Being Perceived

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The philosopher George Berkeley argued that to be is to be perceived.  This perspective goes by the name of immaterialism and I have to admit to being sometimes seduced by it.  The real question comes down to who counts as a perceiver.  In any case, as a book author there’s always a worry that the book sent to the publisher isn’t real until it appears in print.  I’m Berkeleyian enough to think that ebooks aren’t really perceived, and so I mean in print.  Until I see a copy of the book, I don’t really believe it exists.  This entire week I’ve been waiting.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth was released on either Monday or Wednesday, depending on who you believe about such things, and my author copies have been on their way.  At last, the book exists!

In the publishing industry there are those who consider a book like a box of puzzle pieces.  They often refer to books as “content,” or “product.”  Something that can be divided up and sold piecemeal in electronic form.  A chapter at a time.  Never mind what the author was trying to do when s/he wrote the book.  Such people, it seems to me, should be forced to spend several years working on an integrated project only to see the producer of said product take it apart and sell insubstantial pieces of the whole.  It feels like being eviscerated.  Books are objects and those who love them form cultures.  I know there are people who read ebooks, and I don’t judge them for it—readers are readers and we need more of them!  But for me, book culture involves, well, books.

One of the greatest thrills a writer can know is opening that first box of their author copies of a book.  Many academic publishers are cutting down the numbers, to save money, of course.  McFarland, I’m happy to report, still provides ten, which used to be standard.  So before I start doling them out, I have, for the moment, ten copies of my sixth book.  I have only one copy of the second edition of A Reassessment of Asherah and two copies of Nightmares with the Bible.  They’re both too expensive for me to buy more.  (Income from writing books may bring images of Stephen King or J. K. Rowling to mind, but they’re household names because their situation is so exceptional.)  Right now, however, I’m bathing in the glow of knowing, at least at the moment, my latest book is being perceived.

A Glimmer

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You just never know.  A few months back I emailed Liverpool University Press because my book, The Wicker Man, has apparently not sold any copies.  I had never received (have still never received) a royalty statement or any payment.  Now, I’m willing to accept that no copies have sold.  I’m not a recognized name and a bigger book came out in 2023, the fiftieth anniversary of the film.  I moved on.  Then, the day before my Sleepy Hollow as American Myth copies were scheduled to arrive, a friend sent me a text that made my day.  He’d seen on the MIT bookstore staff picks shelf, a copy of my humble little book.  I was floored.  Someone had read it and liked it.  And MIT!  I mean, that’s worth celebrating.  It also made me curious.

Image credit: a friend

I checked a website that tracks classroom adoptions.  The Wicker Man had been adopted for a class at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.  Ironically, just the day before my friend’s text arrived, a colleague at a nearby seminary asked if I’d come and give a talk about Weathering the Psalms.  This is all very dizzying to me.  I am an obscure private intellectual because no schools will open resident scholar or any other such non-tenure positions to me.  I can’t even verify myself on Google Scholar.  But a few people, it seems, have found my books.  In case you might think otherwise, I’m very well aware that the scholarly world is small (and the current administration would like to make it smaller by the day).  But I tend to think of myself as lost in that small world.

The Wicker Man was a departure for me, as is Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  In these two books I moved away from my identity as a scholar of religion.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve used my background and experience, and even latent knowledge of religious studies in both books, but they aren’t fronting religion.  It remains to be seen if the just curious will pick them up.  I know many people don’t default to, “I find this interesting, I’ll buy a book on it,” as I do.  And I’m more than willing to suppose that others aren’t interested in what I have to say.  Still, just when I’m starting to feel down on all my efforts, a little ray of hope shines through.  Someone in a bookstore somewhere has recommended one of my books.  And it feels good.

Letting Go

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I should’ve known from the title that this would be a sad story.  Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go won the Nobel Prize in Literature, despite being speculative.  It’s only mildly so, but enough that it is sometimes classed as science fiction.  It’s appropriate that a twentieth anniversary edition was released because it is an extended consideration of the price of technology as well as dehumanization.  I’ll need to put in some spoilers, so here’s the usual caveat.  I read this novel because it’s often cited as an example of dark academia and it certainly fits that aesthetic.  It starts out at a private school called Hailsham, in England.  The students are given some privileges but their lives aren’t exactly posh.  Most of their possessions are purchased on days when a truck sells them things they can buy with money they earn by creating art.  They aren’t allowed to leave the school.  Spoilers follow.

