Sluggish

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If you enter into it with the spirit of the thing, Slugs is actually better than you might expect.  You have to expect that it’s going to be hokey and outlandish, with bad acting.  With all of that in the assumed category, it’s a passable horror film.  I was surprised to learn, in the opening credits, that it was based on a novel.  That makes me almost curious enough to read it.  Set in a small town in upstate New York (Ashton), the movie is about carnivorous slugs.  There’s an incipient humor about the idea and although no planned laugh-out loud moments permeate this film, there are plenty of incredulous snort opportunities.  The local health inspector is the first to cotton onto the fact that the slugs are attacking, but even he doesn’t believe his own wife at times when she points out their unusual behavior.

There’s a lot of running about and trying to get officials to do something about it, but who takes slugs seriously?  Meanwhile the gastropods eat the town drunk, a gardener, a young couple making out when the parents are gone, and are responsible for the death of a local developer.  That leads to the gore required by the tale.  Finally the health inspector teams up with the local sewage inspectors and a high school science teacher who figures out a way to blow up the slugs.  In some respects the movie resembles Evolution at this point—using a pumping truck to spray the invaders with a chemical solution that saves the day.  The best friend of the protagonist does get eaten by the slugs while trying to save the town, but otherwise there’s a happy ending.

This is a bad movie but it’s better than many “so bad it’s good” features.  Some competent work is done with special effects and the story itself is laughable (I don’t know about the original story).  I have a weakness for innocuous creatures turning dangerous—it’s one of the more interesting applications of existential horror in a world full of different types of animals, plants, and fungi.  (And occasionally even minerals can attack, cue The Monolith Monsters.)  As a kid these were the kinds of movies, in addition to the usual vampires, werewolves, and mummies, that helped me cope with an uncertain world.  There are those who find Slugs profoundly bad, but I’m not among them.  Is it great?  Not by any stretch.  Is it worth watching for free when you have a spare moment?  Certainly.  If you get into the spirit of the thing.

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.

Horror for Folk

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I’ve been following a few auteurs these days, and I discovered  Damian McCarthy somewhat accidentally.  Wanting to watch a movie and relying on the two streaming services I can choose from, I watched and enjoyed Oddity.  A bit of Celtic folk horror, its story is disturbing rather than the kind of thing that destroys you psychologically.  A friend then told me that he’d directed only one other movie, Caveat, which I also watched.  Hokum is the third and most recent of the folk horror trilogy and is a movie I’m glad to have seen.  It follows an acerbic American writer, Ohm Bauman, who goes to Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes at a place they enjoyed.  He arrives at Halloween and finds the hotel owner frightening two young boys with stories of the Cailleach, a witch associated with the coming of winter.

Bauman treats everyone poorly except Fiona, the one woman on the staff.  He hangs himself after disposing of the ashes but is rescued by Fiona and the single bellhop.  After he’s released from the hospital, Bauman finds the hotel closing for the season and Fiona missing.  He suspects she’s in the forbidden honeymoon suite and Mal, the front desk clerk, reluctantly allows him to explore it.  Bauman finds Fiona’s body and learns that Mal murdered her because he got her pregnant.  I’m leaving out a lot, but the movie’s worth watching.  The witch, in the film’s scariest scene, circles Bauman as he hides in the curtained four-poster bed while trapped in the honeymoon suite.  Mal realizes that his only option is to kill Bauman and the two end up in the hotel basement where Mal is caught by the witch.  Bauman, we learn, was playing with a gun as a boy and accidentally shot and killed his mother, thus his guilt and depression.

A little research after watching Hokum revealed some of the subtlety of the film.  The Cailleach, who drags away the murderous Mal, is associated with winter.  In Celtic timekeeping, Halloween is the onset of winter and the murder that leads to Mal’s demise took place on Halloween.  It’s even shown with a carved turnip jack-o-lantern.  Holiday horror, anyone?  Another aspect that comes out is that the witch’s minions strip off body parts as the unwary are dragged away.  The owner frightens the boys at the start by implying the witch will take their private parts.  Mal is guilty of murdering Fiona because he impregnated her.  Subtle, but effective.  There’s more to the film than I can summarize in the brief space here, but it is another example of sophisticated folk horror from Damian McCarthy.  He is an auteur worth following.

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.

Shy Incubus

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Shelby Oaks is one of those horror films that benefits from more explanation than the camera gives.  Or maybe I just missed some things.  Yet another religion and horror movie that utilizes demons, which are legion these days—paging Nightmares with the Bible—it goes like this: Riley, along with three friends, is a YouTuber.  (I sincerely think my life would’ve been different if that were a career option when I was in high school.)  They run a channel under the name Paranormal Paranoids.  While investigating the Ohio ghost town of Shelby Oaks, they disappear.  Many think it’s a publicity stunt, but the three friends are found murdered and Riley is still missing.  Her sister Mia can’t rest not knowing the fate of her sister.  She’s interviewed by other YouTubers, but after a man (Wilson Miles)  shoots himself in the head at her front door, she becomes an investigator herself.  Her husband is less enthused by the idea.  There will be spoilers below.

