Cool Book Festival

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

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

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

Red Thread

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Theseus would never have survived the labyrinth without the help of Ariadne.  After escaping the minotaur, the two eloped and, according to some versions of the myth, Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the isle of Naxos.  This story has been told and retold countless times, and even served as a source of inspiration for the movie Inception.  Back when I was thrashing about dark academia, trying to make a living as an adjunct professor at Rutgers and Montclair State, I taught classical mythology at the latter.  These were in the days of PowerPoint lectures, and I knew a few things about doing them: slides shouldn’t be overly wordy, and they should have images.  People are visual learners.  During my three semesters at Montclair, I developed my PowerPoints peppered with images found online.  I recently remembered one of Ariadne on Naxos, and I really wanted to find it.

My Oshkosh slides were burned onto CDs, but now tech has moved beyond that and I have no readers for burned CDs.  My hopes of finding the name of the artist in the credits on the slide have not been fulfilled.  I turned to the all-wise internet.  Image search after image search brings up nothing close to that particular picture.  I thought it was a painting, but it might’ve been a pastel or colored pencil drawing (it was from a relatively contemporary artist).  I simply can’t find it.  I remember the subject, and the image, but neither its formal title nor its artist’s name.  The information exists, but on unreadable discs.  On those same discs rest the sermons I preached at Nashotah House.  I sometimes think of them and would like to look at them again, to refresh my memory.  I can’t, however, access them, although they are on discs in the closet just behind my back.

Not the image I was looking for (image: Bacchus and Ariadne. Guido Reni).

We let technology drive our lives.  It comes with costs.  I recently talked to a young person who was buying a nice journal and some writing implements to use in it.  They told me that although they’d grown up with computers, and the internet, they wanted the very human experience of writing by hand.  My default for taking notes is still by hand.  If only I had done that when adjunct teaching…. I remember well how frantic those days were.  I was teaching up to eleven classes in one year (a typical professor has three or four), driving between two campuses.  Eating in my car.  I didn’t really have much of a chance to note individual artworks in a notebook, figuring I’d be pining to remember them many years later.  I could use Ariadne to help me out of this labyrinth.  I know right where she is, but the isle of Naxos is inaccessible.

Together Again

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Body horror can be gruesome, but also thought-provoking.  Together shares a similar them to The Substance, namely, bodies merging.  They differ in the details, and some spoilers may follow.  Before I get there, however, I’ll say that this is yet another example of horror and religion working, one might say, growing, together.  The basic premise is that a pool of water in the woods, located at the bottom of a cave, causes two people (or animals) who drink it, to physically merge.  Tim is an emotionally immature, and troubled man and Millie, his girlfriend, refuses to give up on him.  They buy a house together outside the city, but their relationship continues to struggle.  Out on a hike, they fall into the cave and drink the water.  Soon Tim, who has refrained from intimacy with Millie for a long time, can’t be away from her.

As the movie unfolds, they try to resolve their differences, but if they try separating, they are physically forced together.  Religion comes into this in that a New Age church, which collapsed into the cave, had formerly accepted this new form of marriage.  Those who have gone through with it experience a level of belonging and intimacy that is otherwise unattainable.  One of Millie’s coworkers was a member of that church and encourages her to go through with the union.  Meanwhile, Tim discovers the horrific fate of those who resist.  Despite all these positive reassurances, the two resist it until Tim tries to stop a deep wound of Millie’s from bleeding.  Stuck together once again, they decide to go through with it.

Interestingly enough, the rationale given for the New Age church in the movie is a story taken from Plato’s Symposium.  People, the claim is made, once had doubled bodies.  When these were forced apart, they thereafter cannot be at peace until they find their other body to merge with.  The fictional church even has a painting representing this.  Anyone who’s been in love knows the feeling.  Together exploits the fear associated with it—the loss of self to become someone new.  Literally.  In that way it can almost be a parable of parenting a child, although one of the couples that merges in the movie is a gay couple.  And he, it can be argued, is the most content person in the film.  Movies like Together and The Substance tend to find praise among the critics because they concern issues of embodiment and what it implies.  That in itself is thought provoking.