The special circumstances of the children are because they’re clones being grown for replacement organs.  The public doesn’t want to know about them or interact with them.  In fact, most people believe they don’t have souls, or aren’t really human.  They’ve been created to be used and exploited until they die, always prematurely.  While this may sound grim, the story is thoughtfully told through the eyes of one of these children, Kathy.  She becomes best friends with Ruth and Tommy, who later become a couple.  Ruth is a difficult personality, but likable.  As they grow they’re slowly given the facts about what their life will be.  They’re raised to comply, never to rebel or question their role.  Most simply accept it.  Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, in a submissive way, try to get a deferral regarding their “donations.”

I suppose it’s presumptuous to say of a Nobel Prize winner that it’s well written, but I’ll say it anyway.  Ishiguro manages to capture the exploratory friendships of youth and reveals what you need to know in slow doses, all told with a compelling, if sad and accepting voice.  Although the genre could be sci-fi, it’s set in the present, or, more accurately, about twenty years ago.  The technology, apart from the cloning, is about what it was at the turn of the century, or maybe a decade or two before that.  With what we see happening in the world right now, people should be reading books like this that help them understand that people are people, not things to be exploited.  And that Nobel Prizes should be reserved for those that are actually deserving for their contributions to humanity. 

Non-Saints

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It was an epiphany.  My wife has, on more than one occasion, accused me of playing the martyr.  I know very well that I let other people step all over me.  The epiphany came when I was reading about Stephen’s martyrdom in the Acts of the Apostles (in the New Testament).  Unbidden by me, a memory—more of a distinct impression, a deeply planted feeling—arose.  I started reading the Bible at a young age.  The story of Stephen is disturbing to a child.  The thought of being stoned to death for saying what you believe is a species of horror.  The memory, or impression, was of my mother pointing out how good it would be to be like Stephen.  He is not technically my namesake, but since there were no male role models in my family, I subconsciously made the connection: Stephen the martyr, Steve the martyr.

Giovanni Battista Lucini – Martyrdom of St. Stephen, public domain. Source: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/martyrdom-of-st-stephen/twGNCf3waLKDvA via Wikimedia Commons

It’s strange to realize this suddenly after half a century of not consciously recollecting it.  What we teach our children stays with them.  If we tell them that it’s good to die for your beliefs, well, we shouldn’t be surprised when they grow up with strong convictions.  (My brother tells me that Virgos think they’re always right and that’s why we’re stubborn; is it the stars or is it the Good Book?)  The Bible puts a positive spin on Stephen’s death.  Formal sainthood isn’t a biblical concept, but he dies forgiving his murderers.  It struck me there in the middle of a working day.  Some of my subconscious personality traits floated to the surface.

My deep desire to avoid Hell also formed my young outlook.  Although my beliefs have to be held accountable to what I’ve learned over decades of study, that fear never departs.  This too was planted in me before I had any real concept to absorb it.  When I grew old enough, the horror became academic, but nonetheless real for it.  I’d studied the history of Hell and I knew New Testament secrets.  To avoid the bad place, be like Stephen.  The dilemma is that as life goes on, we continue to learn.  Young parents don’t know as much as old ones do.  And since we have to teach our children not to run out into the street, or not eat that thing they found, we cast ourselves as The authority.  And that includes things religious.  If we live an examined life, we see shades of nuance where once there was only certainty.  And sometimes we have epiphanies.

X-Rayed

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If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the comic book ads for x-ray specs.  That’s the idea behind a Roger Corman film that Stephen King thought one of the scariest he’d seen.  X, subtitled The Man with X-Ray Eyes, came out in 1963.  Not to be confused with the X of the modern trilogy, this X follows a Doctor Xavier who develops a formula that allows him to see inside people so that he can accurately diagnose and cure them.  This formula may affect his sanity, however, and he kills a friend who is trying to take the ability from him.  A wanted man, he finds a carnival barker who exploits his gift as a trick.  It was a bit jarring to see Don Rickles in a horror movie, but stranger things have happened.  In the midst of this exploitation, an old friend finds him and drives him to safety.

