Scary Cosmology

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In many ways a harrowing book, A Cosmology of Monsters, by Shaun Hamill, is a real achievement.  A monster story, it’s less a story about monsters than it is about people—which, upon thinking it over, is generally the case.  This story is about the suffering people undergo, sometimes simply for being who they are.  Hamill gets his hooks in early and drags you through this wonderful, terrible story.  Even now that I’ve finished it I’m not quite sure what to make of it.  What’s it about?  Maybe I can try to give you a few signposts and pointers.  To find out more you’ll need to read it and check my work.

The Turner family, through no fault of its own, has been living under a strange kind of curse.  It involves monsters, from what is probably another dimension, kidnapping and enslaving them.  The Turners aren’t alone in this.  Others who’ve been suffering from various causes are also targeted and treated.  Perhaps this is partially a parable on suffering and depression.  The Turner family faces death, missing children, forbidden love, and regret.  They run a local haunted house around Halloween, which the father’s regular job finances.  They do it for fun and it’s free.  It keeps them going when a terrible diagnosis is given.  Stressed financially and emotionally, they barely manage to stay together.  Noah, the narrator and only son, checks out the competition, including a Christian Hell House.  There he meets the girl he’ll eventually marry.  But the monsters don’t stop coming.  He befriends one.

An intricately interwoven story, you might call this horror but you would probably be closer to the truth with literary fiction.  There are uncomfortable facts about families.  Things we tend to overlook or ignore in order to keep society running smoothly.  These kinds of issues are brought out into the open here and mixed in with monsters.  On both the human and monster sides, the emotionally wrenching ideas have to do with relationships.  Noah, who was born just as his father was dying, establishes relationships both with his family and a monster.  As the story progresses over the years, his wife is added to this complex of relationships and they all end up, in a way, competing.  Decisions have to be made and someone you love must lose.  This novel makes monsters and humans the objects of the reader’s sympathy.  What’s more, it works.  I hope I haven’t given too many spoilers here, because this is quite an accomplishment, and well worth a reader’s time.

Lovecraft’s Palace

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So, to see Witchfinder General I had to buy a set of Vincent Price movies.  Complex copyright deals mean that not everything can be streamed—there’s a movie I’ve been waiting months to see because Amazon Prime says “not currently available in your area.”  That word “currently” tells you that it’s a rights issue.  In any case, that box of Price movies contained a few goodies I’d never seen and had wanted to.  And one that I hadn’t heard of: The Haunted Palace.  Legendary producer Roger Corman had Price star in a variety of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations.  (Witchfinder General wasn’t one of them.)  Corman wanted to make an H. P. Lovecraft movie, but the studio insisted it stay within the identity of this Poe series.  This movie is an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” but titled after a Poe poem, “The Haunted Palace.”

Suffice it to say, I knew little of this before I sat down to watch it.  I didn’t know, for example, that this was the first big-time movie based on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.  I didn’t realize it would involve the Necronomicon and perhaps the first, blurry—to preserve the sanity of viewers—view of maybe Cthulhu.  The movie doesn’t specify which of the Old Gods is kept in this pit, so it could be Yog-Sothoth instead.  You see, as a child I watched some of the movies in this series.  They would’ve had to have been the ones showing on television, likely on Saturday afternoon.  The one that I clearly recall, and remember thinking “that’s not how it goes!” was The Raven.  And as a child I had never been exposed to H. P. Lovecraft.

Some of us have our own brand of cheap or free entertainment.  The small number of friends I had growing up didn’t care to read.  My family wasn’t literate, and most high school teachers couldn’t suggest much to a kid who’d somehow found Poe and liked what he read.  As I’ve said before, Goodwill was my bookstore.  I discovered Lovecraft on the internet during a lonely stretch of teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.  Like many visionaries, Lovecraft didn’t achieve fame in his lifetime, but is now considered a bizarre American treasure.  The Cthulhu mythos is everywhere.  Even my auto-suggest is quick to fill in his name as I type.  The Haunted Palace isn’t a great movie—this is Roger Corman—but it’s a pretty good movie.  And its history in the cinematography of Lovecraft makes it worth part of a Saturday afternoon.