Bounce Back

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I confess to being a graphomaniac.  I write a lot.  I’ve done this pretty much most of my life, and so I tend to have backlogs, both fiction and nonfiction.  This is necessary background for this bit of friendly publishing advice—avoid bounce-backs.  What I mean by this is if an editor tells you “no,” don’t come back a week or two later with another project.  It speaks of desperation when an author does that (and believe me, I know about desperation!).  Publishing is a slow industry (which is one reason that AI is so dangerous).  Authors who can quickly pull together a new proposal, let alone a manuscript, in only a couple of weeks may as well wave a red flag at an editor.  Give it some time.  Give it some thought.  There are plenty of publishers out there, and targeting one for repeat requests isn’t likely to achieve success.

Photo by Samuel-Elias Nadler on Unsplash

We all know the rebound relationship.  You’ve just been dumped and you need to find someone to fill that hole in your life.  The person selected too quickly is a rebound, or bounce-back.  In my experience, such relationships don’t end well, if they ever get started.  It’s a life lesson we sometimes don’t think to apply to that other passion many experience—the desire to be published.  Many of us have publishers that we want to be associated with.  Mine is W. W. Norton.  My very first publishing job interview was with Norton.  They flew me from Milwaukee to New York City for an interview.  I didn’t get the job, but it was like being let go by the girl (or guy) you just can’t have.  The bounce-back, in my life, was Gorgias Press.  And you can piece the rest of the story together from this blog.

In any case, if you’re inclined to learn from the voice of experience, don’t keep pushing after you’ve been told “no.”  Please understand that I know how this desire feels.  If you want to be published, you need to be professional about it.  And sometimes you need to take a strategic approach to reach a more lofty goal.  I started writing my first attempted novel at about sixteen.  It was never finished.  The first one I completed was in 1988.  I had to take a few years off to write a dissertation, then a second book (during which time I began a novel that I only recently finished).  Please note, that span of time was over twenty years.  Publishing is a slow business, and the bounce-back is a sure way to gain a reputation you don’t want to have.

Actual Intelligence

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Horror movies love a good sequel.  A self-referential genre, there’s a lot of give and take and reassessing.  I may have waited a little too long to watch M3GAN 2.0, however.  I remembered the premise of M3GAN: an AI robot companion built to keep a young girl company misreads its protocol and ends up killing people.  I’d forgotten the details of how this came about, but as I watched the sequel, it started coming back.  It might’ve been best if I’d rewatched M3GAN first, but weekends are only so long and I’ve got a lot to do.  In any case, it isn’t bad.  This is sci-fi horror, but the future it foresees doesn’t seem very far off now.  So, M3GAN was destroyed at the end of the first movie.  Her maker, Gemma, has become kind of a Neo-Luddite, such as yours truly, and is advocating for control of AI by the government.  This need is underscored when a military application of M3GAN goes rogue and starts killing people.

Fighting fire with fire, Gemma decides she needs to bring M3GAN back to stop AMELIA.  After the usual chaos and action, it seems that AMELIA is going to merge with the motherboard of the first AI system built, which is now super-smart, and will then wipe out the human race.  M3GAN, however, has “learned” empathy and is able to stop AMELIA by sacrificing herself.  The film doesn’t have a clear message, although overall it seems to advocate caution regarding artificial intelligence.  On that I agree.  (Of course, we’ll need to get some kind of actual intelligence in the White House before we can consider any of this.)  This does seem less horror and more action than the original, but it goes quickly and is fairly fun to watch.

A few months before seeing this, I’d watched Companion, another AI cautionary horror movie.  A few months before that, Ex Machina.  Companion was a bit better, I think, but the original M3GAN was out of the gate first.  Ex Machina, however, was even a decade earlier.  The films are very different.  Companion is about a sex-bot and M3GAN concerns a, well, companion for a lonely young orphan.  Ex Machina is about an AI woman developed just because she can be.  She, however, can’t be controlled either.  All three films represent the zeitgeist of an underlying, lurking fear that we are really going the wrong direction with all the tech we’ve created.  All feature female robots, and none of them end well for humankind.  At least if the implications are followed through.  It might not be a bad idea to pay attention to the human creative side when thinking about Actual Intelligence.

