer.  And it’s not that far away.

Worse Seed

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Not too long ago I watched The Bad Seed.  In the 1950s it probably wasn’t considered horror, but it is quite a scary movie.  I’d classify it as horror—not all fifties horror was guys in rubbery suits.  When reading about the movie afterwards, I learned the novel had a darker ending (the movie was pretty dark as it was).  So I decided to read the book by William March.  The movie’s fairly faithful, up to the ending.  As usual, the novel adds more detail and reveals some things rather differently.  For example, Christine Penmark, the mother of Rhoda, can’t ask her father if she’s adopted.  She “learns” this through inference.  Indeed, the book leaves you wondering if she’s actually mentally unstable.  The proof that she’s the daughter of a serial killer is strong but not definitive.  And her father is already dead when the story opens.

The school outing, where Rhoda claims her second victim, is where the movie opens.  Rhoda is expelled from the school because the women who run it can’t abide Rhoda’s dishonesty.  The character of Leroy is very well portrayed in the movie, but he too seems to have some kind of mental illness.  Monica Breedlove is accurately presented as a busybody, but she too spends a lot of time analyzing people, including herself.  Rhoda is, of course, a literal sociopath.  It’s fair to say the novel is an extended exploration of mental illness of various sorts.  I remember from growing up in the sixties that many conditions that are now regularly diagnosed simply weren’t recognized.  Kids were blamed for bad behaviors that were, in all likelihood, caused by being somewhere on the spectrum.

Much water has passed under the bridge since the fifties.  This book was a bestseller then, but I only learned about it last year.  Indeed, it’s been adapted to film three times and was a Broadway play before all that.  There was a sequel released a couple years back.  Rhoda Penmark is herself a trope of the narcissist who lacks empathy.  Hmm, where else do we see that?  It’s still analyzed as primarily a “nature verses nurture” novel, but I suspect there’s something more going on.  We’ve moved beyond Freud and this novel probes what goes on in the minds of those who spend too much time alone, as well as who happen to be the mothers of pathological child murderers.  And the ending is different, but the movie’s is equally as bleak.  The Bad Seed a good book for this particular January.

Poe Day

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Perhaps best known for his rabidly racist The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith was nevertheless influential in early filmmaking.  I’m fascinated by how literature made its way to celluloid, particularly in the early days.  It was thus that I discovered Griffith’s Edgar Allen [sic] Poe, a silent film from 1909.  A dramatized version of Poe’s writing of “The Raven,” this seven-minute movie opens with Virginia Poe—the “Lenore” of the poem—in the process of dying at the Poe’s hovel.  Not able to keep warm or to find nourishment, she languishes on a cot until Poe arrives home and covers her with his coat.  At that moment a raven appears on the bust of Pallas above the chamber door, leading Poe to write the poem in a white heat.  He knows it’s a masterpiece and leaves Virginia promising success.

In a scene only too familiar to any writer, Poe takes the poem to the publishers, three of whom simply dismiss him, the third laughing at his work.  This particular scene rings so true.  A fourth editor buys it from him on the spot.  This is, in fact, how publishing works.  I’ve had 33 short stories either published or accepted for publication.  By far the majority of them were rejected multiple times.  One of them, previously turned down by six editors, ended up winning a prize.  So it goes.  You’ll never find an editor who “gets” you every time.  Even those who like your work may eventually start sending you elsewhere.  I often wonder how many writers of what would be classics died unpublished because of some editor’s choice.  But back to Poe.

Screenshot: public domain,

Newly paid for his work, he buys food and a blanket and returns home jubilant.  Of course, it is only to find Virginia dead.  Poe’s life did have its share of intense drama.  His death remains mysterious all these years later, and Virginia’s death was a severe blow to him.  “The Raven” was published in 1845 and Virginia died two years later, with Poe himself passing yet two years beyond that.  This film, which I learned about from Jonathan Elmer’s In Poe’s Wake, was made sixty years after Poe’s death.  He’d already become an icon by then, instantly recognizable in pancake makeup.  But even now, more than a century later, publishing is still a matter of the same process.  One of my own novels has been declined over 100 times, despite having once been under contract.  I do know the feeling of being rejected by publishers, even as I participate in a ritual as old as writing for publication.  Happy birthday, Mr. Poe.