Intensity

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It was the biggest excuse for breaking up with me.  “You’re too intense.”  I lost track of the number of times college coeds told me that.  At the same time, the same adjective was whispered in awe when applied to professors in class.  You wanted intense professors, but not intense boyfriends.  Was “intense” bad or good?  I don’t deny being intense.  Some of us are just that way.  In personal relationships I’ve often managed to keep it under control.  It was one of the reasons, however, that I was such a good professor.  Students seem to have responded well, even if academia had no permanent home for me.  Thus, dark academia.  Which tends to be intense.  When I throw all my energy at something, it can become intense.  But it’s also true that I’m on the receiving end of it.  My mental mapping, especially in the fallow times, means that I must try to make sense of it all.

Some periods in life are intense.  I’m sure that’s true for everybody.  Or most people.  A concentration of events when time itself seems to have collapsed on top of you and you still have a 9-2-5 for five long days before you can start to deal with the residue.   So far, since the end of November many months ago, I’ve been in an intense zone.  So much is happening that I have trouble keeping up.  Unlike a dating relationship, I can’t beg off with intensity as an excuse.  A big part of it has been the calendar.  Thanksgiving fell late and January with its cold felt like it would last forever.  Both Trump and AI simmered in the background.  And, of course, 9-2-5.

Two major snowstorms were separated by only a few weeks.  As the second was tuning up, a death in the family.  The third in three years.  A novel was finished.  As was a nonfiction draft.  Two orders from Amazon went awry.  Who has time for returns?  Because of the storms, things became double-booked.  Preparations for the 2026 Lehigh Valley Book Festival.  With my expensive books.  I really didn’t think they’d select me as a participant, but was committed.  Or should be.  My wife’s 9-2-5 also hit an intense period.  We had to deal with two major household repairs simultaneously.  An unexpected auto repair.  I checked another website (No Kill Switch) to help define intensity.  What he has to say makes a lot of sense, but the question remains.  Is intensity good or bad?  It does seem to be the opposite of boredom, when you get time to deal with things, after work.  

Crafting Byron

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For a man who lived to be only thirty-six, Lord Byron tends to be featured in very long biographies.  I’ve been curious about him, but maybe not to the tune of 500-plus pages.  I’d seen references to Elbert Hubbard’s Little Journeys to the Homes of English Authors: Lord Byron, and since it was only a handful of pages, and not very expensive, I got a copy.  As a biography it turned out to be exceedingly slim.  And written with a flowery prose.  In fact, you could read this easily in a day.  I did learn about about Lord Byron, but in this instance the author took precedence over the subject.  I knew nothing of Elbert Hubbard.  A free-thinker of the turn of the twentieth century, he was born in Illinois in 1856.  He was a successful traveling salesman but then started a commune called Roycroft outside Buffalo, New York.

The Roycrofters were crafters and artists living together and producing, in some cases influential, artworks.  The community operated from 1895 to 1938.  The buildings, which survive, are now National Historic Landmarks.  Elbert Hubbard was a philosopher and artist, as well as a socialist and anarchist.  It’s not surprising he took a liking to Lord Byron.  One of the crafting supplies at Roycroft was a printing press.  Hubbard published a series of Little Journeys, some sumptuously bound, others with paper covers, and, from experience, uncut pages.  Lord Byron was volume seven, published in 1900.  Roycroft continued for the remainder of Hubbard’s life, and a little beyond.  Hubbard and his second wife died in the sinking of the Lusitania during World War One.  His son kept the community going for another couple of decades.

American history is filled with colorful and creative individuals.  All I knew of Elbert Hubbard was that he wrote a reasonably short treatment of the life of Lord Byron.  Reading it I learned a bit about the other intensely curious and talented writer who’d died just over thirty years before before Hubbard was born.  Byron was then still alive in memory for many.  It turns out that both subject and author lived extraordinary lives.  And each, in their own way, influenced larger society.  And now, having read this small book, I’m inclined to plan a trip to East Aurora, outside Buffalo, to see the settlement of the Roycrofters.  That’s not a bad thing to come from a brief book, not expensive, to read about a poet.