Shopping News

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It’s one of the perils of the online age.  You order something online and the company (which has more money than a mere individual) asks you to pay for their mistake when the send the wrong thing.  This has happened to me a few times.  Once I ordered a used book.  The vendor got the author right but sent the wrong title.  When I explained this they still wanted me to pay to ship their mistake back to them.  I explained the illogic of the situation to them: You said you would send me a certain book and you did not.  In order to refund me I have to pay for the shipping, which sets me back a few bucks without having the right book at all, which I will have to reorder.  They were not happy, claiming it was my responsibility to get the book back to them.  I asked them to pay for the shipping.  They refused.  Eventually they said “Just keep it.  But this time only!”  I do not order from them now.

More recently Amazon, which, for all its issues, is pretty good about getting the right item to you, sent me a defective book.  I noticed as soon as I unpacked it that the cover wasn’t printed correctly.  Words were cut off on the right-hand side, and the spine was printed on the front.  I would’ve accepted it as a fluke, but opening it up I saw that the interior was for a completely different book.  Likely the printer hadn’t properly cleared out the covers from the last printing job before starting the new project.  Amazon didn’t fuss about replacing it.  They did, however, require me to return the defective one.  They’ll pay for the shipping, but I have to pay for the gas and time to drive to one of their preferred vendors.  It’s the same problem on a smaller scale.  Amazon made the mistake (actually the printer did but nobody checked) and I had to pay something to make it right.  This seems off to me.

I worked in retail for a few years and one of the messages management always emphasized is “the customer is always right.”  Sometimes they weren’t, but most of the time we had to resolve any disagreements as if they were.  Online ordering takes the face-to-face out of it.  The person who receives something other than what they ordered, for which they’ve paid the agreed price, has been wronged.  It’s a mistake unlikely to happen in an actual bookstore.  There’s a price to be paid for the convenience of ordering online.  And that price is paid by the customer.

Still Haunted

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Having watched Haunted Summer, I was curious about the origin of the screenplay.  I’d read that the movie was based on a screen treatment by Anne Edwards, a screenwriter and novelist, but that it had been rejected.  Edwards then transformed her screenplay into a novel that was published in 1972, over a decade before the film came out.  It’s sometimes easy to forget that movies spend quite a long time in development.  For example, about four or five years ago it was announced that Lindsey Beer was going to write and direct a new Sleepy Hollow movie.  That was the proximate cause for my writing Sleepy Hollow as American Myth.  I wrote the book, found a publisher and then watched as sales only bumped along the bottom and still no Beer film appeared.  Timing isn’t always my strong suit.  In any case, I decided that it would be good to read Edwards’ book as a follow up to the film.

Marketed as a gothic novel, it came out in my beloved mass market paperback form.  It’s now not easy to find.  The story is well researched, but fictionalized, of course.  The five Regency Era creatives—Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont—had gathered near Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816 (the “haunted summer”).  Famously, the idea for Frankenstein came out of ghost stories they told each other to pass the time during a rainy summer.  Polidori’s story, “The Vampyre,” also traces its origins back to that night.  Edwards’ novel focuses on Mary, making her the narrator.  Since it is a novel some fictional elements are added to what happened that summer.  To me, the most obvious was moving the ghost stories from Villa Diodati to Castle Chillon.  This allows Edwards to introduce Ianthe, a tragic keeper of the castle.

The story focuses on Mary as a strong woman very much devoted to Percy Shelley and standing up to Lord Byron.  Her lack of regard for Polidori was a little jarring since, it seems, historically, she felt sorry for him.  In any case, other than the changes Edwards introduces, the plot largely follows what happened during that summer.  The climax of the book is Mary’s telling of the  basic story of Frankenstein in Chillon Castle.  I found the Author’s Note of particular interest; novelists are also researchers, even if not always treated as such.  The historical incident of this meeting drives my interest, and this largely overlooked novel is a piece of a larger puzzle.

