Rocky Ground

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When I begin to lose my sense of wonder, the natural world grounds me.  I’ve been an amateur rockhound for many years and I sometimes wonder if it’s because I grew up poor.  The idea that you can just pick up something valuable on the ground has a treasure-hunting aspect to it.  Movers, I’ve discovered, dislike rock collectors.  My collection is quite small, and most of it not on display.  The danger is that I’ll be wanting to pick up more interesting rocks.  Like much of nature, rocks are amazing if you look closely at them.  And when the mania hits, it takes all my attention.  We all know that gemstones tend to be small, but perhaps it’s the fact that they look very little like their finished state in the wild makes them intriguing.

This interest was recently rekindled by a visit to the Lehigh Valley’s local cave, The Lost River Canyon.  As with most local attractions, it takes some time to get around to them.  We decided to go during the recent heat wave since caves maintain a constant temperature, generally in the fifties, and during the height of the wave the outside air temperature was double that of the cave thermometer.  Caves often have rock shops associated with them because being in a cave will trigger the rock-hounding gene.  And I suspect I’m not the only one to whom this happens.  Like many preserved caves, Lost River Canyon was an accidental discovery and was later purchased by a family that has been running it as a tourist attraction ever since.  I left inspired to find my rock tumbler and get it rolling again.

It’s difficult to say when or how such obsessions originate.  When my daughter was really into dinosaurs I started looking into geology.  The next thing I knew I was a member of the Wisconsin Geological Society and was going on field trips to collect.  When I lost my job at Nashotah House I seriously considered enrolling in a geology degree program, put off by the fact that calculus and chemistry were pre-requisites.  I was a hopeless humanities major and advanced math just doesn’t psit well in my psyche.  Part of me wonders if the fascination doesn’t go back to Genesis.  Geology was the science that tolled the death knell for any kind of literal six-day creation.  When this rock madness hits other interests can, if I’m not careful, be shunted aside.  It’s important to feel grounded.

Siesta

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“Lazy” isn’t an adjective that most people who know me would apply.  I tend to be fidgety and can’t really sit still at work.  I have a body and I want to move it.  I have an active mind and I need to keep it stimulated.  The recent heatwave over the long Fourth of July weekend, though, enforced laziness.  We don’t have central air conditioning.  Some kind family members bought us a couple floor units for our bedrooms so sleep is technically possible when our bedroom nears 100 degrees in the late afternoon.  But during such sweltering conditions, we spend the day trying to move as little as possible.  Even stepping into a cold shower is difficult when the pipes have warmed up so that tepid is the best you can hope for.  I’ve got a lot of writing projects going, but quality work is difficult to do when the air is so hot.

I see the wisdom of the siesta.  When I volunteered on the archaeological dig at Tel Dor back in 1987, the digging ceased around noon.  Afternoons were too hot for physical labor.  Most people napped.  In hot climates around the world the siesta is necessary as well as practical.  Late capitalism assumes everyone’s in air conditioned offices and has abolished the idea.  It’s the kind of enforced laziness, however, that descended on me during the heat wave.  I’d be reading my book or watching a movie when I’d wake up to find the story quite different from what’d been filtering through my mind.  Or the movie having something going on that seemed to have no precedent.  It was okay for a day or two, but I started to grow restless.  There’s still lots of stuff to get done.

Weather extremes, meteorologists tell us, will only continue because we refuse to curb carbon emissions.  I do remember hot summers from when I was a kid, but the thermometer climbing up into high fever range for days at a time never happened.  Given my age, one thought that recurred during life under the heat dome was that perhaps this is what retirement (not in the cards) must be like.  Retired friends tell me that they’re busier than when they worked, but I do have to wonder if the timing is a bit more open.  The 9-2-5 relaxed a bit more.  It’s not that I’m lazy, but sitting in front of a computer all day earning money for someone else means the siesta’s not permitted.  And when it’s so hot out, it should be.  Otherwise fevered decisions follow.