Then to Las Vegas, where his sight allows him to win unabated.  When the police are called he steals a car and increasingly sees through the fabric of the universe.  He stumbles into a road-side revival where the preacher encourages him to take Matthew 5 literally and he does so as the congregation chants “pluck it out!”  What makes this final scene so arresting, apart from qualifying it for Holy Sequel, is that before the minister tells him to mutilate himself, the doctor says he sees through the darkness to the eye that “sees us all.”  He sees God.  The minister interprets this as the Devil, confusing the most elemental entities that exist one for the other.

The movie has some lighthearted moments, some even apart from Don Rickles.  When the doctor begins to see through everybody’s clothes, it’s presented in a humorous way.  But for the most part, the film is played straight and it manages to raise some serious issues for those who think through the implications.  Our senses evolved to help us survive.  Accessing abilities beyond that is a catalyst for disaster.  Indeed, Dr. Xavier early on notes that he’s approaching godhood because of this newly won ability.  It also means that an individual might know too much.  It seems that at the end he does.  The movie is remarkable even today in several ways.  Technology has made special effects more believable, but the human side of this story remains unaltered.  A doctor wanting to help patients becomes more of a monster than a man, in some respects.  And perhaps the most remarkable aspect is that this is a serious horror film made by Roger Corman for AIP. Scary even to a young Stephen King.

Publish, Perish

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Publish or perish has been around for quite a while and I feel for younger scholars who are trying to publish their collected essays as their second book.  Collected essays, in case you’re not familiar with dark academia, are generally what senior scholars do before they retire and they can’t be bothered to rewrite everything into a proper book.  Or maybe the topics are disparate and don’t easily fit together in one category.  When I was teaching the general rule was an article a year and a second book for tenure.  I was able to do this without a sabbatical, and with a heavy teaching load and administrative duties at Nashotah House.  It’s a lot of work.  My biggest challenge was coming up with ideas for new books.  Eventually I published my collected essays on Asherah in the second edition of my dissertation.

I’d written a 50-page article on Shapshu, the Ugaritic sun deity, that was intended to be my second book.  Then J. C. L. Gibson retired and I had to have something for his Festschrift.  There it went.   It was about that time that I started Weathering the Psalms.  That was my “tenure book.”  There was over a decade between that and Holy Horror, for a number of reasons.  The main one was that I was trying to cobble together a career between Gorgias Press and moonlighting as an adjunct at Rutgers University.  There was no time for research and publication.  Ironically, that only came after I gave up academia to enter the commercial world of publishing.  I see younger scholars now expected to produce that second book, and some of them go for the collected essays approach.  I understand.

Back when I was applying for first jobs—and the scene was already very tight, I assure you, despite promises just a few years earlier—I applied for everything.  One search committee chair wrote a scolding letter saying I wasn’t senior enough to apply.  By the end of his dressing down, he concluded with something along the lines of “unless you’re applying because there are so few positions, in which case it’s understandable.”  He was right.  So few jobs and so much student debt!  I landed at Nashotah and began cranking out the articles.  In a moment of weakness I offered to write some further academic treatments after my horror movie books appeared.  They don’t do anything for my career, of course.  And they take away time from popular writing practice.  Who knows?  Maybe some day I’ll gather them into a book.  Then again, maybe I’ll find myself growing younger too.

Naming Sleepy Hollow

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Local history has always been an interest of mine.  Although I’ve never lived in Sleepy Hollow, my book on “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is due out this week.  I try to keep an eye out for further information on the region.  Christopher Skelly’s The Origin of Sleepy Hollow: The Name and the Village, an Untold History appeared after I’d submitted my manuscript to McFarland, but I wanted to read it regardless.  A new father living in Wisconsin at the time, I was not aware of the name change in 1996.  I do remember looking at a map after we’d moved to New Jersey and seeing, for the first time, the name Sleepy Hollow along a route we planned to take to a point further up the Hudson.  I remember thinking, “I didn’t know there was an actual place called Sleepy Hollow.”  Well, that may have been because prior to 1996, there wasn’t.