Beastly Story

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You think you know a story.  You know, you’ve heard it before, or seen it in a movie, so you think you know how it goes.  I’m not the biggest Disney fan in the world, but I have seen many of their movies.  Occasionally those movies are my first introduction to a story.  That was the case with Beauty and the Beast.  I saw this when my daughter was young, and in general found it a good story.  I’ve seen it a couple of times since, and I thought I knew how it went.  I got curious, however, regarding the origins of the tale.  Was it Grimm?  Other ancient folklore?  The reimagining of a classical tale like Pygmalion?  Well, it turns out it was a story from the eighteenth century written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve.

I decided to read it.  The story is quite different than the Disney version, as is to be expected.  To begin with, Beauty has eleven siblings.  Her father is a merchant rather than an inventor.  The beast is described as having an elephant’s trunk and scales, not fur.  Once Beauty agrees to move into his palace in place of her father Beast is nothing but polite, if somewhat dull.  In broad outline the same action takes place—beauty falls in love with the beast and magically he transforms to a handsome prince.  Any story, as it’s retold, is re-envisioned.  There’s no such thing as the literal retelling of any tale.  As the Italians say, “translators are traitors.”  (Of course, I didn’t read the story in its original French, having had the aid of a traitor.)

As was perhaps the style back then, once the happy ending came the story had to be fully explained.  Indeed, this constitutes half its length, telling, not showing, the backstory.  To Disney’s credit, they do all this in a minute or two of animation time.  The modern reader, unless obsessed with the rules under which fairies operate, and the power struggles among them regarding those rules, will likely find this add-on a bit tedious.  But that’s often the way with original texts.  Think The Iliad.  Think the Bible.  Modern writers seldom explain things fully.  Ambiguity is valued among the literati.  Still, stories have origins.  They start someplace.  Those of us who are curious about those origins are inclined to dig, it seems.  Disney has become our storyteller for children.  It’s a good idea to look behind the curtain now and then, just to see what the original creator wrote.  To see how the story really goes.

The King

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Stephen King.  I haven’t read all of his books, but I’ve done quite a few.  I’ve watched movies based on some.  I read my first story by him in Junior High School.  I’ve even read books about him.  From what I can tell, he’s actually a man with his head on straight.  While some may find that a strange thing to write about a horror writer, it’s been my experience that those who enjoy horror, either as producers or consumers, are generally good people.  Recently King was testifying against the proposed buyout of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House.  Penguin Random House is already the largest trade publisher in the world.  The buyout would probably benefit King personally, but he testified it would make things worse for other writers and for independent bookstores.

How many people these days argue against things that benefit them personally?  Certainly not elected officials, particularly of what used to be a grand old party.  It’s all about me!  That seems to be the mantra of late capitalism.  King has publicly called for his own taxes to be raised.  This is nothing short of heroic.  While the Good Book advocates over and over for this kind of behavior, “Bible believers” have somehow overlooked it.  Leave it to a horror writer to get to the heart of the message.  I have no idea if King is part of any religious group or not—he certainly uses a lot of religious imagery and many religious concepts in his writing.  Of course, you don’t have to be in such a group to embody their proclaimed principles.

Thinking of the needs of others was drilled into me as child raised in a Fundamentalist faith.  Looking around me these days, I don’t see many Fundamentalists that hold to that any more.  Enamored of power—especially the power to control other people’s lives—they flock after rich pretenders who care nothing for the Gospel.  Sacrifice (for that’s what we’re talking about here) is something horror writers know well.  It’s never easy giving up something that’s valuable to you.  Or even thinking about it.  Writing, while very enjoyable, is hard work.  Training your mind is like physical exercise—it doesn’t just happen.  I’ve got a few Stephen King novels on my “to read” pile.  They’re big books, often intimidatingly so.  Once I start reading, however, I know I’ll find the work engaging.  And if I pay attention, there will be a message there too.

Not that kind of book.

Paperback Reader

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Sometimes I wonder why I do it.  Horror is a strange category for books and films, but one thing that may be a draw is that they take me back.  Life, it seems, is cyclical.  I liked monsters as a kid, and grew out of it when college and graduate school taught me to be serious.  As a working academic this genre can spell death to your career, so when my career died anyway, I was left grasping at my childhood to try to make any sense of this.  Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell took me back.  Not that I’ve read all the books listed here—I came away with a list I want to read—but the lurid covers are a reminder of the kinds of things that caught my young imagination.