Throughout, it becomes clear that Mia and Riley were close and that Riley, and once Mia, saw a demon looking through her second-floor bedroom window at night when she was a child.  The demon, Tarion, it turns out, is an incubus.  The man who killed himself was Riley’s kidnapper/rapist.  It turns out that Tarion, unlike the usual incubus, doesn’t perform the sex himself.  Mia finds Riley alive, but her child is dedicated to Tarion—a step removed from Rosemary, whom the Devil himself raped—and Riley tries to kill the boy.  Mia accidentally knocks Riley through a window where hellhounds consume her.  Tarion had planned, since childhood, that Mia would watch his progeny that Riley would bear.

There are some creepy things here.  The use of Wilson Miles’ initials to form the sigil for Tarion brings Blair Witch elements to she story.  The use of the sisters’ initials to show their connection was a nice touch.  And the found footage aspects are done pretty well—the camera doesn’t move excessively, making viewers ill.  Overall, however, the movie has trouble hanging together.  This is a demon without a Bible, a shy incubus who sends others to do his work.  Ideas aren’t fully developed, leading viewers to wonder a number of things—why didn’t Mia wash the blood off herself until after watching the video Wilson had in his hands?  Why did Wilson kill himself in the first place?  This isn’t a bad horror film, but the religion in it could be further developed.  The two naturally go together.

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.

Smile for a Second

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I’d read that Smile 2 was better than the first Smile.  But there was a gap of about a year between seeing the sequel and I might’ve forgotten some details about how this was supposed to work.  The “smile” entity possesses someone when they see the previously possessed person die by suicide.  Okay, we’re back where we started.  The movie makes a fairly heavy use of hallucinations, so it’s difficult to know how far to “rewind” to get back to what “really” happened.  So let’s start at the beginning.  Skye Riley is a pop artist who’s trying to stage a comeback tour after a bad stint with drug abuse that led to the death of her boyfriend in a car crash.  Since Skye was in the car, she sustained several injuries but she’s healed up and ready to perform again.

The problem is that she’s still in pain.  A high school friend, who unfortunately is possessed by the smile entity, deals in drugs so she tries to get some Vicodin from him.  She witnesses his death by suicide and becomes infected.  From that point on the hallucinations start.  We learn that the possessing entity drives the victim, or host, insane within a week.  Skye meets a nurse who offers to help her by stopping her heart, thus killing the entity, and then reviving her at the last moment.  She naturally thinks him insane.  Meanwhile the hallucinations continue and the viewer doesn’t know what is “real” and what is not.  After reconciling with her best friend, and killing her mother, Skye decides she has to take the nurse’s offer.  She’s tricked by hallucinations into not having the procedure done and (somewhat predictably) dies by suicide in front of a huge audience, thereby infecting them all.

The film was praised for its acting, and no doubt, it is good.  The premise is scary enough, but somehow it just didn’t convince me.  Perhaps it was a little too slick.  A little too self aware of the previous film.  The explanation for the entity is that it’s some kind of demon or spirit, but when the movie ends up showing its “true form” it doesn’t seem as scary as all that.  Maybe because it’s smiling.  I’m glad that the critics found it good.  Horror does deserve more positive press than it tends to get.  The creepy smile is effective, but the movie itself, while introducing religion, in the form of a demon, felt like more of the same.

Rumblings

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Despite the many books on Tambora, it surprisingly gets little press.  Of the volumes on the volcano I’ve read, Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora has been the best.  He, like many others, makes a case for the world-changing impact of that eruption that led to “the year without a summer” in 1816.  Knock-on effects remain with us to this day.  Wood also throws in a good bit of concern about our current climate crisis.  As he points out, the volcanic aerosols of Tambora remained in the stratosphere for three years (leading to three chilly summers), but our current carbon emissions, on-going, have no end in sight.  We all already know that weather has become more extreme.  As I write this, family members in Europe are experiencing 100-degree temperatures that used to be unheard of on that continent.  We’ve seen hurricanes increase in intensity, and have had our own erratic weather for a few years now.  The atmosphere’s too large for us to predict just who might receive the God-like wrath of the weather.

Wood uses Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein both as an illustration of the year without a summer and as the atmospheric monster we’ve created.  He also narrates other historical events brought on by the temporary change in climate in the eighteen-teens.  One of them was the breaking up of Arctic ice that led to the ill-fated Franklin expedition many years later.  (I was unintentionally also reading Dan Simmon’s The Terror even as I read Wood’s chapter about the expedition.)  More than that, this book describes the typhoid outbreak and pandemic that followed on from erratic weather in South Asia.  And deadly changes in parts of China.  The disaster of the breaking of the Giétro glacial ice dam, and an earlier famine in Ireland fueled by British hostility toward the Irish, as well as Tambora’s weather.

The developments that grew out of the human response to the changed climate caused by Tambora led to many institutions still with us.  Governments, slowly, of course, realized that disaster preparedness and care for the working class were necessary for any nation to remain strong.  The privileged lose said privilege when there’s nobody else left to compare it with.  (Capitalism has blood all over its hands.)  Overall, this is a provocative book making the case that the world we recognize today evolved this way largely in response to an environmental crisis that occurred before steam engines had been invented, when sails drove shipping and horses drew vehicles.  When a single volcano changed everything.  And although we should learn from such things, being what we are, we tend to overlook that largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history.

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.