Summers and Hauntings

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I’ve written before about that odd Ken Russell movie Gothic, one of my “old movies.” In case you missed it, the film is a fictional retelling of the gathering of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, John William Polidori, and Claire Claremont in the summer of 1816.  They read ghost stories to pass the time and decided to try writing them.  Two famous stories came of it: Frankenstein and Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” a story that would go on to influence the genre.  I hadn’t realized, being generally the one invited to someone else’s choice of film, that two years following Gothic a movie called Haunted Summer was released.  Directed by Ivan Passer, it is a slow-paced romance that tells about the same meeting.  It’s somewhat more believable than Russell’s movie, but it has some oddities.  Perhaps the most telling is that it doesn’t mention the famous “contest” at all.

No doubt, one of the most compelling aspects of that summer meeting was the fact that a nineteen-year old Mary Godwin would go on to write one of the most influential fictional books of all time.  The influence of Frankenstein is visible in most unexpected places.  Internet personalities create “Franken” products by mixing together discrete products.  (For example, “Frankensoap” is when you cut up and blend different soaps.  You’ll actually find Frankensoaps in our bathrooms at the moment since that’s the way I handle soap scraps.  Soap never seems to go fully away before it becomes unusable.)  Frankenstein influenced everything from feminists to science fiction.  Not to mention horror.  Haunted Summer, however, although it has Polidori as a character, doesn’t mention his story at all.  It really focuses on the sexual tension between Byron and Mary Godwin.

Our imagination of that meeting of two famous writers and one soon-to-become famous one, often doesn’t make room for the fact that Shelley and Godwin were actually traveling with their infant son William—not shown in the movie.  (Mary had delivered a premature daughter the year before, who didn’t survive.)  I suppose putting a baby in the mix might, in Puritan America, dampen the romance implied in Haunted Summer.  Both that movie and Gothic make use of Henry Fuseli’s painting “The Nightmare.”  And although Haunted Summer isn’t a horror movie there are a few moments of fairly high tension—one when Godwin has her dream of the creature approaching her bed at Villa Diodati.  The story, however, had already been told by Ken Russell’s movie and Haunted Summer failed to make much of an impact.  That isn’t, however, quite the end of the story.

Just Average

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It certainly feels like it.  That web searching has grown a lot more frustrating since AI has taken over.  For some of us, Al has no idea how our minds work or what we’re looking for.  Apart from hallucinating, it tries to average out the human experience.  Some people aren’t like everyone else.  I like to think that I’m reasonably intelligent and that I pick search words with some aforethought.  Yet the web searches I do bring up things (mostly products for sale) that have nothing to do with the information I’m hoping to land.  We’ve swapped quality for convenience, yet again.  The experience of being human is being effaced by those who are growing rich off the world’s love affair with “artificial intelligence.”  Emphasis on the artificial part.

The real issue is with finding information.  Some of us don’t trust the web much, and prefer to find our information in print, which is less easily manipulable.  More stable.  These days Google appeals to our natural vanity and, more importantly, likes to try to sell us stuff by personalizing search results.  It’s all about the money.  Some of us really just want information.  The alternative is to try to find what you’re looking for in a library, which is fine and good if you have the time and resources to do so.  And the issue there is finding what you need.  Since many university libraries have gone electronic, you need to be a card-carrying member to read information on a screen.  What have we become?  Vividly I remember searching through the underground stacks at Edinburgh University.  If something wasn’t in the card catalogue, ordering it on inter-library loan.  I never did land any grant funding to travel to read books that just don’t move.

I was trying to read a public domain text online the other day.  My eyes quickly grew weary and restless.  The internet encourages that, and although social media isn’t my personal demon, often the weather websites are.  And those little things that have crept into your brain while at work to look up later.  Which brings us back to searching.  AI works by averaging things out.  Some of us want the raw material, not what other people want.  After all, look who “average people” elected to fill the White House a couple years back.  I admit to being nostalgic, to missing the days when a book in the hand couldn’t just be dashed off by anyone with a computer and internet connection.  Averaging everything together, is by definition, making it all mediocre.