Subtitled The Twisted History of ‘70s and ‘80s Horror Fiction, this is actually a very fun book to read.  Hendrix has a light touch and had me nearly laughing out loud (quite an accomplishment) a time or two.  And I learned a lot.  Although I write books about horror, the genre is a large and sprawling one and this book takes a clear focus at the paperback market.  Just a reminder: paperback originals were designed to be sold and consumed quickly.  No waiting around for 18 months while profits from the hardcover roll in.  Hendrix really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the history.  It also seems like he may have read more horror than is necessarily good for you.  He clearly knows how the publishing business works.

Several of these books were big enough that I knew about them.  He starts off with Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist.  (And The Other, which I’m now obligated to find and read.)  In fact, the first chapter focuses on religion-themed horror.  This is something that only began in earnest in the late ‘60s.  While the horror paperback market may have tanked in the ‘90s, the film side of the genre has been doing quite well and continues to do so.  The late sixties also got that kick-started.  It seems that when people stopped running from the fact that religion is scary, horror itself grew up.  I was shielded from that part as a child, but now, looking back, I can see that things weren’t quite what they seemed.  This full-color, grotesquely illustrated book has great curb appeal.  And if you’re not careful, you can learn a thing or two as well.

Yep, Nope

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I can honestly say that I’ve never seen a movie that starts with a quote from Nahum.  I also honestly admit that Nope left me scratching my head, but very glad to have seen it.  I trust Jordan Peele implicitly as both a screenwriter and a director, and I know I need to see Nope again to make it all fit (if that’s possible).  His movies are the most Twilight Zoneish things out there, and despite Peele’s reported reason for naming the film Nope, I’m going to keep watching the skies.  It’s clear he had done his ufological homework.  Even the idea that—SPOILER ALERT—have you seen it yet?  Are you going to?  You might want to finish this later, if you haven’t—they are biological entities has been widely discussed.  

Although classified as horror, Nope has mercifully few jump startles.  In fact I noticed (there were maybe only 10 of us in the theater) that one couple had brought their kids.  I can imagine they had some interesting discussions on the car ride home.  For me, driving home alone, I felt like I’d watched Close Encounters, Twister, Signs, and Arrival simultaneously.  Peele set out to film a spectacle and he did indeed.  Horror has become more intelligent of late, and there’s so much going on here that I’ll need some time to sort it out.  The online nattering suggests the Nahum quote (“I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile and make you a spectacle”) reflects Peele’s thoughts on the Bible.  A more literal take might see the evacuation of waste creating a spectacle, which it does.  How to explain the angel form of the creature?

Alien horror works.  Alien sees them deep in apace, but many films, such as Fourth Kind, see them closer to home. Fourth Kind, also by an Africa American director (Olatunde Osunsanmi) never received critical acclaim, but I thought the first half was impossibly scary.  It’s natural enough to fear those we don’t understand.  Perhaps that’s one reason we tend to deny their existence.  If we deal with them in fiction we can call it horror and go home happy.  Nope asks us to consider whether our differences matter so much in the face of a non-discriminate predator that eats any human that enters its territory.  Even if they were there first.  I still have a lot of questions about the movie.  Some of them will likely never be answered.  One that will is “Do you plan on seeing it again?”  The answer is yep.

Jekyll and Jekyll

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W. E. D. (“Marilyn”) Ross was a journeyman writer.  Prolific, he produced more than 300 pot-boilers, and he only started writing at mid-life, which kind of lends hope to me.  (He, however, didn’t always pay attention to literary niceties.)  I’ve made a determined effort, over the past decade or so, to collect and read all of his Dark Shadows novels.  These aren’t great literature, and I generally have to space them out to recover from them.  I just finished number 27 (of 32), Barnabas, Quentine and Dr. Jekyll’s Son.  Although I watched Dark Shadows as a child, it’s pretty clear that my cosmology of Collinwood was primarily shaped by Ross.  Living in an area without a regular bookstore, and without the cash to regularly buy books, I found what volumes I could at Goodwill and read them avidly.