This self-published account of how the name came about is valuable local history.  Not exactly belles-lettres, it nevertheless begins at the earliest Dutch naming of the area as the Dutch version of Sleepy Hollow.  By the time Washington Irving wrote his story around 1819, the area had already gone by several names but the village of Tarrytown was well established.  And, over time what was vaguely called Sleepy Hollow by the Dutch became North Tarrytown.  I learned here that the haven, or harbor on the Tappan Zee that was first called some version of “Sleepy” had been the victim of landfill so that a railroad could be put in.  The author is clear that the “Hollow” is still visible if you know where to stand and look.  He also explains the motivations behind changing the village name that began in 1988. 

One things I learned in my own study of ancient history is that place names tend to be remarkably resilient.  European settlers ignored much of the indigenous nomenclature, but did adapt many examples of it.  Our species needs to reference where things, or other people, are over very large distances.  We know where Edinburgh is, even if we live in Australia.  Names are important.  Personally, I’m glad that some citizens of North Tarrytown decided to change the name of their village to Sleepy Hollow.  And not just because I have a book coming out on the topic.  I’m sure the change has boosted tourism immensely, even if that wasn’t the initial motivation.  It’s nice to know that the change was actually back to the first Dutch ideas about the place.  And that a visit to Sleepy Hollow is possible because of one influential little story.

And Bones

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Often making lists of dark academia movies, The Skulls plays right into that territory.  A secret society, an elite college, and something’s definitely gone wrong.  It’s not a great movie, feeling somewhat contrived, but it fits the mold pretty well.  Things are a little too pat in the film, and the writing isn’t the best.  It’s entertaining, if overblown.  The story begins at an unnamed Yale (actually University of Toronto) with working-class Luke being invited to join the Skulls after an impressive rowing competition victory.  From the first, the Skulls meetings seem to lack gravitas.  Rich and powerful, they are above and beyond the law.  The problem for Luke is that his friends, Will and Chloe, are being edged out of his life.  Will, who writes for the school paper, breaks into the Skulls headquarters but is caught by Caleb, Luke’s “soul mate.”

Will is killed in what follows, and Luke wants to get out but it’s too late. Caleb’s father is the head-honcho for the Skulls and decides to have Luke committed to an asylum when he refuses to cooperate over his friend’s death.  Chloe and the second-in-command of the Skulls, Senator Levritt, rescue Luke and he challenges Caleb to a duel.  I’ll leave it off there so as not to spoil too much.  That gives you a sense of the darkness, in any case.  But the film doesn’t feel that dark.  Yes there is a murder, and there are bad guys, but something I can’t define prevents it from having the tone that you might expect from a grim tale.  As I say, things are a little too pat.  The characters’ emotions are a little too close to the surface.

The movie did well at the box office, but the sequels were released direct to video.  As far as the academia side goes, there are, no doubt, secret societies.  Privilege doesn’t let go once it gets a grip.  But the above-ground “Yale” sees a bit too light and airy.  Maybe more classroom and library scenes might’ve helped.  Likely it would’ve been better had it been based on a novel.  Films that are based on books have a solid development on which to stand and it’s often a matter of figuring out what to omit.  The writer and director had gone to Yale and Harvard, respectively, and wanted to portray what secret society life is like.  But that’s the thing about secret societies—you can’t really know, can you?  It’s a matter of imagination.  And dark academia is where such things fit.

End of the Story

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You know that feeling?  Like when you’re driving in thick fog and you know you should stop but you’re late and you have to keep going?  There comes a moment as you’re driving when you know that it’s going to end, and probably badly.  Yet you keep on going.  Trump has me thinking of the end of the world quite a bit.  I know there are many evangelicals out there praying for it fervently while the rest of us would like a little more time on this beautiful planet.  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand this outlook, because I do.  I grew up with it and I’ve never forgotten the sensation it caused.  And then I pondered that we are story-telling, and story-thinking creatures.  Perhaps other animals don’t think this way, but we constantly tell ourselves stories.

A story has a beginning, a middle, and well, eventually, an end.  We all know, at some level, that we’re mortal.  Life will end, and every completed story has an end.  Why not the world?  It’s a strangely haunting idea, the world continuing on without us here to make it interesting.  Plants will grow in any soil they can find, even microscopic cracks in the pavement.  Every year it’s like one day everything is suddenly green where only the day before we could see the sky through the branches.  And animals continue their quests for food, mates, and shelter.  Some live to hide while others strut.  Each has a role to play and if you watch them closely you’ll find yourself narrating their stories.  That rabbit.  That bluejay.  That fox.  They have a beginning, middle, and end.  If they can’t tell it, we can do it for them.  It comes naturally to us.