Not Conan

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What are Weapons without a Barbarian?  I learned about the latter movie after reading about the former.  After watching Weapons I knew I had to see Barbarian.  It is outlandish but decidedly scary.  I haven’t been that tense during a movie for some time.  Nor have I watched one where there were so many moments when the average person in real life would’ve just left before things got so bad.  There may be some spoiler-level information here, but I won’t give away the ending.  Tess is booked into an AirBNB in Detroit, but arrives to find another renter already checked in.  It’s a rainy night and there’s a convention in town so all the hotels are booked.  Tess decides she can trust Keith and stay the night.  They end up getting along very well, and she’s planning on staying the next night as well, even with the double-booked situation.  Then Tess discovers a disturbing room in the basement.

We then learn that Keith, whom we’re all suspecting (Bill Skarsgård has become well known for playing horror villains), isn’t the real threat.  In one of the moments when I would’ve left, she goes to find him after he falls silent in the basement.  She discovers a sub-basement where a strange, inhuman woman dwells.  This woman kills Keith.  Cut to California where AJ, a guy who’s not exactly evil but certainly not good, is being accused of rape and is losing money.  He’s the owner of the AirBNB and he flies to Detroit to get the house ready for selling.  He sees that it’s occupied, but the agency says no one is staying there.  He discovers the secret sub-basement and we learn a sexual predator has for years been abducting women, having children with them, and then having children with their children, thus producing the scary woman.

As I say, outlandish, but the story is quite effectively filmed.  The real monster is not the woman, but modern people such as AJ.  The police refuse to help because they assume everyone in that neighborhood is a crackhead.  The urban blight reminded me very much of It Follows, another horror film set in Detroit.  This is kind of a new form of folk horror where the landscape becomes a monster.  Instead of using traditional folklore, however, films like It Follows and Barbarian suggest that the landscapes we build and then neglect become scenes of supernatural horror.  This is quite effective.  Having grown up in a much smaller town, but one which is equally neglected, this kind of horror really works.  Zach Cregger has become another horror director to keep an eye on.

Earnestly

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Christening.  The subject may sound old fashioned, but it was once, within Christendom, where a name was officially conferred.  These days a birth certificate, issued very shortly following a live birth, is the official record of name, but not so long ago religious authorities had the final word.  This came to mind upon seeing a local (Lehigh University) stage production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.  I’ve read the play before, but hadn’t seen a stage production.  As is likely widely known, the play’s title plays on the name Earnest.  Two characters, Jack and Algernon, both claim to be named Earnest only to learn that the women they’ve proposed to both insist on marrying a man whose name is indeed Earnest.  In order to remedy this situation, both men ask the local vicar to be christened, changing their names.

Names are chosen for us and given to us.  Although it is possible to change one’s name (I’ve done so twice), many consider this almost insulting to the parents who provided the name.  Since baptism, or christening, was so widely practiced in medieval Europe, this experience was fairly universal in western culture.  The Reformation eventually changed that; some traditions declared that a person had to be old enough to consent to baptism and you couldn’t very well wait until seven or eight to be given a name.  I was baptized in a river at about six or seven, and by then had learned my given name quite well.  Names become our identity.  I still recall the lines about names from another play, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”  Thus spake John Proctor.

The Importance of Being Earnest is, of course, a satire.  Even the name of the priest, the Rev. Canon Chasuble, DD, is a joke.  A chasuble, in the ecclesiastical world, is the outer vestment worn by a priest who is the celebrant at a formal mass.  Clothes make the man, so the saying goes.  Those of us who write fiction often wrestle with names.  In my day job I quite often encounter what seem to be unbelievable names.  Names that, were I to put them into a novel, would earn the scorn of critics (assuming any) that it was made up.  So I enjoyed being earnest for an afternoon.