Barnabas, Quentine and Dr. Jekyll’s Son is now a rather rare item on the used market.  It’s pretty clear that as Ross went on and on in the gothic fiction genre, he tried new things and these generally improved his work.  This story, set in the past, involves Dr. Jekyll’s grown son accompanying Barnabas Collins to Maine in order to escape his father’s reputation and, as a sidebar, to try to cure Barnabas of his vampire curse.  This means that one of the Collins girls, Emily in this instance, falls in love with Jekyll rather than Barnabas.  It also marks the point at which Ross tries to make it clear that both Barnabas and Quentin are good guys, but being under their own curses, they have to follow their vampire and werewolf natures, respectively.

I think I may have read this one as a child.  Although each book was stamped with its number in the series, I was dependent on when my mother decided to go to Goodwill and what they happened to have on hand in their book bin.  Some scenes from this book came back to me in the reading—although it was perhaps forty or more years ago—and one of the most important of these was one where Barnabas and Quentin collaborated on capturing the criminal.  Among the true fans of the series, they are known as the immortals (and Quentin isn’t always a werewolf), and they revisit Collinwood over the centuries.  Quentin can be both good and evil, but Barnabas is generally a sympathetic character.  Dr. Jekyll’s son isn’t such a strange guest at Collinwood, and the stories do seem to have improved over time.  It’s still Ross writing, but this one was more than a surface refinishing of a classic tale.

Nope, Not Yet

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It’s perhaps this summer’s most hotly anticipated movie, but I’m not sure when I’ll get to see it.  Jordan Peele’s Nope opened in theaters this weekend but I’ve been busy.  For many Peele may have seemed to come out of left field with his 2017 directorial debut, Get Out (it took me a couple years to see that one), but he’d been working in films prior to that.  Then Us appeared in 2019 and instantly established him as the auteur of black horror films.  Like many in horror, Peele has a strong element of humor as well.  His films feature black actors falling into circumstances that whites have tended to claim for themselves—being the victims of monsters (often human).  I unfortunately missed Peele’s attempted reboot of The Twilight Zone in 2019-20.  Nevertheless, I know he’s a kindred spirit.

I try not to watch trailers before seeing a movie.  They give away too much.  I don’t need any enticement to see a Peele movie.  Even as I await a free weekend, I think about how horror has been a field accepting of auteurial diversity.  Women have directed horror since at least the eighties.  James Wan has been a major player in the genre since the early new millennium.  M. Night Shyamalan had his start shortly before that.  Good horror is good horror.  Often such films are quite smart as well.  Get Out drew attention for its social commentary—something for which Rod Serling was famous, and thus the naturalness of The Twilight Zone.  But when will I have time to get out and see Nope?  Perhaps I need to cash in a personal day so I can take in a matinee.

The trick will be, of course, to be on the internet without reading about it before that can happen.  Taking time off work is punished with skyscrapers of emails when you return.  But when I start having dreams about my boss coming to my messy house and helping me do necessary repairs, I think maybe I’ve been working too hard.  Movies, in such a life, seem like superfluous luxuries.  Of course, I’ve long accepted the thesis that films are our modern mythology.  They are our cultural referents, and not infrequently the source of meaning.  They explain our world.  And they require taking at least an hour-and-a-half out of the mowing, painting, hammering, and hauling that never seem to end.  Nope, I won’t have time to see the movie this weekend.  Yep, I’ll be looking forward to the first opportunity to do so.

Stay Safe

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I’m not an impulse buyer.  Having grown up poor, I tend to walk into stores with a list firmly in hand and I don’t deviate from it.  Advertising has virtually no impact.  I don’t pay attention to ads unless they’re for things I know I need, and even then I shut them out most of the time.  I do let my guard down in independent bookstores, however.  So it was that I found in Aaron’s Books in Lititz, Your Guide To Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village.  It was totally an impulse buy, easily read in a sunny afternoon in a caboose motel.  Or a rainy afternoon in an English manor house.  Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper have produced a wonderfully witty illustrated guide here.  It helps to have lived in the United Kingdom for a few years.

Shelved face out in the thriller section, it’s a great opportunity for murder-mystery, gothic literature, horror movie fan types to laugh at themselves.  Some parts are snort out loud funny.  Okay, so I was on staycation and being a bit free with cash for a change, but I’m sure I will keep this one near my desk and turn back to it from time to time.  Maureen Johnson is known for her young adult novels and Jay Cooper is a children’s book illustrator.  Their talents, however, work together incredibly well for this slightly naughty guilty pleasure read.  The Wicker Man even gets a nod or two.  Something that those who disdain horror don’t often realize is that it quite frequently has its own sense of humor.  It’s an intelligent genre that doesn’t take itself too seriously.  At times it does, of course, but those of us who are fans can tell fantasy from real life.  Maybe.