Photo by Florian Siedl on Unsplash

Sun Shines

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The world is a much stranger place than we are taught in school.  Even as a kid I was drawn to the weird and uncanny.  Yes, I was teased by others.  The mocking response is one that is intended to bring outsiders to conformity.  Nobody likes being shunned.  A friend, knowing my continued interest in the unusual, sent me a piece that mentioned, among other things, the Marian apparitions at Conyers, Georgia.  On October 13, 1998, while I was ensconced at Nashotah House, an event took place of which I’d never heard.  It was similar to the “miracle of the sun,” known worldwide as part of the phenomenon witnessed by between 50,000 and 70,000 people at Fátima, Portugal.  Both events included several solar anomalies.  The Catholic Church, always reticent toward modern miracles, didn’t claim Fatima as an official one.  In 1998, on the farm of Nancy Fowler in Conyers, the phenomenon was repeated in front of 100,000 witnesses.  Interestingly, the Wikipedia page on the apparitions doesn’t mention this.

News reels and Polaroid photographs (which can’t be tampered with) show something clearly unusual happening with the sun.  There are videos on YouTube that present these.  I’m always a bit skeptical of any modern videos, however, since so much can be faked.  There is no source whence the curious might go to find a rational, but not debunking, description.  Mainstream science dismisses such things out of hand—they can’t happen, so they don’t.  Faith-based treatments are also suspect.  The fascinating thing, to me, is that I was at a religious, quasi-Catholic institution at the time and heard nothing of it.  Television reception at the seminary was notoriously poor, and although the internet existed, the seminary had not yet jumped on the bandwagon.  At least not to the point of say, getting news online.

The article my friend sent was making the point that when large crowds of credible witnesses see something we should pay attention.  With events that don’t regularly repeat—the problem of occasional phenomena—setting up scientific observation doesn’t work.  For instance, ghosts tend not to show up when actual scientists (not those who play them on television) set up equipment.  One conclusion is “that’s because ghosts don’t exist.”  Another, however, is that they don’t act on cue.  And scientific experiments take both time and money and aren’t wasted on things that have a high probability of not showing up.  Our world is full of weird things like this.  All of us have had something we’ve brushed off as “just one of those things.”  But when 100,000 people see something, I’m curious as to what it was.

Scary Scripture

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The question’s not as simple as whether chocolate and peanut butter go together.  What is it with horror and the Bible?  A number of us have explored that question in book form, but probably the most prolific is Brandon R. Grafius.  His Scared by the Bible is a mapping through terrain that will feel foreign to some: if you live for the beach in summer, why would you fly to Antarctica to visit the South Pole instead?  Part of the reason is clearly that the Bible isn’t the rainbow-and-unicorn book that it’s often made out to be.  Some parts—not a few—are pretty scary.  That’s Grafius’ entry point into how horror and the Bible are surprisingly compatible.  Interestingly, we had similar starts down this path.  A Bible given to us by a grandmother when we were a child, and the determination to read it.  My world was a bit more hellfire and brimstone than Grafius’ but we’ve ended up near the same place.

Often I thought, as I was reading it, “Are people going to get both these references?” (i.e., both the biblical story and the horror movie being cited).  After all, many Christian denominations still teach that horror is not helpful at best, and satanic at worst.  I just wonder how many of us there are who never found watching horror a spiritual problem.  I grew up thinking about death a lot.  Part of this was because Evangelical children’s literature raised the question of where would you spend eternity if you died today.  Seriously, some of the stories I read, along with Dick and Jane, still scare me today.  Religion often uses fear for its own purposes.  So does the Bible.  Grafius comes down to this at the end, asking if it’s intentional on the Bible’s part.

It seems to me that this is an important question to explore.  Religion has been weaponized through fear since at least the Reagan years.  More recently it has been aimed specifically at us “evil” liberals and our “culture of death” even as conservatives rain bombs on Iran.  We desperately need to understand religion’s now very intentional use of fear to retain power.  People are afraid.  They have reason to be.  Generally it’s not the emotional issues politicians hand-pick to garner votes.  Yes, the Bible is a source of fear.  Horror films are often also a source of scary thoughts.  They do have a lot in common.  We just need someone to come along with an open jar of peanut butter to run into someone eating a chocolate bar.

250 Years

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America doesn’t seem to be in a partying mood.  With more than the usual inanity coming from Foggy Bottom, and hot air being added to this heat dome, well, it might just be best to keep it simple.  Algae will grow, no matter what the self-appointed-divine say.  I remember a half century ago.  America seemed optimistic at its bicentennial.  Nixon was safely gone and Reagan hadn’t reared his fanged head yet.  It seemed like the country had a future.  These days, with more than regressive rhetoric, when emails from the Social Security Administration go out of their way to say how great Trump is, well, I think I’ll just stay home and watch a horror movie.  It’s less traumatic.