The Vampire’s Father

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I’d been very curious about D. L. Macdonald’s Poor Polidori for several years.  This is not an easy book to find.  (I have noted before that I find university press book pricing illogical and unconscionable.)  John William Polidori was, as the subtitle states, the man who wrote “The Vampyre,” treated sometimes as a novel, at other times a short story.  Polidori, apart from being treated as a fictional character, is a difficult man to get to know.  This critical biography contains much useful information.  There are sections, however—and probably the reason for the pricing—, that interest only scholars of literature looking to find an exegesis of works of Lord Byron and Polidori himself.  My curiosity about him derives from the fact that “The Vampyre” was a very influential story and yet its author is somewhat consistently considered insignificant.  This seems to have predated his association with Byron; Macdonald points a finger at his father.

So who was Polidori?  Born in England of an Italian father and English mother, he was raised with literary aspirations but his father (who was a writer) had other plans for him.  Catholic in a period of strongly Protestant sentiments, John was sent to Catholic school and considered the priesthood.  His father eventually sent him to Edinburgh University to become a medical doctor.  Clearly this wasn’t John’s interest, but he complied.  Finishing his qualifications, he found setting up practice difficult because of both his foreign-sounding name and his Catholicism.  Lord Byron, about to exile himself from England because of scandals, wanted a personal doctor and settled on Polidori.  He knew of Polidori’s literary ambitions and frequently belittled them.  Polidori was present in the summer of 1816 when Percy and Mary (soon to be) Shelley visited Lord Byron along with Claire Claremont, Mary’s half-sister pregnant with Byron’s child.

Famously, the group read ghost stories and at Byron’s suggestion each started writing their own.  Byron’s fragment led to an idea Polidori later wrote out, after Byron had dismissed him, as “The Vampyre.”  Mary Shelley’s story, of course, everybody knows.  “The Vampyre” was published without Polidori’s knowledge and was attributed to Byron.  Even Goethe read it and thought it Byron’s best work.  Polidori was eventually credited with the story and tried to make a living as a writer.  He produced other works, but no real success.  He decided to become a lawyer.  Unable to establish his independence from his father, he died at 25 by ingesting prussic acid.  Even during his life, which was quite interesting, he was called “Poor Polidori” by more than one acquaintance.  His literary output isn’t bad, according to critics.  To me, he’s a kind of patron saint of those who would write but who are overshadowed by Byrons and Shelleys.

Logan Again

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A couple of friends, both younger (ahem), liked my recent post on Logan’s Run.  As did someone my post on Goodreads.  I was pleased to see that.  I was alive, but not yet literate, when the book was originally published.  So, predictably, I sat down to watch the movie again.  My wife had to work that weekend and I had last seen it in 2011.  This time, the book fresh in my mind, I was able to notice just how much the movie diverges.  For practical reasons, the movie has people live to 30 instead of 21.  The issue was finding enough young actors (this was the seventies, after all) who could carry off the story.  Michael York was over thirty, but he could pass.  The book is a romp across the country, and it would be unbelievable in the film if Peter Ustinov were able to walk from Washington DC to Los Angeles.  

The movie has Logan dedicated to Jessica, but in the novel they have to grow to love each other.  In the film, Logan is sent on a secret mission to find Sanctuary, which, it turns out, doesn’t exist.  The novel has Ballard (transformed into “the old man” in cinematic form) disguised as Francis, Logan’s fellow Sandman, from pretty much the beginning.  On the screen, Francis remains a dedicated Sandman to the end.  Gone are the zoo animals in Washington, the hovercraft chases, and the little children who save Jessica’s life.  Granted, a lot in the novel would be very difficult to transfer to celluloid, and changes had to be made.  The whole episode of the religion of “Carrousel” isn’t in the book, but was added to give the movie coherence.  I did find it odd that they included the scene with Box, which really doesn’t fit the film.  

In any case, it warms my heart that some of my younger friends have fond memories of this movie.  It’s definitely a period piece.  Fitting for the seventies, there’s kind of an atheistic undertone to it.  Sanctuary only exists in people’s minds.  Nobody is “renewed” (born again).  But not all is doom and gloom.  The old man quotes from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, by T. S. Eliot.  (That fact is the only way that I could get my daughter to watch the film.)  And it does have an optimistic ending.  Logan and Jessica decide they want to stay together—marriage was ancient history in their world.  And the young people, my greatest hope for the future, came to see the old man was fascinating.  Something that gives this particular writer a true sense of hope.