Reclaiming the Past

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It started after Nashotah House.  That event shook me to my very core.  And I was approaching middle age.  I started taking an interest in my childhood.  I learned some uncomfortable truths that probably help explain the way that I am, but more tangibly, losing that job launched me back to both monster movies and the earnest need to collect books that I’d given up when I went to college to “grow up.”  Fortunately (perhaps) the internet had been invented and it was possible to locate used copies from the seventies.  I’ve written many times about the Dark Shadows books that I began collecting shortly after the incident in Delafield.  But there were others.  Many others.  Often it became a matter of identifying and finding the same edition that I’d had as a child.  (Modern reprints complicate this, but with enough patience the exact book editions can be found, and usually no more expensive than  contemporary bookstore prices.

The goal has never been to replace all of my childhood books, but those that evoked a palpable sense of wonder in my young psyche.  This was strange because I was very religious and these books sometimes challenged what my fundamentalist upbringing taught.  Some years back I had to find the exact edition of Erich van Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? that I had.  The curiosity did not extend to several of his other books from the seventies.  I got rid of these because they caused me to question my faith.  Teenagers.  In any case, I also had a compulsion to replace a book of Twilight Zone adaptations.  The cover of that book still sends me back to Rouseville.  Then I had a hankering to reread Logan’s Run.  It’d been reprinted many times, and the one I had as a kid was itself a reprint.  I needed that exact one.

My wife has been very patient with me.  I’m seeking something here.  I’ve always been haunted by the truth and there is a nagging feeling that I had grasped, only by the very tips of my fingers, a little bit of it before college.  Facing higher education (the first in my family to do so), I felt I needed to “put away childish things.”  The library that sustained me through those difficult Rouseville years was scuttled.  There’s a saying about babies and bathwater.  I’m beginning to think there may be something to it.  There were some very dark incidents in my early childhood, before I learned to read.  I think of them often.  And yet, a sense of wonder remains.  Mostly in the escapism of  old, mass market paperbacks from the seventies.

Confidential Hazing

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Set in a Long Island prep school, among a somewhat secret society called the Players, this is a dark academia tale of murder and discovery.  The Players, usually numbering eight in the senior class at Gold Coast Prep, are down to six.  One of their number was murdered and the one who confessed to that murder has been jailed.  Most of the students are extremely wealthy, but Jill Newman isn’t really rich.  This is what lies behind They Wish They Were Us by Jessica Goodman.  Although technically a young adult novel there are several disturbing elements here, some worthy of Lord of the Flies.  For that we need to dig a bit deeper.  To become a member of the Players, hazing is involved.  Since this isn’t an official program of the school, the hazing is entirely controlled by the seniors who are Players, to initiate their underclassmen into the club.

Some of the hazing is pretty intense, even for an adult reading the novel.  Kids aren’t always good about thinking through the consequences of traumatic activities on other kids.  People tend to be resilient, but at the same time scars heal in different ways.  In the course of one of the hazing tasks, something goes wrong and one of Jill’s friends, her best friend, ends up dead.  Since there’s a lot of drinking and drugs involved, it isn’t always easy to piece together what might’ve happened.  The crisis occurs for Jill when her younger brother joins the Players.  She has to watch him face the hazing, and at the same time comes to have suspicions about what really happened to her best friend.  Things get pretty tense.

As adults we can easily place ourselves, in our minds, back to our teenage years.  This is something that we didn’t appreciate as teens, and even now most teens don’t realize this about adults.  Wisdom, hopefully, comes with age.  In this fictional setting, rich adults are seldom around.  Their kids, with access to nearly unlimited money, can set their own rules.  Even the police treat them differently.  I’m deliberately not saying too much about the story since it would be too easy to give away the ending.  The school officials in the book care more about preserving the reputation of Gold Coast Prep than they do about the welfare of their students, even if this leads to blackmail to maintain its good name.  And this is something that teens will come to understand only once they start to work for a company with its own secrets.

Uncut

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I remember well the first time I encountered a book with uncut pages.  It was in Edinburgh and the book was mine on inter-library loan.  This presented a dilemma: should I, a mere post-graduate student, cut the pages of a book older than me?  The librarian told me it was fine to do so.  I wasn’t sure how to go about it.  I’ve never trusted myself with scissors and this seemed like such a permanent act I was about to commit.  I settled on a butter knife, figuring a sharp knife might cut into the meat of the page.  It worked fairly well.  I later bought a book with uncut pages.  I didn’t do so well on it, but I need to read what was inside (and it wasn’t a cheap book).  