Independent bookstores are starting to make a comeback.  A significant part of our population isn’t on board with retailers trying to convert everyday life to the metaverse.  We want to hear our music with the occasional pop and microphone hiss.  We want to drive our own cars.  We want to browse in actual bookstores.  Given my buying record online, I have to laugh every time I look at the recommendations.  The electronic world brain doesn’t know me very well at all.  It assumes it knows why I bought that ladder or that round blank four-inch stamped electrical cover.  Some of us play in nontraditional ways with such things.  And we get ideas from wandering into independent bookstores.  As long as they’re not in quaint English villages.

Sacred Hudson

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As scientific as we may wish to be, there’s no denying that there is a sense of place.  We know that some animals, at least, also feel it.  Whether theirs is a more pragmatic desire to return to where conditions were favorable to be born, or whether something deeper draws them there, we have no way of knowing.  People feel it too, this sense of place.  We know where we’re from, and if we don’t we often want to find out.  The space is somehow part of us.  There’s a compelling exploration of this in Judith Richardson’s Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley.  While not America’s first haunted location, the Hudson Valley was singled out for this treatment by Washington Irving.  He, however, didn’t invent it.

I’m not from the Hudson Valley.  I could never afford to live there.  That doesn’t mean the area can’t speak to me.  Richardson’s approach is academic yet readable and she considers how hauntings fill needs and how they play a role in that ever-contentious enterprise of land claims.  Ranging through literary treatments, whether the fiction of Irving or tour books of the next generation, or indeed, more recent literary efforts, Richardson deftly guides the reader through American Indian and Dutch and other inhabitants’ stories of themselves.  Race inevitably plays a part, and her tracing of the origins of some traditional tales is really remarkable.  Who owns the land?  Who truly owns anything?   

Similar treatments (I can’t help but feel somehow lesser) must exist of other haunted locations.  Richardson doesn’t engage in arguments over whether ghosts are factual since ghosts serve so many other functions.  Our lives are the stories we tell about ourselves.  Many of those tales involve the place we are or places we’ve been.  In our highly mobile society, few of us, it seems, can make a living where we’re from.  Those of us born in small towns range far and wide to find employment.  In many cases we may not want to go live where the drama of our childhoods unfolded.  Yes, there are pleasant memories there, but there are also ghosts.  Richardson explores how this plays out in one small stretch of the country.  Indeed, it’s a small stretch of New York state.  Stories of hauntings continue in that particular valley.  Uncanny, perhaps, but there are places in this world like that, and this book is a sure road post on this particular overgrown trail.

The Horseman

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Washington Irving’s tale, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” perhaps due to its being the earliest literary American ghost story, has been retold time and again.  When I saw that Christina Henry had a take on it that came out last autumn, I knew I’d be reading it.  I’d read her The Girl in Red late last year, but I couldn’t wait until fall to read this one.  Henry has a way of taking traditional stories and making them relevant.  Horseman is set two generations after Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones and Katrina Van Tassel, but they all appear in it.  According to Irving’s story—and this is often changed in cinematographic treatments—Brom and Katrina wed.  The narrator of this tale is Ben, who in today’s terms would be considered transgender.  He (his preferred pronoun) is the grandchild of Brom and Katrina.

Henry is a master of magic realism.  There really is something in the woods of Sleepy Hollow and it’s taking children’s heads.  Some influence from Tim Burton’s film version is found here, but the story has its own trajectory and inner logic.  Ben actually sees the monster, but nobody will believe him.  Not until it’s too late.  The one person who does believe is Katrina, Ben’s grandmother.  She, however, wants Ben to act like a girl because he was born female.  She wants him to stay home and learn sewing and cooking.  Ben’s hero, however, is Brom.  He’s a good man, if rowdy.  He married Katrina for love, not wealth.  Ichabod Crane does appear, later in the story, but since how he appears is a spoiler I’ll need to let you read for yourself.