For me, as a kid, the Fourth of July was all about sparklers, black snakes, smoke bombs, and staying up late for fireworks.  Black snakes were these black discs about the size of a button coin battery that you lit with a match and the ash would fizz out the top into a “snake.”  It was an ephemeral thrill.  What we called “smoke bombs” were small colorful spheres that gushed colored smoke when you lit them.  We never played with anything explosive, but even the thought of these simple pleasures still brings a smile.  I haven’t seen anything like these trinkets (except sparklers) for many decades now.  I see from YouTube that they’re still being sold.  Almost as if the past fifty years never happened.  And staying up late to see fireworks only means being excessively sleepy at work on Monday morning.

I won’t be around for the tricentennial, presuming we survive what the Republican Party has up its sleeves.  I do hope things are more optimistic then.  I’ve been around long enough to notice the distinct difference in national outlook a mere fifty years can make.  I was born less than twenty years after the Second World War when everyone knew fascists were an evil to be avoided.  In just the last decade that has done a 180.  And we see what it’s like.  Our grocery bills are double what they were before our fearless leader took his post, claiming to make things better.  If I’m to believe the propaganda from the Social Security Administration things would be just rosy, could I afford to retire.  So our social experiment in democracy seems to have lasted only about two-hundred and fifty years.  Hopefully in another fifty what’s left of the United States will have come back to its senses or will have come up with something better than we have today.

Hopeful Weeds

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Our approach to our front garden has been to buy the perennials we can afford and hope the beauty of nature does the rest.  Nature, we quickly learned, loves weeds.  Tough, tenacious, even if not always pleasing to the eye, weeds may be the ultimate symbol of hope.  A friend of mine, now departed, used to say that a weed was just a plant where we didn’t want it to be.  To put a more lexical sounding spin on it, a weed is “a plant considered undesirable in a particular situation” (according to Wikipedia).  Opportunistic plants, but those with a strong desire to survive.  I have noticed, in our eight years in this house, that each year different weeds predominate.  We have a front lawn that is difficult to finagle a mower onto, so we put down ground cover and mulch and planted several store-purchased non-weeds.

Some of these survived, and others haven’t.  Some hung on for a few years and then died.  It’s difficult to say if we just don’t have green thumbs or if the brutal, full summer sun did them in.  Weeds, however, thrive no matter what.  And they find any location with the smallest bit of promise.  Tired of wrestling the lawn mower down the front steps, a couple years back I put weed-blocking ground cover on the verge.  I went to the hardware store and bought many bags of sand and gravel and some paving stones.  First the sand on top of the ground cover.  Then the heavy paving blocks.  The gravel covered the sand, and I pushed it off the paving blocks to make a somewhat pleasing, if simple hop-scotch track.  (I’m delighted whenever I see kids using it that way.)  I hadn’t realized that weeds don’t mind sand.

That first year was good.  The second summer, however, weeds had begun to sprout and grow, tenaciously.  Instead of mowing, I was now kneeling on paving blocks and pulling weeds.  Mowing took less time.  Still, the weeding can be done every few weeks rather than the weekly ritual with the mower.  I decided for our front garden that any non-spiky plant that was shorter than what we’d planted would be left alone.  There aren’t enough hours in a weekend—even a three-day one—to weed properly, not with books to write and a 9-2-5 breathing down my neck all the other days.  Not to mention the mowing and grocery shopping and other errands that eat up weekends like popcorn.  Still, fresh in from pulling the latest batch of weeks I have to confess that they give me hope.  All it takes is a place to settle down, no matter how marginal, and the will to survive.

Remembering Downtown

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Monroeville Mall.  Even those who’ve never been to Pittsburgh may recognize it as the site of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.  I have to confess that, although living in Pittsburgh for a little while I never got there myself.  It has nevertheless been a pilgrimage site for fans of the movie, but, according to the New York Times, the mall has been purchased by Walmart.  Their plans?  Tear it down.  No empathy.  No sense of decorum.  Just cheap prices and sub-par goods.  I recently had to go to a Walmart.  It had literally been perhaps a decade since I entered one.  I dislike their business practices and they have ruined many a small town downtown area as well as many a mall.  In fact, the one I’d be in prior to this recent trip was the store located in Seneca, Pennsylvania.