This is more common in Europe than it is in the United States.  I recently bought an out of print book for my research.  The pages were uncut.  Now we have the internet which can be useful from time to time.  The proper technique, it turns out, is to use an index card with a saw-like motion.  It works extremely well.  Fighting paper with paper.  And I love these old books.  The heavy paper.  The actual, clear imprint of where the type hit the page.  This was an object being crafted, not electrons cycling around a screen.  When it was done you were left with something that felt permanent.  Something that wouldn’t disappear when an online vendor went out of business.  These old books also give you an idea of how they were made.  Offset books (those made on a traditional printing press) are printed on paper that is then folded and bound together.  Most modern presses also trim the edges, but you can, on rare occasions, still see where metal met paper.

Substantial.  These books feel substantial.  Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy the trim, clean look of the modern book, but part of me misses the solidity of old fashioned books.  As much as I enjoy visiting new bookstores, I also like used bookstores.  There used to be several around here, but I think the pandemic killed them off.  You can browse their inventory online, but it’s not the same experience as that dusty, musty smell of books aging well.  Now that mass-market paperbacks are being discontinued, they have their own place of pride as being the books that brought reading to the masses.  Now people stare at screens and call it reading.  I, for one, will be keeping my index cards handy for the next book with uncut pages that comes my way.

Alien Signs

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Personally, I find alien home invasion movies scary.  The combination of being awoken at night by a terror that seems plausible and the fact that there is nothing you can do to prevent it is genuinely terrifying.  Having said that, I wasn’t aware that was what Dark Skies was about when I decided to see it.  It does a good job of some things while others are less effective.  The Barrett family (parents, two sons) is going through a difficult patch when their younger son, Sammy, starts talking about “the sandman” visiting him at night.  At the same time, inexplicable events happen at night inside their locked house.  Daniel, the father, is unemployed and Lacy (mother) is having trouble at work.  The police think the kids are playing pranks but Lacy begins to realize they’re not alone in this.

Discovering the alien abductee phenomenon, she realizes that they have all the signs.  Having finally landed a job, Daniel doesn’t believe her.  Until he experiences it for himself.  The problem is nobody will believe them if they report it.  A fellow experiencer tells them they can fight back, but there is little they can hope to achieve.  The aliens, he says, take the one they first contact in a family.  When the aliens return, the Barretts try to protect Sammy, not realizing that Jesse, the older son, is really who they’re after.  There’s a lot of tension that works for this film but there’s also a number of questions raised.  The final reveal feels like a bit of a let down after all the build up.  The financial stress of Daniel’s unemployment seems to have done nothing for the plot.  And the burgeoning love between Jesse and a girl he likes simply drops.  As does the visit of child welfare.

Still, the ideas here are quite scary.  If you know something is happening and know nobody will believe you, that’s scary.  The idea that we are inferior to the technology of a more advanced race is also frightening.  The whole not knowing the motive of the monster works.  The tension build-up is good but the resolution leaves too much unaddressed.  Overall it isn’t a bad movie.  It did make me feel a bit paranoid after watching it, which is usually a good sign.  The acting is good, but the fatalism makes you wonder if there’s a point to the story other than to be afraid.  Dark Skies wasn’t bad for a last-minute pick for a rare free slot, if you can accept aliens as viable monsters.

Machen’s Monstrance

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It was a coincidence worthy of a story written by a mystic.  Arthur Machen became famous for his novella The Great God Pan.  Descended from a clergy family, his interests were in supernatural stories, but Pan was considered extreme in his day, which, of course, made it famous.  I have the Oxford World Classics series volume of Machen’s stories and I had only a few minutes, not enough to read Pan.  Flipping through the table of contents, I noticed that the story “Monstrance” was brief.  I decided to read that one.  It’s about a German major-sergeant Karl Heinz, during World War One.  As he is trying, with several others, to set up a machine-gun emplacement unnoticed by the English, a vision he has been seeing leads him to cry out and die.  Through the discovery of his diary, it is learned that he’d committed a war atrocity at a church and the procession with the monstrance became a vision haunting, and ultimately killing him on the battlefield.