Americans are often raised with the wrong-headed notion of canon as the one way a story goes.  Retelling is as ancient as writing itself.  Homer, Apollodorus, and Ovid were retelling stories.  So were many Bible writers.  People tell one another tall tales.  Washington Irving didn’t invent the Headless Horseman out of whole cloth.  Neither did the people of Tarrytown.  How the story goes is a matter for discussion.  Bet yet, it’s also a matter for retelling.  Henry’s version could be made to fit with Irving’s, but with a bit of prior assumption, some posthumous collaboration.  Hers, however, is a tale for our times.  Just like in Red, the protagonist isn’t conventional, according to conservative sexual standards.  Both are, however, authentic.  And although both may be flawed in various ways, there’s no denying that they’re heroes.

Having X

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The final girl is such a classic horror trope that even horror novels can be titled after it.  You know the drill—teens hanging out, doing things that teens do, end up being killed off one-by-one by a monster or a disturbed person(s).  The one to survive is the virginal girl who doesn’t drink, use drugs, or whatever.  As a long-term horror watcher, I think the trope has been exaggerated, but it does occur enough times that there was clearly something to be noticed.  Enter X.  Released earlier this year, a slasher that rather obviously juxtaposes religion and horror, X features a “final girl” who is anything but virginal and sober.  The religion aspect is blatant from the beginning when the opening sequence involves a televangelist preaching to a viewership of the dead.

The title derives from the premise (which is a throw-back to the classic slasher era) that a would-be independent movie producer wants to shoot a pornographic movie.  Since this is strictly low-budget, he contacts an elderly gentleman on a remote Texas ranch who has a guest house.  With his one male and two female stars, a cameraman/director, and an assistant he drives to the isolated location.  They are all divided into couples, with each of the women having sex with the male star.  What makes this creepy from the beginning is that the old man, and his elderly wife, create a sinister presence.  She sneaks up on the young people, watching them through the window.  She misses her younger days when she was young and attractive.  As night falls the young people are killed off by the older couple one at a time.  What’s more, they’ve done this before.

X is a reflection on aging.  More than that, it’s a reflection on how religion leads to horror.  To say precisely how would involve giving away a spoiler, so I’ll leave the reader to watch the film to find out.  Suffice it to say, the televangelist is preaching about how sex leads to evil and the older couple kills because they’ve been listening to him preach.  X is not for the faint of heart.  I generally don’t like jump-startles and there were a couple of those that caught me off-guard.  (I try to anticipate them when watching slashers, or any horror, for that matter.)  But what of the final girl?  There is one, but it’s one who flies in the face of horror convention, if there is such a thing.  

Carter’s Creations

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Angela Carter was a novelist whose best known work is her short story collection, The Bloody Chamber.  Often acclaimed as both gothic and feminist, these repurposed folktales and fairytales leave the reader in a thoughtful state.  I have to admit to having not known of Carter or her work until quite recently.  I’d seen a biography about her, but there are so many writers and my time seems always so limited.  Then I saw The Bloody Chamber mentioned on a list of best gothic fiction.  I had to find out what this was all about.  The stories are indeed unlike much of the feminist literature of the seventies.  The stories are focused on women, often young, and how they deal with being treated as the property of men.

The first, and lengthiest story, “The Bloody Chamber,” is a retelling of Bluebeard from the point of view of his last wife.  It’s an extended reflection on feeling owned and boxed in—literally trapped—by men’s economic rules of property.  Carter keeps readers on edge, even if they know the base story.  This isn’t a simple retelling.  Nor is it a lament about the natural, biological unfairness of sexuality.  There’s an ambivalence here, an enjoyment tinged with melancholy that gives the story a gothic sensibility.  The women in the different stories here prefigure more recent Disney heroines that take charge of their circumstances.  And there’s also ambivalence about the setting of the stories.  There are contemporary appurtenances but still castles and baronial mansions.  You’re lost in time.

The collection has some stories, such as beauty and the beast, retold twice and ends with three versions of werewolf stories that play, to an extent, on little red riding hood.  Some were tales with which I had no familiarity.  The effect of the whole is thoughtful contemplation of the human condition.  Much of the world, it seems, has been unduly influenced by a kind of literalism—a story, whether biblical or traditional, is supposed to go like this—that has not only robbed great texts of their depth, but has entrapped human beings in a stone-chiseled certainty.  A self-righteousness, if you will.  Even writing a text in stone doesn’t prevent others from interpreting it, however.  Since none of us have all the answers, we are each interpreters.  There was no historical Bluebeard.  There have, unfortunately, been many men who embody his attitude towards women.  Carter’s genius is to remind us that every story has at least two sides.  And the woman’s side may well be the truer of the two.