Across from that giant Walmart stands the husk of the once trendy Cranberry Mall.  Not far away is the struggling downtown of Oil City.  My aging mother lived in Seneca—had once worked in the mall—but getting down the hill into Oil City was more difficult than nipping over to the super Walmart for groceries or other necessities.  Prices were cheap and she wasn’t flush with cash.    The same applied to many of her neighbors.  Walmart exploits such situations, becoming the only show in town.  Mom and pop stores can’t compete with their prices.  Malls, although many affluent specimens still exist, have struggled in working-class areas.  They served for more than shopping, however.  They were meeting places.  They too contributed to the troubles downtown.

Monroeville Mall never went upscale enough to survive.  Ironically, it was the message that shopping had become a source of meaning that was critiqued by Romero’s movie.  It’s that same corporate greed for more and more market share that will be the eventual death-knell of capitalism.  Any system founded on greed is the same thing as “might makes right.”  We’re seeing that in the politics of our own day.  The paradox of this ouroboros will become clear eventually, if our species survives long enough to observe.  We become attached to places.  While not all movie props can be preserved, we’re compelled toward pilgrimage, and Pittsburgh is the home of the modern zombie.  A message that may not always come through in Dawn of the Dead is that all of us are being made into zombies.  Not by some satellite picking up something in space and then returning to earth, but by good old capitalism.

Fictional Dreams

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It’s difficult to be discreet when you feel like shouting.  My first novel has been accepted for publication.  Since my fiction is published under a pseudonym I can’t tell you the title, but I’m very excited.  Chuffed, even.  It’s no secret that I’ve been publishing short fiction for years.  Even this novel was initially finished when I was in my forties.  Publishing is a slow business.  Although I could interest no agents (not for lack of trying), a couple said it was good.  Another publisher had decided, after accepting it, to pass on it anyway.  Mostly I’ve tried small, independent publishers.  Editors, however, are people with personal tastes and aligning your vision with theirs is half the trick.  If not three-quarters.

I’ve avoided self-publishing not because of the stigma—traditional publishing is devilishly hard to break into—but because of the effort involved.  Yes, you can price your books in the affordable range, but you have to arrange for printing and design.  Distribution can be a nightmare.  Also, it’s difficult to do with a nom de guerre.  Pen names are about as early as fiction writing itself, and unless you’re a major name, the title’s more likely to sell your book than your name is.  As more than one editor has told me, “It’s the writing that counts.”  Using a pseudonym comes naturally enough when you have a professional standing in a “serious” business.  Somehow we tend to think fiction writers can’t be serious people.  If they are they may have trouble finding a publisher.

Recently I’ve spoken to a couple of people who’d like to get published as a way of making money.  I try not to discourage such folk, but it’s important to keep in mind that making significant money from publishing is very rare.  You need to keep your day job.  I certainly wouldn’t complain if most royalties checks were actually over thirty dollars (which is very seldom, and since royalties come maybe once or twice a year, don’t base your mortgage on your wordsmithing).  Those of us who persist in writing tend to do so because we have no choice.  I can’t not write.  The forthcoming novel is, I think, fairly well written.  Some of the stories I had published, in retrospect, weren’t.  (Others very much were.)  At the time they seemed pretty good.  Although written over a decade ago, this novel seems to have held up over time.  At least I hope it has.  When it comes out it’ll be mixed in here amid the other books I discuss, I expect.  If I don’t end up shouting too loud, and spilling the beans, first.

Survival Writing

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Word of mouth tends to be remote these days.  I suspect local readers of this blog are quite few.  I work remotely and, like many Americans, have trouble getting to know people in the town where I live.  Still, I use this blog instead of my mouth.  Elizabeth Rosen used to write for Nickelodeon, which I find highly impressive.  As someone who has found venues to publish my fiction as common as oases in the Sahara, anyone who’s made a few bucks off their work makes me want to stand up and salute as if a general just walked into the room.  I just read Rosen’s chapbook Survival Skills and thought I’d talk about it.  (As an aside, I always thought “chapbook” referred to chapters, which confused me because most books have chapters.  The term probably derives from “chapman,” a kind of traveling salesperson who used to include these kinds of small books among the wares they sold.)