The coincidence grew even more appropriate when, reading about Machen, I learned that his probably second most famous story was “The Bowmen,” which also happened to be short, and which in the Oxford World Classics edition, is printed right before “Monstrance.”  Of course I had to read it also.  The reason I chose “Monstrance” in the first place wasn’t because of its famous neighbor, but because of the religious symbol of the monstrance and because it is brief.  Since I still didn’t have time for The Great God Pan, I was led to his second most well-known story by looking for something short and landing on the story immediately following it.

“The Bowmen” is also a war story in which a miracle occurs.  It led to the rumor that the event, which involves angels fighting for the British forces, actually happened.  It is, however, fiction.  As a result, “The Bowmen” became the second most popular Machen story.  I wouldn’t have read it—at least not any time soon—had it not been for its placement before “Monstrance,” even though the two stories are somewhat similar.  It’s easily imagined that God is fighting on your side, and it should be remembered that often the enemy believes the same thing.  That most futile of human activities, war, certainly spawns stories as so many lives are meaninglessly lost.  There is, however, a mystical element to these tales, in keeping with Machen’s outlook on life.  Not bad for having about 20 minutes to fill.

Still Growing

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A couple of years ago I posted about Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors.  Now life is so busy that when Friday rolls around my wife and I find ourselves at odds for deciding on a movie.  She’s not into horror and I’m often not in the mood for human drama after a week at work.  We recently compromised on the 1986 Little Shop of Horrors.  It has been many years since I’ve seen it although I watched it shortly after it came out.  Like Rocky Horror, the music makes the movie.  That and the appearances of Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Jim Belushi, and Christopher Guest.  The original was a comedy horror shot on a very short schedule but this Frank Oz production is a bit more lavish.  And the songs.  I’m a fan of classic rock-n-roll, and the show tunes here seem like a combination of Cats (the original) and Rocky Horror.  There’s an optimism to them.  And who couldn’t use a little hope?

Seeing the movie again brought home a phenomenon that’s been on my mind lately.  What you see first becomes your benchmark.  I only saw the 1960 version a couple years back.  Little Shop of Horrors was, to me, a musical.  It does use some classic horror tropes: thunderstorm at night, shadows of violence on the walls, and the ubiquitous fear of being eaten.  But unlike Roger Corman’s vision, this is primarily a love story about escaping Skid Row.  And, strangely, a feel-good film.  I suppose the lingering question is whether this is a horror movie or not.  Another phenomenon that’s been kicking through my gray matter lately is that “horror” really isn’t the best description for many movies so labeled.

My interest in origins led me to go back to the original a couple of summers ago.  That story developed because Corman had access to a set from a previous movie and wanted to shoot another using it.  The story took many forms before settling on a human-eating plant.  By the way, that still works for horror, as The Ruins shows.  Since his previous movie was a horror comedy, the movie I’m sitting down to watch on a Friday night was born.  Between the original and this one, the story was adapted into a stage play.  The movie version of the stage show was a box office success, and it still appeals to me on a night where we just have trouble deciding on a movie by which to unwind.

Recipe for Childhood

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I once read that over the course of an average lifespan, an American will eat 73,646 pounds of food.  Think about that.  That’s over 36 tons of food.  Apiece.  No wonder recipe books sell so well!  This came to mind recently as I was thumbing through one of my mother’s mementos.  When she died I inherited her recipe box.  In liquidity terms it’s worthless, but inside is a great deal of my childhood.  I still find it poignant to look through her things although she died two-and-a-half years ago.  The memories are thick and tangible.  I only now had the courage to look through the foods she tried, liked, and sometimes didn’t.  (Some have notes, for example, saying what a friend didn’t like.)  We eat every day.  And variety is important for health.  So, recipes.

But not all cards are for things we eat.  The one that really jarred me was the recipe for play dough.  I grew up in a family of humble means, but not destitute.  I know, and still recognize instantly that Play-Doh smell.  It, along with Crayola, encapsulates childhood.  But I remember Mom making play dough for us.  The recipe is very simple: flour, water, salt, and a little oil (yes, it is edible) with food coloring.  I remember trying to mix the coloring in by hand and ending up with stained skin until the dye wore off.  And Play-Doh always makes me think of Silly Putty.  I think as a kid I kind of supposed the two were married.  Similar, but different in significant ways.  Kind of like cats and dogs, in my juvenile mind.