Keeping Your Head

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Horror is a gift that keeps on giving.  Not many horror fans are among my regular readers, but I like to keep a finger in the pie nevertheless.  Just earlier this month it was announced that Paramount has hired Lindsey Beers to direct a new big screen Sleepy Hollow.  It’s early days, of course, and the movie hasn’t been titled, let alone filmed.  Beers is just wrapping up a prequel for Pet Sematary (not yet titled) that I’ll be eager to see.  Women horror directors tend to bring refreshing angles to the genre—and why shouldn’t they?  Women writers were crucial in developing the Gothic genre that evolved into horror as we know it.  No matter what the Supreme Court says, they are just as important—probably more—than males.

I’ve been reading quite a lot about Sleepy Hollow over the past several months, which is how I came across the intelligence about this new movie.  It’s nice to know that the Hudson Valley is evergreen.  My visits there have offered brushes with the uncanny, but nothing explicit.  A weekend near the ice caves of Sam’s Point, geocaching in the woods outside Poughkeepsie, a visit to Sleepy Hollow itself to visit Irving’s grave and tip my hat to the Old Dutch Church.  With deep family roots in upstate New York, I’ve always thought it would be a great place to live.  Alas, not on an editor’s salary.  It’s been too long since I’ve given the area a visit.

John Quidor, The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, via Wikimedia Commons

There have been many takes on Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  Even in the silent era movies were made of it.  In retrospect, it seems odd that it took so long for Tim Burton to bring it back to the big screen.  There were some television movies, usually with plodding plots to draw the story out to commercial length.  Disney had early on devoted half a feature to it, as if the story couldn’t support its own weight.  For better or worse, that film was probably the first introduction to the tale that many people had—the story itself was written for adults.  Of course, many written kids’ versions have come out since then.  The satirical original was meant for a somewhat sophisticated readership with a sense of humor.  The story lends itself to horror treatments, however, if they’re done well.  It may have been an early viewing of the Disney tale that set me moving in this direction.  I like to think I’ve kept my head over it, however.

Paperback Nightmares

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I’m not assertive.  My voice is not loud and even when I have strong opinions I like to let others have their say.  Those of us who’ve been beaten down too many times can be like that.  So it took a lot of courage to ask.  “Is it possible that Nightmares with the Bible might be issued in paperback?”  You see, I know that “academic” books almost always sell the copies they’re going to sell in the first year.  Some follow-up sales continue into years two and three, but beyond that it’s about done.  And I also know that when authors ask for a paperback it almost never sells as well (or even more poorly) than the hardcover.  I’m hoping the paperback of Nightmares will buck this trend because it published into the pandemic.  That was a game-changer.

When you’re worried about staying alive you might not feel like reading about demons.  Of course, what better time to do so is there?  Paperbacks are often produced, in academic settings, to appease authors.  I have long believed—and this flies counter to the orthodoxy of the publishing world—that if books were initially published in paperback and priced affordably they would sell better.  The fear is that the higher priced hardcovers wouldn’t be purchased by libraries.  Librarians would, oh tremble, purchase the reasonably priced paperbacks and rebind them for less expense than the stratospheric price put on a 208-page monograph.  Publishers are often afraid to try anything different.  Assured sales are a blessing that can be bankrolled.

I’m hoping, once the paperback comes out, to do some more promotional work on it.  This blog was started long before I had books to flog.  It’s free content for those who like the less sweet kinds of treats in the bowl.  I do appreciate the occasional free advertising I can do.  It’s my hope that there’s always something to learn offered with it.  Successful content providers can make a living doing it.  Others pay for the privilege.  I often ponder what will happen to this blog when I run up against the size limits of my WordPress account.  The next level up, commercial, is beyond my price range.  Perhaps, like a phoenix, it will be time to start all over again when that moment comes.  In the meantime I’ll reuse images as often as I can, because each new one takes a byte out of my account.  And when it’s all said and done, Nightmares will still be available in print. Hopefully in paperback next year.