Long ago I learned how one version of Bible interpretation came up with the end of the world as we know it.  I also learned that this was contrived, just as all interpretations are.  This particular one has landed, like a seed, in the cracks of our mind.  It grows, just like that weed in the pavement.  This story must have an end.  We can imagine it no other way.  Even when we grow up and realize that the story was only one we told to children—children old enough to handle it, of course—we still have this certainty that an end is coming.  Like driving in the fog, we just know it.  Even when we realize that in reality we should be putting on the brakes.

Breakage

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Glass makes me wonder; can any member of a trilogy really stand alone?  As someone who consumes fiction, the question always arises as to who really controls the meaning of individual units.  Scholars have given us reader-response theory that posits meaning rests with the reader (viewer, listener, etc.) rather than with the creator.  Being on an M. Night Shyamalan kick—I was brought in through his horror movies—I watched Unbreakable.  I vaguely knew it was a trilogy, but when I saw Split I was caught off guard.  Unbreakable was a super-hero movie.  Split was a horror film.  I knew Glass brought them together, but I wasn’t sure which way it would break.  It turns out the trilogy is a horror sandwich on super-hero bread.  It’s also surprisingly thoughtful.  And over two hours long.  There are horror elements, but it made me wonder since Split is horror, could it stand alone without the other two.

Having read about the development of this a little bit, Unbreakable could have stood alone.  It did for sixteen years.  Split could also, but for the reveal in the last few minutes.  And Glass manages to pull the whole thing off with a characteristic Shyamalan twist ending.  I’ve written about the other two movies in their own posts, but I really don’t want to give any spoilers for the last one.  I can say it ends with a message that is worthy of the Matrix.  It shows what movies can do.  Or at least it was taken that way by this viewer.

Given what movies are, and what they represent, I have to wonder if there’s not a good dose of racism in the criticism of Shyamalan’s work.  His movies are intriguing, without fail.  I haven’t seen all his films, but I have watched eleven of them now.  Some multiple times.  Here’s a guy with stories to tell.  I know, as a fiction writer who has trouble selling anyone on my vision, that a story can take over your life.  And you want to tell that story and see if it resonates with anyone else.  Those of us who make up tales generally recognize when something we write isn’t good.  My list of unfinished or unpursued stories dwarfs the stack of those I’ve had published, or tried to.  When you release a story out there in the world, you hope that others will get it.  I trust certain auteurs.  Even if not all of their films appeal to me, I like to think I see what they’re getting at.  This trilogy is well worth watching through to the end, even if it isn’t horror.

Sad Joy

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I sometimes make the mistake of thinking a short book will be a quick read.  Melancholic Joy is a case in point.  Every time I indulge in a book of philosophy I wonder if I missed my true calling.  As my wife is well aware, I’m prone to philosophical musings about the meaning of life although I tend to place myself among the existentialists.  As soon as I saw the title of Brian Treanor’s book it went on my reading list.  It’s short and I thought maybe a week would be enough.  But it wasn’t.  I do hope I can remember much of it.  A word to the wary, the first chapter is very depressing.  Treanor doesn’t sugarcoat the world in his quest on a Life Worth Living.  Those of us who ponder things deeply tend toward melancholy, in my experience.  But stick with it.  There is gold in this book.  Starting with chapter two I was reminded why I took so much philosophy in college.

The world is full of depressing facts.  By the time I was born we’d already devised ways to wipe out the entire human race.  Many, far too many, people live lives of suffering, much of which could be prevented if we didn’t have people like Donald Trump running things.  The political situation is so bad that I’ve disengaged.  Yet still, amid my melancholy, I do feel joy.  You need to parse words carefully here.  Treanor knows that joy and happiness aren’t the same thing.  For those of us predisposed toward melancholy, joy is probably much more common in our lives than happiness.  This book is one that led me to start underlining again.  I do hope to come back to it when my outlook becomes too bleak.  Treanor interacts with both other philosophers and other writers, even some who aren’t always classified as philosophical.  It is a nepenthe.