Childhood is strange.  We tend to cast a kind of rosy glow on it, even if it wasn’t very pleasant.  In my case, Mom was my protector.  I grew up without a father present and one of my greatest fears on becoming a father was that I didn’t know how to be one.  My role models were television figures and men I’d met and admired in my own life.  My father was a stranger but Mom made play dough for us at home when we couldn’t afford to buy it at the store.  After my daughter was born, and was old enough for them, the smells of Crayola and Play-Doh took me back to that pleasant version of childhood where things were fine and I had nothing better to do than to play.  Mom would prepare part of the many tons of food I would eventually consume.  And it all came from a simple wooden recipe box.

Leaving Soon

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I’d been hoping to read the novel before seeing the movie, but there’s nothing like the words “leaving soon” on your streaming service to spur you into action.  So I watched Misery before I was ready to.  I remember the newspaper reviews from 1987, when the novel came out.  I didn’t read any Stephen King novels until those I’ve posted about on this blog.  There’s a full record here!  I do remember the reviews saying it was self-referential.  The protagonist, as in The Shining (is Jack Torrence a protagonist?), is a writer.  And the book is a writer’s nightmare.  When the movie came out in 1990, I had no interest in seeing it.  A couple of things changed my mind, however.  First of all, it is referenced all the time.  I didn’t even know how it ended.  Another factor was that it was a Rob Reiner horror movie.  And Reiner himself had been murdered a few weeks before I sat down to watch it.

I really wanted to read the novel first.  My reading pile is pretty high.  And currently the next Stephen King novel on it is The Dead Zone.  And yes, I have already seen the movie.  Unlike some critics, I think King is a substantial writer.  He has profound things to say, especially about religion.  And, of course, the movie Misery has plenty of that.  Annie Wilkes is a religious fanatic.  She’s also a fan of Paul Sheldon (the writer).  God tells her things.  She wears a cross.  She can’t stand swearing.  But even so, I wonder if King clearly had her religion in mind.  I would’ve guessed that, given her cinematic profile, she would’ve not been a wine drinker.  And I would’ve guessed that the Bible would appear in the movie.  She drinks and she doesn’t even quote the Good Book—at least not that I caught.

Some day, if I keep doing this long enough, I might make the connection between religion and horror plain.  I know scholars, not shackled by a 9-2-5 are working on that.  And like the books I have to read, there’s a waiting list for those I want to write.  One has my particular attention at this point, and I’ll be trying to put that to bed before starting on a new one.  Before working on such a book I’ll have to read Misery, the novel.  I do plan to do so.  I’m not a fast reader and I have quite a big stack.  In fact, I wouldn’t even be thinking about reading it now.  But my streaming service came up with those fatal words, “leaving soon.”

Easter Flowers

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Easter is our springtime holiday of hope.  Flowers are starting to bloom and the cold spells, when they come, don’t last too terribly long.  Of course, as a moveable feast Easter can come earlier than this, but here we are, in April with brave flowers making themselves vulnerable.  The weather’s fickle, as is typical of spring, with the lovely warm days often coinciding with when you have to be at work, reserving rain and chill for weekends.  Around here, anyway, it felt like winter lasted quite a long time.  It got cold early and was gray and gloomy for much of the time.  And for around here, we had a lot of snow.  Spring was reluctant to show up.  The timing of Easter was good this year.  The older I get, the more I appreciate the flowers.

As a kid, I appreciated the bright colors, but flowers were too delicate to play with and you could surprise a pollinator with a stinger, which seldom ended well.  As an adult I see that each flower is its own world.  For perennials, a resurrection.  Last year I somewhat clumsily dug up the daffodils that some previous owners had planted where nobody could see, and transplanted them in our attempts at a front garden.  Having already sprouted, they did not like that, and they withered and disappeared.  I hoped I hadn’t killed them.  This spring they showed up, reminding me that life is persistent.  It keeps trying.  That resurrection is possible.

We could spend a lifetime studying a flower and still not comprehend it all.  We see it for what it offers to us without thinking it exists for its own purposes.  All of nature interacts and we are connected, that flower and I.  We share the planet with insects for whom it is a source of life.  And other flowers with which it communicates in ways we can’t even understand.  We have to humble ourselves if we would let them be our teachers.  Our constant narrative of being on top of nature is misguided, you can almost hear them say.  There are riches here that money cannot buy and flowers would exist even without us being here to see them.  Nature carries on.  It urges us to acknowledge that we are part of it.  Easter is a holiday enfolded within hope, inseparable from its flowers.  They may be delicate but they are also wise.  We can learn from them.