The seven stories in Survival Skills are short—Rosen tends toward flash fiction.  I’m impressed with how effective she is at it.  I’ve tried to write flash fiction and have found I need more narrative space that it allows.  Chapbooks are easily read in an hour or so, if you’re the kind to rush through things, but these tales left me thoughtful.  You get a sense from these brief accounts that people often do nasty things to one another, or to animals, and that sometimes we really should stop and think about what we’re doing.  At other times we have to realize that we’re animals too.  We forget that at our own peril.

As much as I like reading short stories, books of such are always difficult to summarize.  Going through Survival Skills, the stories do seem organically connected.  This is something that has prevented me from trying too hard to publish collections of my stories.  Like my mind, they’re all over the place.  I’ve attempted, from time to time, to approach my short story writing thematically but it has only resulted in a few tales of each subject.  I’d never considered a chapbook approach.  Even Edgar Allan Poe made his mark in the literary world with short stories.  Washington Irving published his Sketch Book in fascicles.  Publishing exists in many forms for those with stories to tell.  I’m glad to have found Rosen’s little book.  It has spurred me on to reading more short stories, which I should be doing as a matter of course.

Re-Telling Poe

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Retelling stories is a very old tradition.  Fiction writers often do it.  Some even argue there are no new stories (I tend to disagree with that).  In any case, T. Kingfisher decided to try retelling my favorite short story, Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Fall of the House of Usher.”  What Moves the Dead has Roderick and Madeline Usher and their creepy house but the story revolves around the narrator, Easton.  (There’s a helpful author’s note at the end that discusses this.)  As Kingfisher notes, the narrative warps around fully-formed new characters and the question is whether that works or not.  Anyone who’s spent much time on this blog will know that I’m a diehard Poe fan.  It takes a lot to convince me that anyone has done him justice.  What Moves the Dead is a quick read, but perhaps unsurprisingly I had trouble accepting Easton as the interloper to the story.  

One of the most compelling aspects of Poe’s tale is the point of view of his unnamed narrator.  He expresses his horror at what happens but manages to keep himself out of the spotlight.  Easton intrudes a bit too much in the narrative.  And other characters also tend to overshadow the Ushers.  The main thing that is missing, however, is Poe’s unity of effect.  There is a dread running throughout Poe’s “Usher,” and analysts have suggested that every detail of the story is relevant.  There’s a reason it’s my favorite short story—it is just so good!  So good that the few times I’ve ridden on a horse in my life, the first thought that always comes to mind is the opening of Poe’s story.

If you’re looking for a quick horror book to read, which has a bit of humor to it, What Moves the Dead isn’t bad.  Kingfisher is a talented writer and her characters are creative.  It’s just that they muddy the waters, as it were, of Poe’s masterpiece.  Ironically, I think the story would’ve been much more compelling without the Poe tie-in.  The idea of infecting mushrooms (she also discusses this in the author’s note) can be a really compelling tactic.  In fact, it is used quite a lot in horror these days (and I completely understand Kingfisher picking up another book that does what you’re trying to do when you’re in the middle of a project—that has happened to me more than once).  For me, Poe’s story is pretty much perfect and it’s difficult to improve on perfection.

Life’s Work

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It’s official.  I’ve now worked as an editor longer than I was a professor.  The latter was my chosen vocation, the former my fall-back.  I feel like I’ve tipped over a precipice.  As I’ve written before, I still think like a professor and would welcome back life in the classroom.  This came home to me in a major why when I realized that in my current position, in less than a month’s time, there will be only five people remaining in my starting department who were at my employer before I was.  At least twenty editors who were there when I started have left, most of them younger than me.  This was a world-rattling revelation.  You can’t choose your destiny.  You can do everything possible to make your plans happen, but change is constant and you have to make do.  None of this changes my mind, however.  A life has a calling, fulfilled or not.

I’m very grateful for all that I’ve learned about publishing, even if there’s still so much to learn.  As a young person I knew that writing would be part of my life.  I didn’t know what form it would take, and I guess I still don’t.  I’ve been getting positive signals from a publisher about a novel I completed thirteen years ago.  I’m doing my last set of edits on a very different novel that I finished initially last year.  I’ve made good progress on my seventh nonfiction book.  And there are many shorter projects in hand as well.