Some of us think incessantly and can’t help doing so.  It’s a bit difficult to be cheerful if that’s the case.  Melancholic Joy, if I can keep it in mind, may help with that.  There are sections where I had to go back and re-read because my attention had wandered (it happens to us all), but to do so was rewarding.  For anyone who finds many aspects of the world oppressive, and depressing, and who has a philosophical bent, this book is for you.  Just be careful with that first chapter.  Whatever you do, don’t stop there.

Who’s Counting?

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While joking around recently with my daughter, I started counting to ten in Spanish.  I’ve never studied the language, but I can stumble through academic articles in it with a dictionary.  In a senior moment I forgot that “ten” was “diez.”  We had a laugh about it and got back to life.  The next day while doing my sit-ups, I was counting in German, as is my habit.  (The push-ups get counted in English, thank you.)  It struck me that “dreizehn” is where the “teens” start, and I wondered if this was because of some base-six counting.  I decided to check Spanish to see if the pattern holds.  Those of you who know Spanish know that it doesn’t.   In English, which follows German, our teens begin at “thirt” (third).  

Numbers have always fascinated me.  Math not so much.  While I find the base-ten system natural, there is something to be said for base-six.  I’m not sure if that’s where German “zwölfe” comes from, but it does give us our “twelve.”  But those teens are always difficult, aren’t they?  In human life we hit sexual maturity with all of its complications.  Do we project those onto our numbers?  Do other animals do the same?  We now know that some animals have at least the concept of absolute numbers down.  Some birds know exactly how many eggs are in their nests, and bees know what “zero” means.  Their lives tend to be shorter than ours.  Do their ideas of numbers reflect that?

As human beings we know that that good old base-ten number 100 is kind of a life goal.  We know that 100 is “old age,” but we know that it isn’t exactly unusual for a person to live that long.  Of course “ninety” is compatible with either base-six or base-ten, and is a more reasonable goal.  Numbers are used for marking.  They’re so basic to our everyday life that, unless you’re a mathematician, accountant, or scientist, we hardly think about them at all.  Civilization began, however, with gods and numbers.  Kings wanted to know how many people they controlled (some things never change).  In the Bible God punishes David for trying to find out.  There’s even a book called Numbers.  The Mesopotamians used a base-six system that gave us the 360-degree circle.  We still use it even though a 1000-degree circle would give us much greater precision.  I could muse about numbers and counting systems all day, but it’s time to go do some sit-ups, in German.

Cat Tales

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Sometimes I go into an independent bookstore and just look what’s on the shelf.  Often this ends up being an attempt to find a book that isn’t monstrous in length.  Much of what’s currently on offer is long, but I grew up reading 128-page paperbacks (not great literature, granted) that set my expectations.  Now, I do read long books.  Since books and movies are staple topics for discussion on this blog, however, I need to keep things moving in both kinds.  All of which is to say that I picked up Sosuke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved Books because it was short.  This particular bookstore was one where I know and trust the owner’s taste.  I’d bought Haruki Murakami’s works there before.  I really didn’t know what I was getting into this time, though.  I like cats.  I like short books.  I like the Japanese authors I’ve read.  So.

The BISAC code on the back of this one didn’t state that it was fantasy.  I like some fantasy fiction, but my tolerance is limited.  The fault is mine entirely; I own that.  I enjoy speculative fiction and a book with a talking cat felt like it might fit that niche.  I thought the story of The Cat Who Saved Books was good, and the message was sound.  But it felt a bit trite.  The previous Japanese author I’d read was Murakami, and he’s pretty incredible.  I can give you a taste of this book, however, and raise a question about it.  A teenage boy is left taking care of his grandfather’s bookshop after his guardian dies.  A talking cat appears and leads him to four labyrinths where the boy has to rescue books that are being misused.  His arguments to save them don’t seem profound, but something might’ve been lost in translation.

The question is that one of the characters claims to be a book almost two-thousand years old that has had more influence than any other book. Was this the Bible?  Interestingly, nearly every book mentioned in this novel is from the “western canon.”  I have to wonder if this particular book, which is a rather severe character, is the Good Book.  I don’t suspect there’s any way to find out, really.  Still, it seems to fit the sense that Natsukawa uses.  This is an innocent enough fantasy novel.  I guess I prefer my fantasy to have solid rules laid down so that I have an idea what to expect.  But then again, my perspective is that of a primarily western reader, and one who craves short books now and again. I’m open to learn.