Don’t Look

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The title of this movie could stop one word shy.  Of course, I had been warned.  Don’t Look Away is a low-budget horror film.  A low budget in and of itself doesn’t make a movie bad.  Poor writing, poor acting, and poor directing do, however.  Since I’m learning to appreciate bad movies, this was an obvious candidate to watch because it was a freebie. So, a group of college-age friends fall afoul of a supernatural mannequin that kills.  Its origin is never really explained, except a vague reference to “the Devil.”  It is being hauled by long-distance freight so that its handler can bury it, rending it harmless.  But truck-jackers in New Jersey try to rob the truck and release the dummy.  It is seen by Frankie and begins following her, killing many of the people it encounters.  No reason is given—it just does.

Frankie’s boyfriend, Steve, is a rather clueless, and completely insufferable, grad student.  Her more reasonable friends realize that the menace is real, but the police don’t believe in killer mannequins.  After a considerable amount of time they realize that the mannequin can’t disappear if someone is looking at it.  They decide to stare at it until they can figure out how to dispose of it.  They need to prevent other people from seeing it, otherwise they will become its victims as well.  It’s all a rather silly premise.  Finally the handler shows up in New Jersey.  Since he’s blind he can’t see the mannequin but he figures if he kills the surviving friends, the menace will be stopped.  Frankie discovers that it’s almost impossible to hide or defend yourself against a blind man.

As far as the horror element goes, it really isn’t scary.  The face on the mannequin is decidedly creepy, but since no explanation is given of how it kills, there is no focus for any fears.  Yes, looking out your window at night and seeing a mannequin standing on your lawn would be frightening.  There’s so much not to like about this movie.  The pacing, the slipshod story, the soundtrack by one artist who is likely a friend of the director.  I’m glad to have seen it although Don’t Look Away isn’t one of those movies that’s so bad that it’s good.  When I next meet with the friend who recommended it, we can compare notes.  It gives you something to talk about.  If you do decide to look, you have been warned.

Popping Clowns

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You need a scorecard to keep track of all the killer clowns.  While not the greatest horror movie, Clown in a Cornfield isn’t bad.  As with most of my movie posts, there may be spoilers here.  Before I get into it, I should note that this is a horror comedy, so it doesn’t take itself too seriously.  That’s important to help you get the most out of it.  So, Quinn and her father have moved from Philadelphia to Kettle Springs, Missouri.  Quinn’s mother had died that summer and her father was having trouble coping.  In the new town, however, the adults are generally jerks to the kids, not trusting them.  Even harassing them.  Quinn’s father supposes that she’s acting out when she begins to hang out with a “bad crowd.”  These kids like making prank videos of Frendo the Clown killing people and posting them online.  The problem is, there is really a killer Frendo on the loose.

The movie seems to enjoy indulging in cliches—the Black kid is the first to get killed, clowns as monsters, and kids at a loss when faced with old-timey devices such as a stick-shift car and a rotary phone.  These do make the film fun to watch.  Anyway, one night at a party the kids discover that there isn’t just one Frendo.  There are many.  And they come out of the cornfield in a horde, killing the teens.  Quinn has to watch her new friends being slaughtered, but two of them, a gay couple, manage to survive.  The final girl here (Quinn) is hardly virginal.  And it turns out that the adults in the town are Frendo.  Their kids are a “bad crop” and they’re only to glad to kill them off and start over again.

Some of the social commentary is quite good, and some of it is aimed at the cultural moment in which we find ourselves.  Our species is strange; the longer we live (ideally) the wiser we become.  Yet, for procreation we depend on the boldness and general lack of knowledge among the young.  It creates an interesting dynamic, and one that is explored in horror in many ways.  Having the young turn on the old has been done, as in Children of the Corn.  Hmm, maybe corn is dangerous?  Clown in a Cornfield turns that around.  Of course, an older generation that wipes out a younger dooms itself to extinction.  And that’s to say nothing of the psychopathic lack of feeling for your own family.  Clown in a Cornfield is a strange movie, but it is pretty well done.  And it adds yet another clown to that long list of those to fear.

Little Gems

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

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

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

Cool Book Festival

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

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

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