I was reading a book the other day where I was cited.  This got me to thinking about the concept of “life’s work.”  For some of us that’s measured in words.  I have no idea how many academic books cite me.  There’s software to measure such things, but it doesn’t capture every publication and I’m not that deluded that I’d spend much time checking on it.  Still, I do wonder if my life’s work (which is generally measured in written form) has made any difference at all.  I post thoughts here daily and they cover disparate topics.  (I had a record five “likes” recently for a post on the Bible.  Sometimes posts on monsters near that record.  Just sayin’.)  Academics tend not to cite blogs.  This one is, believe it or not, research-based.  That’s why I’m working on a bibliography.  When I’m dead and gone, and the auto-renew on this blog runs out, a good chunk of my life’s work will be archived away somewhere until electronic media cease to exist.  But one thing seems certain, most of the mentions I will have in print will be in the form of acknowledgements from having been an editor.

Whose Bible?

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“What the Bible really says.”  That’s a phrase you find in many places.  In academic books and on the lips of “true believers.”  Nevertheless, it’s a problematic formulation, no matter who uses it.  Biblical scholars often like to “correct” public assumptions about the Bible, but since the association of most people with the Bible is emotional, chances of changing any opinions remain slim.  There seem to be two troublesome words in the phrase: “Bible” and “really.”  Let’s take them in turn.  The Bible doesn’t exist.  Well, it does, but it’s an intellectual formulation, not a book.  This can be asserted with a great deal of certainty.  Why?  Because the boundaries of the Bible are porous and nobody, but nobody, has the authority to close them.  Just a quick example: the books of the Apocrypha—Bible or not?  Most Protestants fall on the “not” side of that question, although the King James Bible included some of the Apocrypha.

The question gets more vexed when we start asking about books like Jubilees and 1 Enoch.  There are ancient Christian churches that include them.  Since they are African, however, Europeans/North Americans have privileged the western canon, and have excluded them.  They are, however, part of “the Bible” for millions of people.  The book of Jude quotes Enoch as Scripture, just saying.  Things get even dicier when you include scholarly opinion.  Many biblical scholars believe The Gospel of Thomas has just as much credibility as (if not more than) the canonical four.  Since biblical scholars can’t add or remove books, however, it’s a moot point, although they are the best informed. 

“Really” is really problematic.  Who has the authority to determine what the Bible “really” says?  Doesn’t this actually mean, “the correct interpretation”?  Who is qualified to make such a statement?  A preacher?  Did God tell them personally?  Did they think to record it?  Or should it be the experts—biblical scholars who spend their lives and careers learning everything possible about the Good Book?  Again, no person, or body of people, has the right and authority to make that decision.  What does the Bible really mean?  I wouldn’t leave that up to any of the many, many clergy I know.  It requires a bit more training than they have.  And I’m still really bothered by the “really” part.  It’s always going to be a matter of interpretation.  Yes, I know hermeneutics always spoil a good time.  Until, however, we can all agree on what “the Bible” is, nobody can say what it “really” says.

Long Winter

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I have to confess that I often feel uncharitable towards very long books.  Mainly, I think, that is because one of my main blogging topics is books and when it takes a long time to read one I have to come up with other things to write about.  Still Dan Simmons’ The Terror had been strongly recommended.  I found it in an indy bookshop on independent bookstore day and began reading it sometime back in May.  It started out strong, but about three-hundred pages in began to feel a bit tedious and self-indulgent.  (I’ve done that myself with my fiction, so this criticism is also aimed at the one writing this reflection.)  In case you haven’t read it, the Terror of the title is HMS Terror, the ship captained by Francis Crozier under the command of Sir John Franklin, captain of HMS Erebus.  Both ships, seeking the northwest passage, froze in the Arctic ice in 1846 and their combined crews of 129 died without ever being found.

That’s a strong basis for a horror novel.  Your mind can’t help but wonder what it’d be like to be stuck in the dark, sunless winter, temperatures well below what most of us could survive, and realizing that you were never going to get out.  Simmons traces the story arcs of several of the crew that historically populated the ships.  Since there were no survivors, just about anything is fair game.  Including creating a monster to attack them.  Even as I began to warm to the book in the last hundred or so pages, it seems that some of this could’ve been trimmed and the same sprawling majesty been preserved.  Maybe I’m just jealous because none of my novels have been published and I keep being told you have to keep things short to get any traction.