Not Just a Visit

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I’ve been on a bit of an M. Night Shyamalan kick lately.  When The Visit showed up on a streaming service I could access, and it was a rainy afternoon when yard work was impossible, I decided to give it a try.  I first became aware of Shyamalan as a horror auteur.  The Village was his first movie I saw, followed by Signs and The Sixth Sense.  (I knew about The Sixth Sense because of the press around the trailer accidentally being shown to underage audiences in theaters.)  I’ve seen some of his movies that aren’t that scary: The Happening, Unbreakable, The Lady in the Water, for example, and others that are.  Knock at the Cabin, Split, and now, The Visit.  The Visit has a twist ending and I’m pretty sure that spoilers will make their way into paragraphs below, so if you’re holding off seeing it, you might want to wait before reading further.

The set-up is innocent enough.  A mother estranged from her parents is letting her two children, both minors, visit their grandparents while she takes a cruise with her new boyfriend.  (The children’s father had left.)  Becca, the daughter, plans to make a documentary of the trip.  The movie is found footage.  Sending the kids off by train, they make it to the grandparents’ house in Chester Springs, completely remote from wifi, to stay for a week.  Initially the stay goes great.  The grandparents, however, have some strange issues.  The grandmother’s sundowning disturbs the two kids, and the grandfather also displays elements of dementia.  As the week goes on, these things grow more intense.  Once the mother returns home, they Skype her (there is ethernet at the house) and when she sees the grandparents she realizes (spoiler follows!)

that the people watching her kids aren’t her parents.  They are a couple escaped from a mental institution.  Not only that, but they have also killed the actual grandparents and one of the visitors to the house.  The mother calls the police, but the insane couple makes their move to take care of the kids.  The youngsters are more resourceful than it seems, and are able to get out of the house just in time.  The police and their mother arrive, shuttling them to safety.  As with Split, the fear derives from a situation of mental illness.  There are some disturbing scenes in this film and it manages to bring in some legitimate scary stuff as well as a few effective jump-startles.  I guess I still see M. Night Shyamalan as a horror auteur.

Death in Cambridge

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In an effort not to give too much away, I’ll try to give only the bare bones and some impressions.  The Maidens, by Alex Michaelides, is considered a dark academia novel.  It revolves around a series of murders in Cambridge and the informal investigations by a psychologist (Mariana), whose niece attends St. Christopher’s College.  There is, not surprisingly, a lot of psychological tension.  It’s also a good illustration of the human condition—our psychology can often be disrupted by those closest to us.  We’re a complex lot.  The whole story is also set against the backdrop of classic Greek tragedies.  Mariana is half Greek herself, living in England.  She’s also a widow and, although not a minor, a woman without parents or siblings.  As a psychologist, she tries to help others sort out their lives.

Perhaps some of us are born prone to trauma through some combination of naiveté, innocence, and neurodivergence.  It’s well known that what simply rolls off one person will traumatize another.  People sometimes comment that it’s surprising that I watch horror, but the fact is that it’s generally removed from my personal traumas.  Looking back over some sixty years, I see quite a lot of trauma and I empathize with Michaelides’ characters who experienced such deficits, some of them without even knowing it.  This really stood out to me while reading the novel.  With the exception of some of the maidens, just about everybody is hurting.  Who are these eponymous maidens?  A group of students who have coalesced around an American professor of ancient literature.  And they’re also the ones who tend to get bumped off.

This is a book that moves along.  Part of the reason is that it has short chapters, something I’ve come to appreciate over my life as things get busier and busier.  Long chapters can be a challenge.  A novel I read recently had no chapters at all (but at least there were scattered extra-spaces between collections of paragraphs).  But what really keeps the pages turning is the story.  Michaelides is very good at misdirection, which is why I didn’t describe the plot in any detail.  You have to read it to see how things unfold and I don’t want to spoil that for anyone.  A literary murder-mystery, it has no speculative elements, apart from a few coincidences.  It does, for at least some readers, have quite an impact.  For me, it influenced my thought process for the rest of the day after I finished it.  At that, with all the books I read, is pretty rare.