Entitlement

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I’ve been guilty of this myself, so the first stone is being cast straight up into the air over my own head.  Academic authors misunderstand how to title a book.  The fact is, these days, that libraries often make their choice whether or not to buy based on the main title—no time for subtitles!  Trade books tend to sell with flashy, if somewhat ambiguous titles.  A well-selected title is truly a thing of beauty.  This tends not to work for academic books.  The librarian wants to know, at a glance, what the book is about.  After being in the editing biz for about seventeen years now, I can honestly say that the vast majority of authors just don’t get this.  They propose catchy, even clever titles that say nothing concerning what the book is about.  Many of them are titles of several other published books.  What’s called for is a descriptive moniker.

Again, I’ve made this mistake myself, but many of the guild have a difficult time distinguishing between the books they write and those that you find in bookstores (trade books).  This is understandable enough when you’ve put years of your life into writing the tome and you want to get some notice for having done so.  Getting notice is a trick all its own these days, but if you’re willing to settle for even average sales, attend to the title.  The book business itself has changed.  For example, back when I was writing my first book (which did have a descriptive title), academic books sales with established publishers sold at least around 300 copies, pretty much guaranteed.  So much so that some presses would print 300 copies and when they sold out the book was put “out of stock indefinitely.”  (You don’t put books “out of print” since authors often have legal recourse to request the rights back.)

That “at least 300” level has now shrunk to under 100.  One reason is there is far too much being published these days.  Publish or perish has come home to roost.  Libraries, which tend to struggle, have to be selective.  And picking a book with a chipper but non-descriptive title is not likely to happen.  So you cleverly title a book, say, Nightmares with the Bible, and it sells fewer than 100 copies.  (In my defense, I understood that it was likely to be made paperback, given the target readership for the series.)  Lesson learned.  Trade titles need to be left to trade books.  And let’s be honest; if your book is a research book written for other researchers, library sales are generally your only hope.

Vengeance Is Hers

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A Lesson in Vengeance, by Victoria Lee,  is a novel with some twists that I’ll try to conceal.  It is a kind of young adult horror-themed dark academia novel.  I really enjoyed it although there are a few improbable events.  That’s the way of fiction with an unreliable narrator.  Felicity Morrow, a girl from a wealthy Boston family, is enrolled at Dalloway School.  Dalloway is a girl’s prep school in upstate New York.  Felicity had to take some time off, during which she was institutionalized, after the death of her best friend, and lover, Alex.  Now that she’s back at school she feels the ghost of her friend coming back for vengeance.  She lives in Godwin House, which only has space for five.  It’s also part of the story of the Dalloway five, girls accused as witches when the school was founded, who all died there.

A new girl is starting at Dalloway this year.  Ellis Haley has already written a published novel and is working on a second.  She lives in Alex’s old room.  In spite of their rocky start, Ellis and Felicity become friends.  Then more than friends.  Meanwhile, they’re both working on their senior projects but Ellis wants to form a fictional coven and replay the way the Dalloway five died, for her novel.  Things grow tense as Felicity begins to remember more and more about what happened to Alex.  Then a murder takes place.  I won’t say more about the plot.  The last several chapters are ones where putting down the book is a real struggle.  You want to know who did it.  And since Felicity is the narrator, you gather that she must survive.  But this isn’t without danger.

The horror elements involve ghosts and witches.  Since Felicity is revealed to be an unreliable narrator it’s unclear whether the ghosts are real or not.  Most of the events are revealed to have had naturalistic answers, but one remains as either a real ghostly visitation or a delusion on the part of Felicity.  I read this book as part of my ongoing fascination with dark academia, and I’m glad I did.  It’s quite a well-told story.  Enough information is held back and revealed in moments of insight as the story unfolds that I was kept guessing until very near the end.  And the final realization only hits at the very end.  This is a good entry into dark academia for anyone wondering where to start, at least in my opinion.