In any case, by the end of the book I was really drawn in.  This was after the villain got his own, and Crozier starts to recognize the indigenous Arctic people for their truly remarkable survival skills.  (Not vegan friendly, of course, since vegetation doesn’t thrive in ice-bound conditions.)  It comes to a remarkable conclusion and I gradually found myself letting go of my petulance for having to invest so much time in one book.  I’m a slow reader with a very large pile of books yet to read.  In any case, Simmons won me back.  I quite enjoyed his Night of Summer and A Winter Haunting many years ago.  If you’re not afraid of big books, and you’d like to read about what can go wrong with a group of men trapped in the Arctic, then The Terror may be for you.

Spliced

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Predictably, I watched Splice again after reading the novelization by Claire Donner.  It is, as I indicated in my post on the book, a sad story.  During this rewatch, a few things stood out.  First and foremost, how many times you must rewatch a film to pull off writing the novel.  Either that, or hit the pause button constantly.  When I was writing Holy Horror I did both of those things quite a lot.  A detail you want to catch, and you have to see what’s on the screen.  I’d pause a scene and put my face right next to the screen, seeing individual pixels.  You have to know your stuff.  Another factor is that actors really do have influence on your understanding of character motivation.  An ambiguous look for the camera comes away pregnant with meaning in the novelization.

The emotional life of the characters is really filled in, in print.  The movie felt like it was going too fast.  That’s a finger on the pulse of reading a book versus watching a movie.  For a writer a movie deal can be a real boon but often you read about how they dislike the results.  That’s really no surprise.  A book takes time to read and you reflect as you go.  Movies hit you with constantly shifting images.  Both can be powerful media, but in different ways.  Another thing I noticed (I hadn’t seen the movie for thirteen years before reading the book) is that the mental image I’d formed of the characters was quite different from what the actors looked like.  

In the introduction to the novelization, screenwriter and director Vincenzo Natali notes that he likes how Donner explores Dren’s inner life.  Dren, in case you’ve not read or watched, is the hybrid.  Indeed, that is an element largely missing from the movie.  Some critics suggested that it should’ve explored that more.  For many of us, emotion is a major motivating factor of life.  We are frequently driven by our feelings, and, despite what AI says, they are integral in our thought process.  What was going through the mind of a creature, part human, with no parents?  I know that having grown up not really knowing my father left deep impressions, voids, in my life.  The novelization explores these kinds of things for all the main principals.  In my opinion, reading the book enhances watching the movie.  Of course, I’ve always been on the book side of the equation to begin with.  

Novelization

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I watched the sci-fi horror film Splice a few years ago.  Long enough that I don’t recall many details.  When Claire Donner, a friend of mine from Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, told me she’d written a novelization of Splice, I knew I had to read it.  If you’ve seen the movie then you know the story.  If you haven’t, you can read it in her book.  I don’t often read novelizations—I read the one for Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, and as a young person read the original three Star Wars novelizations.  Such books really only apply to movies not already based on a novel, of course.  They give the reader a path into the inner lives of the characters.  Naturally, now I have to watch Splice again to see it through Donner’s lens.  The basic idea, if you want some encouragement, is that a couple of scientists add some human DNA into a gene-spliced animal being lab grown for enzymes to fight disease.

In the rawest sense, this is the story of Frankenstein for a more technological crowd.  Like Frankenstein, it is a sad story.  And like said sad story, it involves reproduction without two human parents.  The real builder this time, however, is Elsa and Donner gives considerable development to her motivations and thought process.  (I’m very curious to know if I can see that in the movie or not.)  Clive, her partner, isn’t aware of the source of the human DNA.  The spliced creature grows into the passably human Dren, who finds herself asking the questions Frankenstein’s creature asked about his own existence.  Like said creature, Dren has to be hidden away, and controlled.  At the same time, she is evolutionarily superior to her maker.  There’s a lot to see here, folks!

Having written a fair bit of fiction in my time, I do wonder what it might be like to do a novelization.  I suspect most of us, if a movie is well made, decide on the motivations of characters but how often do we delve into their inner lives?  I’m not sure that I do that most of the time.  When I write fiction I do it all the time.  I want to know my characters and why they are the way they are.  Sometimes they remain mysteries to me, but that doesn’t prevent me from trying.  This novelization is deftly done, and approved by the screenwriter/director.  And the deep motivations make the scenario plausible.  If you haven’t seen Splice you might enjoy doing so.  And then read the novel.  Or the other way around.